Cue the Sun! [Chapter 12-13]

[read 8/17/25]
for media research

Chapter 12 - "The Wink" 

About Queer Eye for the Straight Guy 

> after Queer Eye became a hit for Bravo, Lauren Zalaznick was hired to create the branding for the channel 

Zalaznick reworked the channel, using Queer Eye as a blueprint, focusing on the five areas of 

- Fashion

- Design

- Food and wine

- Culture

- Grooming

with shows aimed and gay men and their female friends 

"This group adored shopping and living the good life, but they also preferred something else in their TV, a certain artifice--irony, camp, the queer tilt of both Batman and Lance Loud. They loved 'the wink'." [p.346]

In this vein, Project Runway and Blow Out were created

"Together [the two shows] would come to define the Bravo brand: the glamorous talent contest and sleek, aspirational real-life soap opera, each of them layered with irony like a seven-layer dip." [p.351]

with this model Zalaznick "effectively gentrified the sketchy neighborhood of reality programming...transforming it into a newly marketable landscape, one that felt 'boutique and chic'..." [p.352]

from this The Real Housewives was created for Bravo, then E! created Keeping Up with the Kardashians

> "These weren't shaky-cam documentary experiments, capturing (or even pretending to capture) authentic, unpredictable human behavior. Instead, they proudly foreground their own artificiality, by casting women who already saw themselves as public figures...Every emotion and desire was outlined in neon, so that it could be seen from space." [p.356]

Chapter 13 - "The Job" 

About The Apprentice and the rise of Donald Trump

> Mike Fleiss, creator of The Bachelor saw Trump's rise as an "indelible stain on the genre, exposing something existentially rotten in the industry." [p.386]

> Fenton Bailey, co-creator of RuPaul's Drag Race argued that the opposite was true, and that Trump just corrupted everything he touched. 

FURTHER RESEARCH

- 

Cue the Sun! [Chapter 10-11]

[read 8/17/25]
for media research

Chapter 10 - "The Explosion" 

About how reality blew up after Survivor/Big Brother and became a whole industry

"The reality craze had become a bonanza for a set of creative misfits who flowed in from the fringes of Los Angeles, strivers who had been locked out of Hollywood proper...Meanwhile, ordinary people were flooding casting agencies, confident they had the stuff to become the next Richard Hatch." [p.268]

OTHER STUFF

it was just a ton of people/networks trying stuff

> a lot of which crashed and burned 

but there was so much it didn't really matter 

- Jackass took off

- also celebrity reality shows with The Osbournes and more 

FURTHER RESEARCH

- The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968) sci fi fantasy about a future in which a tiny elite control the population with sordid game shows 

- The Joe Schmo Show original version of Jury Duty 

Chapter 11 - "The Rose" 

About the creation of The Bachelor and also Joe Millionaire

- the "dating show" reality show and also the kinda spoof (Joe Millionaire) 

The Bachelor was the first show to not have different couples every episode, but to have a season long, narrowing down of the relationships 

> rise of the "Frankenbites" i.e. the molded together sound bites; also rise in producer meddling or construction of moments 

> also notes in here of how the "first season was the most pure" 

I like how the chapter (and book) focuses on the crew, noting how it was kind of young people's work, or just how they were kinda fucked up by the process too (Even Bachelor crew member Sarah Shapiro making the show UnREAL which incorporated biographical elements of her experience) 

Cue the Sun! [Chapter 7-9]

[read 8/17/25]
for media research

Chapter 7 - "The Game" 

About Mark Burnett and Survivor  

"Survivor was the first series to take the reality genre mainstream in the United States, turning the fringe, faddish phenomenon of 'dirty documentary' into a legitimate institution." [p.171]

Survivor stood out because it's format united three key traditions:

- Allen Funt's prank show model

- the Chuck Barris-esque game show

- the real-life soap opera, launched by An American Family

Chapter 8 - "The Island" 

about the first season of Survivor 

the first season is always an interesting experience based on Nussbaum's writing 

"Camera operator Randall Einhorn took a similar path. He worked on Survivor for six seasons--"five too many," he said. He grew to hate the new cast members, always yammering about their Hollywood agents. To him, the whole show felt compromised: Production included more 'do-overs," reshoots to get the right angle; the crew took shortcuts, collection "sweet-and-lows," snippets of dialogue designed to be used as voiceovers for specific scenes...Einhorn, a purist who bridled at sweeteners, preferred footage that was 'gleaned, not produced." [p.231-232]

- eventually he went on to be a camera op for The Office ! 

Chapter 9 - "The Feed" 

About Big Brother 

the first season bombed 

> host Julie Chen was pretty much forced to stay on as host 

but then they cast people that were more wild and it worked 

> they also saw a new type of player, the villain, in Will Kirby who embraced it 

"Will took the opposite appraoch: He turned himself into the production's biggest ally. "This is how I help them produced the show. And subtly, by helping them produce the show, it helps me -- then I'm in storylines, I have face time." [p.256]

9/11 also happened close to the finale which was wild 

Cue the Sun! [Chapter 6]

[read 8/11/25]
for media research

Chapter 6 - "The Con" 

About Mike Darnell and hoax-type shows/specials on the Fox channel 

Mike Darnell created Alien Autopsy which was really just a hoax show (special)-- "less a reality show than a fake documentary that mimicked legitimate journalism" [p.154]

With the show, "Fox television trained its audience to adopt a similar attitude. Like Mulder, they should want to believe; like Scully, they could revel in their skepticism. That cynical credulity (or credulous cynicism) would become the defining quality of American culture, in the reality genre, on the news, and in politics." [p. 154] 

OTHER STUFF

By the late 1990s, Darnell was producing fifty to seventy specials per year 

> and then eventually other networks started to copy 

"Like Eye on L.A. Darnell had shoved the Overton window wide open, forcing his competitors to program leather bikinis." [p.157]

Mike Fleiss started working with Mike Darnell to create more crazy show ideas 

"Fleiss worked hard, absorbing lessons from his beloved Fox guru. Their key philosophical precept: The more divisive a show as, the more it infuriated critics, the higher the ratings. The ideal Fox show was one that smashed every button, managing to piss off both conservatives and feminists. 'We didn't like an idea unless it had a little bit of "You can't put that on television."  [p.162]

Their next big project was Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? which got TONS of ratings, but also backlash and exposés from the press, and made Fox cancel all their reality programming 

In the aftermath of the whole event "the press gleefully celebrated the death of reality TV, a sick, sad fad that was finally gone for good" [p.170] but Survivor was on the horizon, and with it reality tv would come roaring back 

FURTHER RESEARCH

- 

Cue the Sun! [Chapter 5]

[read 8/3/25]
for media research

Chapter 5 - "The House" 

About The Real World 

seemingly when reality TV came together 

created by Jon Murray, inspired by the Up series and An American Family

> he had a longtime collaborator, Mary-Ellis Burnim, and together they were trying to find a good show, which blended reality and drama 

OTHER STUFF

The first season's cast definitely felt the weirdness of being very famous, but not having the money or security of other celebrities  

Beyond The Real World Burnim/Murray would end up doing other shows, including Keeping Up with the Kardashians 

FURTHER RESEARCH

- The Ben Stiller Show -- MTV comedy show, 1 season; also the opening episode has that guy from Odyssey?? who plays Tom, or Arnold or something? link 

- Reality Bites movie that came out two years after debut of The Real World (satirized the show the same way Real Life satirized An American Family) 

    apparently though--the movie wasn't inspired by The Real World, but by OK Soda, a cola brand that had been cynically marketed to Gen X (Helen Childress wrote the screenplay in college) 

- 

Cue the Sun! [Chapter 4]

[read 8/3/25]
for media research

Chapter 4 - "The Clip" 

About America's Funniest Home Videos and Cops 

"seemingly in a flash, television had started cleaning up its act. It got safe, it got wholesome, and for nearly a decade, it got boring....The few shows that broke fresh ground--like Roseanne, Moonlighting, and A Different World --felt like outliers, exceptions in an industry that was ad-driven and mass, suburban, and white." [p.85]

70's tv = funk of a stained shag carpet after a basement orgy

80's tv = a plastic slipcovered sofa in the living room, ready for company 

"In 1989, the plastic cover slipped off the sofa. The thirst for reality...reasserted itself in two hit prime-time formats" (AFV and Cops) 

> both of these were "clip" shows 

    they relied on viewer faith that what they saw was real

    they were the first draft of internet culture 

OTHER STUFF

NBC's 1985 limited docu-series OceanQuest which documented the true-life adventures of a Miss Universe winer as she traveled the globe and got into adventures 

> The People's Court also started around this time (first tv show to feature binding arbitration) 

The "reality impulse" for tv "welled up in the late 80s" and went into public access cable TV, and also into professional wrestling > it also surged in daytime talk shows 

Bob Saget was the original host for AFV! 

Cops: 

- forerunners in Dragnet and The Police Tapes (first TV program to show real police ride-alongs, made by the Raymonds! who did American family) 

- like Jake Webb for Dragnet, Langley intended to tell real stories--"But the Cops approach to realism--its dark verve, its spikes of voyeuristic comedy, and its utter shamelessness as both copaganda and entertainment--would cut a wild new path" [p.100] (the show acted as great PR for the LAPD and cops, who were previously in media portrayed as corrupt, bad guys, or bumbling idiots (a la Keystone Kops) 

Cops was at its heart--a prank show. An ambush show 

Bertram Van Munster, a Dutch Filmmaker, started as a crew member on Cops and would go on to create The Amazing Race 

FURTHER RESEARCH

- Rain Man -- has a running joke in this movie, about Joseph Wapner, the judge picked for The People's Court cuz they decided to go with a more "serious" choice for the judge, and he was transformed into a household name 

- Cocaine Blues: The Myth and Reality of Cocaine (1983); movie made by John Langley, the co-creator of Cops , (he had an interest in drugs)