TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. What do reality show cast members face that viewers don't get to see? For example, the hit reality TV show "Love Is Blind" - that show follows the contestants as they choose a spouse by talking one-on-one with 15 people without ever having seen them, not even a photo. It's a little more complicated than that, and we'll describe it more in a minute.
Working conditions for those cast members have led to accusations against the show's production companies, including false imprisonment and abuse. Several lawsuits have been filed. Two former cast members have formed a group to help connect reality show cast members to legal and mental health resources. My guest, Emily Nussbaum, writes about this in a recent article called, "Is 'Love Is Blind' A Toxic Workplace?" The article is also about the restrictive contracts, including nondisclosure agreements that cast members must sign.
Fans don't usually know about behind-the-scenes problems because the nondisclosure agreements prevent cast members from revealing them without the risk of a hefty financial penalty. Nussbaum says the contracts for "Love Is Blind" are similar to ones on other reality TV shows. Emily Nussbaum is also the author of a new book about the invention of reality TV called "Cue The Sun!," which we'll talk about a little later. She's a staff writer at The New Yorker and a former TV critic for the magazine. In 2016, she won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
Emily Nussbaum, welcome back to FRESH AIR. The book is great. I love your new article in The New Yorker. It answers so many questions I have about what really happens behind the scenes and what has to be kept secret. So let's start by talking about that article and talking about reality show contracts and nondisclosure agreements.
So here's how the hosts of "Love Is Blind" describe the show to the new cast members, and that's how each season starts. So the hosts of the show are Nick Lachey and his wife, Vanessa Lachey. Now, Nick Lachey - he's just like Mr. Reality Show. He's the former lead singer of the boy band 98 Degrees. He was a star of the reality series "Newlyweds" with his then-wife, Jessica Simpson. And Vanessa is a former Miss Teen USA and hosted Miss Teen USA and Miss Universe pageants. So here they are describing the show to new cast members.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LOVE IS BLIND")
VANESSA LACHEY: Well, over the next 10 days, you'll finally have the chance to fall in love based solely on who you are on the inside, not for your looks, your race, your background or your income.
NICK LACHEY: And if you fall in love with someone and you want to spend the rest of your life with them, you'll get engaged.
V LACHEY: (Cheering). And then you get to see them for the very first time.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Cheering).
V LACHEY: And then the two of you leave here with a future wedding date in four weeks where you'll make the biggest decision of your life.
N LACHEY: Will you say I do to the person you fall in love with, right here, sight unseen - or will you choose to walk away forever?
V LACHEY: Is love truly blind? Well, we hope that you prove that it is.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Cheering).
NICK LACHEY AND VANESSA LACHEY: Pods are now open.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: (Singing) I just want to...
GROSS: OK, Emily, that sounds kind of idealized. Like, you're going to choose your life partner not based on their looks or their race but who they really are inside. How does that actually play out? What's the reality?
EMILY NUSSBAUM: It's funny. The people who make the show, Chris Coelen, the creator, and the producers, call the show the experiment. And they sell it both to the audience and to the cast members as something that's better than other reality dating shows, that's something that is a truly high-minded attempt, as they were presenting it, as a way to get beyond stuff. It's true that you can talk to people about those things in the pods, which have a - they're these cozy little settings in which you are divided from the person you're talking to, and you're supposed to just bond with them spiritually.
Like, I don't think the issue with it is that it's crazy to fall in love with a stranger. People do that online. I think the problem with it is the way the show is run, and, frankly, the way that almost all modern reality shows are run. Dating shows, I think, specifically have a lot of these dark qualities that viewers and fans of them don't know about.
GROSS: So explain a little bit more of the premise of "Love Is Blind."
NUSSBAUM: Here's how "Love Is Blind" works. A group of people are cast - 15 men and 15 women - and they live separately from one another. And every day, they are sent into these pods that are sort of these cozy capsules where they sit. It's kind of like Jeannie's bottle, where you sit on a sofa. And there's somebody on the other side of the capsule, and you're divided by a wall.
And you talk all day long. They sit in these capsules on the sofa, curled up, just talking all day, like, from early in the morning often until quite late at night, drinking, sometimes having snacks. Basically, the idea is they do this for 10 days, and during that period, a big chunk of the people in the cast fall in love with somebody. They gradually narrow down who they're interested in. A subset of those people get engaged, and then at that point, that group of people leaves the pods, and they meet the person physically. Like, they've never seen them, and they're already engaged. It's called the reveal.
After the reveal, the set of couples that are engaged goes on a vacation together that's filmed, you know, by cameramen and by audio people to sort of capture their little honeymoon period together. And then finally, they go back to their hometown. Everybody's cast from the same hometown. It's in different cities each season. And at that point, they plan their wedding, they meet their family and friends and ultimately, they go down the aisle, and they have - a subset of people have gotten legally married on the show. I mean, there have been several lasting marriages. There have been people who got pregnant on the show.
But a lot of couples break up, as well. And that's the way the show is laid out. For fans of the show, I think the appeal of it is its intensity and the fact that the stakes are real. They're actually getting married.
GROSS: So some people go to the altar and at the altar, decline to get married. So I want to play a clip of that. So here's a clip from Season 6 at the altar. And the bride - AD is her name - she's so excited. She expresses her love for her fiance, Clay, while she's at the altar. You know, her family, they have - you know, they're so excited that she's getting married. She's always wanted to do this. It's like a dream scenario. And she takes her vows and says I do.
And then the person presiding over the ceremony turns to AD's fiance, Clay, reads him his vows. And here's what happens. So here's what we're going to hear. We're going to hear the minister's last few words, reciting the vows, and then we'll hear the dramatic suspense music as we wait for Clay to say whether he says I do or not. And then we'll hear what Clay has to say.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LOVE IS BLIND")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: In sickness and in health all of your days.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CLAY GRAVESANDE: This has been the best process. AD, I love you. I don't think it's responsible for me to say I do. But I want you to know that I'm rocking with you. I just don't think it's responsible of me to say I do at this point when I still need work. I still need to get to the point where I'm 100% in. And I'm not going to have you over here thinking that this is not going to work. I'm going to put the work in for you, and we'll go through this together. I don't care what nobody says. I know fully I'm not ready for marriage, and you deserve the best. And if I'm not ready to give that 100%, I won't go there with you when I'm not ready. And I appreciate you, and I know that you will fight for me, and we'll let it work. I know, but I can't say yes right now. I'm sorry, AD. But why does it matter, like, with this - with the timeline? Why does that matter?
A D SMITH: Clay, don't do that. OK.
GROSS: Just to clarify, that's AD crying in the background, not laughing. So it seems cruel to me to set up, like, a dream ceremony only to have the bride totally humiliated at the altar. It's kind of, like, voyeuristic fun to watch that kind of thing, but it's really at somebody's expense. If it's an experiment in human intimacy, as the producers describe it, why humiliate somebody at the altar like that?
NUSSBAUM: I think that it's part of a larger set of dating shows. And I think the things that you heard, including the extreme emotionality and the feeling of betrayal are embedded in - yes, the reason that people watch these shows - to some extent, the reason that people go on these shows - is as this kind of extreme sport emotionally. Yes, there's cruelty to that.
It's also part of a tradition that goes way back in history. I mean, there have been dating shows and marriage shows on radio. There's "The Newlywed Game" and "The Dating Game." And the modern shows, including "The Bachelor," all include the theatrical conventions that are part of that, including the serious music and the sort of money shot of dating shows, which is the sound of somebody crying in heartbreak. That was the payoff on "The Bachelor." It's the payoff on "Love Is Blind."
I mean, that moment of what feels like authentic and extreme emotionality, whether it actually is authentic or not, is, I think, part of the reason that people watch these shows. But it's also part of the reason that people look down on people who go on these shows because it's that display of extreme raw emotion, and I think that's at the center of both the appeal and the ethical question of these shows.
GROSS: My guest is Emily Nussbaum. Her article "Is "Love Is Blind" A Toxic Workplace?" is published in The New Yorker. Her new book is called "Cue The Sun!: The Invention Of Reality TV." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF LOSTPROPHETS SONG, "LAST SUMMER")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Emily Nussbaum. She's a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former TV critic at the magazine. Her new book is called "Cue The Sun!: The Invention Of Reality TV." In a recent New Yorker article about working conditions for cast members of reality TV, she focused on the hit show "Love Is Blind." She reported on restrictive contracts and nondisclosure agreements cast members have to sign, accusations against the show's production companies, about working conditions, and how two former cast members formed a group to help connect reality show cast members to legal and mental health resources.
So let's get to the contracts and the nondisclosure agreements. Tell us some of the things you learned in the standard contract for "Love Is Blind."
NUSSBAUM: I think the main thing to understand is that this isn't about "Love Is Blind." This is about contracts for almost all reality shows. The contracts people sign - and they go way back. They're based on older contracts that go back to "Survivor."
They basically require anybody who appears on the show to sign an extremely aggressive nondisclosure agreement that says not just that they can't spoil the show and not just that they can't complain if they are misrepresented on the show, if things are edited that didn't happen. They also just can't talk about the making of the show. They can't talk about what their producer did, if their producer lied to them, if their producer made them cry by asking them numerous personal questions based on their psychiatric evaluation forms and then took that crying out of context in the edit. They can't talk about the hours they work. They can't talk about any of that, or they may get sued.
The other thing is that if they do have complaints about abuse or exploitation, which comes up for some cast members, that has to be dealt with in private arbitration. So essentially, it keeps the public, including fans of these shows, from understanding the actual conditions in which they're made. And most of the time when people talk about their experiences on the show, they're not sued. But the one person who was sued recently, who I wrote about in my article, was sued for $4 million, and I think that sends a significant message. But there are multiple motives for people not to speak out about any of this, and frankly, these conditions and these contracts are absolutely standard for the industry.
I think people who watch the show not only don't know about that, but they often just don't sympathize with it. The dominant feeling is, you know, you decided to go on it, so anything that happens, you should have expected it. I think that shows a lack of compassion, but also, I think it shows a lack of understanding of exactly what the conditions are that we're dealing with here.
GROSS: So there have been a couple of lawsuits against "Love Is Blind," and the stories themselves are a little complicated. But can you tell us what the charges are that have been leveled against the show?
NUSSBAUM: There's a range of lawsuits. There's a class action lawsuit that has to do with labor conditions, people being underpaid, underfed, having alcohol pushed on them. That was recently settled. There's another lawsuit that has to do with accusations not only of false imprisonment, but the person who filed the lawsuit said that she was sexually assaulted by her fiancé in Mexico, told the production about it and that they didn't do anything and actually pressured her to go through a final scene, which was essentially scripted. It's a terrible suit, and it's in the process of going through the courts.
And the third lawsuit that I talk about has to do with a woman, Renee Poche, who was on Season 5, who went all the way to the altar, and then her story was not shown on the show. She's not the only one that this has happened to. But ultimately, after that came out, she started talking about it in public, and she's being sued for violating her NDA. She felt like it was a bait and switch. She - the fiancé that she ended up with was unemployed, an alcoholic, doing drugs. She found threatening, abusive -and when she spoke about this, they sued her for $4 million.
So in aggregate, all of these lawsuits are dealing with a mixture of things. The extremely oppressive contracts, trying to nullify them, dealing with abuse and exploitation on the show and dealing with the labor conditions, the idea of it as a set. And I also want to just say, those lawsuits that have to do with "Love Is Blind," they're one aspect of a new movement to try to redefine the work of working on a reality show and they don't only have to do with "Love Is Blind" - addressing terrible labor conditions and terrible legal conditions and treating these actually as a kind of a job and the people who go on these shows and who work on these shows as worthy of decent treatment.
GROSS: Well, let's move on to a suit filed by Renee Poche. She had agreed to get married to Carter Wall before the reveal, before they got to see each other. And after the reveal, she found out that his phone was turned off because he hadn't paid his bills. He had no fixed address. He was kind of homeless at the time. He was a heavy drinker. He took a lot of Adderall. You talked to a lot of members of the crew from that season, Season 5, who said things like they thought he was racist, that he used different kinds of slurs against gay people. So when she found some of this out, she wanted her to call off the wedding. So what was the producer's reaction to that?
NUSSBAUM: Essentially, I think the message that she got was that she should keep going, because as in that clip that you played before, part of the show is that at the end of it, you go to the altar, and you can say no to it. So it just kept rolling forward. And a lot of people thought she was going to be the star of that season and that she should trust the process. At a certain point, she definitely pulled away, and she refused to live in the apartment that the production company had set up for them to live in. She felt threatened by him. She was only going to film scenes with him when she went over there to be with him. But ultimately, they did move forward to the altar.
I mean, the bigger deal is that Renee wasn't allowed to talk about what happened on the show. She wasn't actually featured on the season. She and Carter were treated as kind of side characters. Their story was cut down very much at the last minute. And once she began to talk about what Carter was like, that she'd felt threatened by him, that she felt pressured to move forward with the show, that's when she got slammed with the lawsuit. Nobody's allowed to talk about the negative aspects of what they experience on the show because there is a threat of these lawsuits. Generally, people haven't been sued. Renee was, and I feel that that was a message to everybody. If you experience anything that's exploitative or abusive while making a reality show - not just "Love Is Blind" but any show - and you speak out about it, you're at risk of getting sued.
GROSS: What's it been like for you as a reporter on this piece, and as the author of your new book about reality shows to find out what really happens on reality shows, when on most reality shows - it's not just "Love Is Blind" - you sign non-disclosure agreements? You're not allowed to speak about it with reporters or anybody.
NUSSBAUM: One thing I found while I was working on this piece was about a workplace category for reality cast members in terms of Hollywood unions. They're called bona fide amateurs, which is to say they're not scripted performers that would be in SAG, like, you know, actresses. And they're not unscripted performers that would be in SAG, like, say, TV hosts and things like that. But they're also not the subjects of documentary, who are in a different category and have a little control. They're essentially like contestants on game shows. They're designated as a category that is sort of non-official and has no protections or rights of any kind.
And so what I was writing about in this piece was the first glimmerings of a movement to try to win protections, and also just to try to educate the general population about how these shows are made and what these issues are, and to improve things because I think some of the people at the center of this movement, it's not like they're saying you couldn't make an ethical reality show, they're saying that right now, the way reality shows are made is non-ethical, really, both for cast and crew. They're non-unionized sets, people don't have a lot of rights and the conventions and history of the genre have a lot of ugly things about them.
GROSS: My guest is Emily Nussbaum. Her article "Is 'Love Is Blind' A Toxic Workplace?" is published in the New Yorker. Her new book is called "Cue The Sun!: The Invention Of Reality TV." We'll talk about the book after a break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVE IS BLIND")
ERMA FRANKLIN: (Singing) They say that love's a sweet thing and for lovers the sun will always shine. But in spite of what they say, I think of love this way - love is bitter, love is hopeless and love is blind. I'll let the poets write about love.
(SOUNDBITE OF RANKY TANKY SONG, "FREEDOM")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Emily Nussbaum and talk about her new book "Cue The Sun!: The Invention Of Reality TV." She got the idea for the book back in 2003, when she thought of reality TV as a hot new pop culture genre, a time when reality stars were bumping actors from the covers of magazines. She waited about two decades before actually writing the book. And by then, she says, the deeper she dug, the darker things got. Nussbaum is a staff writer for The New Yorker and previously served as the magazine's TV critic. She wrote a recent article in the magazine about reality TV titled, "Is Love Is Blind A Toxic Workplace?" She won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2016.
So in your book, "Cue The Sun!," about the history of reality shows, you write that early reality shows depended on the naivete of the cast members. Can you elaborate on that?
NUSSBAUM: The way I conceive of reality television in the book is a essentially as dirty documentary, which is to say it's taking cinema verite documentary techniques and merging it with soap operas and game shows. And, of course, when people were on these shows at the beginning, there had never been a show like this before. So there was a kind of innocence to participating in the production that drove what happened on those shows.
And one show that came out in 1993 that I specifically talk about the naivete of the cast members was "The Real World" on MTV, where, you know, seven strangers pick to live in a house to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. So it was, like, seven young artists living in a loft in New York. And, of course, there had never been a show like that before. So by nature, they were going on to the show just not knowing anything about the techniques. And I think part of the power of shows like that and part of their unnerving quality is the sense of people out of their element.
Reality shows - when I call them dirty documentary, what I mean is they take documentary techniques and they create formats that put pressure on the people inside them. And the less the people inside them know about what's going to happen, the more powerful and, to some degree, authentic their emotional responses are. And this can work in different ways on different shows.
One of the perverse qualities as reality develops and changes and, to some degree, becomes faker is that the faker a show is, the more ethical it is because at the point that somebody is literally just collaborating with the producers and the producers are saying, go and have a fight in the kitchen, that's not an unethical situation. It's a lot more unethical when people are being manipulated or maneuvered, but at the same time, it is genuinely a realer thing where their emotions are real.
GROSS: What were you able to find out about how reality shows are cast, the earlier ones and the more contemporary ones?
NUSSBAUM: The earliest form of reality television that I talk about was actually before TV. It was on radio, and these shows were called the audience participation shows. I was very surprised by this. When I started writing this book, I expected it to go back to, like, the '90s and "The Real World." But what I found was that there was this explosion of shows on radio that also cast just regular people and that created a similar kind of moral outcry, where people were sort of appalled that regular people were going on the air. And I'm talking here about shows like "Candid Microphone," which was the first version of "Candid Camera," Allen Funt's prank show, and "Queen For A Day," where a bunch of ordinary women went on and told really distressing stories about their personal suffering in their marriages, their poverty, abuse, sickness and things like that.
And so people were very upset about the fact that ordinary people were going on the air. There was no such thing as reality casting at the time. I mean, this was just an opportunity for regular people to go on radio and, later, on TV and participate in the shows, sometimes for prizes. Like, on "Queen For A Day," the person who won based on a clapometer - like, other women rating them who had the ugliest life. Like, their motive for going on the show was obviously that they could win these prizes.
I did talk to people who worked on the first season of "Survivor" about the casting process for that show. And honestly, it was an insane situation in which all of the potential cast members were staying at a hotel. All of the producers would go in and just sometimes wake them up in the middle of the night to ask them questions. They also gave them psychological tests. They were trying to nail down that cast to figure out how they could get a diverse set of people who would have really wild and impressive personalities on the air that would capture the nation but could also be on the island of Borneo, starving and competing. And I have to say the cast for that first season is remarkable.
You know, over time, I think casting leaned a lot into racist and sexist stereotypes sometimes. There were, like, this idea of using flamboyant gay men as sort of comic relief on shows. You know, a lot of that stuff comes through in casting, and it sort of repeats itself over and over on different reality shows. I mean, like, a lot of the workers on reality shows that I write about in this book - people were inventing these professions that didn't exist. The idea of being a casting professional who got regular people to appear on pressured formats was a new thing. And so was being a field producer who knew how to talk to people, how to do interviews, how to move people through a story. So were editors. So when they used the crew on "Survivor," they were making their jobs up as they went along.
GROSS: My guest is Emily Nussbaum. Her new book is called "Cue The Sun: The Invention Of Reality TV." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE INTERNET SONG, "ROLL (BURBANK FUNK)")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Emily Nussbaum. She's a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former TV critic at the magazine. Her new book is called "Cue The Sun: The Invention Of Reality TV."
You described "Survivor" as the first series to take the reality genre mainstream, and you described Mark Burnett as a brilliant marketer. What was his marketing brilliance that enabled the show to be so successful?
NUSSBAUM: Well, it's important to know that Mark Burnett did not create "Survivor." He is a brilliant marketer. He got it onto CBS after 10 years, approximately, of the people who initially created "Survivor," including Charlie Parsons, who created the format, trying to sell it, essentially without success. I think it's a really important format, and I traced the beginnings of it, it's kind of a crazy thing 'cause it came out of Europe. It was originally based on a Scottish radio show where they sent people into the woods with a survival guide.
Then Charlie Parsons, who's a British reality producer, created a - sort of a version of it on a show he had, where he just sent people to an island with a group of strangers, and he thought it was a really good idea for a show. And then later, a team of people worked on how to put together things we take for granted, like the two tribes and voting people off the island, and the challenges became a hugely influential format. Anyway, Charlie Parsons, who had overseen this, tried to sell this without success. Mark Burnett was able to sell it because of his skill at packaging a show with advertising. When he sold it to CBS, he essentially came up with a scheme in which the show would cost CBS nothing.
So at the point that Les Moonves bought it, it was not really that much of a gamble. They put it on as a kind of summer experiment. And even if it had failed, it would have actually cost CBS nothing. And then it became a massive global hit and essentially set off the reality revolution as everybody tried to create the new "Survivor."
GROSS: So, you know, "Survivor" is a dangerous show in the sense that people are living in extreme circumstances and have to figure out how to survive in those circumstances, including, like, being asked to eat maggots, which was quite a shock.
NUSSBAUM: Well, they were called...
GROSS: Yeah.
NUSSBAUM: ...Buthids. I think they're, like, a local sort of a squirming grub. And you know, anybody who wants the...
GROSS: Oh, grubs. I said maggots. I'm not...
NUSSBAUM: It's OK.
GROSS: I'm not even sure what the difference is. I've never eaten one.
NUSSBAUM: I don't know either. But I have to say several people in the book vividly described the experience of eating them, but they are something that local people eat. It wasn't, like, a made-up idea on the show, but it really shocked people. And it was one of the reasons that critics of "Survivor" saw the show as so brutal and disgusting, which I think a lot of people don't remember because it's such an established show at this point. It has a huge fanhood. People watch it with their kids. It's like a nostalgic, old favorite.
But at the time, it was a very shocking thing. And, you know, for the book, I interviewed more than 300 people, and there were some shows where I had a kind of Pokemon-like collect-them-all feeling, and one of them was "Survivor," where I talked to every one of the cast members I could and tons of crew members. And all of them remembered this particular thing of the eating of the grub as a shocking experience. And I talked to the people who came up with the challenge, as well.
But Joel, who was one of the cast members on it, described it to me as the first moment that he really understood what the show was because he was just sitting there in the woods, and they bring out these bowls with the squirming, live grubs that have these very hard pinchers. And he was like, there's no way they're going to have us do this. It's just too disgusting and outrageous. And when he realized it was really happening, he was like, this is like nothing that's ever been on TV.
NUSSBAUM: I also talked to Gervase, who was the cast member who ate the grub for one of the tribes. And he said that - he had said in his psychological tests, you know, like, they all had to spill a lot of personal information. And I think he said that he was frightened of caterpillars. Like, that was one of his fears. So his impression was that they had deliberately contrived something that was going to freak him out. And that seems quite likely to me, because one of the things about these shows is they know deeply intimate things about the cast members, so they understand how to set up challenges that are going to affect them. That's the way he saw it, anyway. But it was shocking for people watching the show, as well, I remember there being a million different reviews of survivor that commented on that moment.
GROSS: Mark Burnett, one of the people behind "Survivor," is also behind "The Apprentice," Donald Trump's reality show. Who approached who about it? Was it Trump's idea or Mark Burnett's idea?
NUSSBAUM: The idea for the show was Mark Burnett's idea. He went to Trump with the idea. There's actually a scene in the book where Joel, the same guy who ate the grub remembers being at - I believe it was the party after one of the finales of "Survivor." They had a party at a nightclub, and he was looking up from one tier of the nightclub, and he was looking at Mark Burnett talking to Trump and feeling like he was witnessing this historical moment. So I have no idea exactly when the moment was that he suggested it. Mark Burnett's story that he liked to tell was that he was in the jungle, and he was watching ants, I think, you know, eating a carcass or something, and he was thinking, you know, I should make this show that is about the worst predators of all, which are people in the business world in the big city.
But I think there was an aspect of the show where he wanted to make something that did not involve that much travel, where he could make it in an urban center in New York, and he essentially pitched it as, you know, "Survivor" in the city. So it was his idea. He cast Trump, and Trump is indistinguishable from that show. He's inseparable from it, and he's the main outcome of it. I mean, they rebranded Trump. That was a show about marketing. And he was the ultimate marketed object. They took a failed businessman who was a sort of cartoon guy who was appearing doing cameos on sitcoms in the '90s, and they shined him up and made him look like the kind of guy who could run for president.
GROSS: You spoke to members of the crew from "The Apprentice," and some of them felt really guilty that they were responsible for creating a version of Trump that didn't exist in reality.
NUSSBAUM: Yeah. In retrospect, some of them did feel that way. You know, I talked to people ranging from producers to camera people, and I found that the lower people were on the hierarchy, often the more responsible they felt for Trump, which is unfortunate. But I think it's hard that - when you make a show like that to actually take stock of the outcome of it in that way. But yeah, you know, they didn't feel this while they were making the show. I mean, one of the striking things somebody told me was that by and large, the crew saw the show as a comedy. They thought of Trump as kind of clownish and outrageous. He had a wild charisma that definitely popped on the air, but they didn't take the repercussions at the time that seriously. And, you know, that's a well-made season of TV. They worked very hard.
It's a very skillfully edited, skillfully constructed, well-cast show. So at the time, they were very proud of it, they were in a big hit show on network television. But there was a split between the crew and the cast. The cast, who were real business people, genuinely mostly, not all of them, but a lot of them really respected Trump and wanted to work for them. The crew members, not all of them, but many of them, thought of Trump as a bit of a joke and also thought of the show as, in certain ways, a comedy. And they were surprised sometimes talking to the cast members who were actual business people, many of whom really did respect Trump and want to work for him. There was just a split in attitude between the two sides.
GROSS: Do you think that was because the crew members saw more of Trump behind the scenes?
NUSSBAUM: Bear in mind, while they were making the show, they were not thinking of him running for president. I mean, he was just this kind of clownish New York figure, but, you know, a lot of them were ********
NUSSBAUM: ***** clownish New York figure. But, you know, a lot of them were New Yorkers, and they knew his history of being a deadbeat who didn't pay bills. I talked to the art director for the show, and she described to me the fact that they had to do it on a very small budget. And just in order to design and procure, like, the furniture, they had to go outside New York because no local employers wanted to have anything to do with Trump because they knew that he didn't pay his bills.
GROSS: Trump, of course, likes to show off as a very, very, very successful businessman, "The Apprentice" being an example of that. But there were subsequent Trump reality shows that I don't think anybody really remembers that flopped.
NUSSBAUM: Yeah, there were a bunch of - I mean, Trump had these strange ideas that he wanted to do shows, a lot of which took women who were poorly behaved or tawdry and then shined them up so they could be ladies. I don't remember the names of all the shows. But that was during a period when there was such an explosive amount of reality production that when I would look at the list of the shows, like, it went from there being a handful of shows to there being hundreds of shows. And so, yes, his little attempts at reality production flopped, but they were just flops among many flops.
GROSS: So how has all the research you've done both for your book about the invention of reality TV and your New Yorker piece about "Love Is Blind" and the lawsuits against it, the contracts, the non-disclosure agreements - how does all of that affect your view of reality TV? Has your view and how you watch those shows and your desire to watch those shows changed?
NUSSBAUM: I didn't write this book because I love reality or because I hate reality. I wrote this book because reality television is such an important genre. Like, it's a genuinely powerful modern genre that affects everything from personal relationships to politics. I loved the fact that people opened up about what it was like to make these shows, the cast members and the crew members. So understanding the actual experience of producing a show like that did make me watch shows differently.
And, you know, I'll tell you. I originally had the idea for the book in 2003. And that was a period at which I was watching this streaming first season of "Big Brother" in the United States, which is a very embarrassing habit. I was watching these people out in California sleeping in their bunk beds in the corner of my screen. And it was an upsetting show to watch, and it was a compelling show to watch. I was embarrassed about it. I was fascinated by it. And it's part of the reason I wanted to write about the subject.
GROSS: Emily Nussbaum, thank you so much for talking with us.
NUSSBAUM: Thank you for having me.
GROSS: Emily Nussbaum is the author of the new book "Cue The Sun!: The Invention Of Reality TV." Her article, "Is 'Love Is Blind' A Toxic Workplace?, " is published in the New Yorker, where she's a staff writer and former TV critic. Coming up, classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews the new recording by a controversial 28-year-old conductor. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF YO-YO MA, TON KOOPMAN AND AMSTERDAM BAROQUE ORCHESTRA PERFORMANCE OF BACH'S "WACHET AUF, RUFT UNS DIE STIMME, BWV 645")
Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.