Here are some highlights from this 2024 book by Emily Nussbaum:
* If you could knock your subjects off balance, they’d reveal a moment so shocking and, sometimes, so tender or surprising, that it would shatter viewer skepticism. It was the quality that Allen Funt liked to describe as being “caught in the act of being yourself,” the fuel that fed the reality engine, at both its loftiest moments and its lowest.
* It gave you the godlike power to create stories from the lives of ordinary human beings.
* I began this book excited to dig into the lively, outrageous origins of the reality genre, but the deeper I dug, the darker things got. There are people whose lives were wrecked by reality TV; there are methods of production so ugly they’re hard to look at; and reality programs, like any kind of television, reflect the limits, and the bigotries, of their creators. Early reality production was utterly reliant on the innocence of its stars, their inability to understand what they were consenting to: That was the genre’s secret sauce, its original sin.
* Inspired by a Vanity Fair article about the journalistic fabulist Stephen Glass, Cutler approached Glass’s old high school, in Highland Park, near Chicago, using a reference from his old pal George Stephanopoulos. He cut a deal with administrators, donating $100,000 worth of cameras and editing equipment and also offering to teach a class on filmmaking. In the show’s early stages, Cutler — who had grown up in Great Neck, a similar high – pressure suburb — was thinking about the dark themes in the Glass article, about the “conflict between ambitions and ethics.” By the time the show finished production, however, American High had emerged as a deeply humane project, a real – life analogue to the brilliant mid – 1990s teen drama My So – Called Life . It was full of likeable, layered characters, including an insecure girl and her jock boyfriend, a gay teen coming out to his friends, and a charming trickster with ADHD, on the verge of flunking out.
* Trump was “great TV, because he had no filter,” said Jamie Canniffe, who had started as a low – level producer in season 1, then rose through the ranks to become The Apprentice showrunner through season 6.
* The less ethical a show was, the more authentic the footage it captured. The more trusting (or drunk or exhausted) the participants were, the more likely it was that they’d ultimately crack, releasing a flood of feeling that couldn’t be faked.
