It’s 1956, the Golden Age of television, with feel-good shows like “I Love Lucy,” “December Bride,” “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “To Tell the Truth.”
And then a Debby Downer came along — a tearjerker of a mid-afternoon program that featured depressed, destitute female contestants vying for financial and emotional help.
Host Jack Bailey, a mustachioed ex-World’s Fair barker who had been in Alcoholic Anonymous for years, would open each lucratively-sponsored tearjerker by staring into the camera lens and asking, “Do you want to be queen for a day?”
It was one of the earliest, most successful, long-running, money-making reality shows — “Queen for a Day” was “a kind of upside-down beauty pageant whose winner was the woman with the ugliest life,” writes New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum in her fascinating, definitive 440-page history of the hugely successful genre, “Cue The Sun! The Invention of Reality TV” (Random House).
The book’s title comes from a line in the “darkly prescient” 1998 film, “The Truman Show,” starring Jim Carrey as a man who’s unaware that his entire life is being broadcast from a giant soundstage, reality-TV style.
“Queen For a Day” stood out because of its “acute focus on female suffering, offering up a unique blend of abjection and Vegas glitz, like ‘The Bachelor’ crossed with GoFundMe,” asserts Nussbaum, a Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism.
Each show had four down-in-the dumps contestants, and the winner, who would be crowned, was chosen by the audience, her score tallied on a hokey on-screen meter.
She would be presented with a slew of prizes, be motored around in a gold Cadillac, and get her wish, like the sad mom whose husband back in Toledo had been accidentally shot by a hunting friend.
Her wish?
Often tuition to a beauty school, as she usually had no trade or formal education.
Viewers at home ate it up, a box of tissues next to their favorite TV chair.
“The Apprentice,” MTVs “The Real World,” “Candid Camera,” “The Bachelor,” “Survivor” and “Cops” are just a few of the popular shows besides early “Queen” that receive Nussbaum’s exuberant and critical treatment — as part of a cultural history of America’s “most influential, most divisive” television phenomenon, with each show having an enormous audience, often like rubberneckers passing a fatality on I-95.
She writes that the deeper she dug into the “outrageous” origins of the reality format, the “darker “things got.
“There are people whose lives were wrecked by reality TV, she says; 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,” she writes, “was utterly reliant on the innocence of its stars, their inability to understand what they were consenting to.”
Nussbaum described this fundamental lack of agency as “the genre’s secret sauce, its original sin.”
Reality-TV shows, she writes, made visible “the sort of people” that television had “historically ignored,” from working-class single moms on “Queen for a Day” to a young gay Cuban-American with AIDS, Pedro Zamora, who became a star on “The Real World.”
Then along came the Loud family, Southern California laid-back affluence personified, with long hidden secrets buried in the walls of their Santa Barbara contemporary, a far different world from the downtrodden reality stars some two decades earlier on “Queen for a Day,” but equally desolate.
The show, “An American Family,” would have television viewers in the millions mesmerized when it debuted on Jan. 11, 1973.
Cameras following the Louds’ highs and many more lows – the father, handsome businessman Bill Loud, a secret adulterer; pretty wife, Pat, trying to maintain normality with a few drinks by the pool; typical Cali kids, Grant and Kevin, who played in bands; sister Delilah, who studied dance, the youngest, shy Michele, who liked to ride horses.
And then there was the real star of “American Family,” the 19-year-old flamboyant Lance Loud, who had moved out and was living in New York, with a room in the Chelsea Hotel, which, writes Nussbaum, was “infamous for its louche, outrageous social scene,” and where Lance’s mother visited him on 23rd Street for the first and quietly disapproved of his lifestyle — all of it on camera.
“This documentary footage shattered old notions of what was private and what was public,” the author maintains. “It also sent reality television down a new path. If ‘Candid Camera’ had launched the prank show, and ‘Queen for a Day’ the game show, ‘An American Family’ would initiate the third, and maybe the most powerful, thread of reality programming: the real-life soap opera.”
The twelve-hour series chronicled seven months in the Loud’s lives, broadcast weekly from January through March on normally staid public television station WNET.
“American Family” would become the “most divisive, explosive, endlessly debated pop-culture sensation,” writes Nussbaum, and “would do something astonishing, creating the world’s first reality stars.”
That at a time when the Watergate scandal would end Richard Nixon’s presidency; a cult leader named Charles Manson would lead his crazed followers on a Hollywood murder spree, and across America “drugs, sex and radical politics were everywhere,” writes Nussbaum.
On the heels of “American Family,” more than four decades of reality shows, great and not so great, would come and go – the likes of “Survivor,” “Big Brother,” “The Real World,” “Cops,” “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” “The Bachelor” and “Joe Millionaire” to name a few, all joyfully noted by Nussbaum — before an authentic real-life billionaire, a New York real-estate magnate and Page Six figure, would make the scene.
Donald J. Trump would become a star on a reality show called “The Apprentice” — on the path to ultimately becoming the nation’s controversial 45th president of the United States.
In February 2002, Trump had a meeting at Trump Tower and signed a deal to make The Apprentice for NBC, billed as a “competitive reality show in which Trump would play ‘the universally beloved New York real estate Tycoon, legendary for his business prowess,’” writes the author, clearly with a hint of snark.
It debuted to “decent ratings” and “mocking reviews” on January 8, 2004, filmed on the fourth floor of Trump Tower, in a fake boardroom set with no windows and dramatic shadow lighting.
As Nussbaum observes, “ ‘The Apprentice’ was a blue-chip concept. It managed to unite the two most successful reality models of the era — twisty, scheming team competitions like Survivor and talent contests like American Idol — and then added a shameless capitalistic twist. It was the first reality show to treat corporate marketing itself as a creative act, a form of self-expression as joyful as ballroom dancing.”
Potential challenges on the competitive show listed by Nussbaum include “Grace Under Pressure,” “Brown Nose Your Boss,” and the very Trumpian “Avoiding Corp Tax Challenge.”
Trump could be surprisingly collegial off camera, according to staffers, and particularly with the largely black and Latino crew, schmoozing at the crafts table, scooping up M&M’s and asking, “Who should I fire?”
“Stranger yet, Trump didn’t merely say, ‘You’re Fired,’ he made a gesture as he did so, pinching his fingers together, then jabbing the air — they called it ‘the cobra.’ ”
In the control room, there was a murmur of shock.
“It felt like he had just shot the guy.”
