Schadenfreude, Social Identity, and American Media Culture ...

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

Laughing at the World: Schadenfreude, Social Identity, and American Media Culture

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

for the degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Field of Radio/Television/Film

By

Amber Eliza Watts

EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

June 2008

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Copyright by Amber Watts 2008 All rights reserved

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Contents

Abstract __________________________________________________ 4

Acknowledgements _________________________________________ 6

One Introduction: Laughing at the World___________________________ 8

Two The Reality of Schadenfreude and the Schadenfreude of Reality ___ 44

Three Misery, Transformation, and Happy Endings ___________________ 80

Four Love Hurts ______________________________________________ 134

Five Notoriety, Scandal, and Why We Love to Hate Celebrities ________ 203

Bibliography ____________________________________________ 259

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ABSTRACT

Laughing at the World: Schadenfreude, Social Identity, and American Media Culture

Amber Watts

This project explores historical questions of televisual form and cultural production, centering on

the proliferation of media texts that mobilize real-life misfortune as a form of entertainment in

U.S. television and culture. Specifically, it examines how a variety of “reality” formats in

contemporary television stage and exploit spectacles of failure, defeat, suffering, and humiliation

for the pleasure of the viewing audience. These texts speak to a wide range of emotional

engagements, from pity and sympathy to pure schadenfreude. However, all encourage narrative

pleasure in real-life adversity.

Historically, schadenfreude has been condemned by scholars and thinkers as a “base”

emotion, while reality television is often dismissed as lowly “trash” television. However, the use

of real individuals’ televised trauma has larger cultural, sociological, and ethical significance

beyond the texts themselves. Much like literary and stage melodrama in the nineteenth century,

contemporary media’s exploitation of actual is closely tied to negotiations of status and justice—

a means of working through issues of morality an ethics on a national scale.

In this project, then, I examine schadenfreude and suffering as both a textual strategy and

a site for exploring social identity in American culture. On the one hand, the spectacle of

5 suffering remains as one of the final “authentic” emotions available in the arsenal of reality

television, a unifying textual feature that can be found across the form’s many individual

subgenres. On the other hand, the very real pleasures that viewers find in these often denigrated

texts speaks to the significance of this impulse’s proliferation as a wider cultural sensibility,

particularly in the changing arenas of dating and relationships, fame and celebrity, and

makeovers and self-presentation. The ways in which we emotionally engage with reality

television thus speak to larger issues about both our relationship with media texts and our own

status within American culture.

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Acknowledgments Writing this dissertation would not have been possible without the guidance and support of many

people. I would especially like to thank Jeff Sconce, who has been an invaluable mentor ever

since I wrote my very first seminar paper on reality TV as a Master’s student at UCLA. His

insight and feedback have helped shape this dissertation well before it ever existed, and his ready

humor and constant encouragement have made my graduate school career both relatively

painless and incredibly rewarding. In addition, I would like to thank Lynn Spigel and Mimi

White, invaluable members of my dissertation committee, for their wealth of advice, support,

and feedback given over the years.

The path to the PhD may be arduous, but it is not without its rewards, since I have been

lucky to work alongside and get to know many fabulous people, both at UCLA and within the

Northwestern Screen Cultures community. At UCLA, Vivan Sobchack, Nick Browne, Steve

Mamber, and Robert Vianello encouraged my research at its earliest stages, and Chuck

Kleinhans, Scott Curtis, and Jim Webster have been extremely helpful in fostering my ideas here

at Northwestern. And Mary Beltran, Michael Curtin, and Michele Hilmes, my MCS colleagues

at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, have been instrumental in facilitating my transition

from PhD candidate to faculty. I am also very grateful to my fellow students Erica Bochanty,

Emily Carman, Max Dawson, Susan Ericsson, Hollis Griffin, Hyungshin Kim, Josh Malitsky,

Margo Miller, Elizabeth Nathanson, Mary Pagano, Kirsten Pike, Linda Robinson, Meredith

Ward, and Li Zeng, for their help, advice, and friendship.

7 I would like to express my deepest gratitude to TiVo, the Fox Network and Rockstar,

Inc. Without them, I would have had much less to write about and much less energy with which

to do so.

Finally, I could not have done any of this without the love and support of my family who,

thankfully, “get it.” And, chiefly, I’d like to thank Ron Extract for his special blend of wisdom,

patience, beer, love, and willingness to put up with all the craziness.

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Chapter 1: Introduction: Laughing at the World

The American broadcast media have long used the discomfort, humiliation, or suffering

of real people for entertainment purposes, beginning with Allen Funt’s Candid Microphone

(ABC, 1947-8), which became Candid Camera when it made the move to television (ABC,

1948; NBC, 1949-51; CBS, 1960-67; syndicated 1974-79 and 1991-2; CBS, 1996-2001).

Postwar “audience participation” shows like Queen for a Day (Mutual, 1945-1956; NBC, 1956-

1960; ABC, 1960-1964), Strike It Rich (CBS, 1947-58), and The Big Payoff (NBC, 1951-53;

CBS, 1953-59) used their subjects’ stories of personal hardship as vehicles for prize giving. The

1960s and 1970s Chuck Barris oeuvre, including shows like The Dating Game (ABC, 1965-73;

syndicated 1973-74, 1978-1980, 1986-1989, and 1996-1999), The Newlywed Game (ABC, 1966-

74; syndicated 1977-80, 1985-89, 1997-2000) The Gong Show (NBC, 1976-8; syndicated 1976-

80), Three’s a Crowd (syndicated, 1979-80) and The $1.98 Beauty Show (syndicated, 1978-80)

featured people humiliating themselves largely for the chance to be on television. Early prime-

time “reality television” shows like Cops (Fox, 1989 - ) and Rescue 911 (CBS, 1989 – 1996)

showed the arrests of actual criminals and survivors narrating (and reliving) traumatic accidents.

Over the past decade, though, the American media—particularly reality television—has become

increasingly focused on eliciting and showcasing the humiliation, consternation, and despair of

its subjects. Consider the following examples:

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• The premiere episode of VH1’s Celebrity Rehab (2008) featured eight celebrities with

varying degrees of drug and alcohol dependencies checking themselves into a rehab

facility to detox on-camera. While many of the patients arrived under the influence, none

were as intoxicated as former Grease and Taxi heartthrob Jeff Conaway. After washing

down a cocktail of prescription painkillers with a bottle of bourbon, Conaway arrived at

the Pasadena Recovery Center passed out in the passenger seat of his girlfriend’s car.

Over the course of the episode, Conaway—so drug-addled he couldn’t walk—shook,

hallucinated, screamed in pain, talked incoherently about suicide, and eventually was

rushed to the hospital after a series of detox-invoked seizures. Although Conaway’s

rehabilitation appeared to be successful by series end, the Celebrity Rehab premiere

seemed to be setting up a real-life tragedy unfolding before viewers’ eyes.

• On the 2006 seventh season premiere of America’s Next Top Model (UPN, 2003 – 2006;

CW 2006 - ), a panel of judges whittled down 33 semifinalists to 13 finalists after a series

of one-on-one interviews. Whereas viewers saw most would-be models briefly describe

themselves to the judges and show off their runway walks (in both casual clothing and

bikinis), contestant Megan Morris’s interview went a bit differently. Top Model host

Tyra Banks mentioned that Megan had lived through a very traumatic experience.

Megan tearfully went on to elaborate that she had survived a plane crash as a small child.

Her mother had died of hypothermia on top of an immobile Megan, and it was only the

heat from her mother’s body that kept Megan alive until the crash was discovered the

next morning. This heart-wrenching story received more airtime than any demonstration

of her potential modeling abilities. When she was selected as a finalist, the show’s

privileging of her personal tragedy left the impression that Megan’s suffering, more so

10 than her beauty, justified her appearance on the show. Surviving such a horrific ordeal

seemed to indicate that she had earned the opportunity to compete on Top Model.

• On February 25, 2008, 26-year-old hairdresser Lauren Cleri appeared on The Moment of

Truth (Fox, 2008), a game show where contestants had to correctly answer a series of

highly personal questions, their answers corroborated by a polygraph machine. Each

“correct” answer contributed to a cash prize, but one wrong answer would send

contestants home empty-handed. As she gradually built a jackpot of $200,000, Cleri

admitted—in front of her parents, sister, new husband, a live studio audience, and

millions of viewers—that she had stolen money from an employer, she had been in love

with an ex-boyfriend on her wedding day, she believed she should be married to said ex

instead of her husband, and that she had cheated on her husband. After such extreme

honesty, it was difficult not to see the irony when Cleri answered “yes” to the question,

“Do you think you’re a good person?” and learned that the answer was incorrect; she

would be going home with nothing, save a ruined marriage.

Although these moments differ significantly in scope and in tone, each exemplifies what

has increasingly become a dominant in contemporary factual television: the use of real-life

misfortune as a form of popular entertainment. Viewing the physical and mental toll of Jeff

Conaway’s decades of drug abuse may have been difficult and painful for the Celebrity Rehab

audience. However, his struggles and eventual recovery served as a key framing device for the

show, setting up a compelling morality tale about addiction and redemption. Megan’s heart-

wrenching audition-confession may have seemed out of place in a modeling competition, but it

immediately turned an anonymous wannabe model into a sympathetic (albeit one-dimensional)

11 character—an effective use of limited narrative time. At the more extreme end of the scale,

Lauren Cleri’s series of candid, troubling truths and the irony of her single “lie” read as a

concise, pleasurable morality play. As she admitted to an escalating amount of hurtful actions

for an escalating jackpot, her desire to win money on television clearly (and visibly) pained her

loved ones. In the end, however, her own hubris brought about her downfall—a seemingly

appropriate punishment for her questionable on- and off-camera behavior, and a satisfying

narrative conclusion.

Such moments are not isolated across the spectrum of reality television. Indeed, the

spectacle of real people’s suffering and humiliation are integral to the narrative structures of

myriad reality shows, albeit often folded into a more “positive” storyline. The relationship show

The Bachelor (ABC, 2002- ), for example, ostensibly shows a couple falling in love, but the

romance narrative depends just as much on one man summarily dumping twenty-four women

over the course of several weeks. American Idol (Fox, 2002- ) may be a “search for a superstar,”

but Simon Cowell’s lambasting of untalented singers is just as important as the putative search

for actual talent. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (ABC, 2004 - ) builds a new house for a

deserving family every week, but this gift hinges on the telling and retelling of the family’s often

tragic backstory—a means of proving that they deserve their new home. As reality shows

continue to thrive, watching real people’s pain, failure, or humiliation has become one of their

key narrative pleasures.

As a genre, reality television is difficult to define. At its most basic, reality TV relies on

real people, not actors, playing themselves in an “unscripted” scenario. Of course, the term

“unscripted” is potentially misleading. While reality participants are usually not reading lines,

shows often put them in carefully crafted situations to elicit certain types of desired responses.

12 The 2007 ABC show Kid Nation, for example, featured forty children living by themselves in

a New Mexico ghost town, ostensibly to “create a new society” and show that children could be

just as competent as adults. While the premise left the impression that this social experiment

would quickly turn into a violent, disturbing narrative located somewhere between of Lord of the

Flies and Deadwood, in practice it became a heart-warming narrative of the children’s

friendship, growth, strength, and self-sufficiency. In part, though, this was due to the fact that,

while the children may have had no adults living in town with them, their actions were carefully

choreographed—in terms of planned drama or crises via the “tasks” they were given to complete

each week, or through the results of the elaborate challenges participants competed in every

episode. What the children did with these elements was entirely up to them, but to say that there

was no “script” or prior orchestration of crisis or conflict is not wholly accurate.

In 2001, Brian Lowry of The Los Angeles Times suggested the term “staged, unscripted

TV” as a substitute for the dubious “reality” label, calling attention to the inherent contradiction

between lived experience and the needs of narrative television.1 As Lowry indicated, most

reality programming is not only prefabricated, as in the case of Kid Nation, but postfabricated, as

footage is edited to create compelling storylines, dramatic music underscores emotions, and

narrative arcs parallel those of scripted cumulative television narratives. Similarly, Susan

Murray and Laurie Ouellette have argued that reality television is not an accurate portrayal of

lived experience per se, but instead can be described as “the entertaining real,” a mode where a

realist aesthetic, reliance on non-actors, and claims of “authenticity” are combined with

televisual narrative and aesthetic practices—in short, turning “real life” into an entertainment

1 Brian Lowry, “Time to Be Honest About ‘Reality’ Series,” Los Angeles Times, February 21, 2001.

13 genre.2 Indeed, the appeal of reality television can be tied to the blending of non-actors

“playing themselves” and the pleasures of television’s narrative and aesthetic conventions. It is

“reality” in the sense that participants’ words, actions, and fates are unpredictable; it is

“television” because these words, actions, and fates are recorded purely for entertainment

purposes.

Rather than merely dismiss these shows as “trash” television, I believe that reality

television’s affinity for real emotional spectacle as a form of entertainment is symptomatic of

what Raymond Williams would term a “structure of feeling,” a “sensibility” binding texts,

audiences, and lived culture in profound if often ineffable ways. These often denigrated texts are

often extremely popular—42.9 million viewers, or a 38 share, watched the last half hour of the

fifth American Idol finale, for example—and millions clearly find very real pleasures in them.3

This impulse extends beyond reality television as well, significantly informing, for example, the

exponential growth in the amount of “tabloid” coverage devoted to the failures and

embarrassments of celebrities, an interest that ranges from cheering on A-list divorces to the

mock pathos attending the chronic dysfunction of former childhood stars. The pleasure in

viewing adversity as entertainment has become a reigning cultural sensibility in contemporary

media, a textual strategy that encourages a particular type of viewer engagement with the larger

world of television, popular culture, and society as a whole. It is, I would argue, a symptom of a

larger inability to define, or at least invest in, older binaries of reality and fiction, authenticity

and performance, life and entertainment, virtue and vice.

2 Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette, “Introduction,” Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2004), 4. 3 Cynthia Littleton, “Huge Turnout Sees Hicks Get ‘Idol’ Crown,” The Hollywood Reporter (online edition), May 26, 2006 <http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002575971> (accessed August 3, 2007).

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The Spectrum of Suffering

As the above examples demonstrate, there are a wide range of emotional access points

from which to engage in real spectacles of suffering, from pathos and pity to identification to

schadenfreude, the act of taking pleasure in others’ misfortune. While the spectrum is broad,

though, each of these viewing positions hinges on a form of narrative pleasure in other people’s

suffering, if not in the fact of the suffering itself. At one end of the emotional spectrum lies

Celebrity Rehab, where the sight of Jeff Conaway’s battered body is clearly intended to evoke

feelings of fear, disgust, and, most of all, pity—a pathos-laden entry point to a narrative about

redemption and recovery. Top Model lies somewhere in the middle, using the sympathy Megan

Morris’s personal narrative invokes as a way to help the audience invest in her as a contestant.

Pity, in this case, helps motivate engagement in a narrative seemingly unrelated to her tragedy.

The Moment of Truth, however, represents another extreme. While it would be difficult not to

feel pity or sympathy for Lauren Cleri’s husband as she revealed her secrets to him and the

American public, Cleri’s own downfall evoked something much closer to schadenfreude. In this

case, the conflation of public and private, truth and untruth—the subject of her on-camera

honesty was, after all, her real-life dishonesty—when combined with her mercenary reason for

publicly divulging such hurtful information in the first place, made Cleri appear wholly

unsympathetic. That her losing question hinged on evaluating her own self-worth thus created a

dual viewing pleasure: a clear narrative denouement, as well as a sense that real-life justice had

been served. Her “lie” gave a definitive statement about her questionable morality and

eliminated any possible reward for her behavior.

15 Taking pleasure in tales of misery is not a phenomenon of the post-cable age. As

historian Karen Halttunen explains, the eighteenth century “cult of sensibility” in Anglo-

American culture encouraged similar pleasures, while helping rewrite the meanings of pain and

suffering in the Enlightenment era. Before, suffering was something to be tolerated for its

redemptive properties, if not necessarily welcomed—as in the Orthodox Christian vision of pain,

where suffering brings one closer to Christ, with admission to Heaven as the ultimate salvation.

The humanitarian sensibility, however, learned to view pain as earthly rather than divine and

hence abhorrent, something to be censured. Within actual cultural practice, this did not mean the

eradication of discourse about pain and suffering, however. Rather, the result was what

Halttunen calls “the pornography of pain,” where the taboo nature of pain made spectatorial

sympathy a kind of titillating pleasure.4 “Sentimental sympathy,” a typical emotional response to

sentimental literature, was described as “‘dear delicious pain,’ ‘a sort of pleasing Anguish’—an

emotional experience that liberally mingled pleasure with vicarious pain.”5 Although this was

the era, and the sensibility, from which the Marquis de Sade emerged, this ambiguous

pleasure/pain relationship was not malicious. Sadism was one of the major complaints leveled

against readers of sentimental fiction, but the pleasure involved was vicarious and involved no

direct contribution on the reader’s part. It was pain caused by others to others; the reader was

merely a spectator.

According to Halttunen, the intent behind sentimental literature was less to titillate

readers than to “nurture the moral sense by arousing sympathy” as evil and suffering became to

4 Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (April 1995), 304. 5 Ibid., 308.

16 be viewed less as a manifestation of divine power and more a function of the human

condition.6 Because of this Enlightenment move toward the secularization of ethics, sentimental

art served a key function—teaching humanistic virtue through a visceral, emotional response to

fictional suffering. Indeed, despite intense criticism about the nature of “the pornography of

pain,” it played an important role in navigating the social world, acting as a moral guide for its

readers.

In his influential work on melodrama, Peter Books has indicated that nineteenth- and

early twentieth-century literary and stage melodrama served a similar function for the Western

world. In a “post-sacred era” where older notions of ethics and morality were disappearing with

nothing clear to replace them, the melodramatic mode served as an ethical beacon, a means of

“making the world morally legible.”7 Melodrama inevitably focused on the point of view of a

victim—someone largely powerless in society, like the slaves in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle

Tom’s Cabin, but most often young women or children. As Thomas Elsaesser has indicated,

victim-protagonists in melodrama are always acted upon by the cruel outside world, granting

them “a negative identity through suffering.”8 Acknowledging suffering thus becomes the

audience’s only point of identification with the protagonist—and it is the unfairness of her

suffering that defines her virtue. By encouraging the spectator to empathize with the victim’s

exaggerated suffering, melodrama therefore drew clear lines around what exemplified virtue and

vice. These popular forms allowed readers and audience members to emotionally engage with

and consequently make sense of ideals of justice, truth, and their own lived experience.

6 Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 47. 7 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 15, 42. 8 Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” Film Genre Reader II, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 363.

17 The term “melodrama” literally means a play with musical accompaniment, a mid-

nineteenth century theatrical genre that relied on broad, stereotypical characterizations and an

overly dramatic acting style. Over the years, though, melodrama has come to signify any text

given to excess—whether through sensationalism, characters’ exaggerated behavior, over-the-top

emotional display, or a clear (often overstated) intrinsic morality. The melodramatic mode of

storytelling has readily adapted to various media forms over the centuries, notably film, and as

Linda Williams argues, melodramatic narrative “has been the norm, not the exception” in

American cinema.9 Indeed, according to Williams, melodrama should be considered a mode

rather than a genre, for “if emotional and moral registers are sounded, if a work invites us to feel

sympathy for the virtues of beset victims, if the narrative trajectory is ultimately concerned with

a retrieval and staging of virtue through adversity and suffering,” a text, regardless of its genre, is

inherently melodramatic.10

It is easy to see the links between the melodramatic mode and reality television’s

penchant for showcasing suffering. On a program like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, the

virtuous are rewarded for their adversity with a new house and the promise of a new life. Pathos

and pity become key narrative devices that define the audience’s understanding of the show’s

subjects, and the implications of their misfortune. Even on America’s Next Top Model, a

competition that theoretically has little to do with virtue or vice, contestants like Megan Morris

are framed by their troubles—making them not only legible as characters in a larger drama but

also as social actors navigating real-world adversity. As reality and non-fiction programming

increasingly supplant scripted fare on broadcast and cable television, they have begun to explore

9 Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to OJ Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 16. 10 Ibid., 15, 313 n.7.

18 the dynamics of real-life hardship with growing frequency. Indeed, it seems that reality

programming has become the new site for melodramatic engagement on American television. In

a post-millennial United States marked by growing political, religious, and ideological

fragmentation, it seems natural for a new melodramatic mode to emerge. As Thomas Elsaesser

has argued, melodrama’s popularity invariably has coincided with historical periods “of intense

social and ideological crisis.”11 Recent polarizing struggles over issues like gay marriage, school

prayer, and the war in Iraq reveal an inherent lack of moral consensus in contemporary American

culture, and reality television’s displays of victimhood and vice make it a key site for exploring

issues of morality and ethics on a national scale.

Suffering and Schadenfreude

Where reality television veers from more traditional melodramatic modes is that its

emotional draw comes not from a broad symbolic representation of virtue and villainy but rather

from the trials and tribulations of real people. While Brooks ties melodrama to “the drama of the

ordinary,” it by no means operates under a realist aesthetic, but is rather a highly stylized means

of expressing real-world tension.12 Reality TV, on the other hand, hinges on realism, providing

“authentic” access to the lives, emotions, crises, and drama of “real people,” not actors. But as

“the entertaining real,” where situations are often constructed to create televisual drama and

postproduction techniques help shape raw footage into an entertaining final product, reality

television’s break from earlier melodrama may not be that severe. However, the use of real

people—and the mobilization of their moments of crisis—raises some key ethical issues.

11 Elsaesser, 352. 12 Brooks, 13.

19 Take, for example, the final episode of Fox’s 2003 series Married by America.

Married by America allowed viewers, via internet and telephone votes, to pair up couples who

had never seen one another before, and on the finale, two of these couples had the opportunity to

get married. The climactic moment came when, at the altar, in front of their families, friends,

and millions of viewers, they would have the opportunity to say either “I do” or “I don’t.” One

pair, Tony and Billie Jeanne, appeared particularly mismatched, which seemed to be evident to

everyone but Billie Jeanne. Tony had clearly developed cold feet by the fourth episode of the

series, whereas Billie Jeanne, coming from an unstable family background and a long string of

failed relationships, was sure Tony was her soul mate. When Tony told his made-for-television

fiancée “I don’t” at the altar, chaos ensued. Her best friend Dwayne physically attacked Tony’s

groomsmen. Billie Jeanne ran from the altar and huddled on a closet floor, sobbing and

repeating the words “I’m a joke”, while her friends unsuccessfully tried to comfort her. Tony

cried, too, wondering aloud whether or not he should have just gone through with the wedding to

spare her feelings. In the end, everyone was miserable and uncomfortable—including, most

likely, the majority of viewers at home.

Based on her stories about her troubled past and extreme attachment to Tony, Billie

Jeanne’s reaction was simultaneously expected and disturbing. Her rejection was logical in

terms of the series architecture, but Billie Jeanne’s emotional meltdown was compelling not only

as the conclusion of a narrative that had been unfolding for weeks, but because her suffering was

extremely disturbing to watch—for there was little doubt that her pain was real and that she

would be dealing with her public rejection for a long time in the future. That producers

separated the couples for the two days before their “weddings,” however, makes it clear that

Billie Jeanne’s heartbreak was, at some level, planned. Keeping the couples apart made it

20 impossible for anyone to call off the ceremony at the last minute, which would have been the

compassionate thing to do but would have prevented the climactic “I don’t” moment. While the

show orchestrated her rejection at the altar and subsequent meltdown, then—or at least did not

prevent the easily foreseeable heartbreak from happening—it also guaranteed that there would be

something compelling and “real” to watch.

By choreographing Billie Jeanne’s inevitable meltdown, the producers of the Married by

America finale entered into a questionable ethical relationship with the program’s subjects. The

possibility of rejection at the altar was out in the open for all four would-be newlyweds, but

denying them the opportunity to call off the wedding beforehand was an obvious ploy to inflate

the possibility of heartbreak and humiliation. Married by America also entered blurry ethical

territory, however, in relation to its audience. In part, this humiliation was planned as part of an

“entertaining” narrative, a means of making the finale more suspenseful and compelling. But

this, in turn, relies on the assumption that viewers wanted to see a woman’s spectacular public

meltdown, rather than a more quiet, private breakup. It would have been hard to take pleasure in

Billie Jeanne’s pain, but the show’s producers seemed to anticipate viewers who would.

Billie Jeanne’s orchestrated heartbreak and humiliation seemed like a deliberate attempt

to create a schadenfroh viewing position for the Married by America audience—with suffering

as an “entertaining” narrative denoument. While it apparently failed to do so in this case,

planned schadenfreude is not a unique textual strategy on reality television. Spike TV’s 2003

series The Joe Schmo Show, for example, featured a man who believed he was competing on a

reality show called Lap of Luxury, when in actuality, the rest of the cast consisted of actors

following a script. In a similar vein was the 2004 WB Network’ Superstar USA, where

contestants believed they were competing in a legitimate talent competition, when the show was

21 actually a contest to find “the worst singer in America.” While schadenfreude is perhaps the

most extreme emotional entry point on the reality TV spectrum, it is also the most complex. The

ethics of schadenfreude as an emotion have long been debated, but as an emotional strategy on

broadcast television, it raises significant moral questions.

While reality television’s inclination toward pathos and pity clearly exemplifies the

melodramatic mode, it is arguable that schadenfreude speaks to some other mode entirely.

Whereas melodrama focuses on the suffering of the victim-protagonist, schadenfreude speaks

more to the comeuppance of a villain. It is not an empathetic response to unjust suffering but

rather gratification at the sight of justice being served. However, both responses are intrinsically

tied to ideas of fairness and morality. The main difference lies in the fact that schadenfreude

involves pleasure in punishment, whereas pathos involves the anticipation of punishment’s

cessation. Feeling schadenfreude depends not just on understanding the object’s transgression

and punishment, but also on individual moral codes of propriety: evaluating whether an

individual’s suffering is appropriate for his transgression. If one suffers too little for one’s

transgressions—if Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, had received two years’ probation for his

murders—it is “unjust,” and the punishment will be unfulfilling. If the punishment is too harsh,

however—if Paris Hilton had received life imprisonment for her DUI—it is also unjust, and

crosses the line to cruelty. Instead of inducing schadenfreude, it is more likely to create

sympathy or empathy. Schadenfreude is therefore a means of evaluating social codes and mores,

not just expressing them. Based on the ways in which schadenfroh texts address viewers and

how viewers respond to them, it has the ability to both express and work through contemporary

moral codes and sensibilities.

22 Schadenfreude is something almost everyone has felt in real life at some point, whether

manifested in the secret enjoyment of a rival’s failure or emphatic gossip about Britney Spears’s

public meltdown. John Portmann has called schadenfreude “the emotional manifestation of

beliefs about justice,” an almost Puritanical pleasure in seeing appropriate punishment meted out

to those who deserve it, without having to mete it out oneself.13 And while Nietzsche has called

the active cruelty in punishing an offender “the highest degree of pleasure possible” as a means

of compensating for loss, even the act of witnessing punishment is often “festive.”14 And indeed,

taking pleasure in others’ (merited) punishment is not just socially ubiquitous, but it is apparently

psychobiologically hardwired within us. In 2004, a group of Swiss psychologists discovered that

witnessing the punishment of someone who had wronged the test subject stimulated a pleasure

center in the subject’s brain,15 implying that schadenfreude and the desire for social justice may

both be essential human characteristics. Despite its universality, however, schadenfreude is a

concept that has long been condemned as one of the baser human emotions. In Philebus, Plato

called laughter at the expense of others, “unjust” and “malicious,” recommending that one

therefore suppress laughter as much as possible.16 Schopenhauer, as well, called

schadenfreude’s pleasures “malicious,” and claimed that “There is no more infallible sign of a

thoroughly bad heart and profound moral worthlessness than an inclination to a sheer and

undisguised malignant joy of this kind.17 Kant claimed that schadenfreude “makes hatred of

13 John Portmann, When Bad Things Happen to Other People (New York: Routledge, 2000), 15. 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, “’Guilt,’ ‘Bad Conscience,’ and the Like,” On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kauffman and RJ Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 65-7. 15 Dominique J.-F. de Quervain, Urs Fischbacher, Valerie Treyer, Melanie Schellhammer, Ulrich Schnyder, Alfred Buck, and Ernst Fehr, “The Neural Basis of Altruistic Punishment,” Science 305 (August 2004), 1254-57. 16 Plato, Philebus, trans. Dorothea Frede (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993), 58-9. 17 Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 135.

23 men visible,”18 while Freud merely denounced it as “childish.”19 Psychologist Fritz Heider has

called a schadenfroh reaction to another’s misfortune a “discordant” emotion, establishing

hostility, as opposed to pity or mutual joy, which are “concordant”20 and establish harmony.

Portmann, however, defends schadenfreude, not just because of its ubiquity but also

because of its passivity. While it is often conflated with malice, cruelty, and sadism, Portmann

argues that schadenfreude does not involve any form of active agency. Unlike cruelty, which

relies on an individual’s intent to make another suffer (whether through specific action or a lack

thereof—as in a deliberate failure to help someone in need) or malice, which is an active concept

and involves pleasure in the act of being cruel, schadenfreude is an inherently passive concept.

It is a pleasure in another’s misfortune, but it does not involve the intent or action of causing pain

to others. Rather, it is “a gift of something for nothing,” a joy in seeing justice served to

individuals who have in some way transgressed social boundaries.21 When a smarmy, unethical

business rival goes to jail for insider trading, then, one can enjoy his receiving his just deserts,

especially because it reads as almost karmic retribution for previous transgressions. Because

schadenfreude relies on this sense of passivity, broadcast television seems to be a perfect conduit

for the emotion. It is a site where people’s transgressions and troubles can be played out for a

national audience; all the viewer has to do is watch.

However, the nature of broadcast television complicates these moral questions. Much like

Billie Jeanne’s painful rejection at the altar—which may or may not have been a “just

18 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1966), 207. 19 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York; W.W. Norton, 1960), 278-79. 20 Fritz Heider, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1958), 277-78. 21 Portmann, 26.

24 punishment” for her unrealistic expectations about marriage—many reality television

moments raise questions about whether subjects’ humiliations are pleasurable entertainment or

merely cruel. While everyday schadenfreude is an inherently passive concept, the creation of

schadenfroh texts for a mass audience by a profit-seeking producer raises questions about

whether the audience is actively complicit in some way with the subjects’ humiliation and,

therefore, what it means in a moral sense to enjoy manufactured schadenfreude.

The Morality of Mediated Humiliation

Throughout the January 27, 2004 episode of American Idol, which showed the singing

competition’s third-season auditions in San Francisco, host Ryan Seacrest promised that we

would soon see “the worst singer in Idol history.” After an hour filled with the auditions of a few

good singers and many more tone-deaf ones, we finally met William Hung, a Hong-Kong born

UC Berkeley civil engineering student who, with a thick accent, said that he would rather be a

professional singer than an engineer. At first glance, Hung seemed like any other spectacularly

bad American Idol auditoner. He neither dressed nor looked the part of an Idol winner—badly in

need of orthodontics, with an unflattering haircut, too-short pleated pants and a brightly-printed

short-sleeved shirt buttoned to the top—and it was clear from Seacrest’s introduction that his

vocal stylings were going to be on par with his outfit. Indeed, when Hung appeared before the

judges, he immediately jumped into a unique version of Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs,” shouting

the lyrics and “dancing” along with awkward arm movements. Judges Randy Jackson and Paula

Abdul could not contain their laughter and, when Simon Cowell stopped Hung as he went into

the second chorus, Cowell bluntly told him, “You can’t sing. You can’t dance. So what are you

going to say?”

25 Whereas most would-be Idols would have bristled at this criticism—making excuses

for their performances, begging to try again, or insulting Cowell in return—Hung was humble.

Nonplussed, he told the judges, “I already gave my best, and I have no regrets at all” before

calmly leaving the room. For most Idol rejectees, this would have marked the end of their fifteen

minutes of fame; for William Hung, however, it launched a career. Within days, numerous

William Hung fan sites sprung up online—one, WilliamHung.net, receiving four million hits

within the first week of its launch.22 Over the next several weeks, Hung appeared on numerous

talk shows, including Ellen DeGeneres, where he sang four songs over the course of the hour;

Hung merchandise appeared on eBay; Jimmy Fallon impersonated him on Saturday Night Live;

MTV invited him to sing at their Asia Awards; and, perhaps most shocking of all, he received a

$25,000 check and a recording deal from Koch Entertainment. Hung’s debut EP, Inspiration,

with its hit single “She Bangs,” premiered at number 34 on the Billboard 200 in spring 2004 and

remained on the chart for ten weeks, outperforming the album of Diana DeGarmo, that season’s

Idol runner-up.23 That winter, he released a second EP, Hung for the Holidays, and starred in the

Hong Kong comedy My Crazy Mother. Hung’s third EP, Miracle: Happy Summer from William

Hung, which featured his unique renditions of classic hits like “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” and “Take

Me Out to the Ballgame,” was a resounding failure in the summer of 2005, apparently marking

the end of his extended “fifteen minutes.” However, Hung’s recording career and time in the

22 Jesamyn Go, “He’s a Loser, Baby,” MSNBC.com, February 26, 2004. <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4305972/> (accessed August 26, 2007). 23 Diana DeGarmo’s album, Blue Skies, peaked at number 52. The Billboard 200, Billboard.com, June 26, 2004 <http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/esearch/chart_display.jsp?cfi=305&cfgn=Albums&cfn=The+Billboard+200&ci=3054308&cdi=8169757&cid=06%2F26%2F2004> (accessed August 26, 2007); Diana DeGarmo Chart History, Billboard.com <http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/retrieve_chart_history.do?model.chartFormatGroupName=Albums&model.vnuArtistId=619224&model.vnuAlbumId=661447> (accessed August 26, 2007)

26 public eye lasted longer, and was arguably more successful, than that of many legitimate

recording artists.

The fascination with Hung seemed to stem in part from the fact that, in every possible

way, he represented the anti-“Idol.” His unconventional appearance and utter lack of musical

talent served as a visual and aural antithesis of everything the show claimed an American Idol

represented. At the same time, though, Hung’s humility also made him the perfect foil for the

myriad of other anti-Idols that season. The function of most painful auditions in Idol’s early

episodes is to underscore the eventual finalists’ actual talent, and awful singers’ humiliation

appears as just punishment for their delusional hunger for fame. Hung, however, had no such

pretensions; he just wanted to sing. His rejection did not crush his dreams or challenge any type

of delusion; rather, he took it in stride because he had no pretension of becoming a superstar,

only of doing “his best.” According to Don Chin, the webmaster of WilliamHung.net, Hung

initially appealed to so many people because “He’s just very real... He has a really good time

performing, and he really gives it his all, just for the love of it.”24 And America’s embrace of his

exuberance and humility, despite Hung’s lack of talent, at one level seemed to be a backlash

against bland, homogenous, carefully packaged Idolatry. Buying his album was a way to support

the underdog while rejecting a competition that had no place for an apparently sincere guy with

no singing ability.

At the same time, though, the large-scale support for William Hung was a less-than-

subtle insult to Hung himself. While embracing Hung as the ultimate underdog was a testament

to his genuineness, it simultaneously involved reveling in that which made him an underdog.

Acknowledging that he embodied everything an Idol should not be was to acknowledge that he

24 Jessamyn Go, “He’s a Loser, Baby.”

27 was without talent, clueless about the implications of auditioning for the show, and, to boot,

not conventionally attractive. Even Hung’s official bio on the website for the All-American

Celebrity Network, which books motivational speakers, focuses more on his faults than talents,

calling him “an accidental novelty star that is selling neither sex nor talent” and proclaiming that

Hung, “modern pop culture's inexplicable, talentless phenomenon, is truly a wonder to guffaw

upon.”25

The fact that he was an immigrant engineer with a less than perfect grasp of the English

language and a less than clear understanding of American culture may have been an integral part

of his persona, but at the same time it reinforced several negative stereotypes about Asian males.

Indeed, a number of Asian-American commentators denounced the Hung phenomenon on these

grounds—not only because he was the sole Asian on reality television at the time, but more

importantly because his public image embodied a stereotype of Asian men as earnest, docile,

nerdy, and asexual. According to Emil Guillermo, Hung’s persona resembled nothing more than

a rehash of Mickey Rooney’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s character, which was particularly galling

considering the overall dearth of Asian representation in American media. The only positive

aspect of Hung’s popularity was, apparently, that “he has not been asked to demonstrate any

karate moves or threaten the American way of life.”26 Even though many William Hung

supporters were Asian-Americans themselves, Village Voice columnist David Ng nonetheless

read a kind of anxiety-fueled hegemonic schadenfreude into their enjoyment, namely that “Hung

represents everything we don't want to be seen as (foreign, nerdish, a joke), and thus his oddball

25 “Biography of William Hung,” All-American Talent & Celebrity Network website <http://www.allamericanspeakers.com/speakers/William-Hung/2312> (accessed September 12, 2007). 26 Emil Guillermo, “William Hung: Racist or Magic?” San Francisco Chronicle, April 6, 2004.

28 fame reinforces our own happily assimilated identities.”27 Certainly not every Asian Idol

viewer agreed with Ng’s analysis. Jennifer Kuo, president of the media watchdog group Media

Action Network for Asian Americans, for example, wrote a harsh rebuttal to his column, saying

Ng himself seemed to harbor “a xenophobic rage” against Asian immigrants.28 In a similar vein,

commentator Guy Aoki argued that Hung’s popularity opposed the type of reading Ng proposed:

“They’ve accepted him despite his being a walking Asian FOB stereotype. He beat the odds by

being himself, despite that self being very awkward.”29 Whether or not the Hung phenomenon

was fueled by unconscious racism or a dual schadenfroh engagement with his failures and joy in

his success, however, such debate speaks to the ambiguity and plurality of his meanings.

Such ambivalence was largely fueled by one key question: namely, whether William

Hung himself understood what his fame actually meant. That answer was ambiguous as well.

While Hung was clearly intelligent, it was unclear if he was complicit in the making of his own

image, or if he even grasped that his image was not wholly positive. In interviews, he often

expressed a general bewilderment about his newfound fame—both pleased with the attention but

confused about (or oblivious to) its larger meanings. On the March 1, 2004 Fox special

American Idol: Uncut, Uncensored, and Untalented, Hung reprised his “She Bangs”

performance on the official Idol stage. In a follow-up interview, Ryan Seacrest asked him how

his life had changed since his first Idol appearance. Hung’s happy response was that he had “a

lot more friends now,” which further hinted at a broad naiveté. Apparently, he had missed the

pervasive pop culture message that “hangers-on” or the merely curious are not “friends,” and he

27 David Ng, “Hung Out to Dry,” The Village Voice, April 6, 2004. 28 “Letters,” The Village Voice, May 25, 2004. 29 Caroline Aoyagi, “Success of American Idol Castoff William Hung a Mixed Bag for AA Community,” IMDiversity.Com (originally published in The Pacific Citizen, 2004) <http://www.imdiversity.com/Villages/Asian/arts_culture_media/archives/pc_william_hung_0504.asp> (accessed September 12, 2007).

29 also seemed unaware that his popularity stemmed from anything other than the public’s (and

the recording industry’s) good intentions.

Knowing whether or not Hung grasped the implications of his fame had the potential to

drastically change the readings of the phenomenon. If he did not understand, which press about

Hung often implied, then one could argue that marketing Hung as the laughable loser was both

unquestionably cruel and exploitative. If he did fully comprehend the circulating meanings

about him, however, and was just capitalizing on the unexpected opportunity, the phenomenon

was slightly better in a moral sense. It would be less cruel to laugh at him as long as he was “in

on the joke,” although this would not necessarily alleviate the Asian-American commentators’

concerns. However, having Hung “get the joke” and use it as a marketing opportunity would

further call into question the humility and genuineness that led to his public embrace in the first

place. If part of his appeal was his lack of pretense to fame—since all he wanted to do was sing

“his best”—then being complicit with his image, which derided rather than celebrated his singing

ability, would demonstrate a basic hypocrisy, or at the very least, suggest that his values had

changed somewhat with his newfound celebrity. Indeed, some Hung interviews hinted that this

was the case. In a March 2004 interview with Rolling Stone, Hung admitted, “I'm not famous for

the right reasons. I'm infamous, a joke. It doesn't make me feel good, because I'm a genuine

person, but I don't let it get to me, because I am who I am."30 His admission that his fame was

not wholly kindhearted but that he was going along with it anyway hints at enterprise (albeit

perhaps reluctant), if not complicity. But even hesitant participation on Hung’s part countered

the idea of exploitation; if he was willing to inhabit this particular persona in order to sing, than

part of the onus was his.

30 Erik Hedegaard, “William Hung Bangs Out Debut,” Rolling Stone, March 9, 2004.

30 While one could argue that even William Hung’s possible complicity diffused some of

the moral ambiguity about his image, it is much more difficult to conceive of a similar level of

self-evaluation for many American Idol wannabes. Indeed, the pleasure in watching most bad

singers audition stems from their utter lack of self-awareness and their apparently sincere

conviction that, despite a lack of talent, they are all “the next American Idol.” In many cases,

such delusion is a springboard for schadenfroh enjoyment; sometimes, however, it merely reads

as outright cruelty. Jonathan Jayne, from Renton, Washington, for example, auditioned in

Seattle for the show’s sixth season and appeared on the episode that aired on January 17, 2007.

Jonathan, a rotund 20-year-old with a bright Hawaiian shirt tucked into a pair of high-waisted

pants, sang “God Bless America” in true Hungian fashion. At one level, Jayne seemed to be an

ideal anti-Idol— untalented, not “pop star” attractive, and very much self-unaware. However,

unlike many of his fellow rejected singers, Jayne’s lack of self-awareness did not seem to stem

from either hubris or vanity. Rather, The New York Times reported shortly after the episode aired

that not only did Jayne like to sing, but he also enjoyed participating in the Special Olympics.

Indeed, Jonathan Jayne was autistic, and his apparent inability to read the room was not driven

by an inflated ego but rather by a disability.31

While the judges themselves were relatively kind to Jayne, telling him that he was a nice

guy but Idol was “not the competition” for him, the producers’ decision to include his audition

on the show seemed less than magnanimous. Executive producer Ken Warwick claimed it was

merely an example of Idol’s “not discriminating against anyone during the audition process,”32

but this does not negate the fact that Jayne’s unsuccessful audition was broadcast into millions of

31 Edward Wyatt, “The Good, the Bad, and the Bush Baby: New Low on Idol,” New York Times, January 19, 2007; Alessandra Stanley, “Reality Check for a Generation That Knows Best,” New York Times, January 26, 2007. 32 Wyatt, “The Good, the Bad, and the Bush Baby.”

31 homes as a potential object of ridicule. While the scorn of the vast American Idol audience is

arguably just deserts for the delusional, whose desire to become famous stems from ignorance

and outweighs their judgment, offering up a mentally disabled individual for similar scorn has

significantly different implications. Unlike the fame-driven, who should know better than to

audition without the talent to advance in the competition, it appeared that Jayne did not—and

perhaps could not—know any better. Instead of punishing the delusional, then, the producers

who chose to air the audition of someone without the capacity to grasp its implications were

exploiting the disabled. Whether or not any viewer took actual pleasure in his audition is

difficult to say, but the very presentation of Jayne’s audition for prospective schadenfroh

pleasure seems to cross a moral boundary.

Because schadenfreude hinges on ideas of justice—whether suffering is deserved, both in

scope and in fact—it is a distinctly moral concept. While the emotion itself is not immoral,

experiencing it hinges on an evaluation of our own notions of morality, of whether an ethical

code has been transgressed in the first place, and whether a punishment fits the crime. In Jayne’s

case, it is difficult to say what his actual transgression was, since his bad audition was not a

function of hubris or delusion. His punishment—broadcast humiliation—therefore reads as

unwarranted, since what he was “punished” for, at base, seems to be a disability.

Indeed, moral questions about schadenfreude become much more pressing when the

schadenfroh moment is mediated—and both the transgression and humiliation are broadcast to

millions of people. As with the delusional American Idol auditions, one can argue that, if

someone knowingly humiliates himself in front of a camera, then the broadcasting of that

moment is indeed just deserts. The transgression itself moves from the private to the extremely

public, which theoretically magnifies the scope of the necessary punishment. However,

32 broadcasting is a business, and Fox continues to earn advertising revenue by airing these

auditions. Even if we as viewers feel schadenfreude from the moment, those who broadcast it

move away from schadenfreude’s passivity into the realm of activity, working to create and

magnify individual suffering for our pleasure, which Portmann would define as cruelty.33 And

even if we do not experience schadenfreude in a moment intended to evoke it, as with Jonathan

Jayne’s audition, we are still part of the audience that helps generate advertising revenue for the

program in question, and we are therefore still playing a role in its ambiguous ethics.

The nature of broadcast television therefore complicates our role as viewers as well.

John Portmann claims that because schadenfreude “does not involve expectation, much less

agency,” it is not a “malicious pleasure.”34 In other words, we don’t wait for the schadenfroh to

happen; it just happens, and we enjoy it. However, the nature of schadenfreude on broadcast

television hinges up on the question of whether viewership itself is a kind of agency. Is merely

watching and enjoying a text part of an active process in its production? It is difficult to argue

that there was no expectation of humiliation when one watched the WB Network’s 2004 series

Superstar U.S.A. On that reality show, a pseudo-parody of American Idol, bad singers believed

they were doing well in an Idol-esque talent competition. In actuality, however, the search was

for the worst and most delusional performer in America, not the most talented—a fact the winner

only learned once she was crowned the Superstar.35 At one level, the show was merely a

serialized version of the transgression-punishment formula of American Idol audition episodes.

However, Superstar U.S.A. did not have Idol’s raison d’être—talented singers, bolstered by the

33 Portmann, 23-4. 34 Ibid., 22. 35 To make sure the contestants never suspected the hoax, they never heard each other sing until the finale. In addition, producers told the (paid) live audiences before which they performed that the contestants were terminally ill “Make a Wish foundation” participants, so the audience would at least pretend to be enthusiastic about their singing.

33 untalented—to explain its reliance on humiliation, and the “punishment” for delusion thus

became the entire focus of the show. Again, this raises the question of what appropriate

punishment actually entails for a mediated transgression, particularly one stemming from a

desire for fame. A brief moment in the American Idol spotlight, and maybe a rehash of the

audition on Best Week Ever, seems to have been deemed appropriate for the clueless singer with

an inflated ego—at least according to the tens of millions of viewers who continue to watch these

episodes season after season. By extending several individual’s public humiliation over the

course of several weeks, however, one could argue that the boundary of appropriateness had

been crossed. Taking the self-delusional down a peg is one thing; making the self-delusional

part of an ongoing hoax designed to continually feed their delusion—telling them week after

week that they were brilliant, and giving “constructive criticism” to make their performances

even more appalling, only to cut them down in the end—seems to fall into another category

altogether.

Admittedly, the structure of Superstar U.S.A. paralleled the Idol audition process, most of

which is untelevised. All that is shown on the actual broadcast are stadiums full of American

Idol wannabes and individuals singing before judges Simon Cowell, Randy Jackson, and Paula

Abdul, which implies that the stadium is merely a holding room for the judges’ chamber.

Auditions are actually a multi-stage process. To winnow down the tens of thousands who show

up to audition in each city, contestants initially sing in large groups before low-level production

assistants; the best and worst are sent to producers, who cull the herd even further. This group,

then, sings before executive producers, who determine who are the very best and very worst: the

singers who eventually appear before the judges. Although it is off-camera, this very process

likely feeds into the delusion of many bad singers—who, odds are, are not told that they fall into

34 the “very worst” group—as they advance through the competition. Indeed, it is this process of

feeding delusion that Superstar U.S.A. made explicit, while Idol leaves it out of the show

entirely, which likely helps write their eventual television punishment of the worst singers as

acceptable. However, the American Idol wannabe is expected to understand the implications of

an audition and the possibility of humiliation. The Superstar U.S.A. contestant may have

understood the Idol codes but had no way of understanding that, once they were actually

accepted onto Superstar, the judges continued to bolster their, and their competitors’, delusion.

Indeed, the general consensus seemed to be that Superstar U.S.A. took the humiliation a step too

far. The Superstar U.S.A. finale in June of 2004 attracted a 2.0 rating, a 3.0 share, and 1.4

million viewers.36 While this was not an atypical number for the fledgling WB Network, it drew

only a tiny fraction of Idol audition episode ratings. The delusion-loving audience failed to

materialize on the WB. While this was certainly the result of a number of factors, including the

network’s difficulty in retaining viewers, the fact that so little of the Idol audience crossed over

hints at the fact that the text itself may have been highly problematic.

One could argue that the elaborate hoax was a form of cruelty to the contestants

propagated solely by the show’s producers, who chose to magnify the punishment for

contestants’ delusion from a two-minute clip to the foundation of a seven-week series. However,

if it were not for the extreme popularity of bad American Idol auditions and the record sales of

their poster boy William Hung, there would be no reason for the existence of Superstar USA,

which clearly tried to capitalize on the schadenfroh dynamic of these other texts. It is arguable

that the Hung fan, or even the casual Idol viewer, is at least indirectly complicit in the hoax and

hence the Superstar contestants’ humiliation—for even if one did not watch Superstar USA

36 Nielsen Media Research, 2004.

35 itself, initial pleasure in, gossip about, and money given to American Idol was the primary

reason for the hoax show’s existence. Superstar’s creators recognized the schadenfroh pleasures

of watching bad singers and therefore saw a large potential audience in the Idol fan base; that

this audience did not materialize—whether or not because the show crossed the line—is not

necessarily the issue. By setting up a system for the expectation of humiliation and its inevitable

fulfillment, the schadenfroh viewing pleasure instead became malicious as it propagated itself.

Does this, then, remain schadenfreude? If viewing reality television involves the

expectation of viewing others’ humiliation, disappointment, or punishment, can one describe it

as a passive mode? Even if a viewer is not explicitly watching The Apprentice to revel in

contestants’ failure, failure is embedded into the narrative and drives the outcome of every

episode, where the narrative climax involves a job candidate being “fired.” In a similar vein, the

expectation of a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy viewer is that the participant’s “before” lifestyle

will be both mockable and mocked, as a starting point for a fabulous transformation. On all of

these shows, pleasure in others’ misfortunes is part of a system of narrative expectation and

resolution, for humiliation rarely comes as a surprise. By continuing to view such texts,

bolstering their ratings and advertising revenue, the audience becomes a driving force behind

their production. To call viewers “complicit” may be overstating individual agency, but as part

of the mass TV viewing audience, they are also part of television’s cultural dialogue.

However, while mediation complicates the ethical implications of schadenfreude, it often

simultaneously resolves them. Individuals who appear on reality television are all, at some level,

willing participants, whether they have auditioned for Survivor or signed a waiver to allow their

Candid Camera prank to be aired. When one asks to be on television, one is, at some level,

complicit with the building of one’s own image, whether positive or negative. And by now,

36 those appearing on reality TV should have acquired a basic understanding of its textual codes

and mode of production, and should therefore be prepared for any possible outcomes, also

potentially positive or negative. Just like we expect an Apprentice firing or a member of Queer

Eye’s “Fab Five” to rifle through and ridicule a participant’s underwear drawer, we feel that an

Apprentice contestant or Queer Eye subject should expect the same thing—and being hurt or

humiliated should not come as a surprise to them. Televisual schadenfreude, then, often seems

to stem not just from subjects’ embarrassment, failure, or heartbreak, but also from their

willingness to allow these private emotions to be shown publicly. If broadcasting magnifies the

scope of punishment, then asking to have potential punishment broadcast assuages many ethical

concerns. This is why, however, the humiliation of subjects who cannot understand these codes

crosses a clear ethical line. An inability to exhibit proper judgment rewrites the equation, and, as

in the cases of both Jonathan Jayne and the subjects of elaborate hoaxes, turns gratifying

punishment into gratuity.

And it does appear that self-replicating schadenfreude has its limits on American

television. This apparent “viewer conscience” makes it doubtful that American reality television

could ever reach the schadenfroh heights of Japan, for instance, where shows like Denpa Shonen

are “comedies.” The first Denpa Shonen series, broadcast in 1999, featured a volunteer named

Nasubi who agreed to be part of a “social experiment,” where he was stripped naked, put in an

empty room, and told that he could not leave until he had won a million yen worth of prizes from

magazine contests—and the only possessions he could have, including food and clothing, had to

be won. Nasubi embarked on this quest for a year and a half—naked all the while—until the

series finale, where he learned for the first time that his travails were broadcast weekly to an

37 enthralled Japanese audience. While this played as comedy in Japan, a similar show would

never make it to the air in America.

Indeed, many of the most morally questionable shows on broadcast TV have been both

critical and ratings failures, much like Superstar USA. Game shows The Chair (ABC, 2002) and

The Chamber (Fox, 2002), early entries in the reality boom of the early 2000s, both featured

contestants trying to answer trivia questions while undergoing various forms of physical and

psychological torture, including extreme heat, extreme cold, and various insects and reptiles

dropped on their heads. Both lasted less than two months, cancelled due to low ratings. Hoax

shows like NBC’s The $25 Million Hoax (NBC, 2004) and Fox’s My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé

(Fox, 2004) showed young women tricking their families—on the former, into believing she had

won the lottery (and was spending the money frivolously), and on the latter, into believing she

was marrying a boor she had met on another reality show. While My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé

garnered decent ratings, as it premiered with American Idol as a lead-in, its popularity petered

out by the finale; The $25 Million Hoax barely ranked at all. Fox pulled My Big Fat Obnoxious

Fiancé’s spin-off series, Apprentice parody My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss (2004), featuring a

group of business wannabes completing ridiculous tasks while competing for a (unbeknownst to

them) fictional job with a fictional company led by a fictional lecherous billionaire, after five

episodes due to low ratings. Similarly, CBS’s The Will (2005), featuring a large family

competing to be the sole heir to a (still-alive) patriarch’s estate, and Fox’s Who’s Your Daddy

(2005), an episodic series featuring an adoptee trying to identify her birth father, were both

cancelled after one episode due to dismal ratings, likely fueled, at least in Fox’s case, by

38 indignation from adoption advocacy groups about the premise.37 One ABC show, Welcome to

the Neighborhood, featured a group of middle-class white families judging who among a group

of “alternative families,” including a gay couple, Wiccans, heavily tattooed Republicans, and

non-whites, would be allowed to move into their Austin, Texas neighborhood. It was cancelled

before it aired in 2005 due to moral outrage, never mind the fact that choosing a winner on the

basis of race and religion violated the Fair Housing Act.38

While schadenfreude is a universal emotion, it appears that there are limits to what the

network audience will watch and enjoy. All of these shows appear to have crossed some moral

line—whether they involved the nature of broadcasting elaborate hoaxes involving unwilling

participants, exploiting unstable family relations, or using bigotry as a program’s “hook.”

Indeed, the low viewership for and outcry against so many of these shows seems to have

removed the most explicit versions of the schadenfreude-driven reality show from prime-time.

While there is definitely a niche cable market for shows that foreground schadenfreude as their

emotional entry point—from VH1’s “Celebreality” programming; to Comedy Central’s game

show Distraction, a close relative of The Chair and The Chamber; to Fox Reality’s Solitary, a

competition where individuals are isolated in a small room for weeks at a time—it is not a mode

that engages a larger, more general audience.

Instead, the highest rated reality shows of the 2006-7 season were Dancing with the Stars,

and American Idol—family-friendly programs with distinctly happy endings.39 While both of

37 Josef Adalian, “Eye Won't Leave a Living 'Will'; 'Cold Case' Repeat to Air in Its Place,” Daily Variety, January 11, 2005; “Fox’s Who’s Your Daddy is a Ratings Dud,” USA Today, January 4, 2005; Lynn Smith, “'Who's Your Daddy' Adoption Reality TV Show Stirring up Controversy,” Los Angeles Times, December 23, 2004. 38 Lisa deMoraes, “ABC Faces Reality, Pulls Welcome Mat on 'Neighborhood,’” Washington Post, June 30, 2005. 39 Nielsen Media Research, 2007.

39 these shows rely on a schadenfroh audience engagement at a very basic level, they do not

foreground the emotion in the same way as Superstar USA did. Schadenfreude is integral to

each narrative structure—whether anticipating the next bad singer to audition or hoping Heather

Mills’s artificial leg will fall off—but it is folded into more positive narratives and hence

accompanied by other forms of pleasure. It is still very much a dominant mode of engagement,

but it is not the dominant mode. And it is perhaps this kind of duality that truly allows

schadenfreude to thrive. The failure of the schadenfreude-driven reality show may not have

entirely been a moral issue. It is possible that audiences felt uncomfortable watching a text that

foregrounded their baser desires. Folding schadenfreude into another type of narrative thus

makes it “safe” to experience while at the same time giving a viewer the excuse (and permission)

to experience it.

When schadenfreude’s ties to ideas about justice are coupled with reality television’s

complimentary propensity towards a melodramatic mobilization of pathos, it is clear that the

genre is a key site for exploring the ethics of viewers’ social experiences. Whether exploring the

physical and emotional toll of actual suffering, or orchestrating real humiliation, reality TV’s use

of real people becomes both a moral issue and a way to explore issues of morality. In this

project, then, I will examine the ways in which evoking and evaluating real people’s varying

degrees of suffering and misfortune speak to larger issues about ethics, justice, social identity,

and the meaning of televisual “reality” itself.

Chapter Two, “The Reality of Schadenfreude and the Schadenfreude of Reality,”

examines the interdependence of the reality genre and schadenfreude as a mode of engagement,

both historically and in terms of its recent ascendance as a textual dominant in contemporary

media. It explores how instrumental this sensibility has become in maintaining a sense of “the

40 real” across genres where a mode of authenticity is essential but seems increasingly specious.

While schadenfreude is most pleasurable when tied to the actual social world, reality television

often seems the most “real” when encouraging a schadenfroh reading protocol.

The remaining chapters, then, will examine how various texts and the American public

engage with specific social issues through this dual authenticity. Chapter Three, “Misery,

Transformation, and Happy Endings,” explores the function and social meanings of both

schadenfreude and its shadow emotion, pity, in programming centered on makeovers and other

forms of personal transformation. Because every positive makeover needs an unpleasant

“before” to make the spectacular “after” legible and dramatic, the “ugly duckling” structure

implicit in the makeover format hinges on visualizing the shame of the unfortunate makeover

subject. In some cases, the “before” is purely aesthetic, which leads to a didactic makeover that

simultaneously mobilizes the audience’s insecurities and aesthetic superiority. In other cases,

though, the “unfortunate” subject is truly disadvantaged. Here, the makeover becomes less of a

message about proper self-presentation and more about self-preservation; pity becomes a lesson

in self-reliance. This chapter examines how makeovers mobilize both humiliation and pity as a

means of playing with audience insecurities. Ultimately, both forms of transformation draw on a

larger set of social issues and norms, and assuage fears about social identity through consumer

narratives. The spectrum of emotional engagement with these shows’ unrenovated subjects is

key to understanding the meaning and pleasures of televised transformations in general.

The fourth chapter, “Love Hurts,” examines dating shows from The Dating Game to The

Bachelor and its various contemporary successors. While relationships are often difficult

enough for most people in the real world, these shows seem to posit that finding love is all but

impossible, despite the fact that all participants are attractive, successful individuals. The degree

41 and nature of humiliation and heartbreak on these shows has evolved over time in direct

relation to the changing status of single women and evolving ideas about marriage. In its most

contemporary form, the humiliation of the romantically desperate (usually women) mocks those

who pursue a relationship too fervently, even as these programs underscore the overall

importance and necessity of heterosexual relationships. In this respect, I am interested in how

the mobilization of heartbreak and rejection in these programs is closely tied to historical

meanings of relationships in general, a linkage made most apparent as television has gradually

transformed the “game of love” from a light-hearted pursuit to a calculated blood sport for the

amusement of a mass audience.

Chapter Five, “Notoriety, Scandal, and Why We Love to Hate Celebrities,” examines the

pleasures involved in celebrity scandals. Judging by the enormity of the tabloid industry that

trades in celebrity rumor and scandal, audiences have long taken pleasure in seeing the rich,

famous, and beautiful suffer all manners of humiliation, be it the break-up of an A-list marriage

or the indignity of a “has-been’s” failed attempt to regain his or her fame. Long implicit to

celebrity and entertainment discourse, recent programs like The Surreal Life have created an

entire reality subgenre based on humiliating former child stars and fading C-list celebrities who

still desperately crave the spotlight. Here I am interested in how shame and humiliation

denaturalize and demystify the entire economy of fame and celebrity. Early on, Hollywood

dubbed its actors and actresses “stars” who fell to earth from heaven, thus beginning a century’s

worth of worship at the altar of fame. The explosion of contemporary media formats devoted to

shaming celebrities, I would argue, represents a return of the repressed in these discourses of

elitism and narcissism. Audiences now clearly take great pleasure, not only in seeing the “stars”

come down from heaven, but in their crashing and burning as well, thus reducing the sublime

42 back to a more human level. This pleasure is especially rich when the “star” in question is

seen as talentless in the first place (like the notorious Vanilla Ice) or when a performer oversteps

the boundaries of earned expertise (as when Tom Cruise opines on the state of psychiatry). This

change has largely come through a greater public understanding about and the growing

transparency of the mechanisms of the celebrity industry. Here, then, I am interested in how

backstage gossip has become a front-stage pleasure, schadenfreude working as a reflexive tool

that makes visible the usually naturalized process of fame.

Within all of these case studies, it is important to note that schadenfreude and empathy

are not the only possible points of engagement. Much like Dancing with the Stars or American

Idol, which “fold” their schadenfreude into a different kind of narrative structure, the makeover,

dating show, and tabloid all mobilize subjects’ misfortune as a necessary part of a larger

narrative. On the makeover, then, pity is often used to justify the gifts participants receive.

Alternatively, humiliation is often a tool to jumpstart a transformation. This does not mean that

the humiliation would not be pleasurable by itself—merely that one might feel more distinctly

guilty about enjoying it if there were no outside justification for it. Similarly, schadenfreude and

suffering serve a higher purpose on the relationship show, since heartbreak is merely a function

of the search for true love. Within celebrity culture, enjoyment of the failures of the famous is

something of a reward for knowing the codes of stardom. In all of these cases, schadenfreude is

a function of a larger narrative that allows one to feel pleasure in something that may be morally

ambiguous by itself. But this type of engagement also drives the narratives themselves, coding

our understanding of the outcomes based on our own moral judgments about participants’

motives and actions.

43 The ways in which we emotionally engage with reality television thus speak to larger

issues about both our relationship with media texts and our own status within American culture.

All of these texts ask us to evaluate our own identities against others’, and their pleasures often

stem from the rewards of our personal successes, in relation to others’ failures. In many cases,

this success is a triumph of knowledge—knowing the “codes” of fashion, celebrity discourse,

dating culture, or reality television itself better than the subjects—but each of these intellectual

triumphs simultaneously addresses a larger question about social identity. Knowing the codes of

fashion involves mastery of self-presentation and discourses about the body. Knowing the codes

of dating—on television and off—gives one certainty about an uncertain social phenomenon.

And knowing the codes of celebrity culture involves a mastery of media discourse itself. As we

move into a new era of reality-based melodrama, these texts all explore issues about viewers’

social and media identities, opening up the possibility of creating consensus about ethical issues

that are otherwise difficult to pin down in post-millennial America. While the morality of

mediated misfortune is a complicated subject, the way it both speaks to and codifies larger social

and moral issues underscores its importance in American culture. While pleasure in these texts

involves laughing at the world, it is also a means of evaluating culture, society, and the self.

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Chapter 2: The Reality of Schadenfreude and the Schadenfreude of Reality

Since its premiere in 1992, every episode of MTV’s The Real World has opened with the

statement, “This is the true story of seven strangers picked to live in a house, work together, and

have their lives taped to find out what happens when people stop being polite, and start getting

real.” After nineteen seasons of the show, it is clear that “getting real” on The Real World

usually seems to involve excessive alcohol consumption, which leads to fighting, sexual activity,

or some combination of the two. But the question—what happens when people start being

real?—seems to drive much of the reality genre’s appeal. Whether it is showing how people act

when stranded on a desert island, or how they react when they learn that they are the worst

singers in America, reality TV claims to offer access to the actions and emotions of “real” people

in highly unusual situations. The problem is that most viewers are highly skeptical about the

genre’s claims of “reality.” Annette Hill’s work on reality TV audiences, for example, indicated

that 75% of British television viewers “questioned the authenticity of the content of factual

entertainment,” while more than half believed that stories about real people were sometimes or

always made up.40 Her survey data is from the year 2000, simultaneous to the appearance of Big

Brother on British television—an early point in reality TV’s contemporary incarnation. More

recently, a 2006 Time Magazine/SRBI poll of American viewers found that only 3% believed

40 Annette Hill, “Big Brother: The Real Audience,” Television & New Media 3, no. 3 (August 2002), 328-29.

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that the events shown on reality programs were “exactly as they happened in reality,” while 58%

believed they were either “completely made up” or “not very close to what happened at all,”

closely correlating to Hill’s data.41 Certainly a lot has happened since the summer of 2000 to

make audiences skeptical of reality programming. In 2001, for example, former Survivor

contestant Stacey Stillman filed a widely publicized lawsuit against CBS, stating that producer

Mark Burnett had influenced her elimination by telling other contestants to vote her out. The

same year, producers revealed that the UPN jungle adventure show Manhunt was fixed, with

certain segments scripted and re-shot months later in LA’s Griffith Park. In 2004, Evan Marriott

of Joe Millionaire claimed his show was entirely staged, and an L.A. Times columnist published

a 19-page shooting script for a then-unaired episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, hinting at

the show’s artifice.42 While not every show is rigged, certainly, most viewers are savvy to the

fact that the potential to do so always exists.

The reality audience is also aware that even if a show is not staged outright, the

possibility of manipulation is still present. Unpopular reality participants, for example,

frequently blame a show’s editing for their negative portrayals. In 2001, first season Big Brother

contestant Jean Jordan told The Los Angeles Times that editors cut an hours-long conversation

with a male housemate to seven words—“My sex drive is out of control”—which reduced her

persona to little more than a seductress.43 Survivor: Australia villainess Jerri Manthey stated that

41 Time Magazine/SRBI –January 24-26, 2006 Survey, SRBI.com, <http://www.srbi.com/TimePoll3738-Final%20Report-2006-01-27--8.05am.pdf>, 9. 42 Tom Jicha, “`Joe Millionaire' Was a Faker from the Start,” South Florida Sun-Sentinel, January 26, 2004; Joel Stein, “The New Quiz Show Scandal—Reality Television,” The Los Angeles Times, December 5, 2004. 43 Brian Lowry, “Time to Be Honest About ‘Reality’ Series,” Los Angeles Times, February 21, 2001.

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the show’s editing was “selective” and “one-sided,” to emphasize her bitchiness,44 while

Jonathan Baker, the villain of The Amazing Race’s sixth season, complained to Time in 2006 that

editors were largely responsible for giving him “the worst rap of anyone in reality television

ever,” by both highlighting his bad behavior and omitting relevant scenes that could exonerate

him.45 Indeed, at this point in time, it is rare for an unpopular reality participant not to blame the

editing to some degree for his or her negative portrayal, although it rarely does anything to repair

his or her image.

Even if a viewer is not inclined to believe a reality star’s claims of editing victimhood,

though, it is common knowledge that most reality shows condense huge amounts of footage into

a concise hour-long weekly narrative. Only so much of what was filmed will make it to air, and

what is broadcast is almost certainly a highly condensed version of events which favors the most

dramatic moments. To complicate the question of editing, a number of reality show producers

and editors have come forward to reveal questionable postproduction practices, such as creating

cohesive “scenes” from footage shot over several days, or “frankenbiting,” where editors piece

together a participant’s quotes from different conversations into one unrelated sentence. With

the potential for manipulation hanging over every aspect of a show’s production, viewer

skepticism about reality TV’s “reality” is not necessarily unfounded.

In many ways, though, the reality genre’s mobilization of suffering and schadenfreude

acts as a counterpoint to such skepticism. When a participant’s visible consternation escalates to

the point of melodramatic excess, the intensity of emotion on display often serves as a marker of

authenticity. Texts that rely on humiliation, as well, point to a different kind of authenticity—

44 “Jerri Manthey Final Chat,” Survivor: The Australian Outback official website, CBS.com, April 2, 2001 <http://www.cbs.com/primetime/survivor2/survivors/jerri_c1.html> (accessed August 12, 2007). 45 James Poniewozik, “How Reality TV Fakes It,” Time, February 6, 2006.

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for, as I will argue, mortification almost inevitably reads as “real.” At the same time, though,

these melodramatic modes rely on reality TV’s claims to authenticity as an affective strategy. In

this chapter, then, I will use schadenfreude in particular to explore the ways that melodrama and

reality are intertwined—how both rely upon each other for their narrative and affective power.

While schadenfreude’s focus on the villain and not the victim may veer from traditional types of

melodrama, reality television’s ability to represent humiliation as both authentic and deserved

makes it an important contemporary melodramatic form of engagement.

Schadenfreude has long been a narrative strategy in fictional forms, but it is most

effective when it involves real people. Like humor, schadenfreude invariably has a specific

object: in this case, the individual who transgresses and suffers. I would argue, though, that the

meaning of emotional engagement with this object differs when she is fictional. Fictional

characters are, essentially, representations—often of real “types” if not necessarily of real

people. While characters may exemplify various kinds of transgressions and deserved

punishments within a narrative, though, the comeuppance of a villain in a traditional stage

melodrama does not function in the same way as the DUI arrest of a hubris-laden socialite with

no apparent sense of ethics or consequences for misbehavior. In nineteenth-century melodrama,

schadenfreude’s object is less the villain himself than what he represents about society’s moral

code—what it means to break it, and how it can be restored. In the case of the socialite,

however, the object is clearly her, and her punishment is an apparently just comeuppance for her

actual ongoing refusal to live within the social codes to which all of us are bound. Fiction, then,

veers from the emotional affect of pure schadenfreude, since the object is less the individual and

more what the individual represents; his punishment, similarly, is not his per se, but an

illustration of the fact that there are consequences to transgressing social boundaries.

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The ability of fictional media texts to elicit pure schadenfreude is further complicated by

ideas of performance. As Patricia Mellencamp has argued, most episodes of I Love Lucy

centered on Lucy Ricardo’s desire to escape domesticity and her eventual humiliation, which

returned her to the home.46 Every episode’s climax inevitably involved some form of

spectacular embarrassment for Lucy; the humor, however, came from Lucille Ball’s successful

performance of Lucy Ricardo’s humiliation. Taking pleasure in the televisual Lucy’s

“punishment,” then, relied on pleasure in the indexical Lucy’s comedic talents—which made the

embarrassment less palpable. And while most episodes concluded with Lucy’s comeuppance,

the fact that the same narrative was bound to repeat itself with a new wacky scheme the next

week diminished its potency, for Lucy never truly “learned her lesson.” This kind of fictional

humiliation, albeit humorous, thus does not have the moral connotations of actual humiliation.

For true schadenfreude at another’s embarrassment to occur, we have to be convinced that other

people are actually experiencing the emotions we are watching. Lucy’s inability to learn from

her humiliation and the failure of her comeuppance to “take” implies a lack of affect on her part.

Reality television, however, focuses almost entirely on affect. As a Bachelor rejectee cries in the

back of a limo, or a Married by America contestant is left at the altar in front of millions of

viewers, there is little doubt that there will be longer-term consequences for their public

rejections.

Schadenfreude’s need for indexicality thus makes reality television an ideal medium for

the emotion. The question, though, is why it has become such an integral narrative strain within

the reality genre. The simple answer may be that the shows that offer the opportunity to

46 Patricia Mellencamp, “Situation Comedy, Feminism, and Freud: Discourses of Gracie and Lucy,” Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader, ed. Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D’Acci, and Lynn Spigel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 67-70.

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experience the emotion have thrived because schadenfreude itself is so pleasurable. However, to

think about reality TV as merely a conduit for a particular emotion is to ignore what

schadenfreude contributes to the genre and why so many narrative forms not only use but rely on

it. In large part, the interdependence of schadenfreude and reality TV is closely tied to

negotiating questions of authenticity—both of the emotions portrayed onscreen and the larger

question of the status of reality television as a document of anything at all. Indeed, just as

schadenfreude depends on a sense of reality for its pleasures, reality television depends on

schadenfreude as a means to access “the real.”

Suspicion of television’s ability to access “the real” is not a new phenomenon, but rather

extends back half a century to the 1950s quiz show scandals. High-stakes quiz shows, Kent

Anderson has argued, served an important social function for Cold War viewers. Shows with

significant prizes like the $64,000 Question (CBS, 1955-58) and Twenty-One (NBC, 1956-58)

tended to feature “ordinary” contestants with extraordinary knowledge. Big winners like The

$64,000 Question’s Italian cobbler/opera expert Gino Prato and grandmotherly “Bible specialist”

Catherine Kreitzer, were simultaneously exceptionally intelligent and exceptionally “normal”—

the kind of people one might see in the grocery store, who nonetheless harbored an impressive

knowledge base. The definitive populist strain of these shows signified what Anderson called an

“empathy force,”47 where viewers learned that the average American could simultaneously be

extremely intelligent, fearless, and likeable. Twenty-One’s golden boy Charles Van Doren in

particular exemplified both what was compelling about quiz shows and what was great about the

country—if he was the “average” American, then America truly was the greatest nation on earth.

Handsome, well-educated, dignified, and personable, Van Doren’s $129,000 winning streak on

47 Kent Anderson, Television Fraud: The History and Implications of the Quiz Show Scandals (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978), 39.

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the show in 1957 made him a beloved public figure, and he remained in the spotlight well after

his appearance on Twenty-One, as co-host and news anchor of The Today Show.

Rumors first began to fly about possible “fixing” of big money quizzes in 1958, which

became the focus of a congressional investigation the next year. Former contestants from a

number of shows, including Twenty-One and The $64,000 Question alleged that they (or the

opponents to whom they had lost) had been fed answers to questions or otherwise “helped.” The

rationale was sponsor-driven: a quiz show where the stakes were high, the drama was higher, and

the most compelling contestants were the most successful would draw big ratings. Indeed, one

especially intense episode of The $64,000 Question was watched by 55 million viewers and

received a 57.1 rating and an 84.8 share.48 Although a number of contestants from various

shows—including Van Doren’s first Twenty-One opponent Herb Stempel—testified to the House

Legislative Oversight Committee about various unethical practices, Van Doren initially denied

any involvement in the scandals. When he was subpoenaed in the fall of 1959, however, he

appeared in front of Congress to discuss his appearance on Twenty-One—and said that he had

received monetary advances based on future winnings, had been coached on how to answer

questions to maximize drama, and received answers to questions and show scripts in advance of

filming. The “golden boy” was thus clearly not so golden, since his success on Twenty-One had

been largely a performance, and the show that brought him into the public eye was therefore less

than forthright. Van Doren’s Today Show co-host Dave Garroway cried on-air the next morning,

and even President Eisenhower declared that it was a “terrible thing to do to the American

people.”49 While arguments that the quiz show scandals made a generation of optimistic

Americans cynical are likely overstated, it is undeniable that they made viewers rethink the role

48 Maxene Fabe, TV Game Shows (Garden City, NY: Dolphin, 1979), 194. 49 Ibid., 204-9.

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of broadcast media. Fully 87 to 95 percent of Americans were aware of the scandals50 and

therefore aware of the ways in which a media text can manipulate “reality” for maximum

entertainment value.

American television has had a long relationship with “real” people on camera, the quiz

show scandals notwithstanding. Indeed, the scandals did not entirely destroy the quiz show, but

rather renamed it and moved it to a different daypart. In the 1960s and 1970s, the genre thrived

in daytime, rechristened as the game show. Daytime game show formats all had lower stakes

and were less demanding—and hence less “fixable”— than their primetime predecessors. This

was the era of celebrity-matching shows like Match Game (NBC, 1962-69; CBS, 1973-79; ABC,

1990-91; syndicated 1975-82 and 1998-99) and Hollywood Squares (NBC, 1966-1981 and 1983-

4, syndicated 1986-89 and 1998-2004), couples shows like The Dating Game (ABC, 1965-73;

syndicated 1973-74, 1978-1980, 1986-1989, and 1996-1999) and The Newlywed Game (ABC,

1966-74; syndicated 1977-80, 1985-89, 1997-2000), and shows based on random chance like

Let’s Make a Deal (NBC, 1963-68; ABC, 1968-76; syndicated 1971-77, 1980-81, 1984-86,

1990-91). These were all lighthearted and fun programs that focused on “fabulous prizes” and

elements of humor and surprise instead of large jackpots and impressive displays of intelligence

or skill.

The only pre-scandal quizzes that continued to air on primetime in the 1960s were panel

shows like What’s My Line? (CBS, 1950-67) and To Tell the Truth (CBS, 1956-68; syndicated,

1969-78), where a group of celebrities tried to determine a contestant’s identity. Part of the

reason these shows were unaffected by scandal likely involves the fact that the stakes were

50 William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 291.

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low—a What’s My Line? contestant who stumped the panel, for example, received only $50—

and there was thus little reason to pre-orchestrate winners and losers; they were therefore beyond

suspicion. But the fact that they thrived in the post-scandal era also likely has something to do

with the fact that they were, on the whole, all about dissimulation and the attempt to figure out

what was “real.” On What’s My Line, the panel had to guess the contestants’ occupations by

asking a series of yes or no questions. This was often a more difficult task than it seemed, for

according to producer Gil Fates, the ideal contestant was “a visual anachronism”—a beautiful

female construction foreman, for example, or a 300-pound ballerina—basically “any vice who

looked like a versa.”51 In order to win, a contestant either needed to have a career so bizarre the

erudite panel would never guess it, or to appear to be someone with a different background than

her own. The construction foreman, then, would be more successful if she played up her

femininity and tried to be dainty—not at all like someone one could imagine in a hardhat. What’s

My Line? relied on deceptive appearances to show how preconceived notions and first

impressions could be misleading.

To Tell the Truth took this idea of misdirection even further. Here, three individuals all

claimed to be the same person—someone with an unusual occupation, like on What’s My Line?,

an interesting biography, or some other accomplishment of note. The goal for both the panel and

the audience playing along at home was to try to see through contestants’ deceptive narratives, in

order to figure out who was the “real” animal psychologist, Teacher of the Year, Mr. America, or

Orville Redenbacher. The panel asked the contestants a series of questions about the person’s

background, and then voted for the individual they felt was most convincing. The contestants all

split a monetary prize for each panelist they fooled, with a bonus if all four panelists failed to

51 Gil Fates, What’s My Line?: The Inside History of TV’s Most Famous Panel Show (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 124.

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identify the correct individual. Whereas What’s My Line? focused on how an individual’s

appearance could give a false impression, To Tell the Truth hinged on individuals themselves

being blatantly dishonest. It was a show less about the fluidity and diagnosis of individual

identity, then, and more about deception and performance. While there was always a “real”

individual in the group of contestants, every participant was suspect—and every identity

impossible to diagnose—until the end of a segment when the “real” contestant was asked to

stand up. Before that point, each statement a contestant gave was necessarily read as a potential

untruth or an outright performance. The structure of the game encouraged even the “real”

individual to perform as if he was not himself, in order to misdirect the panel into voting for the

other contestants. Because everyone, then, was performing at some level, To Tell The Truth

involved the audience and the panel sifting through multiple layers of inauthenticity to try to find

something authentic.

To Tell the Truth in particular enjoyed a long life in the post-scandal era, both in

primetime and daytime, lasting well into the psychedelic 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, perhaps

more than any other game show of the era, it greatly benefited from the quiz show scandals,

which laid out the ways in which non-scripted programs could still be plotted, and non-actors

could still be performing. Whereas Charles Van Doren’s winning streak was a pre-planned

narrative, To Tell the Truth demonstrated that entertainment television could indeed “tell the

truth.” To get to this authenticity, however, one needed to decipher what was inauthentic and try

to see through “real people’s” performative natures.

While the quiz show scandals brought it into the public consciousness, there has always

been a tension between performance and truth production in the American broadcast media.

Indeed, reality television’s earliest broadcast forebear, Candid Camera, relied upon exposing the

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various ways that real people “perform” in everyday life. Candid Camera’s pseudo-

psychological project was to reveal people’s authentic reactions to bizarre or socially disruptive

situations, as a statement about human nature. The show intervened on unsuspecting people’s

day-to-day lives by, for example, making a mailbox talk in order to confuse passersby; hidden

cameras captured their reactions, which were consequently analyzed in voice-over by host Allen

Funt. Candid Camera brought the performative nature of everyday life to the fore, through the

pretenses of normalcy that were broken down by (or remained intact despite) a particularly odd

situation. Thus, for example, when faced with a mailbox that spoke to them, most passersby

ignored it, clearly attempting to retain some façade of normality. These real-life performances

were often only broken when Funt, on-site, intervened and let the participants know they were on

Candid Camera—at which point, they could acknowledge the absurdity of both the particular

setup and their reactions to it. Indeed, Anna McCarthy has linked Funt’s project to the work of

Stanley Milgram, particularly his “Obedience” study, where subjects overwhelmingly deferred to

an authority figure even when their instructions betrayed their moral codes—in this case, giving

a series of increasingly dangerous electric shocks to a fellow test subject (who, unbeknownst to

them, was a plant). Candid Camera was never as graphic or disturbing as the Milgram

footage—and was invariably much more entertaining—but both texts painted a portrait of the

notion of public performance and the limits of social pressure.52

Although predating his research by more than a decade, Candid Camera complements

sociologist Erving Goffman’s work on the theatricality of social behavior. Goffman’s influential

1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life put forward the idea that every social

52 Anna McCarthy, “’Stanley Milgram, Allen Funt, and Me’: Postwar Social Science and the ‘First Wave’ of Reality TV,” Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, eds. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette (New York: NYU Press, 2004), 25 – 36.

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interaction is dramaturgical in nature. Individuals perform specific versions of themselves in all

forms of interchange in order to define and control situations through the idealized impressions

they create. To Goffman, then, everything is a performance, and while he differentiates between

“backstage” and “onstage” behavior, he professes that one is almost always onstage when in the

presence of others.53 Candid Camera sought to expose individuals’ “onstage” behavior, showing

how people adjust to strange circumstances and try to maintain proper self-performances despite

situations meant to disrupt them. It was the show’s televisuality that served as its primary means

of truth production, creating and filming moments of crisis in order to see through everyday

theatricality.

To Tell the Truth, on the other hand, used the televisual to obfuscate authenticity. While,

like Candid Camera, the show involved an attempt to see through participants’ theatricality,

these were performances specifically designed for television, dictated by the structure of the

game. In this case, the idea of theatricality extended well beyond Goffman, for it was not a

question of performing the self in everyday life, but performing a self specifically for the

camera. Truth production came not from secretly capturing an “authentic” moment, but rather

from the conclusion of a game staged for the viewing audience, when the “real inventor of the

Slinky” stood up. While each segment ended with one contestant confessing that he was “real,”

the show nonetheless drew attention to the ways in which identity can be played with, and

multiple selves can be performed for the camera.

While To Tell the Truth ended with an admittance of reality, the overall game was

founded on the idea of false confessions. The confession has been a key trope within television

focused on real people since the beginning of the broadcast era, the dominant mode of presenting

53 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959).

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the self on camera. As To Tell the Truth emphasizes, though, while it has traditionally served as a

marker of authenticity for the speaker’s real self, the confession can also be a site of

performativity and dissimulation. Even in televisual forms that stress authenticity, the potential

for performance still exists, which makes the confession a means of both documenting and

discounting ideas of the authentic self.

In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault claims that “Western Man has become a

confessing animal,”54 perpetually speaking in the first person as a means of uncovering personal

truths in every imaginable context. Although most evident in the institutional discourses of

psychoanalysis and religion, confession also plays a role in both public and private contexts,

from criminal justice, medicine, and education to family relationships. Foucault’s model of

confession as discourse of truth functions as such:

The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression alone…produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation.55

Foucauldian confession relies upon power relations between confessant and confidant, where

power lies not within the speaker but the listener. It is a recuperative, therapeutic procedure

within these structures, however, although the truth that arises from confession takes effect for

the disempowered speaker, rather than the listener. For Foucault, this idea of confession is

ultimately linked to the production of sexual discourse within hegemonic power relationships,

54 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 59 55 Ibid., 61-2.

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for “it is in the confession that truth and sex are joined, through the obligatory and exhaustive

expression of an individual secret.”56

In her work on therapeutic discourse on television, Mimi White argues that television

programming employs psychological theory and methods as a means of implicating social

culture but also helps to “modify and reconfigure the very nature of therapy and confession as

practices for producing social and individual entities and knowledge.”57 In other words,

television uses therapy as a function of society as part of its narrative structures, but the

televisual reconstructs the way therapy works, both for those on television and those watching it.

When it is televised, the confession channels therapeutic “free speech” as a means of

“diagnosing social identity”58 within power relations, but for those who confess, it nonetheless

serves some intrinsic therapeutic purpose. On reality-based dramas like Rescue 911, where “real

life survivors” are induced to tell their highly emotive tales of rescue, this very divulgence seems

to serve an intrinsic therapeutic purpose. Part of the ethos of therapy via televisual confession,

White surmises, is that “telling one’s story on television is part of the process of recovery.”59 The

televised confession thus simultaneously produces two kinds of truth—the new psychical change

for the speaker, and the social truth about the speaker for the broadcast audience. While this is a

different kind of truth than the authenticity—capturing people “being real”—for which reality

TV strives, it still opens up possibilities for ways to find actuality on television.

The idea of the confession as a method of producing truth becomes more complex,

however, if one considers that, as on To Tell the Truth, what people confess may not necessarily

56 Ibid., 61. 57 Mimi White, Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 7. 58 Ibid., 81. 59 Ibid., 182.

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be accurate. In a scene in Michael Dinner’s 1985 film Heaven Help Us, one Catholic schoolboy

coaches another as to the proper number of lustful thoughts to admit to in the confessional.

Although fictional, this scene demonstrates the potential performative nature of the confession

itself. Even if the intention of confessing is to have an authority “judge, punish, forgive, console,

and reconcile” one’s vices, the idea nevertheless exists that mitigating the vices themselves can

earn gentler judgment, lighter punishment, and smoother reconciliation. The confession, rather

than a discourse that produces truth, instead has the potential to be a performance of an ideal

specifically for its intended audience. While this may indeed remain a recuperative action for the

speaker, it nonetheless calls into question what kinds of actual truth can be produced and social

identities diagnosed when the confession itself is a lie, exaggeration, or performance.

The Newlywed Game, which aired on ABC from 1966 to 1974 and frequently in

syndication until 1999, featured four newlywed couples competing for a valuable prize selected

just for them—usually a new kitchen appliance, furniture, or entertainment equipment. The

couples attempted to match one another’s answers to questions ranging from the mundane

(“What would your husband say is his favorite sports team?”) to the bawdy (“Where was the first

place you ever ‘made whoopee?’”). The show’s excitement came not when couples’ answers

matched, however, but when they differed. A mismatch between a husband’s and wife’s

responses likely led to an argument, often fueled by host Bob Eubanks, who goaded the couple

however he could—asking pointed questions, using their words against one another—in order to

create as much tension between the two as possible. Newlywed Game contestants thus confessed

to the camera on two levels. Their answers to Eubanks’s questions disclosed specific truths

about their lives (and since the goal was to match an off-screen partner’s answers, most

contestants ultimately would aim to be as truthful as possible), and their responses to

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discontinuities in these truths disclosed other, further truths about their actual relationship

dynamics.60 The potential for humiliation in both types of disclosure was integral to the structure

of the show, but couples were nevertheless willing to be contestants, whether because they

wanted to win a prize or merely to be on television.

Only so much could be confessed on The Newlywed Game, however, due in part to

regulations about what one could say on air, but perhaps even more because of decorum as to

what was “proper” to disclose. The show itself depended on a blurring of lines between public

and private. Bourgeois decorum frowns upon the disclosure of sexual habits in privacy, let alone

in a public forum before millions of viewers, but every episode of The Newlywed Game included

at least one question about the couples’ “whoopee” habits. The very need for the phrase

“making whoopee,” the show’s euphemism for intercourse, indicates the taboo nature of explicit

discussions of the sexual act, particularly on daytime television, but the purpose of the show—

learning the intimate details of newly married couples’ lives—simultaneously depended on some

level of explicitness. Most contestants’ answers fell on the proper side of decorum while hinting

at private improprieties at the same time. In the show’s most infamous moment, however, the

potential for slippage between im/propriety was made evident. On an “expectant newlyweds”

episode from 1977, Eubanks asked couples the question, “Where is the strangest place you have

ever had the urge to make whoopee?” One husband had given the relatively mundane answer,

“in the car, on the freeway,” but his wife, who seemed to misinterpret the question, hesitantly

responded, “In the…,” the end of her answer bleeped out. Although her actual wording was

obscured by censors, the uproar from the audience, Eubanks gentle rephrasing of the question,

and her husband’s and her own highly embarrassed reactions, indicates a serious breach of

60 Ibid., 63-4.

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propriety, and makes it fairly easy to fill in the blank.61 This moment is so notorious and so

humorous because it is an instance of true honesty in a forum where candor of this sort was not

supposed to be given voice. It is a frank confession that highlights the existence of a clear

boundary as to how candid one can be on television. Not only does a moment like this comment

on the need for performativity even within televised forums that depend on participants’ honesty,

but the woman’s lack of performative decorum serves as a disruption in the truth discourses of

The Newlywed Game. Despite the show’s pretense to reveal real couples’ lives and relationships,

it is evident that certain truths needed to be kept in check, limiting the extent of what could be

confessed. At the same time, though, the moment seems to offer a brief glimpse into “the real,”

through its exceeding the boundaries of a text by the wife’s inability to properly perform.

Goffman has indicated that the potential for disruption always exists in any performance.

Even the most trivial discrepancy in an individual’s intended impression can discount the verity

of the entire performance. If, for example, a seemingly pious minister accidentally curses in

front of his congregation, his devout “onstage” behavior may be called into question. Goffman

states that we all constantly attempt to prevent such disruptions to “save the show,” taking

preventative measures both before and after performances in order to smooth over potential or

actual disruptions.62 The Newlywed Game moment serves as a similar type of disruption for its

audience. However, it does not necessarily indicate a rift in the wife’s performance for most of

the audience, since she is a stranger to us, but it rather discloses the performative nature of

televisual “reality.” It is not her performance that is called into question but the necessity of

performing the self within televisual constructs—even ones that lay claim to honesty—that the

moment reveals.

61 The common assumption, which is fairly clear from lip-reading, is that the wife answered “In the ass.” 62 Goffman, 51, 239.

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The confession has remained an integral part of television’s structure, particularly on

narrative-based reality programming like Survivor, Big Brother, The Bachelor, and America's

Next Top Model. Speaking the self to the camera is one of the major tropes on all of these

programs, and the prime-time shows are structured in such a way that their participants confess

to the camera almost as much as they act. Participants on these shows are interviewed privately

at regular intervals about their feelings, whether about other contestants, events that have taken

place, or their own mindsets, and constant clips culled from these interviews accompany

everything that occurs on-camera. Participant confessionals take up almost as much, if not more,

airtime as the events they are talking about on these shows. A two-minute clip of a date between

rocker Bret Michaels and suitor Jess on VH1’s 2007 series Rock of Love, for example, featured

only 30 seconds of audio footage from the actual date. The rest of the segment is taken up by

Bret and Jess speaking about their feelings for one another, with both video of the date and their

actual confessionals receiving equal time. While what happens on the date is important, how the

participants feel about the actions appears to be even more essential—a pattern that repeats itself

on any number of reality programs.

Indeed, in many cases, the confession serves as a marker of authenticity for these shows’

participants. The confessional space, whether a private room or a location secluded from other

people, is a detached area where individuals can express how they really feel about their fellow

participants. Often it is the only place a participant can be alone within each show’s filming

space. CBS’s Big Brother (2000 - ) made the privacy and apparent confidentiality of the

confessional space explicit beginning in the show’s second season, calling it “the diary room.”

Despite the fact that individuals confess to a camera and, when the show airs, their thoughts will

be revealed to both a broadcast audience and to those about whom they may be speaking, the

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detachment of the space signifies that the words spoken are authentic, unaffected by who may

hear them. On the first season of America's Next Top Model, for example, Elyse, a medical

student/wannabe supermodel, constantly ranted in the confessional about the superficiality and

pettiness of the show’s other contestants. Her confessions seemed to contradict her outwardly

friendly interactions with her competitors, and thus marked an “authentic” Elyse—her

“backstage” self, in a forum separate from “onstage” space. Her words in the confessional

indicated the performative nature of her actions outside. While her confessions may have also

been a performance, as types of speech distinct from all others on the show, they nonetheless

attested to a more authentic Elyse. Confessions in this mode function within the Foucauldian

paradigm as well, as means of producing truths about the speakers that, in most show’s narrative

structures, could not be produced elsewhere.

In his work on reality TV, Marc Andrejevic notes how the audience’s omniscience

contributed to their perceptions of contestant authenticity on the first season of Big Brother in the

United States. Contestants whose behavior inside and outside the confessional did not match

were read as less “real” than those with no discrepancies—for, as Andrejevic states, “the most

common definition of ‘real’ in this context is the willingness of a houseguest to ‘be’ him- or

herself rather than attempting to play a role.” An outpouring of emotion expressed only in the

“Red Room” (the precursor to the diary room), would thus indicate that one was at some point

playing a role in front of his or her fellow houseguests. Almost as egregious as keeping one’s

true self to the confessional, though, were contestants who withheld emotions at all times to

present themselves better on camera, thus refusing to “get real.” 63 Under these terms, Elyse’s

confessional rants would be viewed as proof of her phoniness. However, I would argue that

63 Marc Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 125.

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between the first U.S. season of Big Brother in 2000 and America's Next Top Model’s premiere

in 2003, the artifice of reality TV had become more evident to the American viewing public—

beginning with Stacey Stillman’s Survivor lawsuit—and “the real” called into question to a much

larger degree. For skeptical viewers, then, a disruptive confession like Elyse’s may have shown

that while she was not entirely genuine in her social interactions, she was a real person with real

emotions despite the constructed, televisual nature of her overall situation.

In fact, on many of these shows, dissimulation as self-presentation is rewarding for both

contestants and the audience. Viewers of the first season of Big Brother may have wanted to

reward only “real” houseguests, but, as Andrejevic admits, this led to a dearth of drama in the

house and a boring television show. Indeed, the first season failed miserably in the ratings, in

part because the houseguests never forgot they were being watched. According to producer John

Kalish:

They were always talking about how they were being edited, story lines, looking into cameras, being aware of it. They never let go of what the other houseguests in other countries did, which was finally to let go of the idea of being observed. These guys never did. They always referred to themselves as ‘characters’ as opposed to people.64

The houseguests’ hyper-self-consciousness ultimately led to boring television, since their desire

to be likeable characters eliminated almost all conflict in the house—and no matter how “real”

they tried to be, they were nonetheless performing camera-friendly likeability. The first

American Survivor, which aired on CBS the same summer, garnered much higher ratings. One

could speculate that a large part of its success stemmed from the duplicity of its winner, Richard

Hatch, who schemed his way to a million dollars, revealing his plans only through confessionals.

64 Big Brother 2000 official website, no longer online. Cited in Pamela Wilson, “Jamming Big Brother: Webcasting, Audience Intervention, and Narrative Activism,” Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, eds. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette (New York: NYU Press, 2004), 326.

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The second season of Big Brother allowed the houseguests to vote one another out, abandoning

the European model where viewers decided who left the house. This decision not only created

more drama within the show but also gave contestants less of an immediate reason to perform

likeability for the voting audience at home. The winner, Will Kirby, was by his own admission

the most manipulative and dishonest player in the house, and his entire persona was based on the

idea of constant dissimulation. Due in part to his scheming, Big Brother 2’s ratings were

significantly higher than they had been the previous summer.65

The structure of many reality shows tends to reward the duplicitous, particularly

competitive shows where contestants decide who leaves the game. On these shows, contestants

are required to be phony to one another at some level in order to retain alliances and manipulate

their way to the end of the game. However, this makes the role of the confession as a marker of

authenticity even more important, as a site where contestants’ real intentions can be explained.

The confession makes these texts more legible for the audience, who cannot necessarily glean

enough significant information about where participants stand based solely on their interactions

with one another. On Survivor: All-Stars (CBS, 2004), for example, contestant Rob Mariano had

told three distinct groups of people that he was allied with them in a voting bloc. It was only

when, in a confessional, he acknowledged that his only significant alliance was with his

girlfriend Amber, that we could begin to glean his true status in the game. Thus, in a format that

encourages inauthenticity and perpetual performance in interpersonal relations, the confession

underscores the idea that there is authenticity to be found.

However, as reality show participants’ myriad complaints about the editing suggest, these

displays of real feeling can be taken out of context, and, in addition, they can be just as

65 Josef Adalian, “B’casters Face New Reality,” Variety, July 9, 2001.

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performed as individuals’ social interactions. Confessionals, which take place outside of the

normal narrative space and time, can be edited into the show at any point, and comments that

may refer to one incident can be placed in the context of another. In addition, reality show

contestants are almost certainly affected by the presence of the camera. Bill Nichols has noted

how in documentary, the “social actors”—people—play themselves, but as a “virtual

performance,” which corresponds to dramatic conventions of performance.66 In the Survivor

Companion, a behind-the-scenes look at the first season of Survivor, producer Mark Burnett

indicates a moment when in an on-camera confessional, contestant Sue Hawk smiled agreeably,

projecting confidence. As soon as the cameras shut off, however, “Sue’s sweet smile

disappear[ed]. Once again, she look[ed] tired, feral, angry.”67 Her on- and off-camera

presentations each projected a different “virtual self,” indicating a three-tiered Goffman-esque

“stage” paradigm—“onstage” while playing the game, “backstage-onstage” while filming the

confessional, and even further “backstage” when the camera stopped rolling. As this anecdote

indicates, the private confession, supposedly a site to express what one is really feeling, remains

a site of performativity. While the confession still serves as a means by which we can judge

show’s participants’ motives and mental states, as well as creating a feeling of authenticity, this

realness may indeed be only a feeling, a televisual construct. Her change in performative modes

does not make the televisual “Sue Hawk” any less real, but her confession misleads in its

supposed construction of an authentic Sue Hawk.

The tension between performance and authenticity becomes even more apparent on a

newer sub-genre of reality shows, which includes Fox’s Joe Millionaire (2003) and My Big Fat

66 Bill Nichols, “’Getting to Know You…Knowledge, Power, and the Body,” ed. Michael Renov, Theorizing Documentary (New York: Routledge, 1993), 175, 224. 67 Mark Burnett with Martin Dugard, Survivor: The Official Companion Book (New York: TV Books, L.L.C., 2000), 204.

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Obnoxious Fiancé (2004) and Spike TV’s The Joe Schmo Show (2003-04). On these shows, the

ideas of falsity and misunderstandings are more explicitly inherent to the narrative structure. Joe

Millionaire featured a construction worker who wooed fifteen women while pretending to be a

multimillionaire. Joe Schmo created a fake competitive reality show called Lap of Luxury, where

everyone except for one man was an actor. On My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé, a woman tried to

convince her friends and family that she was marrying Steve, an oafish man she claimed to have

met on a reality dating show. Randi, however, did not know that her “fiancé” and his equally

crude family were actually actors paid to make her position as difficult as possible. All of these

shows, while set up as elaborate deceptions for their chosen dupes, retained the confession as a

dominant trope with the purpose of designating what was authentic and what was staged. In

modes similar to Survivor contestants elaborating on their feelings about the game and their

tribemates, Randi confessed to the camera about her annoyance with Steve; Matt, Joe Schmo’s

initial target, about his mystification at the bizarre happenings surrounding him. The role of the

confession as authentication became even more explicit, however, on My Big Fat Obnoxious

Fiancé, for example, when Steve-the-actor spoke to the camera about his feelings concerning his

actions as Steve-the-character, who got no confessions. Joe Schmo actors similarly confessed to

the camera as “themselves,” labeled with their real name underneath their character name.

Melissa Yvonne Lewis played the scheming contestant “Ashleigh” on Lap of Luxury, but her

confessions were always as Melissa; Ashleigh never spoke to the camera directly. Confessing in

these terms is supposed to be read as distinct from the actors’ performances, and we are not

supposed to question their authenticity. Rather, they attempt to lend greater authenticity to the

highly unreal situations about which the subjects are speaking—for they are in on the joke, yet

still have feelings, whether guilty or pleasurable, about their roles. While Steve seemed to enjoy

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playing his part, apparently because he disliked Randi, most of the Joe Schmo castmates began to

express feelings of remorse early on for fooling Matt, whom they grew to respect a lot, in such

an elaborate way. Although the actors appear in dual modes within the programs’ overall

narratives, these confessions serve as a means to locate, authenticate, and make more legible the

show’s subjects, Matt and Randi. While the shows themselves may be reflexive, the confessions

are not supposed to be read as such.

However, taking these confessions as authentic becomes difficult because of the overall

structure of deception on these programs. It is difficult to ground the actors’ confessions as non-

performative because we are set up to see the rest of the narrative world as inauthentic. Many

viewers of The Joe Schmo Show, where the only “reality” was Matt and the actors’ reactions to

him, were more than skeptical about the possibility that any reality existed. Viewers speculated

that Matt himself was an actor, set up to fool the other actors and ultimately the audience, who

were the real “Schmos.”68 The layers of unreality created by the show’s text led to speculation

that no reality could possibly exist. The actors’ confessions were suspect because their

theatricality formed the basis of the show. Similarly, Matt’s confessions were suspect because of

the skepticism derived from a world where so much was false—why would his necessarily be

authentic? The confession, which in theory was supposed to ground Joe Schmo in some form of

authenticity, thus instead created speculation about further inauthenticity. The show’s inherent

performative nature led its audience to mistrust its position as insiders into its world.

68 See, for example, Meghan O’Rourke, “Life Lessons from Joe Schmo,” Slate.com, September 25, 2003 <http://slate.msn.com/id/2088906/> (accessed May 12, 2004; no longer online) and discussion thread “The Real Matt Gould” at RealityTVWorld.com, October 22, 2003<http://community.realitytvworld.com/boards/cgi-bin/dcboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=128&forum=DCForumID55&omm=0?>, (accessed August 12, 2007).

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Four reality shows in particular make the confession completely suspect and thus

foreground the inauthenticity of performance in general. ABC’s The Mole (2001-04, 2008),

Bravo’s Boy Meets Boy (2003), Fox’s Playing It Straight (2004), and Lifetime’s Gay, Straight,

or Taken (2007), like the previous shows, all focus on misconceptions. However, unlike My Big

Fat Obnoxious Fiancé and Joe Millionaire, where the audience knows precisely who is

deceiving whom, all of these shows make explicit that someone is lying, but do not reveal who—

much like on To Tell the Truth forty years earlier. On The Mole, a competitive reality show that

aired in four different incarnations on ABC between 2001 and 2004, one of ten contestants was a

plant by the producers—The Mole—who was there to sabotage the group’s progress. The

contestants and the audience simultaneously attempted to figure out the identity of The Mole,

based in part on the progress of the game but mostly on the individual characters that gradually

evolved through the challenges and in confessions. Boy Meets Boy and Playing It Straight were

both, in theory, romance shows. However, on Boy Meets Boy, a man thought he was selecting a

beau out of a group of gay men when, in fact, half of his suitors were straight men pretending to

be gay. The audience did not find out which contestants were straight until James had eliminated

them. Playing It Straight functioned in a similar fashion with a different inflection. A woman

chose a suitor from a group of men, but she knew some of them were gay. If Jackie ended up

with a straight man, the couple would split a million dollars; if she ended up with a gay man, he

would take home the entire prize. The audience, like Jackie, did not know who identified as

straight or gay until she asked someone to leave; over the course of the show, we tried to figure it

out with her. Gay, Straight, or Taken was an episodic version of Playing It Straight, where a

woman spent the day with three men—one of whom had a girlfriend, one of whom had a

boyfriend, and one of whom was straight and single. If, at the episode’s end, she chose the

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single man, the two won a vacation together; if she chose either of the others, they would go on

the vacation with their respective partners.

The confession remained a dominant trope on all of these shows, but their structures

made explicit the fact that confessions may be completely untrue, to the point where Playing It

Straight opened with a disclaimer stating “The male contestants in this program may be lying or

misrepresenting themselves at all times, including in their interviews.” The false personae

certain participants projected carried not only through their interactions with other contestants

but within the confessional space. Thus, because the audience was aware that someone was

lying but was unsure who, every confession became suspect. As one tried to discern who was

dishonest, then, one constantly read for potential disruptions and discontinuities between speech

and action, since all speech was unstable, and may have been completely performed.

On other shows that rely on misconceptions, like Joe Schmo, viewers were prepared for

disruptions to occur because they were aware of what was being performed. Disruptions were

disquieting, because viewers may have lost the power of their superordinate, omniscient

audience position if the target became aware of the deception. At a more basic level, if the target

figured out the lie, the audience would lose their spectatorial pleasure, for there would

theoretically be nothing left to watch.69 One of the more tense moments on Joe Schmo’s first

season involved one of the actor/contestants slipping up, naming her real hometown in Texas

when her character had previously claimed to be from Wisconsin. The drama involved whether

69 The second season of Joe Schmo, this time a fake dating reality show, which aired in 2004, overcame this very problem. In the third episode, their “Jane Schmo,” Ingrid, became overly suspicious of the plot unfolding before her, going so far as to ask people if they were actors. Producers pulled her aside, informed her of the ruse, and offered her $100,000 if she would join the actors and continue to play out the script for the benefit of the “Joe,” Tim. The tension then became doubly focused on both Tim and Ingrid’s replacement Amanda’s reactions to the script, and whether unprepared non-actor Ingrid could successfully carry out the hoax.

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Matt would notice, whether she could save the show we knew she was putting on, and it was a

relief when she did. On Playing It Straight, however, a similar disruption would make the text

more legible, and thus one searched for discontinuities. When suitor Ryan, despite his bravado

in the confessional, seemed to annoy rather than impress Jackie, it was unclear whether he was a

gay man unsure of how to perform as straight or merely a heterosexual pest. The discontinuity

between the confessional and his interaction with Jackie indicated that two separate

performances were occurring, but it was still impossible to pinpoint the reason why. Truth did

not even necessarily come in retrospect. After Jackie eliminated Ryan, he admitted that he was

straight—but the disruption of both performances through the visible discontinuity nonetheless

made explicit the fact that both were in fact unstable.

There is a strange ambivalence that occurs when trying to read a text for inauthenticity,

especially when we know that not everything is inauthentic. On the one hand, it can be

pleasurable. Goffman notes that an intense interest in disruptions plays a key role in group social

life, a source for many forms of humor (from practical jokes to speculative stories to humorous

anecdotes about, for example, a sailor on shore leave asking his mother to “pass the fucking

butter”).70 If one is looking for and hence reads for all possible disruptions, more sources of

pleasurable humor in others’ performative failures will be evident. However, on these shows,

the search for inauthenticity is a function of a search for authenticity. The fact that neither

category is stable creates a structural ambivalence that can be unsettling at the same time, and for

the same reasons, that it is pleasurable. These shows’ structural foregrounding of performance

blurs the boundaries between authenticity and inauthenticity, and the fact that neither is fixed

televisually can potentially raise the question of whether they can be fixed in reality.

70 Goffman, 14-15.

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Because all confessions are suspect and thus all performances become explicit, the

mediated nature of confession on these shows has seemed to stray from the Foucauldian

paradigm, perhaps indicating a general movement away from his mode of confession. The only

truth that really can be produced in the confessional space, within the suspicious mode of

viewing the shows encourage, is that all confessions are potentially performances, which can be

then be extrapolated to everything we see. For Foucault, the confession is a site for the

production of sexual truth and knowledge; on Boy Meets Boy, the only sexual truth that arises is

that sexual truth is ambiguous. Markers of sexuality are blurred through the performative

confessions, and social identity is only diagnosed with a caption labeling eliminated contestants

“gay” or “straight,” which still may be called into question by the nature of each contestant’s

earlier successful or unsuccessful performance. While at the end of a To Tell the Truth segment,

the audience received a definitive answer as to which contestant got married underwater, the

“definitive” caption of a Boy Meets Boy contestant could still hint at the fluid nature of sexual

identity. The explicit nature of theatricality on Boy Meets Boy and similar shows keeps identity

undiagnosed and blurs its meaning, even for the confessors. In the Foucauldian model,

confession produces the ultimate truth, followed by recuperation, for the disempowered speaker.

On reality television—especially shows like Boy Meets Boy and Playing It Straight—though, the

speaker retains power over the listener. Only he knows what is true and what he is performing,

and his speech only dissimulates, rather than diagnoses. As the genre has evolved, it seems that

indexicality, not social identity, has become what is truly at stake.

While this tension is most evident on hoax shows and gamedocs focused on sexuality, it

affects all television programming that features “real people.” Reality TV in particular is a genre

of self-display, and, Candid Camera-type programming aside, all participants have made a

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conscious decision to appear on camera. The suspicion is always there that if one chooses to be

on television, one is likely performing a specific role—consciously or unconsciously—whether

for camera time, notoriety, a future acting career, or merely an attempt to look good in the

eventual broadcast. But even awareness of such performances does not stop viewers from

searching for authenticity within these performative texts. Indeed, John Corner claims that it is

precisely these negotiations an audience makes between performance and authenticity that lead

to some of reality television’s greatest pleasures. The codes that distinguish fiction from reality

are often unclear, which provides viewers with “a thick judgmental and speculative discourse

around participants’ motives, actions, and likely future behavior.”71 Annette Hill specifies that

while viewers expect reality TV participants to role-play, they also expect these performances to

unravel eventually. The privileged viewing strategy thus involves looking beyond or through the

roles contestants play for the “authentic moment,” when genuine emotion overrides the

performance. The example Hill uses involves a moment when Big Brother contestant “Nasty

Nick” broke down and cried, finally exposing his “true” self that existed behind what was clearly

a performance.72 Like with Andrejevic’s American Big Brother audience, authenticity for Hill’s

viewers involved being true to oneself on an emotional level—a truth, though, that in this case

only emerges in moments of crisis. This type of authenticity is generally fleeting, but is

nonetheless the place where viewers can find the hidden reality of reality TV—definitive truths

about participants’ motives, emotions, and character, that extend beyond their performances for

the camera.

71 John Corner, “Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions,” Television & New Media 3, no. 3 (August 2002), 264. 72 Hill, pp. 334-5.

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That such “authentic moments” are almost invariably tinged with some form of pain or

schadenfreude thus begins to explain its importance within the reality genre. As in the notorious

Newlywed Game moment, the slippage from performance to “actuality” often humiliates the

subject in a fundamental way, while at the same time underscoring a sense of reality. While the

emotion depends on the indexicality of its object, then, schadenfroh engagement can

simultaneously assert that the object is authentic. Sometimes schadenfreude is purely organic,

like when an unlikable individual receives what seems like deserved comeuppance, whether

being shot down by a potential dating partner or being voted out by opponents on a competitive

reality show. But much of reality television’s schadenfreude is orchestrated through programs’

narrative or postproduction techniques, where it almost always doubles as a form of marking

authenticity.

Certain types of programming that foreground schadenfreude as the privileged reaction to

the authentic moment within their narrative structure, like hoax shows, use the emotion as a

guaranteed means of breaking through other performances. Hoaxes build to one epic authentic

moment—the revelation of the con—after humiliating their victims for weeks. The reveal finally

lets victims know the reality of their situation, sets up a guaranteed emotional display, and

simultaneously offers viewers a chance to revel in the ultimate humiliation—the victims’

reaction to the knowledge that they’ve been duped. At the same time, though, the shock or

confusion of the reveal ensures that even the most camera-savvy victims will halt their

performances as they try to comprehend their actual circumstances, returning the hoax to

something truly “real.” Indeed, The Joe Schmo Show in particular uses inauthenticity, its parody

of reality shows, as a means to return to the real—namely the schadenfroh pleasure in the

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Schmos’ attempts to discern what is going on around them, and the anticipation of their reaction

to the revelation.

To a lesser but still significant extent, competitions like Survivor and Big Brother feature

a weekly elimination. One contestant has the misfortune of being sent home, which often brings

with it a significant emotional reaction, and the scheming and machinations that lead up to an

elimination offer plenty of potential moments of crisis, and hence authenticity. However, even

moments that do not involve emotional outbursts can still hint at authenticity and elicit

schadenfreude. Evidence that a reality show participant has been lying, whether to the camera

during confessionals or to fellow contestants, elicits a sort of meta-humiliation, while still

providing a moment of truth. If schadenfreude is indeed “the emotional manifestation of

justice,”73 then catching someone in a made-for-TV lie simultaneously presents her transgression

and punishment. Even if a reality show participant does not receive what seems to be her proper

comeuppance within the action of a show itself, evidence that she has been inauthentic in front of

the camera humiliates her retroactively. Being caught in a lie by the camera is a form of

punishment—humiliation via broadcast—that casts doubts about the contestant’s general

character, and deflates the power of her performance. While not an “authentic moment” in

Annette Hill’s sense of the term, experiencing schadenfreude hinges on believing that there is

something authentic, which proves an individual’s personal inauthenticity.

As Linda Williams has indicated, the “money shot” in pornography—the shot of

ejaculation—is so important because it is an irrefutable document of both the sexual act and

sexual pleasure.74 On reality television, moments that elicit schadenfreude serve a similar

73 John Portmann, When Bad Things Happen to Other People (New York: Routledge, 2000), 15. 74 Linda Williams, Hardcore: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 49, 194.

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purpose, although instead of documenting sex, they underscore crisis, emotion, and authenticity.

The reality TV “money shot” is not as straightforward as pornography’s, though, either

aesthetically or contextually, for there are a number of ways shows intentionally elicit

schadenfreude, and thus multiple types of money shot.

What I would call “postproduction” schadenfreude are those moments when some audio

or visual postproduction process creates a character’s humiliation. Editing incongruous moments

together—seeing, for example, a Flavor of Love contestant claiming to be “classy,” followed by

a shot of her flashing her breasts to the camera—is perhaps the most frequent manifestation, but

cruel subtitles as well as music or sound effects to cue the audience to unpleasant character traits

also commonly occur. On the 2005 finale of The Surreal Life 5, for example, a show where a

group of B-list celebrities share a house for a week, fighting between notorious Apprentice

contestant Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth and former supermodel Janice Dickinson came to a

head. Omarosa attempted to explain that her earlier name-calling of Dickinson was a caring

response to what she saw as a legitimate problem. In a confessional, she told the camera, “My

natural reaction when people are in pain is to comfort them and protect them, and I did that.”

The show then cut to black-and-white footage from an earlier episode of Dickinson sobbing

because Omarosa had just criticized her parenting skills. A giggling Omarosa walked by

Dickinson, casually calling out, “Crack whore!” over her shoulder. The editing here is used to

create a contradiction between what Omarosa said and what we had previously seen her do, and

the incongruity between the two underscores the idea of performance. Only one of the two

statements given—either by Omarosa, where she claims she comforts those in pain, or by the

flashback, where she mocks someone whose pain she caused—can be true, and between the two,

the only real possibility for untruth lies in Omarosa’s confessional. While it is clear, then, that

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Omarosa is performing for the camera, it is also clear that there are authentic moments beyond

her performance, which have real emotional impact for those around her. A reality exists beyond

her theatricality. That the flashback is in black and white enhances its status as a “real”

document of the past. Reality shows often use black and white flashbacks as visual shorthand

for the past tense—to offset them as earlier truths, as opposed to the in-color and perhaps

ambiguous present. Even though the “crack whore” moment itself may have had its own textual

ambiguities, the use of editing here not only encodes it as indicative of the past but a true past; it

is what really happened—the real crisis, not its later rationalization. In moments like these,

creating schadenfreude by revealing a performance shows that, while participants may be fake,

there is still a truth behind their performances.

A second type of schadenfreude is structural, intentionally built into the narrative itself.

These are the moments where a contestant is eliminated or a narrative truth is revealed to

someone, like on the finales of hoax shows. Even though this is largely a function of the

narrative, there are still visual cues that tend to be consistent across the majority of shows.

Within a “rose ceremony” on The Bachelor, for example, where a number of potential suitors

will not receive a rose and will thus be sent home, the camera tries to capture the female

contestants’ anticipation and disappointment. Tense music plays, the Bachelor pauses for

dramatic effect between each rose, and the visual consists wholly of close-ups: the dwindling

pile of remaining roses, the Bachelor’s serious expression, and, most importantly, the tense and

hopeful faces of the empty-handed women. Since the viewer knows that a mass elimination is

about to happen, the visual strategy is to both draw out and search for the anticipated reaction—

in this case, the exact moment when the rejected women’s hope turns to heartbreak. While the

rose ceremony itself is an unnatural situation wholly created for television, the women’s

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emotional reactions feel authentic. The close-up is of particular significance here, since its

function is to serve as a document of emotional intensity and crisis. The camera searches for the

inevitable, and the close-ups underscore the reality of the women’s distress. This strategy is

typical of the elimination ceremonies on any number of shows, since it is a concise, legible

method of both building suspense and capturing moments of emotional crisis in a structured way.

The ultimate, and most organic, kind of crisis the camera can capture is reality TV’s

truest “money shot”—the moments when an individual’s emotional reaction is so intense and out

of control that there can be little doubt that her pain or anger is real. While these moments can

theoretically be painful or disturbing to watch, they also tend to be fascinating because of the

emotional extremes depicted. The end of a 2005 episode of Fox’s Trading Spouses, for example,

delivered one of reality television’s most notorious scenes. On Trading Spouses, the wives of

two very different families switch houses for a week; each family receives $50,000, although the

“twist” is that the other family’s wife must decide how they will spend it. This particular episode

featured a Louisiana woman named Marguerite Perrin, an obese, gap-toothed Evangelical

Christian with a thick Southern accent, who spent the week with a Northern hippie family.

Numerous aspects of the other family’s lifestyle made her uncomfortable—from the fact that

they were pagans, to the sex-themed call-in radio show the couple hosted, to the wife’s day job

as a hypnotherapist, to a phantom odor in the laundry room that only Perrin could smell, which

made her vomit. As soon as she returned home, Perrin let loose with all the anger she had tried

to keep inside all week. Her husband, two daughters, and granddaughter greeted her happily at

the door, as she sobbed that it was the “worst time of [her] life.” When asked to explain why,

Perrin’s sobs turned to screams as she ranted that the wife “not a Christian!” and had “tampered

in dark-sided stuff,” which in turn made the entire house “dark-sided.” Rising from the couch,

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she proclaimed, “This is my house, and I want nothing. I want my God and I want my family.”

Claiming it was “tainted,” she ripped up the $50,000 check; her voice rose, as she roared, “I give

it up to God! I am a God Warrior!” Perrin then screamed at the crew to leave—a statement she

then recanted by demanding all the non-Christian crew members to “Get the hell out of my

house, in Jesus’ name I pray!”

Perrin’s outburst was a reality television sensation; after the show aired, she appeared on

numerous talk shows, began hosting segments on the Fox Reality Channel’s Reality Remix, and

was even the model for a popular talking bobblehead doll. Her moment of fame was aided by

several postproduction schadenfreude techniques—namely, the ominous music playing

throughout her outburst and a series of subtitles at the end that let the audience know that she did

accept the money after all, once she learned that $20,000 was allotted for her to receive gastric

bypass surgery. However, her emotional explosion was the reality TV “money shot” in its purest

form. Aesthetically, this scene presented a sharp contrast to the visual strategy of structural

schadenfreude. While on The Bachelor there is an orderly search for an anticipated emotional

reaction that fits neatly within the frame, Marguerite Perrin’s explosion was visual chaos. Very

few shots were centered; most were constantly being reframed; Marguerite consistently moved

out of frame; and the camera crew was clearly confused, both by what was going on around

them—one camerawoman, for example, made a move to leave the house when Perrin told her

to—as well as by how to capture it. That the crew was visible at all is telling. Usually they

remain out of sight, for their presence serves as a reminder that events are unfolding in front of a

camera, not organically. Seeing a camera operator during a Bachelor rose ceremony would

deflate much of its potential emotional impact by showing the scene’s orchestration. Here,

though, seeing the crew had the opposite effect: Perrin’s outburst was so extreme that attempting

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to film as much of it as possible broke the fourth wall. Instead of searching for one moment of

authentic emotion, there was too much going on here to capture in full.

“Money shots” like this one are so affective because they show something that cannot be

wholly contained; there’s too much reality there. Even though most viewers would likely not

want to be present for such an outburst, the schadenfroh affect stems from both a fascination

with the intensity of the emotion and the knowledge that it is nonetheless being filmed and

broadcast. Like with postproduction schadenfreude, it is often a form of retroactive meta-

humiliation, but in this case it is dependent upon extreme authenticity—that one’s emotion is too

strong to be contained by a proper performance before the camera, which is the source of the

fascination. These full-on “money shots” document spontaneous, extreme emotion while at the

same time showing that it is possible for reality television to capture something truly authentic—

or at least to make the attempt to do so. While these scenes are the most intense and complex,

the audience’s affect is closely tied to negotiating “the real” within each of reality TV’s modes of

schadenfreude. Each time a program elicits the emotion, it simultaneously tells us that, despite

the specious nature of “reality” TV, there is indeed a reality to be found.

At the same time, though, eliciting the emotion as a response to authenticity cements its

affective power. When it is clear that humiliation is actual, palpable, and has larger

consequences within the social world, schadenfreude functions as a truly evaluative mode, an

entertaining way to explore real issues of ethics and morality. This almost symbiotic

relationship of reality and misfortune, where each works to confirm the other’s authenticity, is

key to understanding the pleasures of both.

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Chapter 3: Misery, Transformation, and Happy Endings

The Biggins family of Atlanta had some serious problems. They were struggling financially,

their house wasn’t large enough for a family of five, all but the youngest son Omar were

clinically obese, and, because of their long days at work, parents Al-Mela and Anthony’s

relationship lacked any romance. On the 2004 two-hour premiere of Renovate My Family,

however, the Fox network vowed to change all that. The family was sent away for a week to a

wellness center where they learned healthy exercise and eating habits. Jay McGraw, son of talk

show host Dr. Phil McGraw, counseled Anthony on how to relight the spark in his marriage.

The entire family received new hairstyles and wardrobes before returning home to a brand-new

five-bedroom house on their old lot, where, as a final surprise, McGraw told Mela that she had

received a scholarship to nursing school so she could finally provide for her family the way she

had always wanted.

Like its contemporary and rival Extreme Makeover: Home Edition on ABC, Renovate My

Family promised to jump-start a family’s new life by building a new dream house in a week’s

time. However, while Extreme Makeover: Home Edition grounds each family’s transformation

largely in the physical space of the home, Renovate My Family attempted to repair all

problematic areas of the family’s life, from material aspects to health to interpersonal

relationships. Although the series was short-lived, lasting only nine episodes in the fall of 2004,

it is remarkable for its intent—to be the über-makeover. The idea that it is possible to fix all of a

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family’s problems in a week may be ludicrous, but it is merely the extreme version of a theme

that has been present for decades: on television, any and all transformations are possible.

There are currently dozens of makeover and lifestyle transformation shows on American

television. What Not to Wear—both the British version on BBC America and the American

version on The Learning Channel—and its fashion counterparts, including Ambush Makeover,

How Do I Look?, Style Court, and A Makeover Story, fit the most traditional definition of

“makeover,” making their subjects more physically attractive by changing their wardrobes and

hairstyles. NBC’s The Biggest Loser and VH1’s Celebrity Fit Club showcase the obese, famous

or not, undergoing radical changes in diet and exercise in order to lose weight. More extreme are

the plastic surgery shows. On ABC’s Extreme Makeover, subjects undergo numerous cosmetic

procedures in order to attain aesthetic perfection. MTV’s I Want a Famous Face shows subjects

receiving surgery in order to resemble their favorite celebrities. Fox’s The Swan features “ugly

ducklings” surgically transformed into “swans,” who then compete in a beauty pageant. An

entire network—Home and Garden Television—focuses on home makeovers, as does Extreme

Makeover: Home Edition, Discovery Channel’s Monster House, and TLC’s hit Trading Spaces

and its various spin-offs. Less grounded in the physical are shows that promise more general

lifestyle changes in problematic areas. Super Nanny and Nanny 911, for example, feature British

nannies teaching American parents to deal with unruly children, and Clean Sweep and How

Clean Is Your House? show slovenly housekeepers learning the skills necessary to stop living in

squalor. Renovate My Family and, to a lesser extent, Bravo’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,

bring all these themes together, giving subjects new looks, renovated homes, and new attitudes

that will theoretically transform their entire lifestyles. The popularity and prevalence of these

shows, on network television and cable, in daytime and primetime, for men and women, suggests

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a broad appeal for both the audiences and producers who trade in these fantasies of escape,

metamorphosis, and made-over redemption.

The promise of personal transformation has long existed in multiple forms of media, from

Biblical tales of sinners redeemed to Cinderella to The Taming of the Shrew, while rescuing

women through fashion and cosmetics has been a consistent staple of women’s magazines since

the turn of the century. Kathy Peiss has indicated that many early twentieth century magazine

advertisements for beauty products used “before” and “after” imagery to highlight the

miraculous effects the products could have. A 1928 ad for Zip Epilator, for example, shows two

photos of a young woman “made beautiful by the use of Zip.” In the photo on the left, she sports

prominent sideburns; the photo on the right, taken “three weeks after the application of Zip,”

shows how her unsightly facial hair has vanished.75 The term “makeover” itself was born in

1936 when Mademoiselle magazine enhanced a reader’s appearance and called her the “Made

Over Girl.”76 Like the Zip ad, the article featured before and after photos of nurse Barbara

Phillips, highlighting her full beauty metamorphosis. The makeover has only recently emerged

as a stand-alone television genre, but the essential formula remains the same, since before and

after imagery is integral to the idea of personal transformation. In order for one to believe that a

product or a process can transform an ugly duckling into a swan, it is necessary to see both the

ugliness and its remedy. And indeed, television’s ability to simulate a live process of

transformation makes it ideally suited to such makeovers, bringing (often dubious) still pictures

to life and documenting every step of the transformation itself.

75 Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), 145. 76 Ibid., 144.

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Because of the makeover’s reliance on “before” imagery to reinforce the power of the

“after,” schadenfreude is an emotion often encouraged in a makeover’s audience. An effective

makeover needs to highlight the unpleasantness of the subject’s pre-transformation state so that

the actual transformation will seem relevant and important. To conceive of the end result as an

improvement means that the subject needed improving, and many spectacular transformations

depend on the audiences’ mocking of or pity for a spectacularly antithetical state of “before-

ness.” Every episode of the US version of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, for example, opens

with the “Fab Five” invading the makeover subject’s (usually filthy) home. They tear through

his apartment, criticizing and mocking the rotting food in his refrigerator, his lack of cleanliness,

the apartment’s tasteless or boring décor, and the subject’s problematic wardrobe—essentially

ridiculing his entire lifestyle (and, indirectly, his sexuality, by implying that straight men are

slobs, when compared to the cosmopolitan homosexual lifestyle coaches). By the show’s end,

the subject has become a well-dressed, well-groomed gourmand with a well-decorated

apartment, but this is only truly noteworthy as a contrast to how much of a slob he was at the

start. The more ground covered from slovenly heterosexual to fabulous metrosexual, the better.

Pity, on the other hand, can be an equally engaging force, particularly on lifestyle

makeover programs. Shows like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and Renovate My Family

focus less on subjects’ poor aesthetic choices as a means of humiliating them, and more on the

unfortunate situations that have left them in need of a new home. For the most part, these shows

posit that the state of families’ ramshackle houses is no fault of their own. Rather, the homes are

too small, too run-down, too inadequate because of some tragic (or, alternatively, heroic) outside

circumstance—be it a parent’s death, a child’s crippling accident, or a natural disaster. The

frenzy of building a new home and purchasing all the necessary goods to fill it thus becomes

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almost a charitable mission, a way to alleviate families’ undeserved hardship. Indeed, it is in this

mode that reality television’s ties to melodrama become the most clear, as they are narratives

about unjust suffering and its consequent relief. Instead of ridicule, then, these shows mobilize

compassion as a means of underscoring the magnificence of the “after.” As in traditional

melodrama, a hero saves the victim-protagonist; although, in this case, the hero is the text itself.

While schadenfreude and compassion are two very different entry points to a makeover,

both serve similar narrative functions. In order to take pleasure in the end result of a

transformation, be it a beautiful new house, wardrobe, or life, one must make an investment in

the subject’s initial imperfections. Particularly in the case of televised makeovers, where a

show’s goal is to retain audience members for the entirety of the narrative, there must be an

emotional investment of some kind in the “before” to keep a viewer interested in the revelation

of the “after.” The type of pleasures found in a makeover’s “before” can certainly vary, however,

from derisive contempt to melodrama to pathos. Queer Eye, more so than many other types of

makeover programming, explicitly encourages a humorous reaction to its subjects’ lifestyle

deficiencies, and the show’s pleasure stems from mutual acknowledgement by the hosts and

audience that the subjects are extremely, albeit amusingly, flawed. At the opposite end of the

spectrum are not only shows that build homes for needy families but also clinical plastic surgery

shows like the Discovery Channel’s Plastic Surgery: Before and After and TLC’s A Personal

Story. These programs highlight physical defects that are remedied by cosmetic surgery, both

the mundane (a woman’s tummy tuck, for example) and the tragic (babies with birth defects).

Particularly in the latter case, the “pleasure” involved is certainly not amusement, but more of an

investment in the patient’s fate, resulting from some combination of pity, sympathy, and

curiosity. Nonetheless, even if a viewer’s only conscious enjoyment comes from anticipating the

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problem being fixed, this still hints that the focus on misfortune is part of the show’s narrative

pleasures.

While the shows that mobilize misfortune as a jumping-off point for a happy

transformation all serve multiple agendas, enjoying and learning from others’ mistakes and/or

misery is key to each show’s greater purpose. In this chapter, I will explore more closely the

dual types of engagement various shows encourage, starting with an examination of the historical

precedent to contemporary makeover TV: the postwar audience participation show. On these

programs, needy contestants won prizes in one of two ways: either by “earning” them in some

form of competition, or demonstrating that they “deserved” a reward. While the meanings

behind both modes differ, they ultimately came together through the idea that consumer

consumption could solve all problems.

This duality, however, sets the precedent for two distinct types of contemporary

makeover. Didactic makeovers, exemplified by shows like What Not to Wear and Queer Eye,

force subjects to “work” for their transformations, learning why their aesthetic choices are

abysmal and the processes necessary to remedy them. These shows use schadenfroh engagement

with pre-makeover subjects to elicit self-surveillance in the audience, the result of which is a

solid consumerist lesson—how to purchase products to fix one’s own flaws, which one may not

have been aware of before watching the show (making these programs ideal sites for lifestyle

advertisers). Pity-based transformations, on the other hand, are exemplified by shows like

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, where subjects receive great material rewards by eliciting

audience sympathy. These shows are similarly grounded in a consumerist ethos and have their

own didactic tendencies. Their reliance on stories of hardship rather than more blatant humor,

though, turns a potentially humiliating process into full-fledged melodrama—with the show (and

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its sponsors) playing the role of hero who “saves the day.” Ultimately, however, in both cases

the makeover serves a normative function, mobilizing both compassion and ridicule as ways to

explore social codes and boundaries, and help the engaged viewer become an equally engaged,

self-reliant consumer.

Televised Transformations: The Prequel

The first American television show wholly devoted to making women over was NBC’s Glamour

Girl, which aired from 1953 to 1954. On Glamour Girl, four women explained to the host and

live audience why they felt they deserved a makeover. The audience voted one woman the

winner, and she returned the next day to show off her new look. While the show was relatively

popular, NBC executives’ concerns over the potential exploitation of Glamour Girl

contestants—women willing to disclose embarrassing personal details in exchange for the

chance to win a new hairstyle—led to its cancellation after one season.77

However, while Glamour Girl may have been the first show to focus on the aesthetic

makeover, it was part of a larger genre that sought to transform everyday people’s lives in

significant ways. The postwar “audience participation” genre, which included shows like Queen

for a Day, Strike It Rich, The Big Payoff, and High Finance, featured individuals disclosing their

real-life troubles on-air in the hopes of receiving some reward in return. Audience participation

programs situated their subjects’ stories of hardship within various types of quiz and talk show

formats, offering cash and fabulous prizes as the solution to personal tragedy. All of these shows

promised to transform the lives of participants in significant ways. On Queen for a Day, four

77 Marsha F. Cassidy, “The Cinderella Makeover: Glamour Girl, Television Sob Shows, and 1950s Femininity,” in The Great American Makeover: Television, History, and Nation, ed. Dana Heller (Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 137.

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women chosen from the studio audience told their hard-luck stories and explained how one

desired item could assuage their troubles. At the end of the show, the audience voted by

applause-o-meter for the most deserving contestant, who would receive her requested item in

addition to thousands of dollars of other sundry goods. Strike It Rich contestants described a

product or service they desperately needed and answered quiz questions to win enough money to

pay for it. Even if they failed, viewers could call in to the show’s “Heart Line” and offer the

contestants money, merchandise, housing, or even jobs. The Big Payoff had male contestants

describe why their wives, mothers, or daughters deserved a reward. While the woman in

question sat off to the side, her champion narrated her story and then answered a series of

questions for prizes, ultimately aiming for the grand prize—a mink coat and trip to Paris.

The confessional audience participation show first emerged on radio in the years leading

up to the end of World War II and remained extremely popular on both radio and TV throughout

most of the 1940s and 1950s. Queen for a Day, for example, was the highest rated daytime

program in 1957, averaging a 12.3 rating for the year—but other shows were not far behind. 78

The ubiquity of these programs in the postwar daytime schedule is especially telling. In the mid-

1950s, all four television networks ran at least an hour a day of audience participation

programming, which were a clear staple of daytime television.79 While these programs had a

number of ties to the equally popular question-and-answer-based quiz shows of the era like

Twenty-One and The $64,000 Question, the two genres differed greatly in tone and, often,

structure. Queen for a Day and Glamour Girl, for example, were competitions, but instead of

being rewarded for their skill or knowledge, women won for having the saddest life story,

78 “TV’s Hottest Battleground,” Sponsor, May 14, 1957. 79 “Monday Television Programs,” The Washington Post, October 12, 1953; “Monday Television Programs,” The Washington Post and Times Herald, January 10, 1955.

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expressing the greatest need, and generating the most audience applause and sympathy.80 Other

shows forewent any competitive elements whatsoever. Participants on Stand Up and Be Counted

described a difficult dilemma they were facing, and the studio audience offered feedback and

advice. Participants returned the next day to announce their decision, and they received prizes

based on their choices. It Could Be You surprised unsuspecting studio audience members with

gifts and, frequently, reunions, based on touching or humorous stories their friends and families

sent into the show. Some programs like Welcome Travelers and On Your Account resembled

talk shows more than quiz shows. On these programs, guests—ordinary people—chatted with

the hosts about their troubles and received merchandise that would help them out. On all of

these “giveaways,” demonstrating personal hardship, rather than any particular form of

intelligence, skill, or talent, justified the prizes participants received, and even when contestants

were competing against one another, it was a compelling back story rather than a particular skill

that helped them win.

On the other hand, a number of programs like Strike It Rich, The Big Payoff, High

Finance, and On Your Way were fundamentally straight game shows, closely resembling the

more traditional quizzes of the era. On all of these shows, contestants answered a series of

questions to win cash or prizes, whether by themselves, with help from an expert, or in

competition against other contestants. Where the “misery” quizzes differed from more

conventional shows was not so much structurally but rather in the implications of contestants’

introductory narratives, which altered the meaning of the competitions as a whole. Contestants

80 A TV Guide interview with Queen for a Day host Jack Bailey described how the show’s producers would wager each day on who would win. One episode’s backstage favorite was the elderly schoolteacher who wanted books and records for her students. Ralph Widman, the still photographer, disagreed. He instead favored the mother of three with the ill husband who wanted groceries for a month, saying, “Woman can’t stand to see kids go hungry.” He was right; she, with the saddest story, won. “Jack Bailey: Mesmerizer of the Middle Aged,” TV Guide, March 11, 1961.

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on both types of programs appeared on camera in the hopes of winning cash or prizes, but

audience participation shows framed prize-giving within discourses of need, as opposed to

contestants on more straightforward quiz shows who won luxuries due to knowledge, skill, or

luck. Most quiz show hosts introduced contestants by name, occupation, and hometown and

asked several questions about their backgrounds; the fundamental difference between Strike It

Rich and The $64,000 Question lay in the contestants’ descriptions of themselves and their

reasons for appearing on the show. Whereas a $64,000 Question contestant might be asked what

she would do with her prize money—a question inevitably posed among others pertaining to

careers, schooling, or interesting personal anecdotes—a Strike It Rich contestant’s interview

focused almost entirely on why she needed the prize money. In both cases, the interview served

as an entry point for audiences to understand, identify with, and root for contestants. However, a

Strike It Rich participant’s tragic back story would almost certainly enhance a viewer’s

emotional investment in her overall success within the game—turning the quiz show into

something closer to melodrama. Although their winnings did not solely depend on the successful

articulation of personal tragedy, as in the giveaway shows, contestants nonetheless became

defined by their problems, not their achievements.

Despite the fact that the average American was more family-bound and financially stable

than ever before, the postwar era was nonetheless marked by feelings of anxiety. As Elaine

Tyler May has demonstrated, a major factor influencing the era’s return to domesticity was the

perceived need for security in an uncertain political era. 1950s adults had distinct memories of

the Depression and World War II, and the postwar era offered relative tranquility in comparison

to previous decades. Americans sought to keep it that way, both internationally and

domestically, desiring above all “secure jobs, secure homes, and secure marriages in a secure

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country.”81 Thus, as May explains, many postwar families applied the Cold War foreign policy

of containment as protection against communism, with a slightly different inflection, to the

domestic sphere. The Cold War produced its own anxieties for Americans, but the cohesive

nuclear family with its rigid social roles became its own protection against—as well as

something to protect from—the uncertainties of the outside world.82 Despite the relative stability

of many Americans’ social and economic realities, post-Depression and postwar individuals

knew how easily tranquility could become chaos; their goal became protecting that stability

however they could.

The stories of contestants on audience participation shows represented precisely the types

of insecurity many Americans feared and illustrated the difficulties many women experienced

trying to maintain a secure lifestyle. A typical episode of Queen for a Day from 1958, for

example, featured five contestants, all in conspicuous financial or emotional distress. One asked

for her trailer home to be furnished with bunk beds for her four daughters who currently slept in

one bed. Another requested a transistor radio and a hospital gurney for her bedridden son

recovering from polio, while a third asked for a set of encyclopedias for her bedridden son

recovering from rheumatic fever, which she could not afford because her husband had a

“rheumatic heart” and could not work. A fourth contestant, pregnant with her second child,

needed stock for the grocery store she and her husband owned, for they could not afford both to

pay the bills and fill the shelves. The store had 64 cents in the till and no inventory when it

opened the morning of the show, and her family was in serious financial trouble. The winner,

Ruth Kliczkowski from Toledo, Ohio, had the saddest story of them all. Her husband had died

81 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 13. 82 Ibid., 13-36.

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several months previously in a hunting accident, her two young daughters were severely

depressed, and Mrs. Kliczkowski had no means of supporting her family because she had never

finished high school. She asked for some form of vocational training so she could feed her

children and get her family back on its feet. The audience voted her the winner, and she received

a full scholarship to beauty school in addition to several thousand dollars worth of other prizes,

which would—at least theoretically—pave the way for a more secure financial future for her and

her children.

All of the contestants on this episode described unfortunate situations that conflicted with

images of postwar domestic tranquility. Ruth Kliczkowski’s life story, however, exposed the

seams of the ideal image—showing how quickly circumstances could wear away at an

apparently stable foundation. Especially for women who married young and did not complete

their educations, the realities of postwar life would be particularly bleak if their husbands died,

lost their jobs, or left them without a means of support.

That these were all typical Queen for a Day pleas begins to explain the dynamics of

audience participation shows in general. As Georganne Scheiner points out, most candidates on

the show were lower-middle or working class, a large number of the women worked, and many

were in severe financial distress. Their stories showed that not everyone had attained—or could

attain—the security that middle-class suburbia offered, and that finding oneself in a vulnerable

position could happen very easily. In addition, they demonstrated the dearth of options for

women, particularly single mothers and widows, to fix unacceptable domestic and economic

situations—as did Ruth Kliczkowski’s narrative.83 In Queen for a Day episodes sampled,

83 Georganne Scheiner, “Would You Like to be Queen for a Day?: Finding a Working Class Voice in American Television of the 1950s,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 23, No. 4, 2003, 380-381.

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candidates’ wishes included several radios and record players to entertain invalid children, two

wheelchairs, a wedding dress for the contestant’s daughter, two hospital gurneys, and a hole in

the ceiling to heat the contestant’s children’s bedrooms. All of these pleas were for specific

material goods or services, but at the same time, they hint at much larger concerns for all of the

candidates. Each woman, whether as a result of tragic, unforeseen circumstance or personal

failure, was in some way unable to maintain her proper social role of wife, caregiver, and mother

of happy, healthy children. The poor financial planning by the contestant with the empty grocery

store and her husband had put their family’s secure future at risk. The candidate asking for the

hole was unable to provide a warm house for her family, and the woman who needed a wedding

dress did not have the means to launch her daughter into the social sphere. Women with disabled

children frequently appeared on the show, as did political émigrés who had been forced to leave

their children behind the Iron Curtain.84 Although neither disability nor politics were within a

woman’s control, the contestants’ inabilities to ameliorate their situations (obtaining the

equipment to help the child in one case, or physically obtaining the child in the other) signified a

general powerlessness within their capacities to be the best mothers possible. While their

difficulties in providing for their families in extreme circumstances may not have indicated a

lack of foresight, they did demonstrate how easily one could lose control of the domestic sphere,

particularly without a financial cushion on which to fall back.

These types of stories were by no means limited to Queen for a Day contestants. Indeed,

daytime television in the postwar era was, literally, miserable. In the “Helping Hand” segment

of a 1956 Strike It Rich episode, for example, actor Richard Dern appeared on behalf of an army

veteran in Texas who was injured during active duty and could not perform physical labor once

84 See “Queen for a Day,” Variety, January 11, 1956; “Those 800 Babies,” TV Guide, June 28, 1958, 16.

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he returned home. Dern answered a series of questions and earned enough prize money for his

beneficiary to raise rabbits and support his family. A 1953 episode of On Your Account featured

a widow whose six children had been taken away from her when she could not support them

after her husband’s death. She wanted money to bring them home, and the show did her one

better by reuniting the entire family on air. On Strike It Rich in 1952, a woman won $500 to help

pay for her husband’s medical bills. He had been in a car accident and would likely never walk

again; she had to quit her job in order to care for him, because they could not afford a full-time

nurse. Stories about losing control in some way of one’s financial, social, or domestic spheres

drove the majority of narratives on audience participation programs, and appearing on television

in the hopes of receiving money or prizes seemed to be one of the few available means of

repairing the breach for many participants.

While some shows like High Finance and Strike It Rich aired in primetime,85 most were

daytime programs aimed at a female audience—largely of a demographic strikingly similar to

the shows’ (mostly female) contestants. According to a 1954 audience study conducted at Ohio

State University, the majority of audience participation show viewers were lower- or working-

class women between 30 and 60 who were seven times as likely to have an elementary school

education as a college degree.86 That these were women, by and large, with backgrounds

comparable to those who appeared on the programs complicates the shows’ appeal—for the

contestants’ stories warned the audience that they too could be one accident, illness, or other

unforeseen setback away from financial distress. While these narratives were often dismal, the

85 Strike It Rich aired simultaneously in daytime and primetime on CBS during the summers of 1951-55, but for the rest of its 11-year run on both radio and television, it was a daytime program. 86 “Does Your Show Reach People—or Customers?,” Sponsor, October 18, 1954.

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genre’s popularity and longevity indicate that audiences nonetheless experienced very real

pleasures in hearing them.

That audience participation shows allowed American women to hear types of stories that

were normally ignored by mainstream media, spoken by and about people much like them, is

likely part of their allure. Marsha Cassidy has argued that Glamour Girl and other daytime

postwar programming opened up the possibility for mediated “feminine discourse,” where

women spoke to other women about their troubles in a public forum—a form of power that

emerged through the recognition and validation of the difficulties of living in a patriarchy.87

These programs represented a site where normally invisible social contradictions could become

visible, and the inconsistencies of postwar social ideals were evident. While audience members

may have empathized with participants’ stories, though, a number of elements within the shows

created an emotional distance that deflected the stories’ impact. Audience participation shows,

both structurally and affectively, mitigated the potential for defiance that feminine discourse can

offer by placing the audience in a position of judgment, framing the stories within a light game

show format, and offering easy material solutions to difficult problems.

In 1946, CBS consulting psychologist Dr. Ernest Dichter explained the appeal of

giveaway shows as “a chance to portray yourself” in a spectacular way, since a broadcast

microphone could make even the most mundane details of a life story sound like “an

accomplishment.”88 And for viewers at home, particularly those with backgrounds similar to the

contestants’, there was likely a multi-tiered feeling of achievement that came from identifying

87 Marsha F. Cassidy, “The Cinderella Makeover: Glamour Girl, Television Misery Shows, and 1950s Femininity,” The Great American Makeover: Television, History, and Nation, ed. Dana Heller (Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 135. 88 Jean Meegan, “It’s Psychology That Pays Off on Radio Quiz, Giveaway Shows,” The Washington Post, July 21, 1946.

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with them. On the one hand, everyday lives like their own became noteworthy enough to be

broadcast, and the contestants’ accomplishments of being mothers and housewives added a layer

of nobility onto viewers’ own everyday lives. On the other hand, viewers—at least those not in

dire straits—could feel comparatively content about their own social and financial conditions. A

working-class housewife without any significant life crisis could feel like she was coming out

ahead, at least compared to her pitiable peers on Strike It Rich, while still identifying with their

stories.

An even greater factor mitigating the misery, though, was the competitive nature of many

audience participation shows, which refocused attention from the stories themselves to the

candidates as game show contestants vying for prizes. Strike It Rich made this shift explicit

through its use of separate spaces for interviews and game play. Warren Hull chatted with

contestants on a living room set located on the left side of the soundstage. When the interview

was complete, Hull and the contestant walked to a scoreboard in the center of the stage—a literal

movement away from the site of misery, towards the actual quiz. This physical shift also

indicated a shift in tone, for Hull rarely mentioned a contestant’s troubles as he asked them trivia

questions. Instead, attention refocused on the size of the jackpot contestants were able to build,

and the contestant’s ability to “earn” her way back to financial stability. On Queen for a Day,

this movement was not quite so literal. However, the show’s format encouraged the viewer to

rank the candidates on the basis of need, and to root for one at the expense of others. The more

stories one heard, the less impact each one seemed to have, for each functioned as a basis of

comparison to the other candidates’ in the viewer’s attempt to predict the day’s winner. The

focus, then, became more about the idea of misery-as-merit than the particular implications of

each contestant’s misery, neutralizing the potential power of each story. The result was sob

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stories about social insecurity that would not create any outright moral or social anxiety for the

audience. Contestant narratives were necessary as an excuse for prize-giving, and defusing their

sadness made the prizes’ impact that much more credible.

Indeed, all the giveaway shows offered an easy solution to their candidates’ often

complex problems: merchandise. Despite the fact that a mink coat and a Hawaiian vacation

would likely be of little use to a widow with hungry children and no job prospects, the narrative

structure of most shows nonetheless posited that the consumer goods they gave away would be

participants’ ticket to a stable, happy future. This equation of prizes and financial relief was

most explicit on Queen for a Day, where every contestant wished for one specific product to

alleviate her misery. Of course, on this sponsor-driven show, producers’ desire for greater

advertising revenue underwrote the connection. Although many potential candidates needed

doctors or lawyers, producers could never find any medical or legal professionals who would

work in exchange for a plug, so these women were never chosen as contestants. Rather, in order

to be selected, women had to want something that could be given away in exchange for free

advertising.89 Eliminating the possibility of non-pluggable wishes resulted in a narrative where

commodity consumption solved all problems. Each contestant claimed to need only one

commercial product, the lack of which encapsulated, and the acquisition of which would surely

fix, the major problems in her life. Her specific issue could thus be instantly taken care of with a

phone call to “Carl Woodall, maker of artificial limbs,”90 for example. As a bonus, her

acquisition of the myriad other prizes—usually including several major appliances, a new

89 Howard Blake, “An Apologia from the Man who Produced the Worst Program in TV History,” in American Broadcasting: A Source Book on the History of Radio and Television, eds. Lawrence W. Lichty and Malachi C. Topping, (New York: Hastings House, 1975), 417. 90 Which occurred on the July 4, 1955 episode. To enhance the product plug, guest host Adolphe Menjou added, “You can be assured that if Mr. Woodall makes it, it’s going to be right.”

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wardrobe, a vacation, and assorted medium-ticket home goods like cookware and tableware—

would, in theory, secure her future happiness and ensure that her problems would not resurface.

The products plugged on the show were thus intertwined with the contestants’ hard luck stories

into a seamless narrative, presenting a problem and offering a clear solution. In this sense, then,

the victim-centric structures of so many audience participation shows made the idea of attaining

merchandise almost heroic. Not only were the programs stepping in to help these women out of

their unfortunate situations, but the merchandise itself took on the role of melodramatic hero,

able to right all injustices and restore moral order.

In 1964, George Katona named postwar America a “mass consumption society,” in

which, as never before, consumers themselves were a major factor in economic growth.91

Kiminori Matsuyama describes the mechanisms driving the development of mass consumption

societies as cyclical, whereby the rapid takeoff of the market for one consumer good is followed

by equally rapid increases in the markets for other goods.92 Matsuyama argues that such patterns

of overall increased consumption are tied to upswings in productivity, which decrease the value

of products, making them more affordable to a greater number of consumers. As more people

purchase a broader range of goods, the expanded consumer market further increases productivity,

which keeps the cycle intact.93

91 George Katona, The Mass Consumption Society (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 25. 92 Kiminori Matsuyama, “The Rise of Mass Consumption Societies,” Journal of Political Economy 110, no. 5 (2002), 1037. In postwar America, for example, the percentage of households with television grew from 9 percent in 1950 to 87.1 percent in 1960, a rise concomitant with the increased growth of myriad other household products. Between 1940 and 1954, the proportion of American households with telephones rose from 36 percent to 80 percent, those with refrigerators increased from 44 percent to 91 percent, and indoor plumbing became part of 80 percent of American homes, as opposed to 65 percent in 1940. “TV Basics: Television Households,” Nielsen Media Research-NTI, September 1950 and September 1960, Television Bureau of Advertising, Inc., <http://www.tvb.org/rcentral/mediatrendstrack/tvbasics/02_TVHouseholds.asp>; Cross, 89. 93 Matsuyama, 1038.

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As Gary Cross and George Lipsitz have noted, certain changes in federal economic

practices and citizens’ status as consumers drove this cycle, in an attempt to transition

successfully from a booming wartime economy to one equally successful in peacetime. Business

leaders sought to invigorate the postwar economy primarily through increased federal spending,

exports, and consumer debt. They believed a 30 to 50 percent growth in consumer spending was

necessary in order to jumpstart the economy. Increased consumption allowed for the creation of

new jobs, and would eventually offset consumers’ initial postwar debts—largely mortgages—

and stabilize the federal economy.94 Personal spending thus became “a patriotic duty.”95 And

consumption did increase dramatically in the postwar era, particularly in terms of household

goods. Consumer spending itself increased 60 percent between 1945 and 1950, but purchases of

household goods went up 240 percent.96 Buying household goods could embody national

security while simultaneously providing consumers with secure home lives.

As Matsuyama explains, the changing nature of the meaning of each product as its use

penetrates into larger markets is key to the development of a mass consumption society. It is not

just that the availability of goods themselves trickles down from upper- to lower-class citizens,

but that the goods’ relative priority within the running of a household changes as well. What

starts out as a luxury for a lower class consumer—highly desirable but largely out of reach—

becomes rewritten as a necessity as its price drops, its market penetration increases, and a

consumer’s relative income rises.97 Such rewriting of any given product’s relative importance

94 George Lipsitz, “The Meaning of Memory” in Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 1990), 44-47. 95 Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 138-139. 96 May, 165. 97 Matsuyama, 1035-40.

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not only fuels its own market penetration, but can jumpstart the same cycle for other consumer

goods—for there will always be luxuries one aspires to own.

Audience participation shows, where products could resolve any problem, enacted this

cycle in a very literal way. While home viewers likely saw many of the shows’ prizes as

desirable luxuries—particularly the appliances—the programs framed them as necessities, at

least for the contestants who received them. Because participants were defined by their tragic

stories and particular needs, the specific products that fulfilled them—no matter how lavish—

were therefore rewritten as essential. A 1960 Queen for a Day contestant, for example, asked for

a washing machine so she could take in laundry and help pay the bills that accrued during her

husband’s unemployment. While the appliance was a luxury for her, since she could not afford it

on her own, it was simultaneously a necessity, since owning one would solve her financial

issues. The effect of such a connotative shift was that a viewer could see not just how desirable a

product was, but also why she, too, needed it for her own home—if not to resolve a specific

dilemma, then at least to prevent one from happening in the future. If a washing machine or a

new wardrobe could solve the problems of the truly needy participants on audience participation

shows, then owning one could keep the same problems at bay for the less needy viewer at home.

Within the programs’ narratives, then, what appeared to be “luxuries” were actually necessary to

enter into a middle-class lifestyle and consequently keep oneself afloat. The security that

audience participation show contestants lacked could therefore be purchased by viewers at home.

That so many programs centered on questions of merit—showing why contestants

deserved the products they received—further enhances this blurring of luxury and necessity.

While quiz-type shows like Strike it Rich and High Finance allowed their contestants to earn

their way back to fiscal security by answering questions successfully, participants on giveaways

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had to justify their need in order to win merchandise. The interview portions of chat-show

giveaways, for example, made the eventual sponsor-driven prize-giving appear less gratuitous by

allowing participants to demonstrate why they were worthy recipients of the prizes. Queen for a

Day and Glamour Girl centered on finding the most deserving contestant of the day, usually the

one who needed the most help. Even on The Big Payoff, where a man answered questions on

behalf of a beloved female, the contestant’s interview focused solely on why she deserved the

prizes he was about to win for her. While participants’ sad life stories were a necessary setup for

prizes and product plugs—albeit a powerful one that underscored the importance of the

products—this fusion of melancholy, merit, and merchandise delivered a clear message about

consumer culture. Whereas the “earning” shows were about working one’s way through a

financial crisis—demonstrating that with enough effort, one could buy material goods to ensure a

stable future—these “deserving” shows eschewed the idea of effort. Rather, they seemed to

assert that owning the right merchandise could help one avoid both crisis and the labor of

recovery and that every woman deserved to own the right merchandise. By rewriting the

meaning of “need” to universalize contestants’ specific desires, the shows also universalized the

idea of merit, so that all women could feel that they deserved the same consumer goods, whether

to solve problems or ensure their families’ future security.

Misery and Merit

When ABC cancelled in Queen for a Day in 1964, the audience participation show largely

disappeared from the American airwaves for almost four decades, despite several ineffective

attempts to revive the genre. Queen for a Day had a brief revival in 1969, which ultimately

proved unsuccessful; Bride & Groom returned to the airwaves in June of 1981 as Wedding Day,

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hosted by Huell Howser and Mary Ann Mobley, but was cancelled after only one week. The fall

of 1999 saw both the premiere and cancellation of Richard Simmons’s syndicated daytime show

Dream Maker, on which the flamboyant fitness guru made viewers’ wishes come true on

national television. One episode, for example, featured Simmons giving a struggling single

mother and her six-year-old daughter an Orlando vacation, and a poverty-stricken family a

headstone for their recently departed father. The program was equally short-lived due to low

ratings, but whether this was because of a general lack of interest in seeing people’s dreams

fulfilled or viewer apathy towards Richard Simmons and his manic earnestness is difficult to

pinpoint.

Christian singer Amy Grant’s Three Wishes, which premiered on NBC in the fall of 2005,

followed a format similar to that of Dream Maker, and like its predecessor, it only lasted one

season. Grant and her Three Wishes team traveled to a small town, and, in a week, helped grant

three residents’ wishes in a spectacular way. On the premiere episode, which aired on

September 23, 2005, the show gave the local high school a brand-new football field, arranged for

a boy to be legally adopted by his stepfather, and paid the medical bills of and built a 1,000

square foot playhouse/physical therapy gym for a ten-year-old girl critically injured in a car

accident. Three Wishes was firmly grounded in a Frank Capra-esque sentimentality, where

small-town Americans, albeit significantly aided by the show’s crew and corporate sponsors,

help each other overcome their difficulties and make amazing things happen.

While corporate sponsorship drove many aspects of the show—from the “Home Depot

wish tent,” where townspeople asked for help, to a project each episode funded by, as Amy

Grant told us, “the AmeriQuest Home Mortgage Company, proud sponsor of the American

dream,” to Grant pressuring the CEO of an artificial turf company to donate a football field’s

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worth of Astroturf for free—its form of address varied significantly from the postwar audience

participation shows. Three Wishes posited that the solution to larger social issues was not so

much merchandise, but an ethos of charity with a personal focus—individuals voluntarily

coming together to help one another out. Of course, as Laurie Ouellette and James Hay have

indicated, this ethos of problem-solving at the personal level comes at the expense of critique of

larger social issues. The high school needing a football field may have been a problem solved

through townspeople’s effort (aided, of course, by the donation of free turf), but any mention of

the problem’s origins—namely, underfunded public schools—was wholly elided by the show.98

Instead of being the result of structural injustice, then, the town and school’s need appeared to

stem from something nameless and hence impossible to fight or even prevent. The solution

Three Wishes proposed becomes a neoliberal message of self-sufficiency, where individuals are

called upon to find their own solutions to larger structural problems. Ignoring the roots of social

issues but offering personal charity as a response turned viewers into both potential victims and

potential heroes, simultaneously assuaging and feeding into insecurities The average viewer

may have been able to make “miracles” happen, but may also have been in danger of needing a

miracle.

The most popular contemporary makeover show, ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home

Edition, creates a different kind of miracle: building an entirely new dream home for a deserving

family in a week’s time. In 2005, it was the second highest-rated reality show on television and

the seventeenth highest-rated show overall for the season, averaging a 9.1 rating and 14 share, or

over 10 million viewers an episode.99 A typical episode, which aired October 30, 2005, featured

98 Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 59. 99 Nielsen Media Research, 2005.

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the Ginyard family of Maryland. Veronica Ginyard had had eight children with her abusive

husband, who she finally left after he was arrested for beating her so badly she was hospitalized.

She moved her children into the only home she could afford, which would have been small

enough for a family of four, but was almost uninhabitable with nine. Children slept on cots in

the unventilated attic and unfinished basement, which often flooded, and the actual living area

was tiny. To make matters worse, a contractor had begun electrical work on the house but had

run off with her money without finishing the job, so the home was filled with exposed wires and

gaping holes in the walls, ceilings, and floors.

Ty Pennington and his Extreme Makeover: Home Edition crew showed up at the Ginyard

house one morning and sent the entire family to Walt Disney World. When they returned a week

later, their dilapidated house was demolished, and a brand-new, fully furnished six-bedroom

home had been built in its place, with the help of numerous corporate donations and an army of

2,000 volunteers. Veronica received a check from All detergent for $100,000 to pay for her

children’s college educations, an even larger check from Somerset Homes (who also built her

house) to pay off her mortgage and taxes, and a new Ford SUV. Despite their earlier troubles,

the Ginyards would now be able to live a comfortable life.

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition closely follows the postwar audience participation

show’s ethos, where its subjects’ hardship is put on display for great rewards. The show, for

example, clearly emphasizes the sad state of the pre-makeover home. It is first seen in the

audition video the family originally sent to the show, but the conditions come out in much

greater detail once the crew arrives at the house. The Ginyard children take Pennington on a

tour, pointing out all the house’s flaws; the camera pans slowly across the basement and attic

cots to highlight the poor sleeping conditions, and Pennington himself points out numerous holes

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and exposed wires, on which the camera zooms in for emphasis. Hardship is much more visible

here than on Queen for a Day, for example, since the audience is shown the actual effects of

living in poverty. The show similarly emphasizes the family’s personal hardship in ways that

postwar shows did not. Multiple individuals relate Veronica’s story of abuse multiple times,

emphasizing both its injustice and her inner strength. We first hear it told by Veronica and her

children (with interjections from Pennington) as Pennington and crew watch the audition tape the

family originally sent into the show, and Veronica reiterates it once they arrive at the house.

Later, however, her tale is condensed and retold at least once a segment, the storytelling function

fully taken over by Pennington and other members of the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition staff

in voice-overs, during on-camera interviews, in conversations to one another, and, ultimately, to

a group of local people attending a candlelight vigil for abused women held outside the Ginyard

home. While this takes the narrative voice away from Veronica, the constant retelling of her

story repositions her as more of a victim-heroine—as someone whose story is worth retelling—

and less as someone asking for help because of her sad circumstance. It is impossible to forget

Veronica’s tale, and the constant reminders and rearticulation underscore the ideas that she

deserves a new start in life, and that there is a clear reason why she is receiving so much.

Just like in traditional melodrama, Veronica Ginyard is wholly defined by her suffering.

While the children all discuss their hobbies and career aspirations (including model, actress, and

stuntman) to help the decorating team plan their bedrooms, Veronica’s personality is never

explored. We learn about her pain, her personal sacrifices, her iconic motherhood—but never

hear what she does for a living, how she spends her free time, or what color she would like her

room painted. Indeed, this episode is pure melodrama—with a clear villain (the abusive ex-

husband), a sympathetic victim-protagonist (Veronica, who selflessly saved her children from a

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horrible situation), and hero (the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition team, corporate sponsors,

and army of volunteers who literally rebuild the Ginyards’ lives) rescuing her from a life of

poverty. It would be difficult to feel anything but pity or empathy for the family, who all clearly

love each other despite their difficulties; it would be equally difficult to feel anything but joy or

relief for them receiving a new home and a new start in life. The key difference between

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and a traditional stage melodrama, though, is that what the

viewer sees is a document of actual, real-life suffering—or at least its lingering after-effects.

There is no footage, obviously, of Veronica’s abuse, and the only visual confirmation offered is a

still picture of a hospital report. However, there is little doubt that her family has undergone

myriad hardships, and the state of their home itself serves as evidence to their misfortune.

On the one hand, this in-depth visual and narrative exploration of the Ginyard family’s

suffering brings a serious social issue to light on national television, showing the real effects of

abuse and poverty. Much like on the “deserving” postwar audience participation shows, though,

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition mobilizes pathos as the jumping-off point for a merchandise-

fueled transformation. While it presents the long-term effects of spousal abuse, pity for the

Ginyards goes hand-in-hand with the eventual frenzy of shopping, decorating, and building—

pure consumer fantasy. The suffering, then, makes it patently clear that the Ginyards fully

deserve all they are about to receive, but the true joy comes in seeing what they will receive.

While the product placement is slightly more subtle on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

than it was on Queen for a Day, corporate sponsorship is similarly integrated into a narrative of

misery and relief, and product placement is abundant. Although the actual company varies from

show to show, the home builder’s name is repeated multiple times an episode and all volunteers

wear the company’s shirts. Every episode features the interior designers going on a shopping

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spree at Sears in order to fill the family’s new home with every product imaginable, and the

family talks to Pennington during the week via a live video hookup on a Dell computer. The

credits at each show’s end listing the companies “goods and services [were] provided by” take

up twelve screens. Those listed on the Ginyard episode include myriad contractors and home

product manufacturers, plus sundry other sponsors, like the Howard University Library, FedEx-

Kinkos, the National Basketball Hall of Fame, and clothing manufacturer No Fear. Most of the

companies listed are not explicitly named within the show, and it is never made clear exactly

what goods or services they have provided, but, just like the audience participation shows before

it, their sponsorship drives the show’s good deeds.

There is not a one-to-one product based correlation between subjects’ problems and the

show’s solutions to the same degree on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, for the need for a new

house is often secondary to something much larger. In the Ginyards’ case, while the condition of

their house was an immediate issue, the show made clear that the abusive husband was the root

of all their problems. The essential meaning has changed little from the postwar shows to

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, however: consuming more products will offer a family

security—and every family deserves security.

Just like Queen for a Day and Strike It Rich seemed to draw their consumerist ethos from

the postwar containment ideal, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition plays to a large degree on

Americans’ post-September 11 desire for domestic security. The 2004 presidential election saw

the birth of a new demographic—“security moms,” soccer moms whose fears about terrorism

created new concerns about their families. Much like in the postwar era, the post-9/11 era has

seen a growing concern for domestic security—domestic meaning within both America and

American homes. Self-proclaimed security mom Michelle Malkin explained her basic priority in

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a USA Today editorial as such: “Nothing matters more to me than the safety of my home and the

survival of my homeland.”100 The dual level of security moms’ desire to protect their children—

within the domestic and world spheres—closely parallels the postwar containment ideologies. In

a way, then, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition represents a very similar kind of return to the

home to that which postwar shows played upon. Now, though, the return is much more literal—

the show actually builds secure, comfortable houses for its subjects, making home ownership

itself the singular resolution to all problems.

Owning a home has long been considered beneficial to society at large, and not just as an

integral part of the American dream. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s statement that “a nation of

homeowners is unconquerable” has remained a theme of American policymaking for more than

half a century, as the federal government’s use of tax incentives to persuade more Americans to

purchase homes continues to increase.101 While the mortgage interest tax deduction only

benefits those who can afford a house in the first place, the idea behind it—creating an additional

benefit to home ownership—further fuels that part of the American dream. The Ginyards could

not afford a new, well-decorated home on their own, even though they could afford one.102 Even

if a viewer is in similar financial straits, however, he can still live through their fantasy, and

dream of having a large McMansion, and the security it offers, someday. If nothing else, though,

he can maybe buy a new stainless steel refrigerator from Sears to get him started, making his

own home more comfortable.

100 Michelle Malkin, “Candidates Ignore ‘Security Moms’ at their own Peril,” USA Today, July 21, 2004 101 Eduardo Porter, “Buy a Home, and Drag Society Down,” The New York Times, November 13, 2005 102 One factor that does mitigate the pathos of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition families’ stories is the fact that, in order to be on the show, one does need to own a home that can be made over—thus screening out most of the truly poverty-stricken families in America.

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Extreme Makeover: Home Edition’s ties to postwar programming are further cemented

by the fact that all represent a unique kind of makeover: one with no true “after.” A traditional

aesthetic makeover builds to an eventual “reveal,” which visually documents the ways in which

the subject’s flaws have been corrected. On audience participation shows, however, the “after”

was only implied.103 Rather, it was the “before” that mattered, the setting up of problems that

material acquisition can fix; on the shows’ terms, the desirable “after” was sure to follow. How

could someone’s life not get significantly better with a new leg and a washer/dryer, especially if

the lack of a leg prevented her from holding down a job in the first place? Surely the absence of

follow-ups was related to the fact that the “after” might not be as wonderful as promised, but

leaving each winner’s story open-ended allowed for the possibility that it could be. These shows

were ultimately more about the fantasy of transformation than the transformation itself.

The climactic moment on any episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is the always

spectacular “reveal,” the moment when the family sees its new house for the first time. Much

like on Queen for a Day, though, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition the show ends with these

fabulous spoils—the house, the checks, the scholarships—and no follow-up at all. While there is

a much more clear “after” than on postwar shows, once the cameras stop rolling, the implication

is still that all problems will be solved. The show thus presents an extreme fantasy of

consumption with no resolution to the larger issues that created the family’s troubles in the first

place. And in many cases, the post-reveal life of the show’s subjects has not improved at all. In

2007, five orphans sued both ABC and their foster family over a 2005 episode of the show.

According to the children, once the episode had aired and the family had received their new

home, they kicked the orphans out, reaping the benefits of the children’s personal tragedy.

103 The sole exception would be Glamour Girl, where the previous day’s winner appeared on the next episode to show off her transformation.

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While the lawsuit was dismissed in August 2007, it nonetheless hints at the fact that “happily

ever after” may not be so happy, or so permanent.

However, like in the postwar era, the fantasy of consumption simultaneously hinges on

subjects’ personal tragedy and trumps exploration of the underlying issues. While Extreme

Makeover: Home Edition is at one level a melodramatic tale of unjust suffering and redemption,

it rewrites real-world victimhood less as a moral issue and more as a narrative tactic. It

emphasizes that social injustices do exist—but the solution lies not in large-scale reform or

legislation but rather in individual prevention through consumption. Pity, then, fuels feelings of

personal insecurity; insecurity fuels consumer desire; and this desire masks the fact that certain

issues are truly irresolvable at the individual level. As a clear example of modern-day

melodrama, then, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition demonstrates that moral codes may be

shifting away from belief in reform and more toward the politics of the personal.

Sartorial Schadenfreude

Glamour Girl may have been the first true makeover show on American television, but its

influence at the time was limited. While making women over has been a popular talk show

staple for decades, the stand-alone makeover show did not reemerge until nearly half a century

after Glamour Girl’s cancellation, when E! network’s Fashion Emergency and TLC’s A

Makeover Story both premiered in the US in 1998. On these shows, stylists retooled an

individual’s hair and makeup and helped her shop for a chic new outfit in order to look special

for a specific event. The transformations were usually dramatic, but it was often apparent that

they would only be temporary. While a woman whose wardrobe largely consisted of oversized

football jerseys may have wanted to look sophisticated for a night at the opera, she would not

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necessarily see any need for stylish or flattering clothes on a daily basis. Her physical

transformation may have been striking, but it did not necessarily apply to the subject’s lifestyle

as a whole.

By the early 2000s, contemporaneous to a larger explosion of reality programming across

the American airwaves, the aesthetic makeover had become a programming staple on both

network and cable television, as dozens of shows premiered that documented the physical

transformations of unfortunately dressed and coiffed subjects. Very quickly, though, it was

apparent that many of these new shows had a more ambitious project than mere (likely

temporary) physical transformation. What Not to Wear—both the BBC and TLC versions—

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and plastic surgery shows like The Swan and Extreme Makeover

(regular edition) all conflated the traditional physical makeover with a more ambitious lifestyle

transformation. Each of these, on the surface, transforms only the superficial external aspects of

their subjects’ lives, and yet according to the shows, creating such external transformation

eventually leads to a larger internal metamorphosis. Unlike the “deserving” lifestyle makeovers

where rewards are readily handed to subjects, however, participants on these shows—whether

they ask for it or not—must put effort into their transformations, whether it is an intensive

learning process like on What Not to Wear and Queer Eye or the pain and risks associated with

major surgery on Extreme Makeover. The point of a physical makeover, at least on television,

has become making a person work hard in order to look and hence feel better. The “and hence”

is key to the shows’ meaning, for they tell us this kind of personal transformation depends upon

one’s external condition. But much of the internal transformation the subjects experience comes

from learning about the problems with their outsides, and how to effectively change them.

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While Extreme Makeover: Home Edition closely parallels the ethos of the “deserving”

audience participation shows, these physical makeovers diverge from their postwar predecessors

in a very significant way. Whereas before, contestants participated on a game show to “earn”

their way back to fiscal security, contemporary makeover participants exert actual physical labor

to return to a “normalcy” they may not have known they had deviated from in the first place.

The idea of “need” is rewritten here not just to mean home and consumer goods that can stave

off poverty. Rather, “security” comes in the form of proper self-presentation and self-

surveillance, which can only be attained by knowing how to properly consume. The

transformation thus becomes a function of the subjects’ willing (and necessary) labor, as they

work towards learning what to wear, what not to wear, and, most importantly, what it means to

wear clothing well.

The divide between more traditional “gift” makeovers and these newer shows that require

effort on their subjects’ part stems not only from the active role of the transformee but also the

form of audience engagement. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Three Wishes, and Queen for

a Day are largely based on pity, where subjects’ unsightliness, poverty, or infirmity makes their

transformations redemptive gifts. On the other hand, shows like Queer Eye and What Not to

Wear imply that the subject is at fault for his or her problems, and must be taught proper carriage

and comportment through humiliation. While the “gift” makeovers have an ethos of generosity,

the “effort” makeovers—despite their subjects’ relatively minor infractions (wearing the wrong

size bra or not knowing how to properly store wine)—evoke criticism and ridicule, as if one’s

failure to use hair gel is as terrible as neglecting one’s children. However, both forms of

engagement speak to a middle-class sensibility that is very much in line with television’s general

consumerist address. In the first case, the audience overwhelmingly feels pity for the (largely)

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lower-class participants on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition or Queen for a Day, while at the

same time being reassured that a few key purchases can prevent similar tragedy from happening.

In the second case, however, the audience feels contempt for the flawed subjects, while learning

how to dress, decorate, and shop so as not to elicit similar ridicule.

While traditional makeovers rely on subjects’ admissions of their inadequacies in order to

jumpstart their transformations, many of the newer makeover shows work to elicit confessions of

fashion inadequacy in order to begin the process of transformation—and thus elicit the purest

form schadenfreude, based on their need to show subjects every single thing they are doing

wrong. Audience pleasure comes from an acknowledgment and understanding of how precisely

awful the participants’ pre-makeover states really are, even (or especially) if the participant

cannot understand herself. While makeover subjects on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy do

indeed volunteer to be on the show, thus admitting that there is some problem with their style

lifestyle, the opening segment of every episode, where the Fab Five mocks everything the

subjects own, intensifies the sense of the participants’ incompetence—surely no one thought his

lifestyle was that bad. This humiliation, breaking down all the aspects of the subject’s life that

need improvement, sets the stage for the eventual transformation, for it is through humiliation

that he begins to learn precisely what he has been doing wrong; and it is through the subject’s

humiliation that both he and the audience can begin to learn what to do right. It is much easier to

locate and mock fashion mistakes than it is to know how to remedy them, which is the dynamic

that makeover shows thrive on. The derision inherent in the hosts’ commentary encourages

parallel derision in the audience, and the question that drives the narrative becomes how even

professional stylists can fix such hideousness. Even less subtle than Queer Eye is the syndicated

Ambush Makeover, where a stylist accosts the fashion un-conscious on the street in order to give

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them a “necessary” makeover on the spot. Before the stylist finds his or her subject for the

program, we always see a few “misses”—people who don’t have time for a makeover that day,

or, more commonly, are horrified that they looked bad enough to be confronted in the first place.

The result is that the show humiliates more individuals than its subjects, hinting that potentially

anyone is probably in need of some fashion help. Perhaps the most didactic of all, however, is

What Not to Wear, where a continual process of degradation by the hosts leads to subjects’

enlightenment and hence transformation.

What Not to Wear premiered on the BBC in 2001. Hosted by fashion journalists Trinny

Woodall and Susannah Constantine, known for their “cruel to be kind” sensibility, the half-hour

show attempts to teach fashion victims how to dress stylishly in ways that suit their body types.

Each episode of What Not to Wear features a style-challenged individual who has been

nominated by her loved ones as being in need of a fashion makeover.104 With the aid of the

BBC, her friends and family secretly film her and all her fashion mistakes for several weeks.

Trinny and Susannah view the footage, dissect the wardrobe, and then accost the subject (usually

in a public place for added embarrassment), handing over a £2000 check for new clothing.

Before the subject can accept the money, she must agree to give herself over to Trinny and

Susannah, “mind, body, and wardrobe.”

The next time we see the fashion victim is in Trinny and Susannah’s London studio,

where she watches the secret footage and learns exactly what is wrong with each outfit—usually

in a not-so-subtle way. If the subject does not pick up on her mistakes just by watching herself

on film, the brutally honest stylists will point out how gigantic her bottom looks in a certain pair

of trousers or how an ill-fitting dress creates the illusion of pregnancy. Trinny and Susannah

104 The makeover subjects are customarily female, although both the British and American versions will occasionally do male makeovers.

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then scrutinize the subject’s entire wardrobe, with most items winding up in the trash. Favorite

outfits are subject to Trinny and Susannah’s fiercest criticism in the show’s chamber of

horrors—the 360° mirror, where the subject must view herself at every angle to learn exactly

why her style choices do not suit her.

After this reschooling in what not to wear, each subject receives a basic set of rules based

on her body type and personality, as to what types of clothing best highlight her natural assets.

Armed with these guidelines, she sets out on a two day shopping spree in trendy London shops to

spend her £2000, with Trinny and Susannah stepping in to help when necessary. When the

shopping is done and a new hairstyle and makeup are added, the now well-dressed subject

returns to the studio to show off her new look. Before and after photos highlight the always

striking transformation, and follow-up footage shows that, usually, the subject has retained the

rules, mastered Trinny and Susannah’s lessons in both what and what not to wear, and become

much happier as a result.

What drives the show is the hosts’ brutal honesty, the public speaking of the normally

unspeakable. While an individual’s friends may not have the nerve tell her that her favorite

pleated trousers look horrible, Trinny and Susannah remind viewers each episode that they “are

not your friends” and have no reason to spare anyone’s feelings. They will tell the subject that

pleats make her belly look gigantic, tapered trousers shrink her legs, and vomit colored clothes

do not suit anybody. They had no compunction about letting Alice know her too-small bras

made her look like she had four breasts, or telling mother-of-four Mikaela that she “look[ed] like

a King’s Cross hooker” in her risqué clothing. Every harsh criticism, however, comes with

constructive advice. Makeover subjects with pleat partialities, for example, learn that flat-

fronted, straight leg trousers minimize the waist and elongate the leg. Trinny and Susannah

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advised Alice about the type of bra to buy and complimented her large but shapely rear; Mikaela

learned that showing off too much cleavage and leg at the same time detracts from the assets of

both. In addition, both Trinny and Susannah are quick to point out their own bodily

imperfections, which often parallel the makeover subject’s, in order to demonstrate that good

clothes can mask problems like small breasts or a flabby stomach. The edge that comes with

much of their criticism thus becomes less intimidating because, like the subject, they, too, are

flawed—but they still look great. The hosts exemplify the idea that any woman, regardless of

her body type, can look wonderful if she knows how to shop. While the learning process may be

harsh, most guests value it, and are grateful for their new looks and clearly heightened self-

confidence by the end of every show.

The American version of What Not to Wear premiered on The Learning Channel in the

winter of 2003, shortly after the British series began airing on BBC America. The TLC version

remains largely similar to the BBC original—the major difference being the extension of the

show’s length to a full hour. Celebrity stylist Stacy London with Wayne Scot Lukas in the first

season, Clinton Kelly afterwards, attempt to perform Trinny and Susannah’s version of tough

fashion love. Much of the extra time goes to tough hair and makeup love by hairdresser Nick

Arrojo and makeup artist Carmindy Bowyer, whose British counterparts remain off-camera.

Makeover subjects on this version receive a $5000 shopping spree in New York—substantially

more than the budget of the British makeovers—but for the most part, TLC has attempted to

retain the BBC’s blunt attitude (although in contrast to Trinny and Susannah’s cruel to be kind

nature, Wayne and Stacy were described as “cruel for recreational purposes,”105 doling out more

insults than constructive advice). We still see entire wardrobes thrown in the trash, the horror of

105 Melanie McFarland, “On TV, We’re Still Not Completely Free from Britain’s Influence,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 4, 2003.

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unflattering outfits in the 360° mirror, the shopping anxiety of women who have never seen

themselves as fashionable, and the inevitably positive transformations, both of the subject’s

external self and her self-esteem. However, perhaps because of the hosts’ tactlessness, the

American What Not to Wear has performed extremely well. The first season consisted of a mere

ten episodes but due to its popularity, the second season, which premiered in September 2003,

had forty-eight. It has continued to be a key player in the TLC lineup ever since.

To elicit a total change in the way one presents herself to the world successfully,

particularly when the nominated subject views clothes as unimportant, requires more than a new

outfit and a haircut. Rather, it requires instruction as to why the way the subject dresses is

problematic. In What Not to Wear’s logic, one can only learn what to wear once she knows what

not to wear, which accounts for the importance of the secret footage and the 360° mirror. Both

of these devices force the subject to examine herself in a different light, correlating to the way

the rest of the world presumably sees her. The 360° mirror gives an accurate, unobstructed view

of one’s whole body, which many people never have the opportunity or inclination to look at.

Ill-fitting outfits can be seen in their entirety, from all angles, showing how a poorly cut jacket or

too-short skirt can affect the appearance of the body as a whole. The anxiety many subjects feel

in the mirror is unmistakable. Sam, who Trinny and Susannah made over in 2001, had staunchly

defended the merits of an outfit that she regularly wore to work. Immediately after entering the

mirror chamber and seeing how she really looked, however, she proclaimed that she had changed

her mind and the outfit belonged in the bin. Sam had a similar reaction when viewing her secret

footage, notably a close-up of her derriere in an unflattering pair of white capri pants. After that

shot, Sam told Trinny and Susannah, “I can’t see it in the mirror at home, but I can see it now,”

and asked for them to stop the tape.

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While the mirror chamber allows subjects to see their entire bodies in a new way, the

secret footage gives the subject distance from her personal vision of herself, allowing her to view

the way she dresses more objectively. Often this is necessary in order to convince her that she

needs to change. While, as Jane Gaines states in “Fabricating the Female Body,” Western

women have been trained to feel “the constant surveillance of the public self” in the age of

mechanical reproduction,106 it remains difficult to see one’s public self objectively. Learning

“presentational postures” and knowing that one will be scrutinized by others is one thing, but the

ability to take a step back and read the message these postures actually present is much more

difficult. What Not to Wear’s two distancing devices, however, make the message less personal

and hence more legible, so that individuals can discover the contradictions between who they

feel they are and how the rest of the world reads them—in other words, the differences between

their inner and outer selves. BBC subject Alice confessed in a video diary that, “Inside this

outward bloody exterior, I feel as if I were six foot tall and stunning.” However, after viewing

the footage and stepping into the 360° mirror, she realized that her presentation of her exterior

was actually antithetical to the way she felt about herself. After the learning process, Alice felt

the need to present herself in a way that merged her interior state, that of a gorgeous woman,

with her current exterior, which resembled a frumpy, dated hausfrau, but she could only do so

after the contradictions were made evident.

Schadenfreude is embedded throughout the entire What Not to Wear makeover process—

for the essence of the show involves taking pleasure not only in the poor clothing choices of

someone who does not know what to wear, but also in her almost-certain epiphany that she has

been making poor choices. It is a series driven only partially by fashion pedagogy for the viewer

106 Jane Gaines, “Fabricating the Female Body,” in Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body, eds. Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog, (New York: Routledge, 1990), 3.

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at home; just as key are the pleasures of embarrassment and humiliation. The show itself

encourages the sensibility at almost every level, primarily stemming from the hosts’ derisive

observations on the secret footage and conversations with the subject, but also through the

commentary from the subject’s friends and family—who secretly nominated her in the first

place—and the subject herself once she learns what she has been doing wrong. That everyone,

including the audience, is readily able to acknowledge the subject’s fashion flaws when she

couldn’t herself, puts a new spin on Gaines’s ideas about constant self-surveillance. Similar to

the opening sequences of Ambush Makeover, when any number of people on the street learn they

are, unbeknownst to them, in desperate need of a makeover, What Not to Wear underscores the

fact that the rest of the world potentially views us differently than we view ourselves. Although

we can take pleasure in criticizing others’ fashion mistakes, that same pleasure becomes

cautionary—for who knows who is enjoying our own faux pas, which we very well may not

realize we are committing? The show makes very clear, as well, what the stakes are if an

individual fails to dress appropriately, and these consequences, too, apply to the viewers as well.

Mimi White has positioned the televised confession as a narrative strategy “repeatedly

linked with consumer culture and social identity,” where the act of confessing on camera serves a

therapeutic function while simultaneously allowing callers to the Home Shopping Network, for

example, assert their identities through their consumer choices.107 The narrative arc of What Not

to Wear hinges on eliciting a confession of inadequacy from its subjects, making them admit

their problems so they can begin the process of recovery. With this confession comes a

movement to reconstruct them as social subjects, via consumer culture. In the ideology of What

Not to Wear, however, this kind of authentic self-construction can only be achieved through

107 Mimi White, Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 8-10.

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consumption. Once the subjects discover that their self-presentation is a problem to be solved,

however, they are immediately given the means to solve it—a check. Although many women on

the show experience “sticker shock,” particularly those who have made dressing themselves a

low priority, What Not to Wear lays out that money should not be an object when it comes to

dressing correctly, which applies to the show’s subjects as well as viewers.

TLC makeover Ann, an altruistic housewife and mother of four, told the camera several

times that she would rather spend the money on a family vacation than on herself. While

shopping at Searle, an upscale Manhattan clothing store, she put numerous rules-fitting items

back on the rack since she could not imagine even trying on a pair of $228 trousers. At the end

of her first shopping day, she had spent less than one-fifth of the money, mostly due to her

discomfort with spending so much money on herself. The second shopping day, however, she

returned to Searle with her personal stylists in tow. This time, Ann bought over $1,000 of

merchandise at the store, mostly because of the stylists’ encouragement about how fantastic she

looked in the clothes. It is easy to sympathize with someone who does not want to pay an

exorbitant amount for clothes, especially if the viewer herself has a limited clothing budget.

However, a subject defying Stacey and Clinton’s attempt to help her, in the end, just appears

unreasonable in the context of the show. When we see how much Ann’s wardrobe improves

afterwards, her initial reluctance to purchase anything becomes almost ridiculous. In this

narrative logic, if a pair of $200 pants makes Ann look better than one that is more reasonably

priced, she should buy the expensive pair. It was her reluctance to buy quality clothes that made

her friends nominate her in the first place, and to resist the solution to her problem would put

Ann back at square one. For viewers, the message is clear—it is better to purchase expensive

clothing that suits you than to risk looking like a What Not to Wear “before”. And in order to do

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so, one needs to squelch one’s altruistic impulses and give oneself over to consumerism, since

proper self-presentation is as essential as (or, perhaps, essential to) a happy family life.

The audience member who takes pleasure in a woman’s poor fashion sense, who enjoys

watching the subject’s growing acknowledgment of her flaws through mortifying self-

surveillance, will remain compelled to see the end result. The pedagogical process—learning

about what not to wear in order to learn what to wear—naturalizes not only the importance of

wearing proper clothing but also the importance of buying proper clothing, in order to present

oneself properly. That the pleasure in watching someone else’s growing sense of self-

surveillance potentially spawns similar wariness in the viewer is not unintentional. With a

newfound sense that the world itself is a 360° mirror, the viewer is much more likely to retain the

lessons subjects have learned on the show, for personal use later.

What Not to Wear is certainly not the only show that uses schadenfreude to turn a 360°

mirror on its subjects and viewers. NBC’s The Biggest Loser (2005 - ), for example, takes the

paranoid self-consciousness of What Not to Wear to a new extreme—transferring self-

monitoring not just to clothing but the body that wears it. The Biggest Loser, an ostensibly

inspirational show on which obese men and women compete to lose the most weight, is just as

much about ridiculing large bodies as it is about weight loss. On the show’s second season

premiere in September 2005, the contestants arrived at the ranch where they would be isolated

for three months of intensive weight loss, and they were all given one final opportunity to gorge

themselves. The next five minutes were spent showing the obese contestants—some weighing

well over four hundred pounds—eating as much as possible, even licking the chocolate fountain

that had so helpfully been provided. All the while, the camera slowly panned across and zoomed

in on their bodies, simultaneously highlighting the cause and effect of their obesity. Later, when

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several contestants spoke in confessionals about how disgusting they felt after the feast, it was a

mere reiteration of what we had just seen.

The Biggest Loser presents itself as motivational and uplifting, as contestants work hard

to recondition their bodies and attain almost miraculous results at show’s end.108 But such

“inspiration” is undergirded by the visual and psychological humiliation of the contestants. Each

contestant, for example, is issued a “personal pantry,” an unlocked glass case enclosing all of his

or her favorite (fatty and banned) foods. The contestants have 24-hour access to the “pantry”

room, and thus the ability to gorge themselves at will. However, the show’s rules stipulate that

doing so will result in one’s immediate dismissal. Giving in to temptation, then, is a literal

admission of Biggest Loser defeat. The point of the pantries seems to be nothing more than a

sadistic intervention by the producers, bolstering narrative suspense and viewers’ (perhaps

unconscious) desire to see contestants fail. Similarly “uplifting” is the show’s inordinate focus

on the “before” bodies—close-ups of men without shirts and women’s bulges and extra curves—

which underscores for viewers why the weight loss program is so extreme, while further

humiliating the contestants. Unlike many people with poor fashion sense, most overweight

Americans are aware of the state of their bodies. The Biggest Loser, however, in going so far to

make the overweight body a object of disgust and derision, turns the televisual 360° mirror on

the viewers themselves, showing them what they actually look like and potentially making them

want to change. Of course, a newly paranoid viewer can, as the audience is advised to do at the

end of every episode, go to the show’s official website. There, one can order The Biggest Loser

fitness plans and cookbooks, The Biggest Loser healthy meal delivery, and, for only 67 cents a

day, join The Biggest Loser Club, where one receives daily recipes and fitness plans to facilitate

108 Six contestants out of fourteen on the second season lost over 100 pounds during the course of the show; four of those lost more than 150.

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weight loss.109 By highlighting the horrors of obesity and the show’s miraculous results, the

“before” and “after” effect of The Biggest Loser offers a consumerist remedy to body insecurity.

In her work on femininity and Foucault, Susan Bordo has examined the distinction

between Foucault’s concepts of the “intelligible body” and the “useful body.” The intelligible

body consists of our cultural conceptions about bodily norms that are evident in scientific,

theoretical, and artistic representations of the human body. It is the societal knowledge of the

ideal body within any given culture. These representations, in turn, form a type of practical

discipline that affects the living body, so that it is “trained, shaped, obeys, responds,” and

becomes the socially adapted “useful body.”110 The two both mirror and mock each other; there

are inevitably going to be tensions and contradictions between real bodies and bodily

representations, no matter how much one tries to train one’s body into an ideal. In modern

western culture, body management has become a largely gendered issue, due in large part to the

“tyranny of slenderness” that encourages women to diet, exercise, and, as is more and more

common, get cosmetic surgery in order to live up to the vision of the intelligible body.111

Extreme plastic surgery shows like Extreme Makeover and The Swan represent the most

obvious conflation of the intelligible and useful bodies, as their subjects do whatever medical

science will allow in order to remedy all of their body flaws and emerge with an ideal body. On

these shows, participants undergo multiple cosmetic surgeries, both “necessary” (as in the case

of a female Extreme Makeover subject with extra tissue growth on her top lip that completely

109 “The Biggest Loser official website,” NBC.com <http://www.nbc.com/The_Biggest_Loser_5/> (accessed March 22, 2008). 110 Susan Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity,” in Alison M. Jaggar and Susan Bordo, eds., Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 25-6. 111 Susan Bordo, “Reading the Slender Body,” in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, eds. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth, (New York: Routledge, 1990), 83.

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covered her teeth) and frivolous (the same woman also received a breast augmentation and

liposuction). Both shows promote the idea of surgery as a normative form of body adaptation

and management to make one’s body more useful. What Not to Wear is particularly interesting

in this context, however, because both versions of the show clearly state that there is no such

thing as an ideal body. The markers of femininity that the show treasures—breasts, buttocks,

and curves—are, in fact, more likely to be prominent on women who do not have “the perfect

body.” The hosts celebrate real women’s bodies rather than an unattainable ideal, thus making

their subjects more comfortable with and proud of being women. Indeed, this femininity is part

of the “authentic self” that the stylists attempt to draw out of their women subjects; it is at the

core of who they are, and thus needs to be brought out through clothing as much as their

personalities do.

This celebration and acceptance of the real—not “intelligible” or “useful”—female body

is especially interesting when combined with the simultaneous narrative that one needs to

consume wholeheartedly in order to look good. If the show does not cave to the “tyranny of

slenderness,” why then enforce a tyranny of fashion? The two ideals are not necessarily as

incongruous as one may think. Rather, the idea of an ideally dressed woman may just be more

realistic and attainable for the majority of women than that of an ideally slender body. Not

everyone can afford cosmetic surgery in order to lose bellies or thighs, and not everyone

necessarily wants to. Despite the emphasis placed on being thin, Americans continue to grow

larger. The average dress size for American women is currently a 14, which until a few years

ago was the largest size many retail stores carried. Being plus-sized, however, does not preclude

presenting oneself attractively. Perhaps the ideals of What Not to Wear are merely a more

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pragmatic means of encouraging self-management: even if the body itself is out of control, as

The Biggest Loser underscores for us, the entire public self does not need to be.

That the emotional engagement these shows encourage veers closer to schadenfreude

than pity and is so closely tied to instruction is key to the ways that the shows function. In order

to feel schadenfreude about someone’s pre-makeover state, it is necessary to acknowledge her

flaws, so that her humiliation and redemption become a narrative of justice being served.

Enjoying the “before” involves recognizing that the flaws are flaws. The ways in which the

shows set up the “befores” makes the subjects’ issues more universal, however, and potentially

applicable to every viewer as well as the subjects themselves. Watching the televisual remedies,

then, becomes instruction in learning how to cure oneself, to spare oneself the humiliation that

the subjects are experiencing. What Not to Wear, The Biggest Loser, and the plastic surgery

shows are all both the result and perpetuation of a normative process—the delineation of the

intelligible body. We are encouraged to identify with both the hosts, who scrutinize, and the

subjects, who are scrutinized, and the dual positioning makes us complicit with and problematic

to the ideal intelligible body. The shows delineate how easily our bodies and our appearances

can exceed the boundaries of the norm, but also how to reign them back in, and the solution is

almost always rooted in consumer culture. The instruction, then, serves a larger purpose—not

only making us aware of our own flaws, but making it necessary to consume in order to fix them.

By watching these shows and laughing at the poorly dressed, we learn how to look our best, but

also learn that we need to.

Certainly the types of emotional engagement that Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and

Queen for a Day evoke are different from those of What Not to Wear and Queer Eye for the

Straight Guy. Within the latter shows, schadenfreude exists much more in its purest form, where

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there is rarely the potential to confuse it with pity or sympathy. The hosts’ mocking and

criticisms of their subjects could potentially verge much closer to cruelty, except for the fact that,

as the shows make clear, the purpose of such derision is to benefit the subjects and help them

make necessary changes.112 On these shows, the makeover subjects have to work towards a

better lifestyle, and the makeover resembles more a type of assistance given to them in the

process than a clear gift. For that reason, the humiliation becomes a critical part of the “helping”

process. A What Not to Wear subject has crossed certain bounds of propriety; the criticism and

style lessons she receives render justice by making her want to work to properly articulate herself

through clothing, in an aesthetically pleasing way. The effort she puts in to the transformation,

in the end, mitigates the humiliation at the beginning. On Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, on

the other hand, the only effort required for a transformation to occur is the subject’s confession

of hardship. Consequently, these shows evoke sympathy rather than schadenfreude, which

justifies the gifts participants receive.

What the shows do have in common, however, is the ways in which emotional

engagement with the subjects’ various misfortunes functions as a means of promoting

consumption. On the didactic makeover shows, commodity consumption is the logical end result

of the learning process the narratives set up. Schadenfreude turns in on itself to become a form

of self-surveillance for the viewer, who is then, at least theoretically, compelled to shop, to work

on the flaws she did not realize she had. On the pity-based transformations, fears about the

effects of insecurity similarly promote consumption of domestic goods. On the didactic shows,

the paranoia schadenfreude induces is about being on the receiving end of justice—and hence

112 A half-hour show solely devoted to the purpose of showing off the fashion mistakes and bad haircuts of people on the street without any redemption for the style-impaired—something called, for example, Mullets on Parade—would likely cross the schadenfreude/cruelty boundary.

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becoming the object of others’ schadenfreude—and the pity shows play off of fears about the

insecurities that circumstance and injustice can produce. However, both utilize concerns about

justice and morality to highlight problems that only can be solved with products. Buying into the

subjects’ problems means literally buying into the solutions.

Conclusion

On May 27, 2004, the Lifetime cable channel resurrected Queen for a Day as a one-night

primetime special. The basic premise remained the same—four female contestants, sob stories,

audience voting, and a ton of prizes—but its meaning diverged from that of its predecessor at a

number of key points. The selection process, first of all, was totally different. Instead of being

chosen from the audience, the four contestants were secretly nominated by friends and family.

The show was clear to state that “they did not seek the limelight,” but rather were being honored

by others with the opportunity to compete. The idea of wishes was eliminated completely. The

four candidates—a military bride, a selfless switchboard operator at Julliard, a single mom, and a

cancer-survivor church organist—were nominated by loved ones who felt they deserved a

tribute, rather than needing anything to set their lives back on track. The single mother’s adult

daughter, for example, wanted to pay her mother back for all the sacrifices she had made raising

three children on her own without help. The overall implication was that there were no more

sacrifices to be made; all had already been overcome successfully. Pre-taped segments narrated

the candidates’ lives for them, listing all their struggles and achievements and setting them up as

ideal mothers, wives, and caregivers. Their stories were heartwarming and occasionally sad, but

all already had a happy ending—namely, being worthy enough to be chosen as a contestant. The

pleasure was not so much in the women’s misfortunes, then, but in the stories of how they

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overcame it. For the contestants, unlike their postwar predecessors, the troubles were over.

Becoming or even being nominated as queen was a reward for successfully conquering other

problems and living a good life. The winner, Margo Lamb, the Julliard switchboard operator, had

given up her own singing career to help others with theirs, and her win was a reward for her

selflessness.

This idea of rewarding successful and inspirational women rather than improving their

lives is the 2004 special’s biggest departure from the original. Instead of a show about needing

help, it was about overcoming the need for help. Unlike the original, the “before” had already

happened, and the contestants represented a desirable “after.” In 2004, Queen for a Day no

longer promised a transformation, but rather a reward for not needing a transformation. The

prizes bore this out. Before the winner was chosen, each of the contestants received a

specialized prize package tailored to her interests. The single mother enjoyed cooking, so she

got a trip to Hawaii and new cookware. The military bride received the engagement ring she’d

always wanted but her husband hadn’t been able to afford at the time. Whereas postwar Queen

for a Day consolation prizes were just that—consolation—2004 consolation prizes were

substantial rewards for being nominated for the show.

The winner’s prizes, too, were given out with a different inflection. The emcee,

comedienne Mo’Nique, prefaced each item she described with a statement about why a queen

would need it. “Every queen needs a best friend,” for example, so Lamb received a 1.68 carat

diamond necklace from Sirena. “Queens must stay fit,” so Bally Total Fitness donated a year’s

membership. “A queen is way too busy to tidy up her house,” and therefore Lamb’s would be

cleaned by Merry Maids for a year. The introduction of these prizes promised the fantasy of a

luxurious, glamorous future—not a stepping stone to social recovery. Even the prizes most

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reminiscent of the postwar Queen for a Day, a new washer/dryer, refrigerator, stove, and

dishwasher from Whirlpool, were prefaced with the question, “How does a queen run a perfect

household?,” thus placing regal comfort within everyday tasks. Her other royal prizes included

luggage and a cruise to England on the Queen Mary II, a bedroom set, a car, and $20,000 cash,

all of which totaled over $100,000. None of these prizes promised to transform Lamb or fix any

problems in her life, but merely increase her day-to-day luxury. She had earned the right to the

throne through a selfless life, so her lifestyle would now match her level of achievement. In

2004, then, Queen for a Day was no longer a makeover show, since the fantasy of transformation

had been taken away. The candidates were already living happily ever after because of their

own inner strength.

As much as the Queen for a Day remake veers from the meanings implicit in the original,

it aligns on a number of points with didactic makeover shows like What Not to Wear and The

Biggest Loser. All of these shows stress self-sufficiency and the need to work hard in order to

achieve results. While What Not to Wear offers its subjects help in the process, and a check,

much of the effort expended comes from the subjects themselves as part of the learning process.

The goal of the show is not just to make someone look good with $5,000, but to teach her how to

maintain a suitable look for the rest of her life; it is as much about a makeover as it is about

teaching self-discipline, both to the subject and the audience at home. In this way, it aligns itself

closely with the neoliberal ethic of personal responsibility. In a political economic view,

neoliberalism represents a movement toward a free market culture, characterized by

deregulation, privatization of formerly public institutions, and the idea of “governing at a

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distance.”113 In cultural practice, this results in a greater regulation of and reliance on personal

conduct, rather than institutions, as the cause of and solution to all problems. Laurie Ouellette

has explored the neoliberal world view in terms of the courtroom show Judge Judy. In her

television small claims court, Judge Judy Sheindlin routinely chastises women on welfare, un- or

under-employed men, and anyone else who does not abide by an ethic of personal responsibility.

In doing so, Sheindlin helps “construct templates for citizenship that complement the

privatization of public life, the collapse of the welfare state, and most important, the discourse of

individual choice and personal responsibility.”114 The idea of personal responsibility is key to

Sheindlin’s courtroom, for, according to her, it is irresponsible individuals who obstruct the court

process; people who behave civilly, independently, and cautiously should have no problems

successfully navigating society. According to Sheindlin, “If you’re a victim, it’s your fault;”115

one who follows the appropriate path in life and prepares for difficult circumstances has no need

for her judgment, for she is unlikely to find herself in a precarious situation, where she can

become a victim. This ethic translates to many televisual forms which, as James Hay suggests,

allow for a specific type of “governing at a distance,” in which viewers learn that good

citizenship involves self-discipline and responsibility.116

What Not to Wear, The Biggest Loser, and similar programming stress self-discipline as

the key to personal fulfillment. A makeover, then, is also a lesson in self-sufficiency, for both

subjects and audience, with schadenfreude used as a pedagogical tool. The 2004 version of

113 Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (eds.), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 8. 114 Laurie Ouellette, “’Take Responsibility for Yourself’: Judge Judy and the Neoliberal Citizen,” in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, eds. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette, (New York: NYU Press, 2004), 232. 115 Cited in Ouellette, 236. 116 James Hay, “Unaided Virtues: The (Neo)-Liberalization of the Domestic Sphere,” Television and New Media 1, no. 1 (2000), 42.

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Queen for a Day represents the next level in this continuum, where rewards come not from

asking for help, as on the original version and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, or receiving

help while working to fix a problem as on What Not to Wear, but from overcoming difficulties

without any help at all. The original Queen for a Day, Three Wishes, and Extreme Makeover:

Home Edition, however, seem to defy the neoliberal ethos, since all three shows reward and

repair their subjects’ hardship with material goods. Making the effort to ask for a new iron lung

on Queen for a Day or a new house on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition may be a roundabout

way of taking personal responsibility, but it is nonetheless a reliance on outside institutions to

repair one’s personal problems.

In May of 1964, Lyndon Johnson gave the commencement speech at the University of

Michigan in which he announced his plan for a series of domestic programs he called the “Great

Society.” The central themes of the Great Society involved abolishing racial injustice and

poverty, and when Johnson was reelected that same year, he pushed a series of social programs,

including Medicare, increased welfare benefits, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through

Congress. 1964 was also the year when Queen for a Day went off the air and the misery show

disappeared from American broadcasting for almost four decades. The two are perhaps not

coincidental. Queen for a Day, while a product of the postwar mass consumption society, is also

emblematic of a pre-welfare state, in which very few social programs existed to help people out

of desperate situations. For some women, going on Queen for a Day or another misery show

may have been their only means of getting help with everyday hardship. During the early 1950s,

stories abounded of wannabe Strike It Rich contestants stranded in New York and Queen for a

Day hopefuls stuck in Los Angeles when they could not get on the shows. In 1953, the New

York Department of Welfare attempted to shut Strike It Rich down, claiming it was functioning

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as a “charitable organization.”117 While the Department of Welfare action elicited certain

changes in the structure of Strike It Rich (afterwards, for example, contestants were pre-selected,

to avoid the stranded traveler problem), the show stayed on the air for another five years and

remained exceptionally popular—because of both the problems and solutions presented on air.

The popularity of misery shows is emblematic of certain aspects of the postwar social

climate—namely, the fact that many people could not attain the ideal lifestyle, or even a

minimally comfortable one, but had no real recourse for help. In 1962, the Los Angeles Times ran

a series of stories about Teresa Tarrants, a mother of five who hitchhiked to the Moulin Rouge

Theater in an attempt to appear on Queen for a Day. Her husband had been laid off, the family

had lost their house, and they learned that the only way they could receive any form of public aid

was if her husband was to desert his family. Winning Queen for a Day was the only solution she

could come up with to keep her children from starving; unfortunately, however, she was not

chosen to be a contestant. Columnist Paul Coates, outraged at the fact that Public Aid suggested

a husband leave his family, took up their cause, and after the first article ran on January 18, the

Tarrants family received an outpouring of support, including food, clothing, money, and job

offers from hundreds of local readers.118 While the Tarrantses may have been able to get back

on their feet (albeit thanks to a media intervention), other families in similar situations more

often than not remained helpless. The fascination with and fear of stories like the Tarrants

family’s drove the postwar audience participation show, which, because they played on fears of

insecurity, could only exist when such circumstances were possible. Changes in the American

117 Jack Gould, “TV’s Misery Shows,” The Sunday New York Times, February 7, 1954. 118 Paul Coates, “Poverty-Stricken Mother of Five Tried to Hitchhike to Happiness,” The Los Angeles Times, January 18, 1962; Paul Coates, “Mother Thanks Kind Folks Who Turned Sad Story to Happy One,” The Los Angeles Times, February 16, 1962; Paul Coates, “Royal Ending to Story of Woman Who Tried to Be Queen for a Day,” The Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1962.

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social climate, however, may have mitigated audiences’ desire to hear others’ pitiful stories—

especially once there were greater resources available to help those truly in need and other means

of changing their financial situations. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition premiered in February

2004, at the same time that George W. Bush’s Republican Congress was cutting Medicare and

welfare benefits and implementing new deregulatory policies. If postwar audience participation

shows were a product of a pre-welfare state, then perhaps Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

represents a post-welfare society, where neoliberal ideals can only get one so far. Personal

responsibility and self-sufficiency are noble principles, but when circumstances occur that even

the most forward-thinking individual would not anticipate, other recourse may be necessary.

If one considers the types of emotional engagement these shows encourage, however,

their ties to neoliberal ideals remain intact. Queen for a Day winners and Extreme Makeover:

Home Edition recipients receive help without expending any true effort, but the shows’ messages

are directed more at the audience than the contestants. Both shows focus on the perils of

financial and material instability and delineate what one can do to stave off insecurity. While

Queen for a Day contestants and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition families ask for help they

cannot provide themselves, the audience learns how to be self-sufficient, through their

compassion for the subjects’ own pitiful circumstances. The shows have an ethos of generosity,

but it is nonetheless the viewer’s responsibility to take action for himself so he won’t ever need

to be part of an Extreme Makeover: Home Edition family. Forcing the show’s subjects to ask for

help, using sympathy and suffering as narrative hooks, and illustrating the effects of self-

insufficiency all work together to create what Hay calls “self-disciplining subjects”119—those

who want to consume because they do not want to ask for help. The televised transformation,

119 Hay, 42.

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when infused with schadenfreude, pity, and ideals about justice, thus becomes more than a

means to make women beautiful or give struggling families new homes. It shows the audience

not just what not to wear, but also what not to do, if one is to be a productive citizen in a

neoliberal society.

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Chapter 4: Love Hurts

On November 27, 2006, ABC broadcast the conclusion to a modern day fairy tale when, in the

moonlit courtyard of his ancestral villa, Italian prince Lorenzo Borghese professed his love for

Jennifer Wilson, a 24-year-old middle school teacher from Florida. The real-life Prince

Charming gave his Cinderella a family heirloom diamond ring, and the two promised to trade

their idyllic Italian courtship in what he called “the Garden of Eden” for what would surely be an

equally idyllic love in the real world. As the couple kissed and background music swelled, there

appeared to be nothing that stood in the way of their future together and little doubt that these

two would live happily ever after.

However, this was the season finale of The Bachelor, where heartbreak underlies even

the most romantic of all love stories. Minutes before Prince Lorenzo’s declaration of love for

Jennifer, 23-year-old Sadie Murray arrived at the villa. Like Jennifer, Sadie was eager to express

her own love for the prince and ready to accept his proposal. Instead of getting a diamond,

though, Sadie got dumped. The prince told her she was beautiful and special, but there was

“another girl here” who he would rather be with. Crying, Sadie said she felt “foolish” because

she thought her relationship with Lorenzo was “real.” Later, in the backseat of a limo driving

through the deserted Italian countryside, her tears continued as she expressed her bewilderment

over how she could feel such strong emotion for someone who did not reciprocate it. The

spectacle of Sadie’s tears and confusion, coupled with the intensity of her sadness, offered a

direct counterpoint to Jennifer’s subsequent joy. The series may have ended with the newly

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formed couple’s passionate kiss, but this could only have happened once Lorenzo broke Sadie’s

heart.

In fact, The Bachelor is just as much a showcase of heartache as it is of romance, and

Sadie was merely the last of twenty-six women Prince Lorenzo rejected on camera. Every season

of The Bachelor begins with the introduction of one extremely eligible man—in this case, an

über-eligible man, descended from Italian royalty (never mind that he didn’t speak Italian and

grew up in New Jersey)—to at least twenty-five women.120 During the course of the series, the

Bachelor of the season goes on dates and vacations with his Bachelorettes, meets their families

and introduces his, and—hopefully—falls in love with and proposes to one of them. While this

quest for romance appears to drive the show’s narrative, though, it depends just as much on the

Bachelor ceremoniously breaking up with all but one of his would-be fiancées. As the series

progresses, he eliminates the women who fail to capture his affection at a “rose ceremony” at the

end of each episode, where he gives floral symbols of his romantic interest to a certain number of

lucky women. Those who do not receive a rose go home immediately—or at least immediately

after speaking to the camera about how heartbroken they are.

Indeed, the rejected women almost always get the last word. Although The Bachelor is,

theoretically, a narrative about a couple falling in love, most episodes end with a group shot of

the man and his beroséd suitors toasting with champagne, and any confessionals after the rose

ceremony usually only come from the women going home. We do not hear how happy the

Bachelor is with his decision or how relieved a woman was to receive a rose because of her

developing romantic feelings. Rather, we hear about how hurt one woman is, how another feels

she was led on, and how yet another claims the Bachelor “doesn’t know what he’s missing.”

120 Former Bachelors have included a TV actor, the heir to the Firestone family fortune, an NFL quarterback, and an attractive young ER doctor.

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Every season finale concludes with an idyllic declaration of love, but every week preceding the

finale leaves us with even more women crying in the backseat of a limousine, talking about their

broken hearts. The Bachelor’s spectacle of love relies heavily on the greater spectacle of others’

sadness, which tinges the fairy-tale romance with a fair amount of bitterness along the way.

This blend of fantasy and heartache has been quite successful for ABC ever since the first

season premiered in the spring of 2002. Ten seasons of the program, as well as three of its spin-

off, The Bachelorette, have aired to date, with the show renewed for the 2007-8 television

season. While The Bachelor’s ratings have fluctuated since its first two “appointment TV”

seasons, they have continually remained strong among its target demographic—18-34 year-old

women, who outnumber male viewers three to one.121 That women of marriageable age in

particular are attracted to a romance reality show is perhaps unsurprising; that millions are

attracted to a reality show that focuses on heartache just as much as it does on romance is worthy

of closer inquiry.

It is not just The Bachelor, either, that uses its subjects’ misadventures in finding a life

partner as popular entertainment. The 2003 finale of Fox’s Joe Millionaire, where a cash-

strapped construction worker courted a dozen women while pretending to be wealthy, delivered

42 million viewers, the network’s highest ratings at that point in its 16 year history.122 For Love

or Money (NBC, 2003) added real cash to the equation. While the series resembled The

Bachelor, with a man choosing a partner from fifteen women, its “winner” ultimately had to

decide between off-camera romance and a million-dollar check. Average Joe (NBC, 2003-05)

121 See, for example, Paul Farhi, “Popping the Question,” The Washington Post, November 20, 2002; Diego Vasquez, “Thees and Thous Wooing Crowds,” Media Life Magazine, April 26, 2004 <www.medialifemagazine.com/news2004/apr04/apr26/1_mon/news5monday.html> (accessed July 24, 2007) and Toni Fitzgerald, “An Aging But Still Virile ‘The Bachelor,’” Media Life Magazine, November 28, 2006 <www.medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/article_8783.asp> (accessed July 24, 2007). 122 Emily Nelson, “Joe Millionaire Hits Ratings Jackpot,” The New York Times, February 19, 2003.

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attempted to prove that love is blind, when it paired a model-esque woman with a motley crew of

“average”—meaning overweight, underweight, or just plain nerdy—men. Love seemed to have

20/20 vision, however, for two out of three seasons ended with the woman choosing a hunky

ringer instead of an “average Joe.” On NBC’s summer 2007 series Age of Love, love was not

blind but ageless, when a 30-year-old tennis star had to choose a partner from either a group of

40-plus year old women or a group of hot 20-somethings. Bravo’s 2003 series Boy Meets Boy

and Fox’s 2004 Playing It Straight highlighted issues of sexuality and dishonesty in the dating

world. On the former, a gay man tried to find a partner among a group of men, although

unbeknownst to him, half were straight; Playing It Straight presented the opposite scenario,

when a woman chose from a pool of men, half of whom were there for romance, and half of

whom were gay and vying for a million-dollar payoff. On a smaller scale, episodic dating shows

like MTV’s Next, Date My Mom, and Room Raiders as well as the syndicated Elimidate,

EXTreme Dating, and The 5th Wheel all highlight competitive elements of the dating process.

While lifetime, or even long-term commitment is off these programs’ radar, young singles vie for

the attention of an attractive member of the opposite (or, occasionally, same) sex, the winner

receiving nothing but the thrill of victory and perhaps a subsequent date; the losers being

dumped on-camera.

What unites all these shows, from The Bachelor onward, is their common assertion that

coupling is a desired state of being, but that the route to becoming coupled is fraught with myriad

difficulties—from compatibility issues to the competitive or disappointing nature of the dating

pool to blatant dishonesty from potential suitors. In theory, the simultaneous presentation of

both a desired state and the impossibility of achieving it should make for depressing television.

However, most dating reality shows try to remain upbeat in tone. Some, like The Bachelor,

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ground their narrative as a romantic fairy tale that claims love can conquer all—and, though it

may be difficult to attain, with a fair amount of heartbreak along the way, the payoff will be

worth it. Others, like the syndicated episodic shows, are clearly tongue-in-cheek, ridiculing both

the dating process and those who participate in it. Blind Date, for example, uses pop-up captions

to point out the foibles, neuroses, and mistakes of couples on a first date. On a 2003 episode, for

example, a countdown timer in the bottom of the screen let viewers know the exact moment

when Charlie ruined his chances with Jamie—when he mentioned a good date as being “a future

ex.” Almost everyone has been on a bad first date, and Blind Date highlights both their

humorous potential and ubiquity, allowing us to laugh at the personality flaws of those who have

yet to master the rules of coupling.

But the subjects of laughter extend well beyond clueless blind daters, and the

encouragement to laugh at dating show participants is rather ubiquitous in contemporary popular

culture. Both VH1 and E! have aired several “worst TV dating moments” compilation specials,

which showed the lowlights of programs from Blind Date to The Flavor of Love. In addition,

The Soup, a snarky popular culture roundup that airs weekly on E!, almost invariably pokes fun

of Bachelor rejectees every week the dating show is on the air in its “reality show clip time”

segment. Blogs like “The Sports Gal” on ESPN.com and websites like Television Without Pity

both recap and lampoon contestants on prime-time dating shows, and internet forums allow

viewers to express their admiration and ire for reality show participants; ire tends to be more

common. Indeed, what is striking about the relationship reality show phenomenon is not just

that the shows have repackaged participants’ heartbreak for entertainment purposes, but that

many viewers enjoy watching and mocking it.

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While the participants on episodic dating shows tend to be of a homogenous

demographic—largely underemployed Southern California natives in their early twenties—serial

shows often have a more heterogeneous and prestigious dating pool. Since the non-hoax shows

need to amass a group of potential soul mates for an incredibly eligible partner, the participants

must be on a similar playing field. The Bachelor’s female contestants, for example, come from a

variety of geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds, but most are in their mid- to late

twenties, and almost all are stunningly attractive. Some are students or “bartender/actresses,” but

most have established careers—law, medicine, education, and pharmaceutical sales, for example,

seem somewhat overrepresented among Bachelorettes. For the most part, all are women who

should, in theory, have no problem getting dates. And yet all of them, for whatever reason, are

willing not only to date on television but also to appear on a reality show in the hopes of finding

a husband. It is this apparent incongruity between these women’s eligibility and willingness to

find a partner on TV that seems to make them inherently mockable. For a female audience in the

18-34 year old range, most of whom are likely to be either single or newly married,123 there is a

clear pleasure in watching the heartbreak-turned-spectacle of women who might otherwise be

harsh competition in the real-world dating pool—a pleasure driven by the fact that these

women’s very appearance on television can be read as a public admittance of desperation.

Perhaps the most self-reflexive moment in The Bachelor’s history occurred midway

through the show’s sixth season when two women rejected on previous cycles were added to the

dating pool. The Bachelorettes learned about their new competition via a videotape that showed

the highlights of Heather and Mary’s earlier appearances on the show. Heather’s clip reel in

particular was the cause of much amusement for the women. She had “fallen in love” with

123 The median marriage age for American women was 25 in 2005. Lev Grossman, “Grow Up? Not So Fast,” Time, January 24, 2005.

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season two Bachelor Aaron, came on way too strong when he clearly (at least to everyone else)

did not reciprocate her feelings, and was devastated when he rejected her on the show’s fifth

episode. The women roared with laughter at footage of Heather’s post-rejection confessional,

where she tearfully asked, “What’s so wrong with me that someone can’t love me for who I

am?” Later that night, Krista, a 28-year-old financial analyst, broke into an extended impression

of Heather, where she imitated her accent, appearance, behavior on the show’s second season,

and eventual heartbreak, much to the amusement of her fellow Bachelorettes. The next morning,

while lounging by the pool, Bachelorette Cindy mused, “I think that was the most upsetting thing

last night watching them on the video—they still haven’t found love.” Amanda responded,

“Well, are you surprised?”

While returning to The Bachelor may have been a greater admission of real-world defeat

than Heather and Mary’s first appearances, what seemed to drive the women’s derision just as

much was the fact that Heather and Mary had been unceremoniously dumped in the first place.

Even though the current contestants knew that all but one of them were bound to meet a similar

fate down the line, the irony of women currently on The Bachelor mocking women rejected on

earlier seasons seemed to be lost on them. Their lack of self-awareness was almost certainly a

result of some egoism—each believing that she was, in fact, Bachelor Byron’s soul mate, and she

would therefore avoid similar heartbreak—but what they found so amusing in Heather’s footage

was the deflation of her comparable sense of privilege. In the end, in fact, it was “pathetic”

Mary who won the Bachelor’s heart that season, which meant that every one of these women

was eventually sent home; many in tears, just like Heather.

Such hostility is not limited to women being “chosen” on serial dating shows, either, as

evidenced by the audience response to the 2003 CBS series Cupid. This Simon Cowell-

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produced show claimed to be the “American Idol of dating shows.” Lisa Shannon, an attractive

advertising copywriter from Detroit, and two of her friends traveled around the country

“auditioning” potential suitors. The final ten came to Los Angeles, and each went on a date with

Lisa every week. After watching date footage, viewers voted for the man they felt was most

compatible with Lisa, and the suitor who received the lowest number of votes was sent home. In

the end, the final candidate would have the opportunity to propose to Lisa; if they then stayed

married for a year, the happy couple would split a $1 million dowry.

This coupling by committee did not go according to plan, however, when viewers opted

to play Discordia rather than Cupid. From their very first date, it was clear that Lisa could not

stand one suitor, Austrian fitness model Robert Amstetler. The Schwarzeneggerian 33-year-old,

who professed his love for her at his audition, made Lisa visibly uncomfortable each time they

spoke, particularly because his affection for her continued to grow despite her constant rebukes.

And yet, viewers continued to vote to keep him in the running, notwithstanding her evident

repulsion and a specific plea from Lisa’s best friend on the eighth episode to have him sent

home. People.com reported an active internet campaign to keep Robert on the show, citing a

female message board poster who said, “Let’s make her wish she was still the obscure nobody

that she should have always been! Vote for Robert!!!!”124 Lisa thus faced the opposite problem

of women on The Bachelor, who are derided for their desperation. Rather, Lisa garnered

animosity due to the fact that she was put in a position of power (however limited it may have

been by the audience voting), where she had a pool of eligible men from which to select. The

consensus seemed to be that she did not deserve this position, and therefore it was the audience’s

right to make her squirm, almost as a punishment for being cast in the first place. And squirm

124 Louise A. Barile, “TV Viewers Play Mean-Spirited ‘Cupid,’” People.com, August 29, 2003 <http://www.people.com/people/article/0,26334,626735,00.html> (accessed July 24, 2007).

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Lisa did. Clearly, the “vote for Robert” contingent was not a fringe group of viewers; he made it

to the final two, making her increasingly uncomfortable as every week went by and beating out a

number of men to whom Lisa was actually attracted. When Robert lost out on the finale to good-

natured Hank, who Lisa actually liked, it indicated one of two things: either that the earnest

voting block was indeed in the majority, or that Hank’s win was actually the result of producer

manipulation, since there was a chance she would actually accept his proposal. The viewing

audience and the voting audience for any reality show are not in any way commensurate, but it

was clear that a large percentage of the viewers invested enough in the show to actually vote did

not have Lisa’s best interests in mind. Rather, they were invested in her discomfort and in

finding a way to make her “lose” the show on which she was a star.

That dating show participants generate such derision and hostility from viewers—even

those, like the Bachelor participants, who should in theory know better—is somewhat surprising

at first glance. Most female viewers within these shows’ target demographic have likely

experienced heartbreak or frustration with the dating process. Theoretically, this should lead to

some form of identification with the female participants on these shows. The degree of hostility

directed towards these women, however, speaks to a different form of engagement—one less

about empathy and understanding, and more about schadenfreude. While certainly not every

viewer is a hostile one, and not every participant induces such a response, such derision has

become an integral part of the dating show—so much so that most of contemporary television’s

dating texts themselves encourage this type of pleasure, whether implicitly as on The Bachelor or

overtly like on Joe Millionaire. That the prime-time relationship reality show emerged at a point

in American social history when the meanings of courtship and marriage were becoming

increasingly unclear begins to explain this conflicted engagement. Over the past sixty years, the

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modes and discourses of the American dating show have evolved alongside the modes and

discourses of dating itself. What started out as an earnest programming format to help soldiers

find dates during World War II gradually evolved into a means of ridiculing both men and

women who wanted to find partners in the post-millennial era. Each dating show format has

hinted at certain cultural anxieties about courtship, coupling, and gender roles, from The Dating

Game’s look at the 1960s “swinging single” to Studs’s derision toward sexually independent

women in the 1990s. In this chapter, then, I will examine how the dating show and attitudes

about dating have changed together. While the reality format, much more so than earlier “game

show” and “talk show” modes of televised dating, brings the humiliation of its subjects to the

forefront, all of these modes have painted certain portraits of their subjects that highlight larger

cultural anxieties. When relationships and reality TV collided, though, television became not

just a site for viewers to explore these anxieties but a means of venting their frustration and

confusion about coupling in the real world.

Dating Games

The rules and meaning of dating and courtship have undergone a number of seismic shifts over

the course of the past century. The concept of “dating” itself did not even exist in pre-industrial

America. Before the advent of automobile culture, when America was still largely an agrarian

society, courtship largely took place within the home. A male suitor called on the woman of his

choice, and the couple got to know one another almost entirely during such visits to her house.

Dating as it is understood today developed in the early twentieth century, as the American

population shifted from a rural to a more urban society. In the city, where square footage was at

a premium, most homes had no front porch or parlor that could offer a young couple the semi-

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privacy necessary to the “calling” model. Instead, couples increasingly looked for privacy in

public—a quest aided by the new movie theaters and public amusements like Coney Island. The

rise of car culture in the early twentieth century allowed for greater mobility in less urban areas,

and young couples could more easily seek out greater privacy outside the home.125

The move from calling to dating initiated a major shift in courtship’s balance of power

between the genders. As Beth Bailey indicates, the “calling” model favored women, for it was

ultimately the girl and her mother who decided who gained access to the home. When courtship

moved into the public sphere, however, meals and admission tickets needed to be paid for, and

men assumed control over the dating process because of this financial motivation.126 While

women certainly could benefit from these new conditions—as Kathy Peiss has noted about

“charity girls” in turn-of-the-century New York, who dated (and often did more with) men for

material goods and admission to public amusements127—men nonetheless gained the power to

offer or turn down hospitality, and women gained a new sense of obligation to those who took

her out.128

By the 1920s, dating had become less about finding a partner and more about popularity

in American youth culture. In his influential study of dating patterns among college students,

Willard Waller identified what he called “the rating and dating complex,” where dating was

essentially a separate entity from courtship, and rather served as a competition for the greatest

amount of prestige on campus. A woman’s popularity was determined not just by how many

dates she had, but also by the relative social status of her suitors; men’s was almost entirely

125 Beth L. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 10-15 126 Ibid., 14. 127 Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1986), 110-13. 128 Bailey, 23.

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status-based.129 Waller described this as an antagonistic process—not just between women who

competed for status and men who competed for dates, but also between the genders, who feared

various types of manipulation. Men were wary of falling prey to a gold-digger, while women

were equally wary of falling prey to a man who demanded sexual favors—and being

manipulated by a member of the opposite sex would not only hurt one’s pride but one’s social

standing.130 While coeds might eventually see a dating partner become a spouse, this was not the

goal of the process; for pre-World War II era youth, dating was just as much about solidifying

one’s status within one’s own gender group as it was about spending time with the opposite sex.

In the years leading up to World War II, single men outnumbered single women in

America—in 1940, for example, there were 16.2 million single men over the age of 15,

compared to 12.7 million single women.131 This gender ratio largely contributed to the idea of

dating-as-competition, which equalized men’s access to the female population by allowing them

to “share” social contact.132 The war greatly altered the country’s gender balance, however, and

hence the general rules of dating. 16.3 million men enlisted in the U.S. Armed Forces during the

war133—an astounding number considering that the total population of American males between

the ages of 15 and 34 was 22.4 million in 1940, according to the U.S. census.134 With so many

men away, dates became scarce for women and therefore that much more valuable. Thus,

beginning in the war era, courtship began to trump dating for pleasure, indicating a search for

permanence in response to the scarcity of men. In wartime and the postwar era, marriage rates

129 Willard Waller, “The Rating and Dating Complex,” American Sociological Review 2, no. 5 (October 1937), 729-30. 130 Ibid., 731, 131 U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Population: Volume IV, Characteristics by Age, Part 1: United States Summary, Sixteenth Census of the United States - 1940, 5. 132 Bailey, 28-33. 133 Ibid., 36. 134 U.S. Bureau of the Census, 5.

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rose as the median marriage age for both men and women dropped,135 a pattern that subsequently

trickled down to high school students, as this was the era of “going steady”—a way to practice

committed relationships, albeit at younger ages than ever before.

As Beth Bailey indicates, both the prewar “rating and dating” model and the war-era

courtship ideals relied on notions of “scarcity and abundance.”136 When men were in abundance,

the system in place encouraged women to date both frequently and broadly, thus giving more

men an opportunity to enter the heterosocial world. When women were in abundance, the

system shifted; men did not need to “share” access to women in the same way, women feared

“losing out” due to the scarcity of men, and this anxiety was resolved with more permanent

couplings at earlier life stages than before. While rating and dating was about increasing men’s

access to women, the later courtship model necessarily excluded many women from the

courtship process; equal access for women, then, did not attain the same priority. Financial

concerns likely explain why the later system was not merely a gender reversal of rating and

dating, with men dating multiple women, to equalize female opportunity. Dating one woman

steadily as a precursor to marriage would take much less of a financial toll on a man than dating

a number of girls at once merely for the fun of it. Indeed, because of this fiscal motive and the

power it implied, women were much more dependent upon the scarcity or abundance of men

overall than the other way around.

That wartime marked the appearance of the first American dating show is therefore not

entirely surprising. When dates themselves became such a rare commodity, they also became

something worth competing for, with stakes high enough to interest a national audience. In

135 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 20. 136 Bailey, 55.

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1943, Blind Date premiered on NBC radio. Hosted by Arlene Francis, the show allowed six

servicemen to compete over the phone to win dinner at the Stork Club with one of three lovely

young women. Blind Date eventually made the leap to television, airing nationally on ABC,

NBC, and DuMont intermittently between 1949 and 1953, and giving daters not only a free

dinner but also the chance to be seen by a national audience. What makes Blind Date so

interesting is that, despite the wartime man shortage, the male contestants always outnumbered

the females—a reversal that reduced the show’s schadenfroh potential for female participants,

since women were bound to end up “winning.” Rather, it seemed to be an implicit

acknowledgment of the difficulties women had dating during the war, a kind but compelling way

to help them out and to help single female viewers in turn experience the fantasy of a dream date.

Despite Blind Date’s relative popularity and longevity, however, it did not spawn any

real imitators for almost two decades. Indeed, the only other matchmaking show that aired on a

major network before the 1960s was the short-lived Chance for Romance (ABC, 1958), on which

host John Cameron Swayze attempted to set up members of the studio audience. During World

War II and in the postwar era, however, numerous quiz and audience participation shows

focusing on married couples premiered. Rate Your Mate (CBS, 1950), Do You Trust Your Wife?

(CBS, 1956-58; ABC, 1958-63) and Beat the Clock (CBS, 1948-58), all featured couples

answering questions and performing stunts while competing for cash and prizes. On Two in

Love (CBS, 1954) a married couple’s friends and relatives talked about their history and

relationship with host Bert Parks, and then attempted to win cash for the couple by answering

trivia questions. Perhaps most spectacular was the long-running series Bride & Groom (1946-

53, CBS; 1953-54 and 1957-8, NBC), which showed a real couple’s televised wedding every

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weekday for almost a dozen years. On the air, as in real life, the supremacy of the married

couple marked the postwar era.

Even though the wartime “man shortage” tapered off once servicemen began to return

home and single men once again outnumbered single women in the US,137 the earlier rules of

dating did not re-emerge, at least to the same extent as before. While dating was indeed an

important part of teenage social life in the postwar era, it was usually seen as a precursor to

“going steady”—itself a precursor to engagement and marriage, and a level of commitment

beyond the scope of American youth’s 1920s and 1930s dating system. The courtship process

had become much more accelerated for teenagers in the postwar era, particularly since marrying

young was a practice encouraged by numerous sources. As Elaine Tyler May has argued, steady

relationships were often an excuse for “safe” sexual permissiveness; public health officials,

social workers, and the popular press therefore promoted early marriage as an antidote to the

problems of teenage sexuality.138 And, indeed, the postwar era saw more—and earlier—

marriages than any other point in the twentieth century.139 The focus on marriage tied in to the

larger postwar focus on domesticity, which was driven by the mass suburban migration of these

newly formed families. In postwar America, the married couple and nuclear family reigned

supreme.

In an era, then, when the single girl was usually a soon-to-be-married girl—and if

marriage wasn’t ever in the cards, there wasn’t much one could do for her—the process of

finding a partner seemed to generate less interest to a national broadcast audience than did the

actual partnership. Women’s magazines, to be sure, contained numerous articles on finding and

137 U.S. Bureau of the Census, “United States Summary,” Census of Population: 1950, Volume II Part I, 1-97. 138 May, 101, 127. 139 May, 6, 20.

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keeping a man, but this interest did not carry over to television, which was full of already-formed

couples. Indeed, it was not until 1965, with the premiere of The Dating Game, that televised

matchmaking truly came into its own. On this Chuck Barris Production, filmed in “Hollywood,

the dating capital of the world,” an attractive bachelorette asked three unseen bachelors a series

of producer-prepared questions. She then chose whichever bachelor she felt gave the best

answers, and the two won a swank chaperoned night on the town (in later episodes, a vacation)

courtesy of the show. The Dating Game aired during ABC’s daytime and prime-time lineups

from 1966 to 1973, and, with new incarnations popping up every few years, ran almost

continuously in syndication between 1977 and 1999.

The Dating Game’s success was due in no small part to the contestants who appeared on

the show, women who could ask potential dates “What kind of street sign would you be?” with a

straight face, and men who could glibly ad-lib, “Slippery when wet” in response. According to

Barris, finding attractive contestants who could “state the embarrassing with equanimity” was

more essential to the show than the actual game play.140 The draw for the audience was not so

much the suspense of which bachelor or bachelorette would be chosen but what coy answers he

or she would give to the innuendo-laden questions. While there was always the inevitable

schadenfreude when a bachelorette registered visible disappointment upon meeting her chosen

date, the show was fundamentally less about matchmaking and more about the risqué lifestyle of

the 1960s swinging single.

Indeed, by the time The Dating Game premiered, American coupling had undergone yet

another metamorphosis—one that once again began to embrace the unattached. The appearance

of Playboy magazine in 1953 helped legitimize single life for men by glamorizing the idea of

140 Maxene Fabe, TV Game Shows (Garden City, NY: Dolphin, 1979), 231.

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bachelorhood-by-choice. Playboy addressed its readers—at least those who bought it for the

articles—as suave men whose lack of permanent attachment allowed them to be both sexy and

sophisticated. While self-imposed male singledom could be glamorous, however, women who

stayed single, whether by choice or circumstance, were largely out of luck—that is, until the

publication of Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl in 1962, which made women

rethink the value of being unattached. This national bestseller was not a book that taught women

how to become coupled, but instead elaborated on both how and why to embrace the freedoms of

being single. According to Brown, getting married just to be married was often a mistake, and

single women were not to be pitied, especially if they did not pity themselves.141 Rather, being

alone was a great opportunity to come into one’s own—to build a career, learn self-sufficiency,

have fun, and, most shocking of all to early 1960s readers, be fabulous. This guide to the

glamorous urban single lifestyle addressed topics ranging from good grooming, workplace

etiquette, money management, home décor, and exercise—and, of course, men. But Brown was

not telling 1960s women the secrets of husband hunting, but rather the secrets to having beaux

(plural), flings, and affairs. Indeed, she stressed that an active sex life was one of the greatest

joys of singledom, and an affair between two single people often resulted in “unadulterated, cliff-

hanging sex.”142 The introduction of the birth control pill in 1960 made unattached sex much

more feasible for singles, which led to new types of permissiveness, both in real life and within

mass culture.

When Helen Gurley Brown signed on as editor-in-chief of then-struggling Cosmopolitan

in 1965, she gave the highbrow magazine a new voice—that of readers’ “sophisticated older

sister,” who advised “the girl who doesn’t have anything going for her” in matters of sex and

141 Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, 2003), 4-5, 229. 142 Ibid., 226.

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coupling.143 Unlike Sex and the Single Girl, Cosmopolitan interspersed sex advice, career tips,

and articles on how to be fabulously single with advice on how to catch and keep men. During

Brown’s 32-year tenure at the magazine, the discourses of singledom and marriage were

inevitably intertwined. The February 1982 issue, for example, contained articles on “single girl”

subjects as varied as kinky sex practices, how to split finances when cohabitating, and what it’s

like to work on Wall Street, as well as a piece entitled “How Did He Propose?” and a fashion

spread called “How to Get Married.”144 This dual focus could, and often did, lead to internal

contradictions, but it also seemed to be an implicit acknowledgment that many single women did

eventually want to find a partner. Cosmopolitan in the Helen Gurley Brown years tried to argue,

though, that women could have it both ways—they could find husbands, but they could also have

a fulfilling life and career in the meantime. The single girl may or may not have had marriage in

her future, but Brown showed that she could still have fun—and a lot of sex.

And it was the “fun” that the Cosmo girl and her Playboy-reading counterpart had

together that drove the innuendo of The Dating Game. On the show, actual matchmaking was of

less significance than witty suggestiveness and the public performance of the swinging lifestyle.

That there was never any follow-up with the couples matched during the game underscores the

fact that the dates themselves were relatively unimportant. It was not relevant what actually

happened to the couple after the show, whether they fell in love or hated each other immediately;

what truly counted was how good-looking they were and what they said to each other in the first

place. While the game did matter to a certain extent, since there was always suspense as to

143 “Big Sister,” Time, February 9, 1968. 144 Donald German and Joan German, “The Economics of Living Together,” Cosmopolitan, February, 1982; Frank Bies, “How Did He Propose?” Cosmopolitan, February, 1982; Elaine S. Selesnic, Ph.D., with John Tebbel, “What Are All Those People Doing in Bed?” Cosmopolitan, February, 1982; Warren Kalbacker, “Women on the Big Board,” Cosmopolitan, February, 1982; “How to Get Married,” Cosmopolitan, February, 1982.

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which contestant the chooser would select, this suspense was wholly predicated upon the

audience’s engagement with the relative attractiveness of the contestants and their questions and

answers. Would the bachelorette pick the funny guy, even though a competitor said he looked

like Karl Malden and he seemed to only have one thing on his mind? Or would she choose the

more respectful, reserved bachelor, despite his apparent lack of wit? It was not so much a debate

about who would be a good match, but rather about the ways in which contestants presented

themselves as desirable partners without any visual cues, and whether their chooser actually

found them desirable. Because “desirable” often translated to “risqué” in the Dating Game

universe, the audience’s fascination thus appeared to be with the lifestyle the contestants

represented—with the kinds of women who were willing to ask strangers innuendo-laden

questions, and men who could answer them spontaneously and without embarrassment. The

Dating Game appeared as a television-friendly portrait of the burgeoning sexual revolution that

put its swinging participants on display for the likely less-swinging viewers at home. As such, it

simultaneously glamorized the single lifestyle and made it appear strange, superficial, and rather

silly. It was increasingly common and acceptable for both men and women to be single and

sexually active by the mid-1960s, but this did not mean they had to be taken entirely seriously.

The Dating Game set the standard in televised matchmaking for almost two decades. It

had numerous imitators, all of which followed the template set by The Dating Game—a

competition with a date as the prize, and the promise of “happily ever after” (or, alternatively, a

sense of indifference) implied by a lack of follow-up with the couples afterwards. The first

dating show truly to break from this model was the syndicated daytime program Love

Connection, which premiered in 1983. Love Connection was the televised version of video

dating, a quintessential 1980s matchmaking technique. Before appearing on the show, a

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participant watched videos of members of the opposite sex talking about themselves and their

dating histories, from which he or she would then choose a date. They went out—occasionally

doing something spectacular like skydiving, but more often engaging in typical “first date”

activities like dinner and dancing—and shortly thereafter appeared on the show to discuss their

date with host Chuck Woolery. While The Dating Game and its brethren were essentially game

shows, Love Connection modeled itself more after the talk show, and unlike the earlier programs,

it focused solely on follow-up with its subjects. The selection process here was largely invisible.

The audience saw who the choices were and brief clips of participants’ audition videos, but the

decision had already been made, and the date had already taken place, by the time they saw the

participants.145 The choices could be surprising—as when a man on a 1985 episode who usually

dated “at least” five women at a time and loved to go on “surfing safaris” chose a woman who

called herself the jealous type and said surfers were stupid. However, Chuck Woolery never

asked Scott why he selected Wendy despite their apparent incompatibility; he merely goaded

them for details of their date.

What drove the show was therefore something beyond just matchmaking per se, but

rather an exploration of the dating process itself—not whether two people appeared to be well-

suited within a televisual space, but how they negotiated questions of compatibility in the real

world. While contestants’ introductory segments invariably focused on what they were looking

for in a partner, the majority of time in each segment of the show was dedicated to their date

145 While there was an “audience participation” component—where, after watching the videos, the studio audience cast votes for who they felt was the best match—this was, as Mimi White has indicated, largely conciliatory. The show agreed to pay for a date between the top vote getter and the chooser if he or she agreed, which did happen occasionally (usually after a good date if the audience chose the same person, or an awful date if the audience chose someone else). White sees this as both a mechanism to build suspense and a form of community-building among the viewing audience, who could matchmake-by-committee. Mimi White, Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 61, 192.

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narratives, whether they involved salacious details about a steamy evening or hostile exchanges

between couples who clearly did not get along. There was humor, humiliation, and shock value

to be sure, particularly in descriptions of dates gone awry. Because it implied that real-world

compatibility and not the outward performance of datability was necessary for a “love

connection,” though, the show took the dating process much more seriously than its predecessors

had. The format required guests to break down what made their dates successful or

unsuccessful, to qualify what they saw as integral to forming a romantic partnership, and to

consider their real potential future with prospective partners. While not all participants

approached the show with equal gravity, Love Connection itself attempted to show dating as both

a fun process and a predecessor to actual commitment.

And by the 1980s, committed coupling had returned to the American consciousness.

This is not to say by any means that marriage disappeared from popular discourse during the

swinging sixties and the free-love seventies—this was, after all, the era that saw the premiere of

The Newlywed Game (the original version aired on ABC from 1966-74; numerous syndicated

versions followed), the most popular “couples” game show in television history. However, new

rules and practices of coupling largely overshadowed marriage in the press and popular culture,

as well as, increasingly, actual lived experience in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1970s, a

growing number of Baby Boomer women began to postpone marriage and families as they built

successful careers—a decision made easier by the sexual revolution and the women’s movement,

which helped women take control of their own sexual needs while acknowledging that biology

and child-rearing were not their “sole destiny.”146 Many women internalized Betty Friedan’s

“problem with no name”, and with divorce becoming increasingly common and acceptable,

146 Lucia H. Bequaert, Single Women Alone & Together (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), 15.

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marriage itself came to be viewed as much more of a personal choice than a necessary life

stage.147 This did not mean, however, that marriage was not on many, if not most, women’s

minds during the era of free love and the rise of the feminist movement. Even though the sexual

revolution helped rewrite the idea of singleness as a potentially fun life stage rather than a

waiting game, and feminism helped women expand their social and financial spheres, being

single could still appear tragic if it was not temporary. In her 1976 study on single women,

Lucia H. Bequaert noted that despite the increasing numbers of women who were delaying

marriage and getting divorced in the 1970s, single women’s social activities were almost

invariably read “as having an ultimate goal of marriage and remarriage.”148 Even in the

freewheeling seventies, singleness was something to be overcome.

A 1985 report published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, innocuously

entitled “Marriage Patterns in the United States,” caused many Americans to publicly question

the viability of delayed marriage. The study, written by researchers at Harvard and Yale,

reported that a woman who had never married by 35 had only a five percent chance of ever doing

so; by the time she hit 40, the odds dropped to 2.6 percent.149 When these statistics hit the

popular press, they became cause for alarm. Newsweek reported that an unmarried 40-year-old

woman was “more likely to be killed by a terrorist” than to walk down the aisle, and New York

magazine featured the report in a cover story called “Forever Single.”150 The study’s authors

147 Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 110. 148 Bequaert, 97. 149 David E. Bloom and Neil G. Bennett, “Marriage Patterns in the United States,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series, vol. 21701 (September 1985). 150 Eloise Salhoz, Renee Michael, Mark Starr, Shawn Doherty, Pamela Abramson, and Pat Wingert, “Too Late for Prince Charming?,” Newsweek, June 2, 1986; Patricia Morrisroe, “Forever Single,” New York, April 4, 1988.

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expressed dismay at the public’s panicked reaction, since their findings indicated that the

situation was temporary: women tended to marry men a few years older than them, which meant

that females born at the beginning of the baby boom—those about to turn 40 at the time of the

study—had a smaller pool of men from which to choose, although the numbers leveled out again

for younger women. They also acknowledged that the study did not take actual dating and

marriage practices into account; women certainly could—and did—marry men outside their

“ideal” demographic, which made the statistics even less dire.151 However, the alarm hit home

for many career women, particularly those who planned on marrying once they were settled in

their careers, like a woman quoted in the Newsweek article who (non-coincidentally) got engaged

a month after learning about the study’s results.152 Not that most really had anything to worry

about. Indeed, a 2001 sociological study of baby boomers showed that 90 percent of women did

eventually marry153—and in 2006, twenty years after the “terrorist attack” article’s publication,

Newsweek issued a retraction and apology for creating the “man shortage” panic.154

The alarm, therefore, seemed to be less about the actual marriage statistics and more

about the life choices Boomer women had made. Indeed, despite the popular media image of the

1980s career woman, the era’s return to conservative values also brought anxieties about

women’s ambition into public discourse. A number of policy issues during the Reagan era—

including challenges to affirmative action, Title IX, and abortion access, and most notably, the

failure of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982—hinted at a more general ambivalence about,

and criticism of, American women’s changing social roles. The popular press’s assertion that

151 Caryl Rivers, “Newsweek’s Apology Comes 20 Years Too Late, WomensEnews.org, June 20, 2006 <http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2778/context/archive> (accessed July 24, 2007). 152 Salholz et. al. 153 Joshua R. Goldstein and Catherine T. Kenny, “Marriage Delayed or Marriage Foregone?” American Sociological Review 66, no. 4, August 2001, 506. 154 Daniel McGinn, “Marriage by the Numbers,” Newsweek, June 5, 2006.

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women who spent their twenties and thirties building careers had unknowingly sacrificed the

opportunity for a family was an accessible entry point into this debate, although the alarmist

nature of their reporting inevitably read as a criticism of such choices. As Katha Pollitt argued in

The Nation, “the media coverage of the study, if not the study itself, is just another crack of the

backlash. Women can’t have it all, women must choose. A career or a husband.”155 In an era

where women could theoretically raise a family and have a fulfilling career, the “man shortage”

panic nonetheless spoke to an ambivalence about their ability to do both, at least successfully.

Despite women’s advances in the workplace, and thus their greater freedom from financial

dependence on men, the panic seemed to indicate a desire to return to the World War II-era mode

of coupling. Then, during a different kind of “man shortage,” permanent coupling became a

priority partly because women’s fiscal security relied on having a male breadwinner. In the

1980s, this was not necessarily the case for many women, indicating that the financial basis of

the “scarcity and abundance” model of dating was becoming increasingly irrelevant. Women’s

own fears about marriage, however, indicated that they, too, were ambivalent about their life

choices, unsure about whether they had unwittingly sacrificed their chance at having a family.

The “man shortage” hinted to career women who did want to marry eventually that they might

need to reprioritize before the marriage ship sailed. Even if “having it all” was a virtual

impossibility, it would be even more impossible without a husband and family.

The new conservatism of the Reagan era thus led to a greater emphasis on marriage and

family as something working women should not choose to sacrifice. Concomitant with this

political climate was the mid-1980s AIDS crisis, which to a large degree quelled the sexual

155 Katha Pollitt, "That Survey: Being Wedded Is Not Always Bliss," The Nation 243, September 20, 1986.

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permissiveness of the previous decades.156 The combination of the two led to an increased focus

on monogamous coupling—a trend to which Love Connection spoke directly. As Mimi White

has argued, Love Connection indicated that there was a distinction between a “heterosexual pair”

and a “couple”—a difference underscored on the show when the dating pair decided whether

they would like to see one another again, after the revelation of the audience vote.157 If they did

agree to a second date, the chooser and the chosen—who was previously only seen via a live

video feed from a green room backstage—reunited onstage to end the segment, publicly

declaring their status as a couple, however long- or short-term they actually intended their future

together to be. Love Connection thus depicted dating as integral to couple formation—the first

step toward monogamy. It was a path often marked by missteps, bad dates, and jerks, but it was

nonetheless necessary to follow for those looking for a partner. While earlier dating shows

focused on frivolity, Love Connection implied that it had a loftier goal; dating could definitely be

frivolous, but it also served a larger purpose.

Despite commitment’s comeback in the 1980s, however, TV dating quickly reverted to

an earlier mode once the decade turned. In the early and mid-1990s, a number of dating game

shows premiered on cable, in syndication, and network television, most notably on CBS’s late-

night lineup in 1991 and 1992. Most rehashed the Dating Game format, matching heterosexual

couples in various ways and sending them on a date. A Perfect Score (CBS, 1992) featured

single people’s friends matching them up with prospective partners; Personals (CBS, 1992)

found three potential dates for participants via actual personal ads in Los Angeles newspapers,

and the winner was chosen in a Newlywed Game-style matching/prognostication game about the

156 John P. Roche and Thomas W. Rambsey, “Premarital Sexuality: A Five-Year Follow-Up Study of Attitudes and Behavior by Dating Stage, Adolescence 28, no. 109 (Spring 1993), 67. 157 White, 60.

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chooser’s likes and dislikes; Night Games (CBS, 1991-2) had contestants answer questions and

perform raunchy stunts, graded by the chooser on criteria such as “honesty” or “sensuality.” The

most notorious of all of the early 1990s dating games, however, was Studs, a syndicated show

produced by Fox, which premiered in 1991. On Studs, two men went on dates with the same

three women before the show’s taping. During the show, the men had to match quotes from the

women to their speaker, and the women answered questions comparing the two men. In the end,

each “stud” chose the woman he would like to see again; if she selected him as well, they won a

vacation together. While the game play itself seemed innocuous enough, Studs’s dialogue was

less than innocent. On one 1991 episode, statements attributed to the women included less-than-

subtle innuendo like, “He gasped in amazement when I slurped down that beef" and "A few

sparks, a big thrust, and his mighty rocket started to rise."158 While the corresponding anecdotes

were usually tame—in the first case, she was referring to the steak she had for dinner, and the

second, a fireworks display—the show nonetheless tried to imply that the “studs’” dates

invariably involved some form of sexual activity. Indeed, the structure of the show centered on

how the women rated the men’s sexual prowess, regardless of whether any actual sex had taken

place. Women, for example, answered questions about which man was most likely to “wear

designer condoms” or “fall asleep after sex.”159 Double entendres like "Mine was harder, but his

was bigger,"160 (referring, of course, to a comparison of biceps) went several steps beyond the

mild suggestiveness of The Dating Game. While innuendo in the strictest sense of the word,

Studs’s dialogue eliminated the coy nature of its predecessor by insinuating that sex had already

158 Richard Zoglin, “Game Shows Get Gamier,” Time, September 28, 1992. 159 Ken Tucker, “The Lust Connection,” Entertainment Weekly, September 13, 1991; Tom Shales, “Studs: Smut in a Rut,” The Washington Post, March 20, 1991. 160 “Hunks and Cheese Balls,” Time, August 19, 1991.

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taken place—and that the women were not only willing participants but aggressors who could

not hold themselves back from the “studs” they were set up with.

Studs was a critical failure; Tom Shales called it “wearily smutty,” and Richard Zoglin of

Time claimed that it “reach[ed] new limits of bad taste.”161 Ken Tucker perhaps described it best

in an Entertainment Weekly review, however, when he called it “critic proof,” since the more

scathing the reviews of the show were, the higher its ratings climbed.162 There clearly was a

fascination with a show that pushed the limits of propriety so far in such a blatant manner,

particularly since its participants were real people willing to acknowledge their own sexual

voracity on national television. That it was women who came off as the aggressors—the men,

after all, were already “studs”—made the show even more titillating, while at the same time

depicting the female contestants as both ridiculous and out-of-control. In a way, Studs was a

post-sexual-revolution update of The Dating Game, where the silliness of innuendo fed off a

more general fascination with the single lifestyle. Whereas The Dating Game was something of

an equal-opportunity ridiculer, since all willing participants came off as somewhat frivolous,

however, most of Studs’s derision was aimed at the women.

In a way, Studs seemed to be a rejection of the previous decade’s conservatism. By

featuring contestants eager to imply that they regularly engaged in casual sex—albeit “safe sex,”

as the designer condom question implied—the show acknowledged that AIDS and Reagan-era

conservatism had not killed promiscuity for good. But the way it framed its female participants

hinted at an ambivalence about the nature of this apparent hedonism. On the one hand, their

openness about sexual desire seemed to embody the women’s movement’s ideals about females

taking control of their sexuality. There was no question that most of the women who agreed to

161 Shales, “Studs: Smut in a Rut;” Zoglin, “Game Shows Get Gamier.” 162 Ken Tucker, “The Lust Connection.”

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appear on Studs were unapologetic about their sex lives and willing to initiate and discuss sexual

activity on their own terms. However, their date narratives and producer-prepared sound bites

often portrayed them as aggressive, needy, superficial, and oversexed, a combination that

certainly made for titillating television but also made them seem rather absurd. If they were the

models for sexually aware women, then sexually aware women were in trouble.

Much like the media coverage of the 1980s “man shortage,” which worked to defuse

some of the potential power of socially and financially independent women by blaming ambition

for their social shortcomings, Studs showed the sexually independent woman as both deeply

flawed and laughable. Conservative critics in the 1990s decried sexually aggressive women as

“predatory” because they had the power to “enfeeble men,”163 a sentiment mirrored in the way

that female sexuality on Studs simultaneously fed into male fantasies and anxieties: women were

sexually available, but this made them knowledgeable enough to judge men’s prowess, either

positively or negatively. That Studs invariably tilted the balance of power to the male

contestants, who were always outnumbered by—and hence more in demand than—the females,

allayed some of these fears. While the women judged the men’s potency, the “studs” invariably

came out ahead, since at least one woman per show would be left unmatched, unfulfilled, and

most likely embarrassed when her disclosure of desire did not pan out. On Studs, then, female

sexual availability did not equate to coupling or even a second date; rather, it frequently led to

unwitting humiliation, and going home alone.

Very similar anxieties about aggressive women fueled the 1995 bestseller, The Rules, a

book that promised to help women get the husbands of their dreams by, essentially, playing hard

to get. The Rules told women to “trust in the natural order of things—namely, that man pursues

163 Paula Kamen, Her Way: Young Women Remake the Sexual Revolution (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 38.

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woman,”164 and that any aggressive behavior—sexually or socially—would inevitably drive men

away. The book counseled its readers to treat men they were interested in like men they weren’t.

“Rules” included never approaching a man, never asking him out, never calling him or staying

on the phone for more than ten minutes, and never accepting a Saturday date after Wednesday.

Even in the bedroom—for a Rules girl was allowed to have sex, just not right away—the authors

counseled women to remain passive, to “trust that if you relax and let him explore your body like

uncharted territory, you will have fun and be satisfied.”165 The overall goal was, essentially, to

be a woman of mystery, which would make men—at least those who were genuinely

interested—active pursuers. The sum total of these guidelines, however, read like an exercise in

female passivity from a biological-determinist perspective. Even though the authors claimed in

their follow-up, The Rules II, that “the rules” were not in conflict with feminism but rather a way

to help women get what they wanted,166 they failed to acknowledge that the book was, as Paula

Kamen has argued, “a guide, in the end, to men’s rules, which still define the courtship

process.”167 Unlike John Gray’s Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, the popular

1992 relationship guide that relied on a similar biological essentialism but advised both men and

women how to adjust to one another’s relationship styles, The Rules was only prescriptive about

women’s behavior. The Rules told female readers that they were inherently passive by nature,

that their instincts to pursue men were unnatural and wrong, and that they needed to adjust their

behavior to fit their essential biology; men, however, had nothing to adjust, since it was women

who acted unnaturally. Indeed, the authors claimed that highly educated women who felt “their

164 Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right (New York: Warner Books, 1995), 26. 165 Ibid., 82. 166 Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, The Rules II: More Rules to Live and Love By (New York: Warner Books, 1997), 8. 167 Kamen, 233.

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diplomas and paychecks entitle[d] them to do more than wait for the phone to ring” were often

the most aggressive pursuers and hence the worst Rule-breakers. But such women, according to

the authors, invariably wound up broken-hearted because “men know what they want. No one

has to ask them to lunch.”168

While Studs was created, written, and produced by men for a mixed-gender audience, the

authors of The Rules were, surprisingly, women writing explicitly for other women. Neither

Ellen Fein nor Sherrie Schneider were licensed counselors or therapists, but both had used “the

rules” to get their husbands, and being married seemed to be the only qualification either needed

to offer relationship advice.169 And a large number of women listened to them. The Rules sold

two million copies and spent 24 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 1996 and 1997,

the authors appeared on Oprah several times to dispense advice, and Rules support groups and

seminars popped up across the country. The book spawned three sequels: The Rules II, The

Rules for Marriage, and The Rules for Online Dating, and was optioned as a film in 1996.

Despite the apparently counterintuitive advice Fein and Schneider gave their readers, millions of

women clearly took it to heart.

Whereas the negative portrait of aggressive women on Studs worked to allay male

anxieties about female ambition, the fact that both the audience for and authors of The Rules

were women indicates a deep ambivalence about their own social roles at the end of the

twentieth century. By 1996, women had closed the education gap, making up 55 percent of

college graduates in America, and while they still only earned 72 cents to men’s dollar, they

168 Fein and Schneider, The Rules, 28. 169 Ironically, shortly before the release of The Rules for Marriage in 2001, Fein announced that she and her husband were divorcing.

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made up more than 40 percent of the American workforce.170 And according to Paula Kamen,

the 1990s saw the emergence of a new breed of sexually independent women who played by

their own rules while taking control of their sex lives. While single Americans of both genders

were not as promiscuous as their 1970s predecessors, Kamen argues that the nineties saw an

important evolution (albeit not a revolution) in female sexuality, since women’s sexual activity

came to be defined by their choices, not just their mere participation.171 Despite the fact that

women increasingly echoed men in America’s social, economic, and sexual spheres, however,

the large number of Rules devotees in the mid-1990s speaks to the fact that many women

remained personally unfulfilled. Side effects of women’s advances in education, business, and

sex, as well as the ever-increasing acceptability of remaining single, included an erosion of clear-

cut gender roles, and a dating world without any set guidelines. Older modes of coupling were

predicated upon men’s relative financial power. Men paid for dates and supported families,

which left women in a subordinate position—their only concrete power throughout most of the

twentieth century coupling modes was their ability to say “no.” As women became more

independently financially secure, these earlier modes of coupling began to lose their potency.

Without any clear-cut rules—or evident but unspoken power relations—in place, then, it is easy

to see why many women would be confused about their social roles, and why their successes in

other arenas did not translate to finding a partner.

The beauty of The Rules, then, was that it offered a clear set of guidelines about how to

act towards the opposite sex. For women who felt socially unfulfilled despite their education and

careers, the book was likely satisfying not just because it told them what to do but also because

170 United States Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, 1996, 253, 416. 171 Kamen, 9.

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gave them a definitive answer as to why they were unfulfilled. These were women who were

taught that success in the classroom and boardroom stemmed from aggressive pursuit of one’s

goals; according to The Rules, though, similar behavior in the bedroom doomed one to failure

and was the cause of most romantic disasters. Women who actively pursue a partner have the

possibility of being turned down, and are therefore much more likely to get hurt; by letting

oneself be pursued, then, it is possible to save oneself a lot of possible rejection and heartbreak.

While The Rules’s advice may have seemed counterintuitive to many women, it nonetheless

offered its readers a kind of protective emotional shrink-wrap. Albeit rather Flintstonian in its

outlook, the book gave 1990s women concrete answers to their confusion—particularly to the

question of why, despite so many other advances, dating and courtship remained so difficult.

That it was women and not men who had to adjust their behavior was thus irrelevant to many of

its readers, since The Rules offered clear dating guidelines, comfort, and protection against

heartbreak. Like Studs, The Rules made female sexual aggression appear contemptible, but at

the same time, it allayed fears about the meaning of women’s changing social roles.

This is not to say that The Rules was the definitive dating guide for all American women

in the pre-millennial era. While there were indeed many Rules girls “waiting for the phone to

ring” in the mid-1990s, the popular media offered myriad other suggestions about how to date.

As the self-help industry boomed in the nineties, many cotemporaneous books came out that

directly contradicted The Rules. Margaret Kent’s How to Marry the Man of Your Choice advised

women to treat their dates as interviewees for the position of husband; Todd Landen’s Mates

Don’t Grow on Trees gave advice on how to build a rapport with members of the opposite sex—

whereas The Rules was less about making connections but rather about making a man want to

make a connection. Even Cosmopolitan seemed conflicted on how dating worked in the 1990s,

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which led to even more frequent internal contradictions than in earlier periods. In September

1993, for example, one article advised women to “never play hard to get,” and instead of playing

games, to “be game” to whatever circumstances might arise.172 A few dozen pages later,

however, another relationship expert advised, “a girl shouldn’t hold back forever, but a little

game playing never hurt.”173 When Helen Gurley Brown ended her three-decade long tenure at

Cosmo in 1997, the magazine’s format changed in a way that intensified the inherent coupling

confusion. Articles from dating and relationship experts were increasingly replaced by first-

person stories: what would have been an article on “How to Get Him to Marry You” in 1988 was

more likely to be called “How I Got Him to Marry Me” ten years later. The shift seemed to

imply an uncertainty similar to that which The Rules addressed—namely, that the rules of

coupling in the 1990s had become increasingly unclear. Cosmo, then, chose to decipher how

dating worked through personal anecdotes of individual successes or failures. The success story

of an engaged woman therefore meant just as much as an expert’s advice, especially since there

was no clear-cut “right” way to go about dating and relationships. If nothing else, the bride-to-be

had a fiancé.

It was in this climate that dating games that structurally encoded their participants’

humiliation, like Studs, emerged. Two other 1990s game shows—MTV’s Singled Out (1995-98)

and the syndicated Bzzz! (1995-98) are particularly notable in this respect, as early examples of

dating programs that placed contestants’ rejection in the foreground. While The Dating Game

and its kin certainly had contestants who lost, those not chosen for a “dream date” were merely

passed over in favor of the chooser’s favorite contestant. On Love Connection, participants often

172 Georgette Mosbacher, “How to Get the Man You Want,” Cosmopolitan, September 1993. 173 Susan Jacoby, “Now that He Finally Has You, Why Doesn’t He Want You?” Cosmopolitan, September 1993.

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turned down second dates, but this was usually after mutual agreement that the first had not

worked out. Singled Out and Bzzz!, on the other hand, restructured the dating game show so that,

instead of choosing the best match out of a pre-selected dating pool, contestants eliminated

potential suitors until there was only one left—the best match by default. On Singled Out, a pool

of 50 single men or women was narrowed down through several elimination rounds. The

chooser, for example, would be asked whether she preferred blonds or brunets; if she said

blonds, then, all the non-blonds were automatically eliminated and walked offstage together as a

“parade of losers.”174 The final three contestants played a matching game, and the one whose

answers best corresponded to those of the chooser won a date with her. Because she could not

see her potential suitors until after they were eliminated, Singled Out made the rejection process

appear somewhat arbitrary and superficial; Bzzz!, however, made it much more personal. A

chooser saw the silhouettes of five members of the opposite sex, and he eliminated one

immediately. The first remaining woman came onstage, and he asked her various questions

about her life, preferences, and dating habits. If he liked her answers, the chooser rang a bell,

signaling that he had found his match. If he disliked her, he pressed a buzzer, her turn ended,

and the next woman came out. If the chooser had not rung the bell before time ran out, or if he

buzzed all four women, he would win a date with the contestant he had rejected in the first

round.

What makes these two shows notable is the way they foregrounded rejection as a driving

force behind the dating process, since their narratives posited that the most compatible person in

a given dating pool was merely the least objectionable. Compatibility was thus a relative

concept and largely arbitrary, particularly on Singled Out, where suitors were chosen “blindly”.

174 Redheads were completely out of luck.

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While rejection was much more deliberate on Bzzz!, the way choices were made points to a

similar unpredictability. A chooser could “buzz” a contestant for myriad reasons, both

fundamental and superficial—hating his shirt, his hair, his politics, or his favorite band were all

valid reasons to reject someone, at least within the structure of the show. While most of these

may not have been the most salient terms of rejection for someone looking for a long-term

partner, Amir Hetsroni has argued that choosing a partner on a dating game show is a superficial

process by necessity. In real-life dating situations, a winning personality can compensate for

other flaws; on a dating game, however, a pleasant persona can be feigned but more surface

attributes—particularly appearance—cannot.175 The net effect, though, of watching a series of

daters rejected for seemingly trivial reasons is the sense that partner selection overall is nothing

but idiosyncratic. As products of the mid-1990s, when gendered dating roles were rapidly

eroding and confusion about how to date was on the rise, these shows posited that the only

discernable “rule” of dating was finding a partner with comparable idiosyncrasies. Both

rejection and compatibility were random yet highly personal.

“Real” Love

When the dating show became a subgenre of reality television, the televisual dynamics of gender

roles, rejection, and humiliation became much more complex. Indeed, as the “rules” of courtship

became increasingly blurry in the post-millennial era, the exploration of others’ relationship

woes on reality TV became a textual dominant, beginning with the premiere of Blind Date in

1999. Blind Date went a step beyond Love Connection by showing the actual dates of couples

set up by producers, which moved televised dating itself from a studio to the streets of Los

175 Amir Hetsroni, “Choosing a Mate in Television Dating Games: The Influence of Setting, Culture, and Gender,” Sex Roles 42, no. 1/2 (2000), 99-100

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Angeles. While Blind Date looked like a direct-cinema-style documentary, at least

cinematographically, it took neither itself nor its subjects at all seriously. Every date was

accompanied by a series of pop-up captions, which offered background information on the

participants (“Frank’s last girlfriend was a stripper”), pop-psychological analysis of subjects’

hang-ups (“Whitney complains about jerks but still seeks them out”), and snarky commentary

about the daters’ foibles (“Guns don’t kill dates—blabbermouth chicks do”). The captions

would break down precisely where bad dates went wrong and who was at fault, essentially acting

as a primer in how not to impress someone of the opposite sex.

Even on dates where the couples got along well, though—and many did, particularly

those whose evenings concluded with a soak in one of LA’s many hot tubs—the captions

continued to poke fun at the daters. One 2004 “on the road” episode, for example, featured

Jonelle, a small-town girl new to New York City, who was enraptured with urban life and

defensive about her rural background. Her date was Shawn, a dental student from New Jersey.

The two seemed to hit it off, chatting about their backgrounds, going to an exercise class, having

dinner, and, in the end, making out at a bar. What seemed like a successful date between two

people who genuinely liked each other, however, took on a completely different narrative when

reframed by the pop-up captions. Jonelle, a caption said, would “do anything to fit in” in the big

city; Shawn, on the other hand, “never scores with the natives.” Throughout the date, the

captions painted a portrait of an insecure girl and a desperate guy, both of whom were willing to

settle for less than the best because of their respective anxieties. When he found out Jonelle was

from “Hickville,” a thought bubble caption claimed Shawn believed he “may have a shot.”

When Shawn mentioned he attended dental school in the suburbs, an editor made Jonelle appear

to shrink in her seat—at least until he mentioned that it was “close to the city.” According to the

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meta-narrative provided by the captions, their “connection” was actually the combination of

Jonelle’s naïveté, which made Shawn appear sophisticated to her (and only to her), her

consequent desperation to please him, and Shawn’s own sexual frustration, which made him

unwilling to burst her bubble. The date was only successful, then, because both partners had

complementary neuroses.

Unlike Love Connection, which at least gave the impression of earnestness, Blind Date

rarely focused on the future potential of the couples. While all participants spoke to the camera

at the end of a date about whether or not they would like to see their partners again, Blind Date

rarely followed up with anyone.176 Rather, its narrative focused on the present, not future tense,

and what mattered was what its subjects did (or did not do) over the course of the evening.

Indeed, because of the way it placed humiliation in the foreground of the narrative—as well as in

the foreground of the screen—Blind Date seemed to be less about dating and more about giving

the audience permission to make fun of daters.

A number of other episodic syndicated dating shows that built upon the success of Blind

Date debuted in the late 1990s and early 2000s, all of which similarly encoded participants’

humiliation as an integral part of their narratives. On Change of Heart (1998-2003), an

interesting amalgamation of Blind Date, Love Connection, and the daytime talk show, both

members of a couple who had been dating for less than a year went on dates with other people.

They then reunited in a studio, where they discussed and watched footage of both dates, and

ultimately decided whether they wanted to stay together or whether they’d had a “change of

176 Occasionally, the show brought the victim of a particularly horrible first date back for a “second chance” date. Some later episodes, as well, ended with brief follow-up interviews from a successful couple featured on an earlier episode (although things rarely panned out after the show), but this segment was usually devoted to clips from the Blind Date “Hall of Shame”—particularly awful moments from the show’s archives.

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heart.”177 The format of the show naturally led to embarrassment as couples compared

themselves to their competition. Occasionally, a member of the couple would let some

humiliating information slip out—as on a 2002 episode, when a young woman admitted to going

farther sexually with her on-camera blind date than she ever had with her boyfriend of several

months—resulting, of course, in the couple’s eventual breakup.

Other shows embedded rejection and humiliation more formally into their narrative

structures. Elimidate (2001-06), for example, featured one individual on a date with four

members of the opposite sex eliminating all but one over the course of the day. On EXTreme

Dating (2002-04), one member of the couple wore a wire, from which she heard continuous

commentary on the date and her partner from several of her blind date’s ex-girlfriends; she then

decided whether or not she wanted to see him again. The 5th Wheel (2001-04) featured two men

and three women (or two women and three men) on a “date” together. At the end of the evening,

each chose who they would like to see again—and at least one dater would inevitably be left out

of the equation.

When dating became its own sub-genre of reality TV, dating shows became increasingly

about the humiliation of their subjects. This is not to say, of course, that there was no

humiliation within earlier formats. The Dating Game and Studs in particular made their

participants seem ridiculous to varying degrees, but contestants on both shows were encouraged

to be ridiculous within the format of a game. The risqué questions on The Dating Game and

women’s salacious Studs sound bites were not written by the participants, but the rules of both

games dictated that contestants own up to “their” statements or answer the questions, however

177 While Change of Heart premiered before Blind Date, it underwent a format change in 2001, incorporating video footage of dates into the show. Previously the couples and their dates only described what had happened. Watching a partner’s date significantly increased the potential for humiliation.

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embarrassing they may have been. Agreeing to appear on either show was an explicit

acknowledgment of the rules, and an implicit acknowledgment that one might end up looking

silly. Within the reality dating format, however, there were no clearly laid-out rules. There were

conventions, of course—on Blind Date, for example, when a couple arrived at a hot tub, it was

fairly certain what was going to transpire—but no formal guidelines about how to behave. Any

narcissistic, ignorant, or outright cruel behavior, then, was wholly a matter of choice.

A dating show participant operates within a binary system of self-presentation.

Primarily, one is trying to impress his or her date and to project the image of an ideal potential

long-term partner (or short-term hookup, depending on one’s goals). On a secondary level,

however, one is also on-camera, presenting oneself to a broadcast audience. Game shows, and

The Dating Game in particular, tended to collapse this binary, since the presence of a studio

audience meant that both types of self-presentation happened simultaneously. Indeed, the

audience’s feedback was immediate on The Dating Game, and their laughter and cheers (or lack

thereof) could, and likely did, influence the chooser’s decision-making process. On a reality

dating show, however, the audience is a more distant concept, and one’s eventual portrayal is in

an editor’s hands. This theoretically makes achieving the primary goal—impressing one’s

date—that much more immediate, and hence important. Certainly for many participants,

particularly those within the young, struggling actor demographic, self-presentation for the

camera may actually be their primary goal, if they are going on a blind date as a way to get on

TV. If this is the case, though, the halves of the binary are likely to be in opposition. A bad

date, and hence conflict, is often more compelling viewing than a good date, where everything

goes smoothly. One can thus be a more memorable televisual presence by acting like an

argumentative jerk than an easygoing, nice guy. In such instances, a participant is not

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performing his or her desirability as a dating partner, but rather as a compelling television

character. Since the primary narrative focus of these shows, though, is dating, a participant

performing for the camera instead of for his date has failed on one key level. The alternative

reading of a particularly awful dater, however, is perhaps even worse—namely, he acted

abhorrently because his personality is seriously flawed. In either case, though, his eventual

humiliation, whether at the hands of other participants or post-production techniques, seems to

be just deserts, something that he has brought on himself.

The reality format thus lends itself to the humiliation of its participants in a much more

concrete way than earlier dating show models did. However, this does not wholly explain why

so many schadenfreude-driven programs about dating appeared on the American airwaves in the

late 1990s and early 2000s, and what was so compelling about the format. The sudden plethora

of these shows potentially reads as a public release of long-accumulated angst about coupling,

particularly at the end of a decade when the codes of dating were growing increasingly unclear.

One could argue, however, that these shows were less about dating than about the general

humiliation of their subjects. On Blind Date in particular, where the captions derided both good

dates and bad, the target seemed to be not dating behavior per se, but the overall countenance of

the largely self-absorbed twenty-somethings who agreed to appear on the show. Bad daters,

whether their problems stemmed from performing for the camera or just being a jerk, were

mocked for their poor behavior. On the other hand, the show’s meta-commentary also

constructed successful daters as deeply flawed because of their “good” behavior, as in the case of

Jonelle and Shawn’s blind date. The target was thus not necessarily dating in general, but those

who chose to date on television and expose their shortcomings to the broadcast audience. A date

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was merely a narrative device through which two potentially flawed young people could “be

themselves” on TV.

When the matchmaking show hit American prime-time television, however, it became

more clear that coupling and humiliation were indeed intertwined—particularly because prime-

time shows raised the stakes. These were no longer shows about a couple casually getting to

know one another, but rather about permanent commitment. Who Wants to Marry a Multi-

Millionaire? was the first, and perhaps most spectacular, prime-time matchmaking show. This

Fox special, which aired on February 15, 2000, presented viewers with a real wedding as a live-

television event, much like the daytime Bride and Groom had 50 years earlier. Unlike Bride and

Groom, however, the Multi-Millionaire couple had never met before. Indeed, producer Mike

Fleiss, cousin of notorious Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, had found an actual multi-millionaire

willing to select a bride and be married on live television. During the broadcast, Rick Rockwell,

a real estate investor and motivational speaker, sat in silhouette as he judged what was essentially

a beauty pageant (or, as The Washington Post’s Donna Britt described it, a “slave auction”)178:

fifty wedding-gown-clad women paraded onstage and answered interview questions. Rockwell

narrowed the fifty down to five, and after a further interview and swimsuit and evening gown

competitions, he proposed to Darva Conger, a 34-year-old emergency room nurse. The two were

married onstage, shared an awkward first kiss, and were immediately whisked away on a tropical

honeymoon in an undisclosed location.

Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire was a ratings smash, although the network did

not promote it any more than any other contemporary special. Rather, the ratings climbed

steadily throughout the two-hour broadcast, peaking at 23 million viewers in the last half hour—

178 Donna Britt, “A Marriage for Love of Money,” The Washington Post, February 18, 2000.

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the result, The New York Times’s Bill Carter speculated, of women calling each other in

amazement and telling their friends to watch.179 Indeed, women made up the majority of

viewers; fully one-third of 18-34 year old women watching television that evening were

witnesses to the Rockwell-Conger wedding. As deMoraes stated, “When humiliating things

happen to desperate women, 23 million Americans want to watch.”180

Of course, the relationship did not work out. Within days of the broadcast, Conger filed

for an annulment, claiming that the marriage had not been consummated. Shortly thereafter,

unsavory details about Rockwell’s life emerged—including the fact that he was a stand-up comic

desperate to appear on television, and, much worse, allegations of abuse and a 1991 restraining

order against an ex-girlfriend—which tinged the show with an even greater irony. Not only had

Conger willingly participated in a marriage pageant to become the bride of a man she had never

met, but the man himself was clearly not marriage material. The appeal of Multi-Millionaire,

however, stemmed from this outlandishness—starting from the fact that producers had actually

found 51 individuals (Rockwell included) willing to participate. At least Rockwell got to select

his bride, though. The women agreed to appear on a show to marry a man sight unseen, where

the only known fact about their prospective husband was that he was a millionaire. Their

mercenary motives were completely unambiguous. Agreeing to be a contestant was a brazen

declaration of both desperation and avarice—and millions of Americans were drawn to this

spectacle of self-humiliation.

After the success of Survivor in the summer of 2000, networks rushed to replicate the

serial reality format, and it was not long before serial reality relationships appeared on prime-

179 Bill Carter, “Lights, Camera, Marriage, and Big Ratings,” The New York Times, February 17, 2000. 180 Lisa deMoraes, “An Extremely Engaging Show for Millions of Women,” The Washington Post, February 17, 2000.

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time television. Most reality shows that premiered on network TV in the immediate post-

Survivor era were franchises of formats that had been successful in other countries. Survivor

itself was a remake of the Swedish Expedition Robinson, its summer 2000 cohort Big Brother

originated in the Netherlands, and The Mole was Belgian. Fox’s seven-episode series

Temptation Island, which premiered in January 2001, was not only the first reality relationship

show on American network television, but also the first truly organic reality format to debut in

America in the post-Survivor era. On Temptation Island, four couples in long-term committed

relationships were isolated by gender on a tropical island and, over the course of two weeks,

were “tempted” by 26 sexy singles. The goal was gauging whether their long-term relationships

could withstand the novelty other partners offered—much like Change of Heart, but with longer-

term relationships, greater enticement, and therefore higher stakes. Every episode, they went on

dates with tempters, watched footage of their partners on the other side of the island, and

discussed their conflicting feelings with host (and former talk-show host) Mark L. Walberg. On

the final episode of the series, the couples reunited to decide whether or not they wanted to stay

together; all four, indeed, did.

Temptation Island was much maligned by both critics and conservative advocacy groups.

Before its premiere, the Parents Television Council called for a boycott of the show and asked

stations to pull it from the lineup.181 Brent Bozell of the PTC issued a statement decrying the

show’s anti-commitment focus: “The producers of Temptation Island should be ashamed of

themselves for trying to force the destruction of four relationships for the entertainment purposes

181 Only one station complied. The Raleigh Fox affiliate dropped Temptation Island after it was revealed that one couple had a child together; on the show’s fourth episode, however, Temptation Island producers removed them from the tempters, and let them work on their relationship issues together.

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of those low-lifes who consent to watch this trash.”182 What he and other groups like the

American Family Association failed to pick up on, however, was that Temptation Island was

actually all about lifetime commitment. Participants may have been free to do whatever they

wanted on the island, but they were doing so for the sake of producing personal truths about their

relationships. As host Walberg reiterated several times an episode, they were there to make a

decision about whether or not to stay with their partners—meaning the goal was lifetime

commitment, but the question was whether the participants were in the right relationship for such

a commitment. Since both members of a couple had free reign to experiment with others and

had seen selected footage of their partners’ dalliances, the question at the “final bonfire” was not

only what they had learned about themselves but what they could forgive in the other partner.

Temptation Island’s narrative focus lay in discovering what acting outside of a normative

heterosexual relationship will do to a couple and what the consequences for those who do stray

might be, rather than merely reveling in their indiscretions.

Fox produced several other serial dating programs over the next year, but it was not until

the March 2002 debut of The Bachelor on ABC that the relationship reality show took dating to

the next level. As host Chris Harrison explained on the series premiere, “This is no ordinary

relationship show. The stakes are considerably higher here. This is about something real,

something permanent. If all goes according to plan, our Bachelor will propose marriage to one

of our 25 Bachelorettes.” Although his promise of a proposal was qualified with a big “if,”

Harrison’s statement about the reality and permanence of the future relationship seemed to be

completely in earnest. It is perhaps not surprising that Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire

producer Mike Fleiss also created The Bachelor. Both shows were driven not only by the male

182 Allan Johnson and Steve Johnson, “Reality TV Lowers the Bar, Leads Fans Into Temptation,” Chicago Tribune, January 14, 2001.

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fantasy of choosing a mate from a group of beautiful women, but also by the idea that television

could help people find their ideal partner. The Bachelor did improve over the Multi-Millionaire

format in a number of key ways, however, indirectly addressing the criticism aimed at the earlier

program. The women, first of all, were given the option of rejecting the Bachelor during the rose

ceremony—although, in the show’s ten seasons, none ever have.183 The show took great pains to

iterate exactly how desirable the first Bachelor, Alex Michel, was—as an attractive Stanford grad

and Harvard MBA with no prior arrest record, he indeed seemed to be a bona fide “catch”—and

how serious he was about the prospect of finding true love. They thus made it clear that,

although he was choosing a partner on television, he was no Rick Rockwell. The primary

difference between the two shows, though, stemmed from its serial narrative format: the

Bachelor actually dated the women from whom he was choosing, so the process of getting to

know one another was reciprocal and thus much more “real.” While the first season of the show

included its fair share of drunken antics and promiscuous behavior, it nonetheless tried to

underscore the gravity of Alex’s search for love and the reality of his eventual relationship with

winner Amanda Marsh. Subsequent seasons as well have retained this earnestness; even if

relationships fail to “take” after the show, The Bachelor tells us the journey is nonetheless

something to be taken seriously.

Unfortunately, however, the search for love on The Bachelor is grounded in fantasy much

more than in reality. Much of this has to do with the fact that the romance takes place solely

within what Sam Brenton and Reuben Cohen have termed a “pocket world.” A pocket world is

the self-contained universe reality show participants inhabit during filming—it is not just the

island on Survivor, for example, but the social dynamics and tensions created by the other

183 Several women have walked out before the rose ceremony, but all of those asked to accept a rose have complied.

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participants and the show’s rules, which are completely separate from the reality of participants’

lives before and after filming. It is, according to Brenton and Cohen, “the sole reality

experienced by contestants through the duration of filming,” and it depends on participants’

isolation from the real world and total immersion in the show’s premise.184 The pocket world of

The Bachelor lends itself to an overvaluation of romance. All 25 women live together and have

little or no contact with their friends and family at home. Dates with the Bachelor offer their

only opportunity to leave the house before they are eliminated from the show. Such isolation

increases the importance of the dates—and hence of the Bachelor, who has the power to offer or

refuse them. That the dates themselves are always “fantasy” dates, whether high-rolling trips to

Las Vegas, evenings on private yachts, or tropical vacations, enhances their desirability as well

as the desirability of the individual offering them. At the same time, the dynamics of the house,

where everyone is competing for the same man, can easily lead to an overestimation of his

personal worth. Someone who may not have been drawn to Alex in the real world may have

found herself actively competing for his heart on the show, simply because she was surrounded

by other women who seemed to believe he was perfect. Despite The Bachelor’s claim that the

process is “real,” the pocket universe in which romance takes place relies on a combination of

boredom and fantasy, and not necessarily on the actual process of falling in love.

The biggest blow to the show’s sense of realism, though, is the fact that after ten seasons

of The Bachelor and three of The Bachelorette, only two couples are still together. Trista Rehn,

the first Bachelorette, married her “winner,” Ryan Sutter, in a 2003 million-dollar wedding that

ABC paid for and subsequently broadcast as a three-part special, and their first child was born on

July 28, 2007. Byron Velvick proposed to Mary Delgado on the sixth season’s finale. The two

184 Sam Brenton and Reuben Cohen, Shooting People: Adventures in Reality TV (London: Verso, 2003), 50.

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claimed to have set a wedding date in 2006, and although no news of the wedding has

materialized as of the summer of 2007, there has been no news of a breakup, either. Every other

couple matched by the show, however, has split—some, like season eight’s Travis Stork and

Sarah Stone, even breaking up before their season aired. Even Prince Lorenzo and Jennifer

Wilson, despite their idyllic declaration of love in the Italian courtyard, ended their relationship

within weeks of the finale, a breakup made even more harsh when gossip columnists reported

that runner-up Sadie had moved to New York to be with Lorenzo.185 While some of the couples’

troubles surely stem from production constraints—to prevent spoilers about the outcome of the

show, the couple cannot see one another regularly or tell people they are together until the finale

airs—it is nonetheless clear that the fantasy romance of The Bachelor’s pocket world rarely

carries over to the real world.

Viewers, however, are not necessarily interested in the long-term potential of Bachelor-

matched couples, if the angry reaction to the conclusion of the third Bachelorette is any

indication. On the live season finale, which aired on February 28, 2005, Chicago PR executive

Jen Schefft—a previous Bachelor winner whose engagement to Andrew Firestone did not pan

out—publicly rejected both of her final suitors. The second rejection, of art gallery owner Jerry

Ferris, seemed particularly cruel, since he had waited several months between the filming of his

proposal and the live finale to hear what he was sure would be a “yes.”186 Schefft told Jerry that,

while she did feel a connection with him, she believed they were better off as friends. He

seemed stunned, as did viewers, and the backlash against Schefft was heated. Anti-Schefft

185 Kristin Veitch, “Bachelor Exclusive: Host Confirms Lorenzo and Runner-up ‘Hanging Out,’" E! Online, January 19, 2007 <http://www.eonline.com/gossip/kristin/blog/index.jsp?uuid=1b1d407a-78df-4131-ac32-b44c2d6119e3> (accessed July 24, 2007). According to Page Six, however, Lorenzo and Sadie broke up within two months. Richard Johnson, “Page Six,” The New York Post, March 5, 2007. 186 She turned down her first suitor when he had initially proposed three months earlier.

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message boards popped up overnight; angry bloggers and commentators called her a “fame

whore” and claimed that she had “wasted [their] time” by refusing to marry either suitor; even

the New York Times claimed that the show had “jilted us all,” and viewers’ “pathetic love affair”

with The Bachelor franchise should now be “over.”187 While Schefft’s double-rejection was far

from a satisfying narrative conclusion, one could argue that it was a brave move on her part, and

one wholly consistent with the show’s goals of helping couples find “true love.” Even though

she voluntarily appeared on the show to find a fiancé, the fact that Schefft felt she had not found

someone she wanted to spend the rest of her life with—or even pretend that she did for a few

months, until their relationship died a quiet(er) death in gossip columns—shows that she may

indeed have taken the process more seriously than previous Bachelors and Bachelorettes. If The

Bachelorette was really about true love, and true love had not transpired, there should have been

nothing wrong with her unwillingness to enter into an engagement she knew would not pan out.

However, the impassioned backlash against her indicated that viewers were not wholly invested

in the participants’ actual process of finding a life partner. Instead of televised love that

translated to a long-term, real-world relationship, they would rather have seen a satisfying

narrative conclusion. The backlash, then, read not just as anger at Schefft’s decision, but an

implicit acknowledgment that good storytelling trumped the “reality” of TV romance.

It is likely because of this tension between the efficacy of televised matchmaking and the

need for a satisfying conclusion that a number of The Bachelor’s successors added some form of

“twist” to their narratives that was meant to test the participants’ dedication to the process of

finding love. All of these “twist” shows concluded with some type of revelation that could

187 Lynda Liu, “Let’s Just Call the Show ‘Bitchlorette,’” Media Life Magazine, March 24, 2005 <http://www.medialifemagazine.com/News2005/mar05/mar21/4_thurs/news3thursday.html> (accessed July 24, 2007). Virginia Heffernan, “A Romance Drained of Its Heart,” The New York Times, March 2, 2005.

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function as a secondary narrative resolution even if the romance itself did not pan out. On the

Monica Lewinsky-hosted series Mr. Personality (Fox, 2003), for example, a woman dated and

eliminated suitors who wore masks for the duration of filming. She only got to see the face of

the man she claimed to have fallen in love with after choosing him as the winner. While the idea

that love could literally be blind drove the narrative, the series denouement centered less on who

she chose than on her reaction to seeing his face for the first time. If the relationship failed, then,

there was a definitive reason—namely, her superficiality. The For Love or Money finale had a

similar two-tiered conclusion: the “bachelor,” Rob Campos, chose Erin Brodie as the winner—

and she then chose a million-dollar check over him. Because of the way these shows redirected

their focus from romance to participants’ other less wholesome motivations, they were inherently

self-reflexive. They hinted that finding true love on television may be possible, but participants

often have less-than-romantic ulterior motives that get in the way of love. However, even an

unsatisfying romantic conclusion could still be part of a satisfying narrative, albeit at the expense

of the participants’ dignity, or the exposure of their avarice and superficiality.

The most successful of all the “twist” dating shows was Fox’s Joe Millionaire, with a

premise so outlandish that it verged on parody. Evan Marriott, a construction worker who made

only $19,000 a year, traveled to a chateau in the French countryside, where he met twenty

women vying for his affection. He had to convince them that he was the heir to a $50 million

fortune, and his goal was to find one woman who would love him “for him” and not his

“money”—despite the fact that he was assuming a disingenuous personality in order to make his

ruse convincing. It seemed clear from the outset that most of the women were more impressed

by his fortune than his character, and the text of Joe Millionaire mocked them accordingly. The

show included a number of “challenges” for the women designed to exploit their aggression and

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greed. On the first episode, for example, they had to choose a gown to wear at the ball where

they were to meet the “millionaire” for the first time. The catch was that there were an equal

number of dresses and women, which meant they would have to fight each other for the best

outfits. “Dates” with Marriott were invariably misleading: when the women were told they were

going to a vineyard, they ended up picking grapes; the “horseback riding” date actually involved

mucking stalls; and they had to shovel coal on the “romantic train journey.” The point of such

misdirection was, theoretically, to show Evan which women were high maintenance and which

were more down-to-earth. In reality, though, they—much like the choreographed gown

catfight—were designed to show the women at their worst.

Many women appeared to bring the audience’s derision on themselves, as did second

runner-up Melissa, when she claimed that her goal in life was to go to a Third World country and

“bathe the children” because she was “a mercenary kind of person.” However, post-production

techniques further underscored the show’s disdain for most of the contestants. One woman,

Heidi, tried to appear sophisticated by speaking French—a sophistication quickly deflated by

subtitles that informed viewers she did not know the language very well, particularly when

enquiring about the whereabouts of her missing “bread baggage.” On a later episode, Marriott

and contestant Sarah Kozer escaped into the woods and away from the cameras for some

privacy. They were, however, still wearing microphones, and the audio footage of their “tryst”

was accompanied by subtitles that identified minimal dialogue but many sound effects—mostly

“slurping” and “gulping.” While both Kozer and Marriott later claimed nothing untoward had

happened and they were the victims of particularly cruel sound and subtitle editors, this did not

change the fact that Joe Millionaire’s production team actively portrayed Kozer as a gold digger

who would do anything to win Marriott’s heart and money.

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Indeed, the only Joe Millionaire contestant who was not thoroughly humiliated in post-

production was Zora Andrich, the only woman to express ambivalence about a potential

relationship with an extremely wealthy man. Throughout the show, Andrich was placed in

opposition to the other unapologetically mercenary women, and the editing helped solidify a

portrait of near-saintliness. During a date with Marriott, for example, Andrich talked at length

about how much she loved animals and nature as the two picnicked together in the woods—a

monologue that was accompanied by whimsical Disney-esque music and a montage of woodland

animals that appeared to be lovingly approaching her. From the very first episode, when

Andrich ended up with the last, and most ill-fitting ball gown, she was clearly painted as the

Cinderella of the show, while the other women were nothing but vicious, gold-digging, “ugly

stepsisters.”

Because of the way she was set apart from the other women, it was clear that Andrich had

to “win” in the end, even though she and Marriott seemed to have little romantic chemistry.188

But, like with other “twist” dating shows, the Joe Millionaire finale relied on more than Marriott

simply making his choice, for Andrich consequently had to decide if she still wanted a

relationship with him. In the show’s climactic scene, Marriott and Andrich—this time dressed in

a properly fitting ball gown—reunited in the manor’s grand ballroom hours after he revealed his

secret to her. She told him she wanted to “continue [their] journey,” he gave her a $25,000

diamond ring, and the two were subsequently presented with a check for one million dollars. As

188 According to a 2004 interview with Marriott, he felt no real connection to any of the women, so he chose “the nicest one there”—which, if nothing else, cemented the “fairy tale” story arc. Tom Jicha, “’Joe Millionaire’ Was a Faker from the Start,” Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL), January 26, 2004. On the 2004 VH1 special Reality Secrets Revealed 2, Andrich took his claim one step further, saying that Marriott told her he had wanted to choose Kozer, but the producers made him choose her instead.

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the background music swelled, the newly minted couple kissed for the first time, and the words

“The End” appeared on-screen, concluding the real-life fairy tale.

It is difficult to picture a different conclusion to Joe Millionaire. Even though the two

did not continue their relationship after the cameras stopped rolling, little else would have led to

a satisfying finale. Andrich could have called Marriott out for lying about his background and

consequently rejected him. While that may have been satisfying in a moral sense, it would have

been a less than rewarding conclusion to the “fairy tale,” particularly since there would be no

million dollar check. That Marriott himself was portrayed as a nice guy bewildered by the

strange circumstances—any ambiguity about his character seemed to be erased on the fifth

episode, when he almost quit the show because he hated lying to the women—meant that

punishing him for the show’s premise would be unwarranted. Similarly disappointing would be

Marriott choosing another woman. Most, it appeared, would have turned him down once the

secret was revealed. If any of them, particularly runner-up Kozer, did agree to stay with him,

however, the ring and the check would have seemed gratuitous—not a reward for magnanimity,

as it appeared when given to Andrich, but rather a fulfillment of the gold-digging fantasies that

were so condemned from the start of the show.

Indeed, without Andrich’s own personal Cinderella narrative, the finale would have been

unfulfilling, and the portrait of the other nineteen women unfathomable. Joe Millionaire was

ruthless to these women on a number of fronts, not only within the show’s structure and editing,

but also through its very premise. The question the show asked—whether it was possible for a

beautiful woman to fall for a nice, attractive, yet penniless man—implied that whatever

relationship problems Marriott may have had in the past stemmed from women’s inability to

overlook his financial status. The larger implication was, then, that most women were gold-

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diggers, and the show went out of its way to make them appear as such. The British adaptation

of Joe Millionaire focused much more on the “millionaire’s” romantic interest than on the

women’s greed, and every episode concluded with footage of the eliminated contestants learning

about the hoax. None were outraged. Rather, most were amused, and several said they liked

Dominic better knowing he was a doorman from Bournemouth. Despite the fact that the

climactic moment of most “hoax” reality shows is watching the target’s reaction upon learning

they were tricked, however, the US version of Joe Millionaire deprived its viewers of this

revelation. This is perhaps because, like the British women, the majority of the American

contestants would have taken it in stride, and a good-natured response would have run counter to

the entire focus of the show. Whatever the eliminated contestants’ reactions may have been,

then, they remained off-camera, leaving the viewer with the idea that they went home as clueless

and mercenary as they started.

That there was one pure, magnanimous woman on the show counterbalanced the inherent

structural cruelty toward the other nineteen, because Andrich showed that not all women were

aggressive, superficial, and materialistic; just most of them. If one read the show as Andrich and

Marriott’s personal fairy tale, with she as the Disney princess and he as Prince Charming, then it

seemed almost natural that her competition should appear morally bankrupt. Indeed, this

narrative structure seemed to further sanction derision at the other women, who were unlike

Andrich in every possible way. Their humiliation thus appeared to be a punishment for their

baser motives—whether real or projected on them by ambitious story editors—but particularly

with Andrich at the other end of the moral continuum, it was a punishment that appeared to be

wholly deserved.

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While Joe Millionaire’s narrative structure depended on the humiliation of its

contestants, it appeared to feed into a different breed of schadenfreude than that found on

relationship shows much more focused on rejection. The 2002 Fox series Looking for Love:

Bachelorettes in Alaska, for example, set up a visually stunning rejection scenario for its female

participants—one that certainly set out to humiliate them, but not because of any clear moral

lapses on their part. On Bachelorettes in Alaska, five women having trouble finding a spouse in

the lower 48 states traveled north to bachelor-filled Alaska in the hopes of improving their odds.

During the course of the series, they dated and eliminated suitors drawn from a pool of rugged

Northern men, each finally choosing the one she felt was her soul mate. Despite the

Bachelorettes’ ability to eliminate potential partners, however, it was ultimately the men who

held most of the power. Each women received a “dowry” which rose based on how many men

chose her for dates or “pleaded” to her at the end of each episode to take them to the next round.

The more desirable they made themselves to the opposite sex, the more they were worth. Thus,

Rebekah, the show’s biggest flirt, raised a dowry of over $20,000 while Sissie, who made it clear

that she only had eyes for Brent, only raised $9,000. The series finale dealt the definitive blow

to the Bachelorettes’ agency. After the Bachelorettes had chosen their “winner,” each donned a

wedding dress and was taken to a glacier, where she awaited a hydroplane with—she hoped—

her beau inside. If he showed up, he was supposed to propose; an empty plane, however, meant

rejection. Ultimately, only two planes had passengers (although both merely proposed a

continuation of their relationships in the real world—not marriage), and in some of reality

television’s most spectacular imagery, the majority of the women were left standing on a glacier,

in a wedding dress, crying, and alone.

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Whereas the derision aimed at Joe Millionaire’s female participants was written as just

punishment for what appeared to be serious character flaws, it is more difficult to pinpoint why

the Bachelorettes in Alaska would be set up for such humiliation. There is little ambiguity that

their degradation was the goal of the finale, since there was no other apparent reason why the

women had to wear wedding gowns while waiting for the men’s response. Very few women

ever receive proposals in full bridal regalia, since generally, one buys her dress after she gets

engaged. However, the costuming choice underscored the Bachelorettes’ desperation to get

married and left the viewer with an utterly pitiful image when it became clear that their dream

weddings were not to be. While this is an extreme example of the schadenfreude of rejection,

however, it is merely at the far end of a continuum that spans most relationship reality shows—

with tearful Bachelor rejectees not far behind.

It seems that the combination of desperation and emotional overinvestment lies at the

crux of this type of humiliation, although emotional display marks a participants’ motives as

“authentic” and not a performance. It is difficult to say how many people appear on reality

shows for reasons beyond a given program’s premise, whether instant celebrity, an attempt to

launch an acting or singing career, or money, although many obviously do. On a commitment-

based dating show, however, suspicion that a participant is there merely for screen time—or

worse, to “win the game”—flouts the premise, and raises the ire of both more genuine

participants and viewers. Unlike Blind Date and other episodic shows, where subjects’

performativity is somewhat expected, performances defy the serial narrative structure and earnest

nature of prime-time relationship shows. Almost as bad are women who are there to get married

and do not particularly care who the groom is, like Lisa, who wore the wedding dress she had

purchased before appearing on the show when Prince Lorenzo visited her hometown on The

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Bachelor. Lisa made it clear that was not on the show to fall in love with him per se; she just

really wanted to get married, and Lorenzo would do. He eliminated her accordingly.189

Some rejections are amusing because the participants’ tears underscore other apparent

personality issues. Sarah, rejected by Bachelor Charlie, cried in her “back of the limo” moment

that he eliminated her because she was “too beautiful,” a type of prejudice she felt was

tantamount to “racism.” Beauty discrimination was, apparently, a problem Sarah had been

dealing with her entire life, and she claimed her looks—not her constant attacks of and attempts

to undermine her competitors throughout the season—were what soured her relationships with

the other women in the house and, down the line, Charlie. The footage of her seemingly earnest

consternation thus seemed to serve as a double-comeuppance. Not only had she been rejected by

The Bachelor, despite her nefarious attempts to “win,” but also her claims of “racism” exposed

her extreme vanity to a national audience.

Most women on relationship reality shows, however, have not done anything wrong, at

least to the same qualifiable degree as Sarah or Lisa. That the tears of earnest participants can be

similarly schadenfroh, then, speaks to larger issues about the meaning of televised heartbreak.

Several earlier dating show formats focused on the idea of rejection, but serial reality narratives

added the spectacle of heartbreak, and hence pain, to the schadenfreude spectrum. This was

partly an issue of format. When the stakes were raised from a single date to potential lifetime

commitment, more emotions would certainly come into play for a participant devoted to the

process. Forming a relationship, or losing out on one, on television by necessity involves the

public revelation of what is often a painful, difficult, and private process in real life. In a way,

189 The conundrum, though, is that candidates applying to appear on most relationship shows do not know who the Bachelor or Bachelorette will be in advance, making it a virtual impossibility that one can be there to fall in love with a specific individual.

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then, televised tear-jerking rejection can be read as a type of punishment for those not reality-

TV-savvy enough to know that they, too, could very likely end up heartbroken in front of a

national audience. This consequently creates a paradox for participants on relationship shows.

The best way to avoid such heartbreak (apart from not appearing on a reality TV dating show in

the first place) is to shy away from emotional investment; those who are not emotionally

available enough, however, are sure to be rejected. The only way to come out of a show like The

Bachelor unscathed appears to be winning, but to win, one must put one’s emotions on the line.

For those who are earnest about the process, then, rejection is bound to be painful. That the

honest expression of feelings has become something potentially amusing, at least when it does

not pan out, is a recent development in televisual schadenfreude.

The real issue in these cases seems to be the apparent desperation of women who

willingly participate on reality relationship shows. Most of the time, appearing on these

programs represents a lose-lose proposition for the women involved. On The Bachelor,

participants face a 96 percent chance of being rejected on-camera; the relationship of the

Bachelor and his winner, as well, has a very good chance of failing once the cameras stop

rolling. Despite these odds, however, relationship shows are full of women who appear to desire

nothing more than marriage, or at least a fantasy proposal on camera. That they have chosen to

ignore the realities of the process for whatever reasons—whether the hubris of believing they

will be exempt from rejection, or a mere inability to see anything but their long-term goal—

makes their desperation that much more evident. When they cry after being rejected, their

emotional investment, and hence desperation, comes to appear even more genuine, for it leaves

the impression that they really believed they could find a husband on a reality show. This is

almost certainly not a performance, since their tears indicate actual sadness—which can in turn

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become schadenfreude for the viewer who is aware of the reality conundrum. “Putting oneself

out there,” then, makes sense within the contexts of the shows themselves, but it paints a less

than ideal portrait of the women who choose to do so. However, it remains a marker of “the

real,” and an indication that they are there for the “right” reasons.

There thus seem to be two different types of humiliation at play on relationship reality

shows: one stemming from certain participants’ desperation and earnestness, and one stemming

from others’ superficiality, or being there for the “wrong reasons.” These dual types of

humiliation—which can be directed at both the shows’ choosers and chosen—demonstrate that,

as on Blind Date, participants cannot win. If they are earnest about the process and willing to

open up emotionally, they are likely to be humiliated; if they are there less for the process than

for the potential rewards of winning, they are almost certain to be humiliated. Both types of

humiliation rely on viewer speculation about, and condemnation of, participants’ motives for

appearing on the shows in the first place, and it was this dual suspicion that drove the VH1 series

Flavor of Love, a semi-parodic reality show, where women competed for the heart of 47-year-old

Flavor Flav, the “comic relief” of 1980s rap group Public Enemy. Unlike the stars of The

Bachelor and other competitive relationship shows, Flav’s desirability as a romantic partner was

questionable. He had seven children by three different women (as well as two grandchildren,

both older than his youngest child), none of whom he paid child support for. He had battled

various drug addictions since his rapping days, spent several years scalping Yankees tickets as a

career in the early 2000s, and served some time in Riker’s Island in 2002. To top it all off, he

was not particularly attractive, bearing, as New York Times television critic Lola Ogunnaike put

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it, “more than a passing resemblance to a California raisin.”190 While Flav was a minor celebrity

who appeared to be an amusing and kind man, he was clearly not the best romantic prospect.

The women on Flavor of Love, however, certainly acted like he was. Indeed, their

attempts to win his heart (and the show) were over the top, even for reality television. Many

were sexually aggressive with Flav and physically aggressive to one another. There were

constant catfights on the show, the most notorious involving an eliminated contestant who spit in

her rival’s face as she left the house. Several women even employed the strategy of enraging

their competitors to the point of physical violence—which on reality TV means an automatic

dismissal from the show. In certain respects, their overly aggressive and calculating behavior

made their dedication to Flav seem genuine. One might expect twenty women living in the same

house and fighting for the same man to express both jealousy and animosity towards one’s

competition—particularly if they all are falling in love with him. That the man for whom they

were willing to resort to physical violence was Flavor Flav, however, overrides any potential

emotional authenticity and makes every contestant’s motives questionable. While some, like

Krazy191 on the second season, publicly acknowledged they were on the show to jump start

entertainment careers, the motivation for others was less clear. For many, it seemed, being on

television in the first place was their major priority, since wanting to spend their lives with Flav

was probably not on their lists. Indeed, several women on the first season of the show were

eliminated when they could not bring themselves to kiss Flav, although the majority had no such

compunctions. The combination, however, of the women’s over-the-top emotion and sketchy

motives made the show farcical—and made the women willing to bed Flav and spit on one

190 Lola Ogunnaike, “A Ladies’ Man Everyone Fights Over,” The New York Times, October 1, 2006. 191 Flav claimed that he would never remember the women’s names, so he “renamed” them all. The girl who got drunk immediately upon entering the house became “Toastee,” for example, while the one with the great body was called “Deelishis.” Flav was not the best speller.

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another on national television appear completely ridiculous. The contestants’ behavior verged

on parody, highlighting the worst aspects of both desperation and greed, and the show fed off of

viewer hostility toward women looking for relationships on national television.192 The question

becomes, though, what the source of such hostility is—not just on Flavor of Love, but on the

shows it parodies. What are the pleasures involved with watching these types of humiliation,

particularly for female viewers, and what is it about this particular cultural moment that underlies

the hostility towards people willing to date in public?

Coupling seems to have become more frustrating than ever before in American society.

The general confusion about the rules of dating that began to emerge in the 1990s led to a new

iteration of coupling for American youth—“hooking up.” A “hookup” can be anything on the

intimacy spectrum from kissing to full-on intercourse; what truly defines it is casual intimacy

without any expectations of commitment from either party. According to Laura Sessions Stepp’s

ethnographic study of hookup culture, the concept of the hookup moved from porn magazines to

colleges in the mid- to late-1990s, and by the millennium, it had become the dominant mode of

coupling on campuses across America.193 Hooking up virtually eradicated dating and even the

idea of courtship. While college students have traditionally had lots of sex, in the past it usually

happened within the boundaries of committed relationships. What happens now, though, is that

a couple meets, often at a bar or a party, hooks up, and parts ways. They may or may not see

each other again, but if they do, it is more often than not for another hookup. Instead of

192 That most of the contestants were women of color—a group vastly underrepresented on network reality shows—very much complicates this issue, since Flavor of Love inarguably feeds into unpleasant stereotypes about black women. At the same time, though, their behavior can be read as an extreme version of what transpires on other reality shows, and thus draws the same types of hostility directed towards white women on The Bachelor. 193 Laura Sessions Stepp, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007), 30.

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boyfriends, women are more likely to have “fuck buddies” or “friends with benefits”—men they

get together with solely for the purpose of sex, with the understanding that their connection is

purely physical, not emotional. While men and women do still fall in love, more permanent

commitments are, as Stepp discovered, the subject of great ambivalence for both genders.

Relationships “consume time, energy, and emotions,” and for a generation of young women

expected to achieve great things in the outside world, they appear to be nothing more than a

distraction. 194

Indeed, the women coming of age in the late 1990s and early 2000s are the first

generation of girls born after the rise of the feminist movement. They grew up being told not

only that that could grow up to be anything they wanted, but also that they were expected to

achieve their fullest academic and career potential. This message seemed to take, for according

to a 2004 report by the General Social Survey, young adults of both genders prioritize academic

achievement, career success, and financial independence above marriage as life goals.195 At the

same time, though, this generation grew up in an era with an escalating divorce rate; the United

States has more families living in transitional arrangements—and more children with multiple

parental groupings—than any other developed nation in the world.196 The fact that so many of

the women embedded in hookup culture are children of divorce means that many lack role

models for healthy, long-term emotional intimacy. Physical intimacy, however, is much easier

for them to attain and understand—and to protect themselves from its possible dangers. The rise

of hookup culture, Stepp argues, was thus largely fueled by this generation of women. It offered

194 Ibid., 227. 195 Barbara Defoe Whitehead and David Popenoe, “The State of Our Unions 2004,” The National Marriage Project, 2004. Cited in Jillian Straus, Unhooked Generation: The Truth About Why We’re Still Single (Hyperion: New York, 2006), 16. 196 Andrew Cherlin, “American Marriage in the Early Twenty-first Century,” Marriage and Child Wellbeing 15 (Fall 2005), 46.

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a way for them to meet their sexual needs while protecting their emotions, and to avoid

distraction on their way to other successes.197 In a way, it seems to be the millennial-era

woman’s answer to the same anxieties that fueled the 1980s “man shortage”—the problem of

balance between women’s career and relationship/familial success. Now, though, instead of

feeling guilty for unintentionally eschewing marriage in favor of a career, college-age women

seem to be embracing the imbalance. Particularly since the American divorce rate consistently

hovers around half the marriage rate, marriage itself appears to be a gamble.198 Success in the

working world is a goal these women are better prepared to deal with and work toward, even if it

comes at the expense of adult emotional intimacy.

This is not to say that hookup culture has freed women from emotional entanglements;

rather, as Stepp discovered, many women found that hooking up was even more of an emotional

drain than a bad relationship.199 And its effects extend well beyond the college years. While

Unhooked examines the foundations and problems of hookup culture for high school and

college-aged women, Jillian Straus’s similarly titled Unhooked Generation explores its longer-

term effects for individuals of both genders who have reached next life stage. Eventually, most

men and women embedded in hookup culture realize that they do want to find a partner and get

married; the problem is that Americans in their twenties and thirties struggle now more than ever

to find and sustain committed relationships. Straus sees this as an issue with myriad roots, many

of which stem from the same issues that drive hookup culture. Generation X and Y’s prioritizing

ambition over coupling has led to a greater marriage delay than ever before—and the meaning of

marriage has changed so significantly over the past fifty years that attaining it seems like an

197 Ibid., 178. 198 “Births, Marriages, Divorces, and Deaths: Provisional Data for 2005,” National Vital Statistics Reports 54, no. 20 (2006), 1. 199 Stepp, 227.

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impossibility. Marriage is no longer necessary for practical reasons, so the former portrait of

what constituted a happy partnership—namely, Elaine Tyler May’s notion of “security”—has

become largely irrelevant.200 Instead, Straus argues that young adults now see the foundation of

a happy marriage as being with the “right person;” success depends not on faith in the institution

itself but on finding one perfectly matched individual.201 Many young Americans very much

want to get married to their “right person,” but the Divorce Generation’s skepticism about

marriage makes them particularly reluctant to state definitively that a partner is “the one.”202 A

minor argument or an unexciting stretch of time in a relationship can be enough to make them

want to explore other options, and, as this cycle tends to repeat itself, “the one” becomes an even

more perfect and hence even more unattainable concept. The cumulative effect is paradoxical:

namely, that the more one desires an “ideal” marriage with “the right person,” the more

impossible it becomes to find.203

This does not mean that people are not trying, however. Indeed, dating, aided by online

personals sites like Match.com, JDate, and Yahoo! personals, has made something of a

comeback in recent years, at least for those in the post-college demographic. However, the rise of

the instructional dating show, or the dating makeover, in the later half of this decade indicates

that dating is a lost art for the hookup generation and directly speaks to this ever-growing

frustration many young Americans feel towards the coupling process. Programs like Love U

(TLC, 2003), Can’t Get a Date (VH1, 2006), and Confessions of a Matchmaker (A&E, 2007) all

showcase singles who have trouble finding dates, acting properly on them, or turning individual

dates into more permanent relationships. Some, like Love U, feature full-on personality and style

200 May, 13. 201 Straus, 54. 202 Ibid., 22, 54. 203 Ibid., 161-3.

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makeovers for their participants, functioning much like What Not to Wear or Queer Eye for the

Straight Guy. Others are smaller in scope. Confessions of a Matchmaker, for example, focuses

on professional Buffalo, New York matchmaker Patti Novak’s no-nonsense advice to her clients

about what they need to change if they no longer want to be single. All, however, stress only

two main rules about dating: don’t make the other person uncomfortable, and be the best “you”

you can be. As instructional programming, then, they seem to acknowledge that finding a

relationship has become a wholly idiosyncratic process without any clear guidelines; the only

way to succeed is not to offend anyone, and to project oneself as “the one” and hope that one’s

date agrees. Since the problem for many single Americans is not necessarily finding dates but

sustaining relationships, though, these shows may not be entirely helpful, for none extend their

advice beyond one or two dates. When it comes to turning a dating partner into a long-term

partner, then, reality television offers little help.

Indeed, the only shows that do depict the formation of committed relationships are The

Bachelor and its ilk—and their portrait of long-term coupling is not a promising one, either.

Ironically, the reality show that offered the most optimism about relationships was Temptation

Island, which showed that being with “the one” was possible; the shows that followed it,

however, painted a much less rosy picture. For women firmly embedded in Straus’s “multiple

choice culture,” one could argue that shows like The Bachelor make coupling appear to be even

more of an impossibility than it may seem in real life. If Bachelors and Bachelorettes cannot

find long-term commitment among a group of suitors specifically chosen to match their

“checklists,” then finding a partner in the real world might be unfathomable. Furthermore, these

shows—and their parade of heartbroken rejectees—may confirm for women enmeshed in

hookup culture that making oneself emotionally available to a prospective partner is simply not

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worth it. The audience’s superior viewing position seems to enforce this attitude. The more

ridiculous and desperate the women on relationship shows appear, and the more they are willing

to debase themselves for the sake of a televised proposal, the less desirable “putting oneself out

there” for love looks, even outside the pocket world of televised dating.

In Reading the Romance, Janice Radway argued that readers of romance novels find

compensatory pleasure in successful narratives, where an independent woman transforms an

emotionally stunted male into a nurturing partner. The novels’ (mostly married) female readers

buy into these narrative fantasies because the heroine inevitably achieves “the very pleasure the

readers endlessly long for”—namely, receiving the same level of nurturing they provide as wives

and mothers on a daily basis.204 Romance novels are a form of escapism, but by identifying with

the heroine, readers can at least fantasize about a relationship that meets their emotional needs.

While most commitment-driven reality romances play into a similar notion of romantic

fantasy, Radway’s model does not fully explain their pleasures. In one respect, it is reasonable

to assume that the 18-34 year old women who constitute the main audience of The Bachelor and

its ilk do see the shows as compensatory narratives, whereby they can identify with the process

of falling in love and finding an “ideal” partner, particularly if they have not been able to do so in

their own lives. Indeed, Joe Millionaire, with its saintly heroine whose devotion made her suitor

wealthy, seems to offer a clear parallel to Radway’s romances. Unlike Joe Millionaire, however,

most shows do not have a clear “heroine” from the start, which thwarts the possibility of any

significant identification with the winner. While a viewer can pick a pony, as it were, to root

for—whether it is the contestant who is most like them, or most like who they would like to be—

there is never any guarantee that she will last through an episode, let alone to the series

204 Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (Verso: London, 1987), 14.

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conclusion. Particularly with a process as idiosyncratic as falling in love, it can be difficult to

detect who is right for someone else—a difficulty aided by the fact that, to build suspense, reality

show “choosers” invariably express total ambivalence about their feelings, refuse to play

favorites, and claim that every decision is the “most difficult.” Identification can easily be

thwarted, then, which creates an emotional distance. On The Bachelorette and other shows

where women are the choosers, there is a greater possibility of identification with a “heroine,”

but this creates its own set of problems. If viewers do not take to a participant, as was the case

with Cupid, the narrative automatically becomes unfulfilling—a farce rather than a fantasy. And

successful identification also remains tenuous, depending largely on the chooser’s decision-

making ability and continuing likeability. The Jen Schefft backlash, for example, seemed to

stem in part from the frustrated fulfillment of viewer’s romantic fantasies; they wanted an

engagement, but she did not let it happen.

Both Cupid and the third Bachelorette season could read as examples of what Radway

called “failed” romances, but then again, so are most reality relationships, whether a show ends

unsatisfactorily or a relationship fails to take off in real life. Indeed the fulfilling narrative

conclusion to the most successful reality romance, Joe Millionaire, was also its downfall. The

2004 sequel, The Next Joe Millionaire, was a ratings failure—the result, Fox Entertainment

President Gail Berman speculated, of the audience’s awareness that, despite the satisfying

conclusion, Joe Millionaire “wasn’t a love story at the end.”205 And it is the high rate of failure,

and hence the unreality of the fantasy these shows propose, that most seems to thwart the process

of identification, particularly since such fantasy is supposed to carry over into the participants’

real lives. While a romance novel heroine is bound to live happily ever after with her newly

205 Jicha, “’Joe Millionaire’ Was a Faker from the Start.”

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nurturing partner, a reality TV couple will both likely be single again and dating in the real world

within a few months. Why waste empathy, then, on a doomed relationship?

It may be difficult to find a clear heroine on The Bachelor, but villainous and desperate

women abound. In a romance novel, or on Joe Millionaire, these women would merely be

obstacles to the heroine’s romantic fulfillment; when there is no heroine, however, they move

closer to the center of the narrative as a viewer anticipates their inevitable comeuppance and

elimination. Most shows, then, seem to encourage a process of disidentification, rewriting

romantic fantasy as the spectacle of others’ pain, frustration, or humiliation, whether deserved or

not. That the women on romance reality shows tend to be beautiful, successful, and hence

representative of real competition in viewers’ dating realities fuels this fantasy. It is not so much

a compensatory fantasy of falling in love, as in romance novels, then, but a compensatory fantasy

of seeing one’s competition summarily rejected, or at least made incredibly uncomfortable.

Average Joe, for example, was atypical of most hoax reality shows, in that the revelatory

scene—the professional model learning that she would be dating a group of “average” men—

always occurred early in the first episode. The rest of the series involved her coming to terms

with the fact that she had to associate with, and view as potential romantic partners, men she

clearly felt were beneath her. The show’s premise relied on an inherent distance between the

female viewer and the chooser, which encouraged a viewer engagement that Mikhail Bakhtin’s

carnivalesque. Average Joe turned the world upside down, and the beautiful woman was made

to date the kinds of “normal” men that most of the population had to choose from. Her

consternation and discomfort with the initial revelation thus served an egalitarian function, albeit

one that assumed a fair amount of hostility on the audience’s part.

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A similar process seems to be at work on more straightforward dating shows as well,

albeit with a slightly different inflection. The carnivalesque on The Bachelor stems from the

constant rejection of women who should theoretically be successful in real world romance,

particularly those whose hubris or naïveté has led them to believe they will be exempt from such

heartbreak in the first place. For the single female viewer, or the viewer who was single in the

recent past, disidentification in this case is its own compensatory fantasy, feeding into multiple

types of superiority. If a contestant has behaved badly, whether through a display of treachery or

obvious desperation, a savvy viewer’s superior knowledge of both dating texts and reasonable

real-life dating behavior elevates her above her televised counterpart. More generally, however,

is the fact that most viewers do not feel the need to appear on a relationship reality show, while

Bachelor contestants do. That their televised actions very well may correlate to their real-world

demeanor both explains why they may not have found someone in real life, and further enhances

the viewer’s superiority. Watching the rejection of other women, then, allows viewers to assume

a relative mastery of both the television text and the dating world, despite whatever frustrations

they may encounter in real life.

For Bakhtin, the carnival, where masters became servants and fools were sages, served as

a social release valve—a way for individuals living within a strict hierarchical structure to

publicly question the system, at least for the duration of the festival. The carnivalesque was thus

a means to undermine ideological hegemony and criticize social norms. While commitment

reality shows all focus on marriage as an end goal, though, it seems that their critical target is

less the institution of marriage itself than the hierarchy of relationship formation. Indeed, the

contestants on relationship shows, particularly the “ideal” women, problematize their own

abilities to fall in love. Most are either there to exploit the system—wanting to win for personal

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or monetary gain—or are incapable of seeing beyond the institution of marriage itself. Either

way, the image of attractive and successful women unable or unwilling to navigate relationships

calls their relative desirability into question. Perhaps the carnivalesque in this case does not

merely serve an egalitarian function, then, but rather elevates the viewer well above the

contestants; it does not question the hierarchy but tears it down.

These women offer myriad examples of what not to do when falling in love. While most

contestants go home without actually learning anything, a compilation of Bachelor rejectee

histories, or merely one screening of Flavor of Love, could read as an instruction manual in how

not to win the man of one’s dreams. Indeed, romance reality shows seem to capitalize on the

frustration of viewers who are unable to live out their own fantasy romance, by showing them

how not to fall in love. By placing the audience at a relative distance from the contestants—and

their respective neuroses—a viewer can feel a sense of mastery over what is inherently an

idiosyncratic process. It is still possible, then, to feel superior to the contestants and

simultaneously be carried away by the fantasy the shows represent. A viewer can gain the

knowledge necessary to build a successful relationship, so that someday she may be at the

receiving end of her own fantasy proposal. And a viewer ambivalent about the nature of being in

a relationship, similarly, can see that heartbreak is not entirely random, but rather something that

happens to those who do not know how to navigate the dating world. Being able to laugh at

those who get it wrong indicates that one acknowledges there is a “right” way, and relationship

reality shows therefore feed into the audience’s fantasies of romantic mastery. Visible

heartbreak may be the only marker of “the real” on these shows, but it is through pleasure in

others’ pain that viewers’ romantic fantasies take flight.

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Chapter 5: Notoriety, Scandal, and Why We Love to Hate Celebrities

If the continued success of American Idol is any indication, millions of individuals love to

participate in other people’s success stories. American Idol’s intensive talent search, with

would-be pop stars hoping to survive a panel of judges and votes by the American public to win

a recording deal, has been a ratings and promotional phenomenon for the Fox network for seven

seasons, and a sales phenomenon for management company 19 Entertainment, which produces

the albums and manages the careers of Idol winners and runners-up. Based on the UK’s Pop

Idol, which ran for two seasons on ITV in 2001 and 2003, American Idol premiered in June 2002

and was the highest rated program of that summer. Its winner, Kelly Clarkson, released her first

single, “A Moment Like This,” in September 2002 and proceeded to break Billboard records,

jumping from number 52 on the Billboard Hot 100 to number one in one week. Each successive

winner, as well as each second-place finalist, has also had at least one number one single on the

Billboard charts, and these individual recording success stories are only supplanted by the

success of DVDs, compilation albums, tours, and group singles from each series. American

Idol’s second season, which premiered in January of 2003, remains the most successful summer-

to-regular-season transplant series in television history. Even in 2007, its sixth season, it

remained the top rated primetime television series in the United States, with Tuesday nights’

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performance shows and Wednesdays’ results shows averaging 30 million viewers, and 36.4

million Americans tuning in for the May 24 finale.206

A large number of Americans are clearly fascinated with the American Idol phenomenon,

willing not only to watch the show and buy its merchandise, but also to have an active role in the

outcome by casting votes for their favorite contestant, thereby choosing who they want to be a

celebrity. And many viewers take this responsibility very seriously. A 2006 survey of 1,045

Americans by Washington D.C.-based Pursuant Research, Inc. found that although only 22% of

respondents had voted for an American Idol contestant in the fifth season, 35% of all respondents

indicated that an American Idol vote “counts” as much or more as a vote in a Presidential

election.207 While the potential meanings of the word “count” are myriad (whether respondents

feel that their vote for an American Idol contestant matters more than a vote for President, or,

even more cynically, that Idol’s vote-counting practices are less dubious than those of

Presidential elections, is unclear), a significant portion of the viewing audience believes in Idol’s

democracy to the same extent as, if not more than, America’s. Indeed, Idol makes its ties to the

democratic process explicit. On the fifth season finale, host Ryan Seacrest announced that the

two finalists received 63.4 million votes—which he stated is “more than any President in the

history of our country has ever received.”208 During the May 22, 2003 American Idol 2 finale,

where, according to Seacrest, Ruben Studdard beat Clay Aiken by a mere 1,335 votes, the host

206 “TV Ratings: 2006-2007 Season,” zap2it.com, August 12, 2007, <http://tv.zap2it.com/tveditorial/tve_main/1,1002,272|||season,00.html> (accessed August 12, 2007), Rick Kissel, “‘Idol’ Finale Draws 36 million,’” Variety.com, May 25, 2006 <http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117944137?cs=1&s=h&p=0> (accessed August 12, 2007). 207 Pursuant Research Based Solutions, Inc., “American Idol Survey,” May 2, 2006, <http://www.pursuantresearch.com/Pursuant_American_Idol_Final_Report_Results.pdf> (accessed May 20, 2006). 208 Note that viewers may vote for a contestant multiple times during the four-hour period in which phone lines are open, and that while no Presidential winner may have received 63 million votes, that says nothing about the total number of Americans who vote in a given election.

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equated the singers’ close race to the 2000 presidential election when he announced that Ruben

“won” Alabama and Florida and Clay, Ohio and North Carolina. While the show’s broad

narrative is about individual talent breeding success, triumph on Idol, as the show itself makes

clear, is a microcosm of American democracy, based on the same popular foundation. Whether

or not one likes fifth season winner Taylor Hicks, he was the public’s choice, which, at least on

the show’s terms, means he is America’s next deserving pop star.209

Democratic narratives about the meaning of celebrity existed long before American Idol.

Joshua Gamson describes the studio system narratives of stardom in the 1930s as positing the

public “as an entity that ‘owned’ both space and the public figures inhabiting it.” The cult of

personality of this era—“normal” individuals “just like you” who rose to the top because of their

hard work and talent—was deemed to be under the control of the public, at least in studio

narratives, which attempted to hide the studio and publicists’ own roles in manufacturing

celebrities. 210 Talent and elbow grease, the stories went, brought deserving individuals to

popular attention, but it was only the public whose interest could grant someone star status. Joan

Crawford, née Lucille LeSueur, famously worked her way from chorus girl to Hollywood before

Photoplay featured her in a contest to “name the next star.” Shortly after Photoplay readers

renamed her, Crawford’s career took off, but only after years of effort on her part and a public,

democratic rechristening. According to Gamson, film stars belonged to and were controlled by

everyone; the celebrity was, in a sense, a public servant, but not that distant from the public

209 There are, of course, exceptions. While second-season winner Ruben Studdard’s first album, “Soulful,” debuted at number one on the Billboard Top 200 albums chart, it sold 200,000 fewer copies than runner-up Clay Aiken’s contemporaneous debut “Measure of a Man.” Even though Aiken placed second, however, the viewing audience voted him into the finals and subsequently bought his recordings, still taking ownership for his stardom. Chris Nelson, “Who Becomes an Idol Most?” The New York Times, December 18, 2003. 210 Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 33-35.

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itself.211 Seventy years later, the popularity of American Idol seems to demonstrate Americans’

desire to still believe in this discourse of the meaning of fame. There is a distinct pleasure in

watching talented individuals work hard to rise from obscurity to stardom, especially when it

serves as a confirmation that their success is directly the result of our whims.

While Richard Dyer has discussed the conflict between competing characterizations of

“stars-as-ordinary” and “stars-as-special,”212 another inflection of the cult of personality—that of

“star quality”—is not necessarily contradictory to the myth of individual success as the result of

personal endeavor and competition. Lana Turner, the story goes, was discovered while having

an after-school soda at Schwab’s Drugstore, and her beauty and screen presence seemed to

outweigh her lack of effort in attaining stardom. In this version of the celebrity mythos, labor

alone cannot make someone famous; rather, innate genius—the “It factor”—not hard work,

causes an individual’s star to rise.213 This idea, as studio publicity suggests, is that star quality,

albeit difficult to define—whether as charisma, personality, allure, or at its most basic and

ineffable, “It”—is innate within an individual. Gamson cites publicity that tells us Ruby Keeler

was “born with dancing feet” and Greta Garbo always had “a certain force within her,”214

intrinsic qualities that apparently foreshadowed their eventual fame. While Garbo and Keeler

were “of the public,” it was each woman’s innate charisma that allowed her to take on her

“public servant” role. In this narrative, if one born with “It” gets a lucky break and is

discovered, she will almost certainly become a star, since she already has what it takes to gain

public acceptance.

211 Ibid., 34. 212 Richard Dyer, Stars: New Edition (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 43. 213 David Lusted, “The Glut of the Personality,” in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Stardom: Industry of Desire (London: Routledge, 1991), 251-2. 214 Gamson, 32.

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As American Idol demonstrates, neither inflection of the celebrity mythology has truly

gone away, despite a public increasingly aware of the ways the media shapes and creates

celebrities. American Idol does have another side to it, however, a second narrative that

simultaneously undermines and feeds the feel-good “America discovers an unknown talent who

makes it big” storyline. The show is about failure just as much as it is about success. From the

semi-final rounds on, at least one contestant is eliminated each week, their dreams of stardom

presumably crushed. What is more, as the initial episodes showing the open-call auditions in

cities across the United States prove, most people who want to become an Idol are not even

talented. These initial episodes in particular highlight stardom’s antithesis—those individuals

who believe they deserve recognition but have nothing to offer in return. During the auditions,

the talentless often receive more screen time and attention than the future finalists who will

become the focus of the narrative, showing that their failures and consequent humiliation by the

judges, particularly the caustic Simon Cowell, are just as entertaining as the eventual success

story that will emerge.

Contrast between the talented finalists and less-talented auditioners is, in a sense,

necessary to prove that the likes of Ruben Studdard and Taylor Hicks—both humble yet

confident of their talents—are indeed worthy of our attention. The fifth season finale featured a

running gag called “The Golden Idol Awards,” where Seacrest “honored” some of the worst and

most memorable early-round rejectees. One such “winner,” the dorky Michael Sandecki,

received the “best impersonation” award for his resemblance to Clay Aiken. A clip showed us

Sandecki’s horrible audition, where he proclaimed himself to be “the next Clay Aiken” and

blamed his poor singing on a need to use the bathroom. After this reminder of his initial

humiliation, Sandecki began to sing an off-key version of Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go

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Down on Me,” and the actual Aiken appeared behind him on the stage of the Kodak Theater.

The extremely excited Sandecki’s microphone was shut off, and Ryan Seacrest pulled up a chair

and told him to sit down while Aiken finished the song. Such a direct comparison between an

untalented Clay Aiken impersonator and the real Clay Aiken bolsters the reading of Aiken as a

genuinely talented singer deserving of both his success and the audience’s attention. At the same

time, though, this means of proving Aiken worthy of stardom relies upon the humiliation of his

untalented lookalike who, like many Idol auditioners, does not seem to comprehend his own lack

of talent. Sandecki auditioned for the show, but with nothing to back up his desire for fame and

nothing to offer an audience in exchange for their attention—except for his own, unwitting

humiliation. The schadenfreude, then, of enjoying the role of inept wannabe that Idol had him

play is, in a way, a just retaliation for foisting his unfounded dreams of stardom onto the

American public. While singing a nationally televised duet with Clay Aiken clearly made

Sandecki ecstatic, it was also a form of comeuppance, whether he realized it or not—a way to

extract pleasure from his delusion while simultaneously proving that he was not what he claimed

to be.

Asking for fame by auditioning for American Idol is a crapshoot. In a narrative where

the audience has the power to select their own celebrities based, theoretically, on each

contender’s innate talents, positive fame is difficult to achieve—requiring talent, charisma, and

the popular vote—but promises a large payoff. Negative fame, on the other hand, requires

nothing more than delusion, albeit on a grand scale, and, with the exception of third-season

auditioner-turned-pop-star William Hung, only offers humiliation in return.

In contemporary popular culture, there are a number of competing narratives about the

nature of fame and the relationship between celebrities and their audiences. At one level, fame is

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a desired commodity, and those who have achieved it are admired and envied. At the same time,

however, there is a fascination with “negative” fame, witnessed not only in the public’s

enjoyment of some fame-seekers’ exhibited lack of talent but also in the foibles and scandalous

behavior of those already in the public eye. The love of celebrity and the love of celebrity failure

are not mutually exclusive by any means, and they often coexist within the same text or even in

readings of the same public figure. But if the celebrity mythos involves elevation, talent, hard

work, and “star quality,” where does the desire to see the talented and revered returned to earth

come from? In this chapter, I will examine this dual fascination with fame and failure. While

both the lure of celebrity and discussion of its dangers have driven star discourse for much of the

past century, they seem to be intertwined much more tightly in the contemporary moment.

Celebrity texts have become increasingly cruel in the past decade, more so than ever before,

indicating a wariness of stardom in general. At the same time, there is a much greater public

acknowledgment of the various mechanisms that make the famous famous, and the audience’s

celebrity savviness contributes to its malaise. Even the casual celebrity watcher now

acknowledges that all star images are manufactured. Key pleasures no longer stem from

uncovering a star’s “authentic” persona but rather in the process of watching celebrities maintain

their public faces. That the love of fame and the love of humiliation coexist so naturally speaks

to the audience’s tenuous understanding of celebrities, celebrity texts, and their own relationship

to celebrity discourse.

Notoriety vs. Scandal

If American Idol makes explicit democratic and talent-based celebrity narratives, what other

celebrity discourses does its concomitant dependence on narratives of failure, embarrassment,

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and schadenfreude speak to? In the celebrity realm outside of reality television, there are

certainly individuals who are famous yet untalented. The exploits of Paris Hilton and other

socialites like Nicole Richie and Brandon Davis have filled tabloids for years, yet, apart from

Hilton’s poorly received role in 2005’s House of Wax and 2006 reggae-pop album, none have

produced anything of recognizable artistic merit or demonstrated any concrete form of talent,

except for a consistent ability to fill tabloids. They appear to embody what Daniel Boorstin

notoriously described as the modern celebrity: someone who is “known for his well-knownness;”

they are famous because the public reads about them, not because of any exceptional

achievements. 215 In Celebrity, Chris Rojek differentiates between three types of famous people.

Ascribed celebrities are those individuals, like royalty, born into fame. Achieved celebrities are

the talented individuals who earn their fame. Finally, attributed celebrities are those who are

given fame through “cultural intermediaries,” namely publicists and the media—they are, as

Tom Mole has described reality television celebrities, not even famous for being famous, but

“famous for having been made famous.”216 Some attributed celebrities, like Zsa Zsa Gabor, have

staying power and remain in the public eye for a long time; others, which Rojek terms

“celetoids,” are, like famous mistresses and mothers of octuplets, flash-in-the-pan media

events.217 While Hilton and Richie, the former a hotel heiress and the latter the daughter of

singer Lionel Richie, have a certain degree of ascribed celebrity, their fame is more a product of

the media coverage of their public foibles than their lineage. In 2003, a sex tape of Hilton and

ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon surfaced on the internet; in 2005, the contents of her personal T-

215 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, 25th Anniversary Edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 57. 216 Tom Mole, "Hypertrophic Celebrity," M/C Journal 7.5 (2004) <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/08-mole.php> (Accessed October 10, 2006). 217 Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 17-20.

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Mobile Sidekick were also leaked online. Her engagements to model Jason Shaw and shipping

heir Paris Latsis, her falling-out with best friend Richie, her frequent drunken antics and July

2007 23-day jail sentence have dominated tabloids, Page Six, and entertainment journalism for

the bulk of the twenty-first century, and these exploits inevitably frame media coverage of all her

other ventures. In February 2006, British tabloid The Sun reported that an Indian film director

wanted to cast Hilton as Mother Teresa in an upcoming biopic. Of course, this article reminded

readers of Hilton’s most famous film credit, her sex tape, One Night in Paris.218 An April 9,

2006 Los Angeles Times review of Hilton’s album criticized other reviewers who doubted it

could possibly be any good, while at the same time opening with a discussion of the sex tape and

describing the album as “a record for her to dance on banquettes to."219 Hilton is more notorious

than beloved, and her penchant for scandalous behavior weighs heavily on anything else she

does. Indeed, Hilton seems to embody the term “fame whore”—someone who will do anything

to recoup as many of her “15 minutes of fame” as possible—particularly since so much of her

media promiscuity stems from some form of sexual promiscuity. However, despite her overt

media manufacture and lack of artistic talent, Americans continue to crave news of her exploits.

As of June 2, 2006, Paris Hilton had been one of the top twenty overall most searched-for terms

on Yahoo.com for 54 weeks running, and a much-hyped fourth season of The Simple Life

premiered on the E! network in June 2006, with ratings quadruple those of E!’s normal prime-

time average.220 Even though Hilton’s brand of fame clashes with the stardom model American

218 Daile Pepper, “Paris as Mother Teresa?” The Sun, February 14, 2006. 219 Chris Lee, “Will Paris Burn?” The Los Angeles Times, April 9, 2006. 220 “Yahoo’s Buzz Index,” Yahoo.com, June 2, 2006. <http://buzz.yahoo.com/overall/> (Accessed June 6, 2006), “Simple Life scores for E!,” TV Week E-Edition, June 6, 2006. <http://www.tvweek.com/news.cms?newsId=10133> (Accessed June 6, 2006).

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Idol posits, the public fascination with her extreme decadence represents yet another facet of

celebrity/audience relationships: the love of gossip and scandal.

Paris Hilton seems to be scandal personified. Since she only exists through media stories

about her exploits, few of which are savory, outrageous stories are all that she can offer the

public. However, the word “scandal” implies a form of public shame, an act that, when revealed,

causes outrage and damages—or at least alters—an individual’s reputation. It seems impossible

to truly shame Hilton, and each public revelation of her wild behavior has only bolstered her

public presence, not changed it for the worse, or at all, for that matter. While there are certainly

individuals who find her behavior deplorable, an equal or greater number are fascinated by it—

and the two are not mutually exclusive by any means. Hilton may be notorious, but each

revelation about her private life merely brings her more notoriety, not scandal.

Instead, what is scandalous is a story about a public figure that calls into question his or

her previous image and meanings. Early press about Whitney Houston, for example, presented

the pop singer as a clear embodiment of both the democratic and talent-based stardom narratives.

When she burst onto the music scene in 1985, the press drew a picture of a demure young

woman who was literally born to sing—her first time in a recording studio was when she was

still in the womb, while her mother recorded a gospel album—and always possessed that elusive

star quality.221 As a July 1987 Time review of her second album described her, Whitney was “a

phenomenon waiting to happen” before her eventual (inevitable) discovery.222 Just as inevitable

as her discovery, according to these stories, was her acceptance by the public, at least once they

were given the opportunity to her sing. Whitney’s celebrity narrative worked as a combination

221 See, for example, Mary Shaughnessy, “Whitney Houston’s a Chip off the Old Pop Diva,” People Weekly, December 9, 1985; Bud Scoppa, “The Long Road to Overnight Stardom,” Billboard Inside Tracks, December 1986; Richard Corliss, “The Prom Queen of Soul,” Time, July 13, 1987. 222 Richard Corliss, “The Prom Queen of Soul,” Time, July 13, 1987.

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of innate skill, hard work, and democracy. She was born into talent but nevertheless needed to

work hard for exposure until the public finally received the opportunity to accept her. But,

nonetheless, there was no question that she deserved her stardom.

For over a decade, Whitney Houston lived up to the high expectations her early stardom

narrative set up for her. Between 1985 and 1988, she had a record run of seven consecutive

number one singles on the Billboard charts. 1992’s “I Will Always Love You” remains the best-

selling non-charity single of all time, and Houston’s recording success led to equally successful

acting roles in The Bodyguard (1992), Waiting to Exhale (1995), and The Preacher’s Wife

(1996). Post-millennial Whitney, however, has not fared as well. In 1992, she married R&B

singer Bobby Brown, whose career has stalled due to a litany of abuse and substance abuse

issues, and both became embroiled in tabloid rumor and scandal. Rumors of abuse had lingered

around the couple since their marriage and were finally confirmed in 2003 when Brown was

arrested for domestic battery. In 2000, the pair was arrested at a Hawaii airport when security

officers found marijuana in their luggage. Soon after, tabloid photos of an extremely skinny

Houston began to appear, at the same time as she began canceling a number of public

appearances, which led to rumors about further, harder drug abuse. In a December 2002

interview for Primetime Live, Diane Sawyer asked her about rumors that Houston was smoking

crack. Houston’s infamous reply was: “Crack is cheap. I make too much for me to ever smoke

crack. Let us get that straight, okay? We don’t do crack. We don't do that. Crack is whack."

While crack may have been too “cheap” for her, she did tell Sawyer she used marijuana and

cocaine, which she apparently kept using, as her rehab stints in 2004 and 2005 indicate.

In 2005, the reality show Being Bobby Brown premiered on Bravo and painted a less than

flattering portrait of Whitney and Bobby, from Brown’s proud story about loosening his wife’s

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bowels with his hands to Houston’s semi-coherent ramblings and less-than-demure catchphrase,

“Hell to the no.” Tina Brown, Houston’s sister-in-law, told the National Enquirer in 2006 that

Houston had been smoking crack for years, including during the filming of the reality show, and

that she "spends her days locked in her bedroom amid piles of garbage, smoking crack, using sex

toys to satisfy herself and ignoring personal hygiene."223 Whether or not these allegations are

true, they still work to paint a portrait diametrically opposed to that of the reserved, church-going

girl who dominated pop music for a decade; nor would they be remotely credible without the

previous litany of unsavory incidents in Houston’s life. Whitney Houston has not appeared in a

film since The Preacher’s Wife and has not released an album since 2003’s One Wish: The

Holiday Album, featuring covers of Christmas songs—her first album ever that did not go gold.

And while she did divorce Brown in 2006, her career remains stalled a year later. Whether

public knowledge of her private life has impeded her record sales, or her personal problems have

hurt Houston’s productivity is impossible to tell. What is clear, however, is that after years of

scandals, Whitney Houston’s career has taken a turn for the worse. Indeed, the reality show—an

attempt to capitalize on the perverse public interest in their relationship—appeared to be a last-

ditch attempt for Houston and Brown to regain their former spotlight; although they could no

longer even be notorious, the show offered them an opportunity to control their own scandal.

The public Whitney Houston of 2006 is a very different woman than that of twenty years

earlier. While the singing voice and inherent talent that made her a star in the first place may be

intact, both have become buried under the image of the New Whitney, who abuses drugs, is

abused by her husband, and consistently exhibits erratic public behavior. She may or may not

smoke crack, but the truth is almost inconsequential in terms of what Whitney Houston means in

223 Michelle Caruso, “Houston, You Got a Problem…Crack!” New York Daily News, March 29, 2006.

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2006. The former pop darling is still a celebrity, but her contemporary fame stems more from

tabloid exposés and memories of what once was than from her musical abilities. Where Paris

Hilton’s debauchery has always defined her in the public eye and serves as the basis of her

entertainment career, Whitney’s troubles have redefined her and consequently altered her career

for the worse. If Paris Hilton exemplifies notoriety, Whitney Houston is scandal.

As long as there have been stars, there have been scandals, some more spectacular than

others. In 1920, silent comedy star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was arrested for manslaughter

when starlet Virginia Rappe died of a ruptured bladder during a party in his hotel room. Rumors

flew that Arbuckle raped her, perhaps with a bottle, and the pressure of his excess weight had

caused her internal injuries. This and several other contemporaneous scandals, including the

mysterious murder of director William Desmond Taylor, led to a large public outcry and

industry-wide reform, including the founding of the Motion Picture Production Code Association

in 1922 and the institution of morality clauses in studio players’ contracts. Although acquitted of

the crime in 1922, Arbuckle became unwelcome in Hollywood, at the behest of PCA president

Will Hays.224 He directed a number of comedy shorts under the pseudonym William Goodrich

and starred in a few shorts before his death in 1934, but Arbuckle’s post-scandal career is largely

summed up in the title of a 1931 Photoplay profile of the blackballed actor: “Just Let Me

Work.”225

The nature of Arbuckle’s offense and the scope of public outcry and retaliation were

much larger in scale than many celebrity scandals, but they exemplify the extent to which a

scandal can affect a star’s image and career, as well as the public perception of the celebrity

224 Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 204-5; James Robert Parrish, The Hollywood Book of Scandals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 16-18. 225 Tom Ellis, “Just Let Me Work,” Photoplay, March 1931.

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industry itself. The full effects of a more recent scandal, actor Mel Gibson’s July 29, 2006 arrest

for driving while intoxicated—during which he attempted to run away, claimed to “own” the city

of Malibu, called a female officer “sugar tits,” made anti-Semitic remarks to the Jewish arresting

officer, and vandalized a prison pay phone—remain to be seen. On August 1, ABC announced

that Gibson would no longer be producing a Holocaust miniseries for the network, although they

claimed it was due to the lack of a script rather than Gibson’s anti-Semitism.226 Like any

scandal-ridden star, Gibson immediately became the butt of jokes, like the anonymous vandal

who changed a letter in the official “Welcome to Malibu” sign so it read “Melibu,” and Jimmy

Kimmel Live offering free bagels and pennies to Los Angeles tourists, making “reparations” in

Gibson’s name. The question is, though, how permanent the effects will be. The true test of a

scandal is the degree to which it affects the public consciousness, as well as the duration of said

affect, which is unpredictable. While O.J. Simpson’s acting career, for example, has ended since

the 1994 murder of his ex-wife, certain individuals’ careers have remained largely unaffected by

scandal. Roman Polanski, for example, received a directing Oscar for The Pianist in 2003,

despite the fact that he has been unable to set foot on US soil since his 1978 conviction for

statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl. While the box office receipts for Eddie Murphy’s more

adult-oriented films have fallen drastically since the mid-1980s, his well-publicized 1997

encounter with a transgendered prostitute does not seem to have hurt his career in family films

like Dr. Doolittle (1998) and Shrek (2001). This does not mean there is no pleasure in reliving

said scandals—Murphy’s indiscretion, for example, was ranked #61 on a 2003 E! network

countdown of the most shocking celebrity moments of all time—but the overall implications for

the parties involved were not wholly detrimental. However, the scandals themselves will always

226 Dan Glaister, “Party’s Over for Gibson, but the Outlook’s Not So Dim,” The Guardian, August 5, 2006.

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remain a part of how the stars are defined in the public eye, and there will always be public

excitement when new scandals are uncovered.

A Growing Cruelty

In certain respects, fan magazines and celebrity publications have always focused on negative

aspects of stardom, but while scandalous behavior has always been scrutinized, all types of

celebrity behavior have increasingly found themselves under attack. Certain aspects of celebrity

reporting do seem to vary little from the golden age of Hollywood, but the inflections have

clearly changed over the years. In 1938, for example, fan magazine Modern Screen reported

that, after filming The Sisters, Bette Davis had gone on vacation in Nevada, without husband

Harmon Nelson. Divorce, the magazine reported, was imminent—backed up when, days later,

Bette released a statement that she and “Ham” were separating.227 Sixty-eight years later, Star

magazine ran an almost identical story, this time about pop star Britney Spears’s sudden

Hawaiian vacation—with her newborn son, without ne’er-do-well husband Kevin Federline.

According to the article, “The countdown to their divorce has begun.”228 Stories of love and

heartbreak, marriage and divorce, then and now, remain the most common type of celebrity

gossip. As Richard Dyer points out, love has consistently been a central theme in fan magazines

and other celebrity reporting, whether it is stories about new couplings or, even more commonly,

about romantic failures and problems.229 And, according to Dyer, a common theme in such

articles in early Hollywood fan magazines is the unique problems Hollywood marriages present.

227 George Benjamin, “That Marital Vacation,” in Martin Levin (ed.), Hollywood and the Great Fan Magazines (New York: Arbor House, 1970), 110-112. 228 Evan Matthew, Suzy McCoppin, Jeff Samuels, Maxine Page, Shahrier Rahmanzadeh, and Ilyssa Panitz, “Britney: Ready to Divorce?” Star, March 13, 2006, 42-45. 229 Richard Dyer, Stars: New Edition (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 45-46.

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Pieces like “The High Price of Screen Lovemaking,” published in Photoplay in 1933, which

describes the difficulties of remaining faithful to a spouse at home when one’s job involves love

scenes, or “How to Stay Married to a Movie Star” (Photoplay, 1927) instruct readers on what

proper coupling should look like, while at the same time blaming Hollywood for causing so

much romantic failure.230 While heterosexual coupling remains unproblematic in and of itself,

there is a deep cynicism in these articles about the effects of celebrity on romantic relationships.

The difference between coverage of Davis’s and Spears’s marriage troubles is thus not

necessarily a question of a more cynical present than past, for skepticism about the nature of

celebrity marriage has been present in star discourse since Hollywood’s golden age. However,

the type of cynicism, its target, and its tone have all changed in the past 70 years. While, with

Davis’s divorce, the main question was why it happened, stories about Britney Spears and Kevin

Federline’s relationship focused on why they were still together. In part, this difference could

hinge on the fact that divorce itself is no longer the taboo it once was in America, where the 2005

divorce rate was nearly half the marriage rate,231 and ending an unhappy marriage has become a

more culturally accepted option. However, the type of coverage Britney and Kevin’s marriage

inspired seems to hint at larger changes in the nature of celebrity reporting and the ways readers

understand the celebrity industry. While Modern Screen felt the need to spell out the fact that

one of the issues in Davis’s marriage was likely her greater ambition and success relative to her

husband’s, Star assumes readers are already aware of a similar discrepancy between Spears and

Federline. Spears was a platinum-selling recording artist when she married Federline, an

unknown ex-backup dancer for her tour’s opening act. While he released two singles during

230 Ibid., 45-46. 231 “Births, Marriages, Divorces, and Deaths: Provisional Data for 2005,” National Vital Statistics Reports 54, no. 20 (2006), 1.

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their three-year marriage, both were met with ridicule, and he clearly brought less to the table,

both financially and creatively, than Spears did. Entertainment Weekly, for example, called his

2006 song “PopoZão” a “soul-snuffing, repetitive booty-shaker” that was, “believe it or not,

worse than expected.”232 Federline was clearly ambitious, but his questionable talent and lack of

success made him appear even more loathsome. He read not just as a gold digger, out for

Spears’s money, but also a “fame” digger, hoping to capitalize on her success. In Star’s article

on Britney’s Hawaiian vacation, an unnamed “family friend” claimed it was “a joke” that

Federline could make it on his own and expressed relief that Spears signed a prenuptial

agreement.233 While the “friend” may or may not have existed, the sentiment likely shocked few

readers.234

This was a troubled marriage cast as trash, not tragedy, and the cynicism here lay less in

the difficulty of celebrity marriage than in its transparency. Britney and Kevin split up in

November 2007, but long before the publicly announced separation, websites like

DivorceKevin.com sponsored pools where one could bet on the date the seemingly inevitable

separation announcement will take place, and, between March 25 and June 11, 2006, a blog on

Us Weekly’s website kept a running tab on the amount of time it had been since the two were

photographed together—a total of 78 days and 15 hours between common public appearances.235

Such sites speak to a public not only aware of the continuing status of this unbalanced marriage,

but also the mechanisms in place to keep it in the public eye. The Us Weekly countdown would

232 “Net Gains,” Entertainment Weekly, January 20, 2006, 69. 233 Benjamin, 112; Matthew, McCoppin, Samuels, Page, Rahmanzadeh, and Panitz, 45. 234 Indeed, it took Spears’s very public, extreme 2007 post-divorce meltdown—including clubbing with Paris Hilton, shaving her head, attacking paparazzi with an umbrella, and a trip to rehab—to make Federline look like “the good guy.” 235 “Elapsed Time Since Britney & K-Fed Were Last Photographed Together,” usweekly.com, June 20, 2006, <http://www.usmagazine.com/blog/2006/06/05/elapsed-time-since-britney-k-fed-were-last-seen-together/> (Accessed June 20, 2006).

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mean little to an audience unfamiliar with the knowledge that, due to the omnipresence of

paparazzi, if the couple has not been seen together in public, they likely have not been together.

The pleasure in tracking media coverage of Britney and Kevin’s marriage, then, involved power

in knowing not only that something is awry between the two, but also that, try as they might,

they are unable to hide it. Such power stems from a sense of “insider knowledge,” the public’s

feeling that they are more cognizant of celebrity protocol than the celebrities themselves, yet

another symptom of the growing transparency of the celebrity industry.

At the same time, however, there is a degree of hostility involved in both the media’s

reporting of and the fans’ reading about the couple that borders on personal attacks. The March

13, 2006 cover of Star magazine, for example, featured the headline, “How Kevin Ruined Brit!,”

an exclamation backed up by two photos of Britney: one from 2000, pre-Kevin, where she wears

a skimpy outfit highlighting her toned body, and one from 2006, where, “alone and unloved,”

she wears a pair of shorts that highlight her comparatively much larger belly and thighs.236

While in a sense, the cover is sympathetic to Britney—for it is Kevin who ruined her—there is

nonetheless a malice here that did not exist in the fan magazines of the golden age of Hollywood,

or even celebrity-focused American tabloids from two decades ago. The photos exist just as

much, if not more, to highlight the relative grotesqueness of Britney’s new body than to

comment on the status of her marriage. There is an element of pity, to be sure, but an equal

focus on her humiliation. Tabloid coverage of Britney’s post-divorce meltdown in 2007 grew

even less sympathetic and more accusatory, particularly when it came to the two children she had

with Federline. From matching Us Weekly and Life & Style cover stories about Britney’s poor-

child rearing—where Us Weekly’s cover proclaimed “Britney’s Boys: Help!” and Life & Style’s,

236 Star magazine, March 13, 2006.

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“Britney’s Babies: Help Us!”—to an August 2007 Star cover story (“Britney to Her Kids: You

Were Both Mistakes”), the tabloids began to enumerate the myriad ways Spears was a bad

mother. 237 Her infractions included feeding the infants soda and Doritos, constantly switching

nannies, and training 22-month-old Sean Preston to fetch her cigarettes, or “Mommy’s

lollipops.”238 Ironically, this turn toward outright hostility painted Federline as the stable

member of the couple, overwriting the previous years’ anti-K-Fed dialogue.

While classic Hollywood fan magazines tended to focus on the positive aspects of stars’

fame—and the negatives were usually treated with sympathy—tabloids have long reveled in

celebrity scandals. From 1952 to 1958, Confidential captured stars with hidden cameras and ran

numerous exploitive stories about the seedy lives of the rich and famous, until publisher Robert

Harrison shut down production because of the large number of libel suits filed against the

magazine. Overall, though, according to former National Enquirer editor Bill Sloan, celebrity

journalism in the pre-Watergate years was marked by “an unwritten policy of nonaggression and

nonintrusion” until the public’s negative reaction to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s post-JFK life

spawned a new form of tabloid journalism, one much more focused on celebrity scandal than it

had ever been before.239 There has always been a degree of personal backlash in the reporting of

actual scandals, but in recent years, the tabloids seem to have taken on more elements of malice

all aspects of star reporting—deriding stars for everyday actions rather than spectacular screw-

ups. In 1988, Jack Levin, Amita Mody-Desbarau, and Arnold Arluke, looking at four major

supermarket tabloids, found that 98% of celebrity stories focused on minor or mundane aspects

237 Us Weekly, August 13, 2007; Life & Style, August 13, 2007; Star magazine, August 15, 2007. 238 Kevin O’Leary, “What If This Were Your Mom?” Us Weekly, August 13, 2007; “Britney: Inside Her Babies’ Tragic World,” Life & Style, August 13, 2007. 239 Bill Sloan, “I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby!”: A Colorful History of Tabloids and Their Cultural Impact (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2001), 96-101.

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of stars’ lives, and the vast majority had a positive spin.240 S. Elizabeth Bird’s 1992 sample of

the same four publications revealed similar results, where stories about stars’ weight gain and

family troubles stressed the positive in an attempt to “make the stars human.”241

Many contemporary tabloid stories indeed still remain fairly close to this humanizing

model. A number of papers have columns that illustrate how celebrities can be down-to-earth.

In Touch, for example, has a regular column called “Stars Are Real, Too!,” where, as in the

August 7, 2006 issue, one can see pictures of Kate Beckinsale posing for a driver’s license photo

at the DMV and Nicole Richie leaving a pet store.242 The February 6, 2006 issue of Us Weekly

contained that publication’s similar feature, “Stars—They’re Just Like Us,” with pictures of,

among other things, Julia Roberts tipping a supermarket bag boy and Justin Timberlake exiting a

porta-potty at a golf tournament.243 The February 13, 2006 issue of OK! featured separate

interviews with Angelina Jolie, Sarah Ferguson, and Reba actress Melissa Peterman, all of which

focused on the beauty of motherhood and shied away from various indiscretions the actresses

may have been part of, like Fergie’s tumultuous marriage to Prince Andrew and the mysterious,

potentially adulterous beginnings of Jolie’s relationship with Brad Pitt.244 Such stories play upon

Dyer’s ordinary/extraordinary binary, although the end result can cut both ways. While the “just

like us” photo spread and OK! articles have a populist strain, seeing a star being “ordinary” can

also bring him down a notch. The National Enquirer seemed to blur this boundary between

240 Jack Levin, Amita Mody-Desbarau, and Arnold Arluke, “The Gossip Tabloid as an Agent of Social Control,” Journalism Quarterly 65, no. 2 (1988), 516. 241 S. Elizabeth Bird, For Enquiring Minds: A Cultural Study of Supermarket Tabloids (Knoxville, U of Tennessee Press, 1992), 47. 242 “Stars Are Real, Too!,” In Touch, August 7, 2006, 82-83. 243 Carolyn E. Davis, “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!,” Us Weekly, February 6, 2006, 24-25. 244 Rob Chilton, “The Art of Living Well,” OK!, February 13, 2006, 38-39; Rob Chilton, “‘I Have a Lot of Love to Give,’” OK!, February 13, 2006, 40-43; Maria Neuman, “Melissa Peterman,” OK!, February 13, 2006, 60-63.

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humanization and cruelty in its March 20, 2006 cover story about extreme celebrity flaws. Much

like Star’s photo of “ruined” Britney Spears, this six-page photo spread featured pictures of stars

looking their worst—including close-ups of a bald patch on Christina Applegate’s head, a booger

in Halle Berry’s nose, Katie Holmes’s mouth covered with cold sores, and Keanu Reeves

vomiting on the street.245 While in a way such articles humanize celebrities by showing how

they are not perfect, there is an element of cruelty in the mode of humanization, for the photo

spread’s point seems to be not that stars are “just like us” but that, despite the glamour we expect

from them, they can nonetheless be “more grotesque than us.”

While much less shocking or scandalous than the O.J. Simpson murder trial or Whitney

Houston’s drug and abuse problems, Britney Spears’s “ruin” has been cast an even less

humanizing light. Her Maui getaway was, as the Star article described, in the “$12,000 a night,

three-bedroom Presidential Suite at the Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea,” which most

tabloid readers would likely not be able to afford.246 Her purported emotional suffering may

draw empathy, but the fact that she can relax with a free bottle of hotel champagne in her three-

bedroom hotel suite while getting an 80-minute massage likely makes her less sympathetic to

someone who may have experienced a similar situation without the same financial resources and

ability to escape. The flip side of Spears’s economic power, her “country” roots, has set her up

for a different type of distancing method. A 2005 Us Weekly photo spread on Spears, for

example, which showed her emptying ashtrays and eating Cheetos, said she was “trashtastic.”247

Her two 2006 visits from Child Protective Services—one for driving away from paparazzi with

infant son Sean Preston unsecured on her lap; one for a fall Sean had from his high chair—have

245 “Extreme Celebrity Flaws,” The National Enquirer, March 20, 2006, 29-34. 246 Matthew, McCoppin, Samuels, Page, Rahmanzadeh, and Panitz, 42-45. 247 David Carr, “Of Tabloids, Mega-Fame And Free P.R.,” The New York Times, December 26, 2005.

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not helped her lose the “trashy” label. While her behavior may seem coarse, particularly

considering her wealth and relative power, this is not necessarily the same type of populism and

democracy Gamson discusses in relation to classical Hollywood stardom. Spears may be “of the

people,” and her hard work may have made her a star, but it is hard to say that she is acting as a

public servant. Articles that focus on her wealth, supposed trashiness, bad parenting, or all three

set her apart from the average reader. On the one hand, she is a wealthy celebrity; on the other,

she does not act like a wealthy celebrity should—and, in fact, acts in a less refined, and more

potentially damaging, way than many not-wealthy not-celebrities. She is not “just like us,” but

rather less polished than us—and has more money, to boot. While the populism in Gamson was

about normal individuals rising above their roots to become an illustrious representation of what

normal individuals can be, Spears does not appear to be representing anybody, at least not well.

If she is “of the people,” she’s not doing them much justice. What could work to humanize her

instead distances her further from her audience. At the same time, her inability to act like a

celebrity should—whether by wearing underwear in public or hiring the competent nanny she

should be able to afford—reads as a major failure on her part. Instead of populist, her “country”

roots so clearly showing through comes off as sad, particularly since the celebrity audience

knows the codes of stardom much more than she appears to.

This distancing approach applies just as much to more mundane celebrity stories. The

March 6, 2006 issue of Star included that magazine’s regular feature “Stars: Are They Normal or

Not,” which affixes a “normal” or “not” label to a celebrity photo. While similar to the

humanizing “just like us” columns in Us Weekly and In Touch, Star’s column simultaneously

points out the bizarre behavior celebrities sometimes exhibit, which often confounds the

normal/abnormal boundaries. Here, for example, Kelly Clarkson is declared “normal” for

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touching up her lipstick at the Grammy Awards, while Bill Murray is “not” for wearing a sunhat

while golfing.248 The designations are somewhat arbitrary, since all readers could ostensibly

protect themselves from the sun, but attending the Grammys in the first place is an unlikely event

for most “normal” people. The feature does indeed humanize some stars, but at the same time,

the column reads as if “not normal” is the default, and “normal” is a surprising exception to the

rule. In the May 8, 2006 column, for example, it seems more shocking to see the “normal”

Naomi Watts carrying bulk twelve-packs of toilet paper and paper towels in a supermarket

parking lot than it is to see the “not” Heidi Klum carrying a giant stuffed animal, ostensibly for

her daughter, out of Barney’s.249 The latter, a high-end shopping spree, is almost expected of a

wealthy star; the former, while “normal” for readers is abnormal for what is expected of a

celebrity, because it definitively places Watts in the real world of tabloid readers—she is not

only grocery shopping but buying in bulk. Putting readers’ normal behavior (grocery shopping

or eating in public, for example) side-by-side with what is presumed to be normal celebrity

behavior (frivolous shopping) may show that there is a continuum to the ordinariness of stars’

lives. However, the article’s basic question, “normal or not,” implies that the very possibility of

celebrity normalcy is up for debate. While some photos do therefore show stars partaking in

“normal” activities, the assumption seems to be that most do not do these things on a regular

basis, and that most celebrities are, likely, not “normal.”

Another regular Star feature is the column “Knifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” where

plastic surgeons examine side-by-side photos of a celebrity to determine whether or not he or she

has had any recent cosmetic procedures. In the May 8, 2006 issue, for example, a surgeon

concluded that Bo Derek likely has had a lip augmentation and Botox injections, after comparing

248 “Stars: Are They Normal or Not,” Star, March 6, 2006, 34-5. 249 “Stars: Are They Normal or Not,” Star, May 28, 2006, 34-5.

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a picture from 2005 with one from 2006.250 The column asks readers, much like the surgeon, to

deconstruct the familiar celebrity face, to see what is real and what is manufactured. The

assumption is that, if there is a noticeable change, it must be an unnatural one. While not

blatantly cruel, the “Knifestyles” column is not kind, either. It invites a type of scrutiny where

the celebrity is almost literally dehumanized, for the face becomes a type of puzzle or “what is

wrong with this picture” game instead of a human representation. This type of search for the

unnatural implies the audience has some understanding about the nature of celebrity

manufacture—or at least that, in fact, there is some degree of unnaturalness within stars’

representations. The cynicism extends beyond the celebrity face in question to stardom as a

whole, and serves as another reminder that stars may not be “normal.”

This type of cynical celebrity/audience detachment is not unique to tabloids. Indeed, a

new spate of websites and television shows have recently sprung up that see celebrities with a

less than kind eye, focusing less on positive stories about their personal lives and more on their

oddities and public shortcomings. Tabloid-style celebrity journalism has, in recent years,

become its own niche market online and on TV. GoFugYourself.com mocks celebrity fashion

mistakes; the Defamer website features industry gossip and reports of public star sightings with a

cynical, bitter twist; TMZ.com engages in guerilla celebrity journalism by planting its own video

cameras at celebrity hangouts to capture some of their very worst moments; and the tongue-in-

cheek, often cruel blog by Mario Lavandeira, a.k.a. “Perez Hilton,” regularly analyzes stars’

foibles and personal ambiguities. On television, syndicated veterans Entertainment Tonight,

Access Hollywood, and Extra, much like they have for the past decade, tend to focus on

promotional materials and feel-good celebrity plugs, remaining true to an older model of

250 “Knifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” Star, May 28, 2006, 36.

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entertainment journalism. Newer shows, however, like VH1’s Best Week Ever and E!’s The

Soup, weekly entertainment news roundups, make fun of contemporary popular culture, from

talk shows and reality TV to celebrities and politicians, in a “snarky” way. VH1 and E! also both

fill programming hours with various celebrity-related countdowns and specials, many of which

show stars in a less than positive light. E!’s 2004 countdown, 101 Most Sensational Crimes of

Fashion, reminded its audience of times when stars have looked their worst. VH1’s 2005 special

Celebrity Weirdness Explained, informed viewers of such celebrity oddities as Sopranos star

James Gandolfini’s habit of photographing women from behind and R. Kelly’s living in a jungle

he built inside his Chicago studio. E!’s 2005 “Gone Bad” series, which included the installments

Good Girls Gone Bad and Child Stars Gone Bad, reminisced about various celebrities’ troubles

with the law, as did VH1’s 2005 countdown, The 40 Most Shocking Celebrity Mugshots. In

addition to these specials, VH1 has had a continually rotating block of shows called

“Celebreality” since 2004, including Celebrity Fit Club, which chronicles overweight stars’ (or,

more likely, B-listers’ or former stars’) attempts to lose weight; The Surreal Life, where a similar

group of B-listers, albeit of all shapes and sizes, live together Real World-style; and But Can

They Sing?, where a group of famous people not known for their vocal abilities competed in a

singing contest and showed why they were not known for their vocal abilities. The precursor to

a number of these shows may be MTV’s Punk’d, which premiered in 2003, where Ashton

Kutcher played occasionally very cruel pranks on fellow celebrities—such as on the 2003

premiere, where he convinced Justin Timberlake that his house and all his possessions had been

repossessed. And watching stars humiliate themselves is by no means limited to cable. Fox’s

2002 special Celebrity Boxing successfully traded on viewers’ desire to see former Partridge

Family member Danny Bonaduce beat up ex-Brady Bunch son Barry Williams. The same

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network’s 2005 pseudo-follow-up, The Great American Celebrity Spelling Bee, proved once and

for all that acting and orthography do not necessarily go hand in hand. Also in 2005, NBC had a

successful summer run with Hit Me Baby One More Time, a competition between various one-hit

wonders from the 1970s and 1980s to see, essentially, whose voices and bodies had best

withstood the ravages of time.

What all these shows and websites have in common is an implied audience—one that

enjoys viewing stars in a snarky, antipathetic manner. This is not just a love of scandal, of

loving to be shocked, but a more blatant pleasure in seeing celebrities humiliated, in both big and

small ways. And despite public outcry against invasive paparazzi, or “stalkerati,” practices,

particularly following the 1997 death of Princess Diana, there still seems to be a desire to see the

results. In their 1985 ethnographic study of fan culture, Fred and Judy Vermoral seemed

surprised at the amount of hostility fans showed towards stars, but later realized it was a

“necessary consequence” of devotion.251 The significance of and fascination with various star

scandals shows that this type of pleasure has likely existed in some form or another since the

birth of the mass media celebrity. There have definitely been earlier mediated manifestations of

the desire for celebrity humiliation, like the series of TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes specials

that aired in the 1980s, which showed television outtakes and, like Ashton Kutcher, played

pranks on TV stars. Whereas TV’s Bloopers lightheartedly showed us how Facts of Life star

Kim Fields reacted when convinced her braces were picking up Soviet radio transmissions,

however, Being Bobby Brown now lightheartedly shows us what happens when a drug-addicted

former R&B superstar returns home from prison. Instead of being humanizing like Bloopers,

which made embarrassment “cute,” these newer shows are irreverent and predatory—

251 Fred Vermoral and Judy Vermoral, Starlust: The Secret Life of Fans (London: W.H. Allen, 1985), 249.

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underscoring the fact that celebrity humiliation has apparently become its own arm of the culture

industry. The contemporary magnitude and volume of media outlets for celebrity humiliation is

unprecedented and complicates notions of both audiences’ relationships to stars and the meaning

of stardom itself.

From Reverence to Ridicule

A number of theorists have attributed an ideological function to celebrity. Chris Rojek, for

example, claims that, in contemporary secular society, celebrity has become the setting in which

religious mythologies have most clearly taken hold. For Rojek, religion “addresses the

fundamental questions of being in world.” With commercialism supplanting other forms of

religion in the Western world, however, it is celebrities who have come to best address the same

ideological questions religions once did. 252 Much like Frankfurt School theorists, Rojek explains

this elevation as a function of secular materialist culture. Devoting (faux) religious ecstasy to the

cult of celebrity allows the public to displace the meaninglessness of their everyday lives onto

the consumer culture the revered celebrity both represents and gives meaning to.253 Celebrity

may not give the same type of answers that religions do, but it does deflect thoughts of

purposelessness and allows for religious feelings of “recognition and belonging” in a society

with few other milieus for these emotions.254 Rojek draws his parallel between mythology and

celebrity ideology through narratives of ascent, which, for stars, involves elevation from the

general public based on a kind of “magic”—similar to more traditional definitions of talent—

252 Rojek, 58. 253 Ibid., 90-91. 254 Ibid., 97.

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which leads to a kind of “immortality.”255 These powers set them apart from the general public,

as models of achievement and consumption to aspire to. In a similar mythological way, stars

occasionally descend, returning to earth, a fall that is typically based on “mortification of the

body,” and can only be redeemed through a confession of said mortification, a pattern paralleled

in shamanistic mythology.256 While a religious metaphor may be apt for some dedicated

fandoms, Rojek’s parallel fails to answer a number of questions about contemporary celebrity.

While much celebrity gossip does indeed involve bodily mortification—speculation about

actresses’ eating disorders or talk about stars’ alcohol and drug problems, for example—not all

stars lose their elevated status through bodily abuse. Some, at a certain point in their careers, fail

to get work—or, like one-hit wonders with unsuccessful follow-up albums, have their work

fail—and fade from the public consciousness. Others, by choice, remove themselves quietly

from the public eye. Neither option follows Rojek’s mythological narrative of bodily desecration

and redemption, perhaps indicating that his parallel is flawed.

The larger question for which Rojek fails to account, however, is why there is a popular

fascination with narratives of failure in the first place. Stars’ ascents are based on “magic” and

“immortality,” and audience’s pleasure in learning about how the magic fades and the sublime

returns to earth seems to undermine the power of both. If celebrity has become elevated to a

level where it has attained the power and meaning once held by religion, why is there not only a

desire for, but also a pleasure in, seeing stars’ descent? Jesus Christ may have died for the

purpose of being resurrected, but the only way for a devout Christian to take pleasure in the

crucifixion is to concentrate on the eventual redemption. Good Friday is only “good” because

there would be no Easter without it. There is no evidence, however, that watching Mel Gibson’s

255 Ibid., 74-78. 256 Ibid., 80-85.

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career and public persona falter will have such a payoff—nor would redemption necessarily be

either desirable or as pleasurable as his breakdown. Perhaps the desire for failure is the public’s

rejection of the material culture that, according to Rojek, celebrities embody. If this were the

case, however, it would be difficult to reconcile pleasure in celebrity humiliation with a larger

enjoyment of celebrity culture in general. Taking pleasure in the failures of a few does not

preclude even greater pleasures in others’ success. Not everyone who reads “Go Fug Yourself”

or watches a VH1 “bad celeb moments” countdown wants to see the entire celebrity system, and

all it stands for, fail. In fact, those who seek out embarrassing stories about stars seem to have a

significant interest in celebrity culture overall. The websites, shows, and tabloids that

foreground celebrity humiliation rely upon a knowledge of those involved and their back stories

in order for a viewer or reader to comprehend the significance of the event in question. The

desire to seek out gossip can only exist when the audience is familiar with celebrity culture.

These embarrassing stories are an integral part of a larger investment, for the pleasures of

notoriety seem to feed off pleasures in other types of more positive narratives. In the same vein,

scandals are only shocking when they add a new perspective and a new narrative layer to an

individual’s biography. If there is no investment in the pre-scandal star, the scandal itself can

have little impact. If there is no investment in the star system at all, there will be little desire to

look for stories that challenge it and little pleasure to be found in them. This is not a case of

individuals looking to tear down all their idols, and, as Rojek would likely argue, wholly reject

materialism, but rather part of the process of idolatry—even (or especially) when redemption is

unlikely to occur.

Richard Dyer, like Rojek, proposes an ideological connection between stars and their

audiences, albeit with a less direct correlation between the meaning of celebrity and dominant

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ideology. While stars can be mirrors of dominant ideology, particularly of values that are under

attack in a given historical period, Dyer modifies Max Weber’s use of “charisma” to temper

stars’ meanings. For Weber, charisma is that quality whereby an individual “is set apart from

ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least superficially

exceptional qualities,” which gives him or her leadership abilities,257 similar to Rojek’s

shamanistic portrait of celebrities. Most entertainment celebrities have no official political

power, but Dyer claims that stars’ power comes not through enforcing or articulating dominant

ideology—direct leadership—but by embodying specific ideological tensions within society.

Marilyn Monroe, for example, was the sexual ambiguities of the postwar era personified—

simultaneously woman and child, hypersexual and innocent. Her persona relied upon the

inherent contradictions between these ideals, but her charisma effected a form of reconciliation

between them—she “was” ambiguity, but she was also an individual living out the tensions in a

public, glamorous (albeit eventually tragic) way. Because the individuals most invested in

celebrity culture—according to Dyer, women, adolescents, and gay men—also tend to be those

who experience the greatest conflict about their own societal roles in terms of dominant

ideology, attachment to stars can be a vicarious means of working through their own issues.258

Dyer’s model could potentially explain the appeal of star scandals, for if celebrities

represent ideological conflicts, each public transgression may allow the public to reevaluate the

issues a celebrity embodies. Initially, Britney Spears—publicly declaring herself a virgin, yet

singing provocative songs while dressed in revealing clothing—personified societal sexual

contradictions, and her ambiguity was a large part of her appeal. At a time when fears of teenage

sexuality were increasingly debated in public forums, manifested by the growth of federally

257 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Free Press, 1947), 358. 258 Dyer, 30-32.

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funded abstinence-only sex education programs in public schools, Spears’s statements about her

sexuality or lack thereof coupled with her provocative image, revealed an enigma. If American

preteens’ role model for chastity dressed like a naughty schoolgirl and sang songs like “I’m a

Slave 4 U,” how would that affect their views of sexuality? Was virginity the real issue, as

abstinence education advocated, or did a greater problem lie in sexually charged images and

music? The question was not just how “innocent” Spears was, but how to define innocence at

all.

After a marriage, two pregnancies, and Chaotic, a 2005 reality show where she boasted

about her sexual activity with then-new-boyfriend Federline, however, that ambiguity has been

deflated—innocence lost the battle—and questions about her sexual virtue no longer define her.

Spears is now met with more hostility than ever before, and this could very well have to do with

the fact that what once made her intriguing has become irrelevant to her new persona. She is

now emblematic of different contradictions, largely involving class and the nature of celebrity

itself. The way she works through these issues may be less compelling to the American public,

or the issues themselves are less relevant or relatable. Alternatively, the hostility could stem

from the fact that innocence did lose the battle for meaning, which rendered the initial enigma

Spears represented moot. She did not negotiate the contradictions but merely abandoned them,

perhaps hinting at the fact that there is no real way to reconcile purity and hypersexuality. Either

way, her more recent transgressions seem to be compelling because of the way they reinflect her

previous ideological meanings, and show the impossibility of truly reconciling the tensions about

youth and sexuality in America.

If pleasure in celebrity transgressions is potentially pleasure in the renegotiation of

specific ideological tensions, however, how does one explain the contemporary shift towards

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media outlets that highlight celebrity humiliation, or the increased desire on the part of the

audience to see it? Certainly not every celebrity featured in unflattering National Enquirer

stories is as clear an embodiment of specific cultural anxieties as Britney Spears was. Similarly,

a photograph of a drunk starlet leaving a Los Angeles nightclub, or a pop singer with sweat

stains on his shirt is not necessarily a means of working out any larger issues. It is, rather,

merely amusing to see celebrities without their usual veneer, and it induces schadenfreude at the

fact that those we are supposed to revere can exhibit worse behavior than us. While Dyer’s

explanation of celebrity may account for pleasure in scandal, it seems to have no place for

pleasure in everyday transgression and the desire to seek out humiliation.

Many theorists have linked celebrity culture with a search for authenticity, which further

complicates Dyer’s account. The celebrity/audience relationship may involve identification with

stars’ ideological tensions, but for that kind of identification to take place, there must be

something authentic with which one can relate. As Dyer clarifies in a later essay, authenticity—

a star actually being who she seems to be—is a necessary component of charisma, for this also

“guarantees the authenticity of the other particular values a star embodies.”259 Media celebrities

exist simultaneously on multiple discursive planes. Actors, for example, generally appear in the

public eye in two ways: through the roles they play and through official publicity about them.

The most elusive plane, though, is the actors’ authentic, private selves, which the public gets

glimpses of from time to time but rarely sees clearly. The desire for authenticity in celebrity

personae is a search for a larger truth, proof that the star texts the public reads and sees are not

fictional. Often, all the proof necessary is a hint of that which publicity cannot show—at least,

as long as the private correlates with the other, more public layers.

259 Richard Dyer, “A Star Is Born and the Construction of Authenticity,” in Stardom Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill, (London: Routledge, 1991), 133.

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In The Frenzy of Renown, Leo Braudy claims that the audience is less interested in seeing

the “real” star than in seeing the star’s image fixed and consistent between each discursive

layer.260 The public perception of reality television stars illustrates Braudy’s point. Despite the

fact that many viewers see reality TV texts as heavily manipulated and highly performative, they

nonetheless read an individual’s actions on a show as the result of his or her essential

personality. Consequently, they ascribe this personality extratextually, whether or not it

corresponds to the individual’s “authentic” persona. There is a desire for consistency in this case

that often outweighs other evidence. With non-reality television personalities, however, the

audience seems enjoy the process of testing an individual’s consistency. Scandal and celebrity

embarrassment invite exploration of inconsistencies, complicating stars’ images and highlighting

the differences between each discursive layer. Embarrassing celebrity moments confuse the

notion of celebrity as elevated and unlike the general public, while scandal highlights the idea

that a celebrity’s “authentic” self may contradict the overall consistency—and hence

authenticity—of his or her image. Pleasure in each may be a form of punishment for being

inconsistent, but the desire still exists to uncover new layers of an individual and test his or her

authenticity.

In Picture Personalities, Richard deCordova historicizes this desire, explaining the

development of the Hollywood star system in terms of a gradual evolution of performers’

identities, from character to actor, to picture personality, to star. Initially, faces on movie screens

were only identifiable as the specific characters they played. With the audience’s desire to have

them identified, they became “actors,” revealing not only their names but also the fact that a

reality existed beyond the filmmaking process. The next evolution was the “picture personality,”

260 Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame & Its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 589.

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when the actors’ own personalities extended beyond the film text, albeit still within terms of their

profession. Finally, there was the star, whose personal life trumped his professional life and

became the focus of discourse about him. Each successive movement was fueled by audiences’

desire to gain access to the various layers of performers’ real selves, a search for a concealed

truth behind the image.261

Star scandal, according to deCordova, becomes the ultimate evolution and the ultimate

layer of truth, for it reveals what other discourses conceal. The Fatty Arbuckle scandal, for

example, belied the cotemporaneous fan magazine portraits of stars’ stable home lives. At the

time, showing stars with their families in relatively normal, conventional situations seemed to

showcase Hollywood’s moral fortitude. Stars’ fame and money made them different from most

Americans, but their domestic lives were nonetheless natural and healthy, at least according to

studio publicity.262 Arbuckle’s infamous party, however, showed another side of the Hollywood

lifestyle that discourses of stability had hidden—namely, immorality, debauchery, and excessive

wealth. In turn, it also showed that in many cases, stories of stars’ normalcy were also likely

fiction.263 Each evolution in the development of the star system was the result of a desire to see

the next “hidden” layer of those onscreen. The Fatty Arbuckle scandal, then, revealed some of

the mechanisms behind the star system itself, specifically what official publicity can conceal,

confirming that there was another layer of reality beneath it.

Scandal is the ultimate unveiling of truth, for it underscores the inauthenticity of much

star discourse while simultaneously indicating that many things normally remain hidden.

Despite myriad media stories about stars’ daily lives, the public does not usually have

261 Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 98-101, 140-141. 262 Ibid., 104-7. 263 Ibid., 128-31.

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unmitigated access to what is truly private, and what is not seen is always potentially shocking.

And, even after eighty years of star scandals, this process of revelation continues to fascinate the

public. This in itself is somewhat surprising, for if the star scandals of the early 1920s first

showed some of the seams of the star system, by now they should be fully unraveled. The 1975

publication of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon revealed in depth the types of stories that

fan magazines like Photoplay had previously hidden or glossed over. Anger disclosed, through

both gossip and photographs, the previously only rumored details of various actors’ strange

sexual proclivities and deaths—including grisly crime scene photos of the corpses of Thelma

Todd, Bugsy Malone, and Marie Prevost, whose body was partially eaten by her hungry pet

dachshund.264 As a Los Angeles Times review put it, these were the type of stories that never

made it to the papers, but were still common knowledge—or at least common gossip.265 Anger’s

breathless prose and photographic evidence, though, gave the past-tense gossip a new sense of

reality. Hollywood Babylon’s subjects were almost all dead or forgotten by the time of its

publication, but the re-revelation of past scandals showed old Hollywood in a new light,

revealing that there had always been more to the star system than was normally visible.

Stardom functioned very differently in the 1970s than it had under the studio system,

when studios controlled each performer’s image and publicity. A studio could arrange marriages

to cover up a performer’s homosexuality, send out favorable press releases to contradict

scurrilous gossip, and arrange other forms of publicity to bolster positive images for its stars.

After the fall of the studio system, however, performers were on their own, or at the mercy of

264 Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon (New York: Dell, 1975), 146, 202-3, 247. 265 Kilday, Gregg, “All-Night Babble-On with a Moral Hangover,” Los Angeles Times, July 13, 1975.

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publicists and agents, when it came to creating positive and overcoming negative buzz. 266 This

opened the door for publications like Confidential, for, without studio protection, celebrity

images and gossip became fair game.

A large degree of public credulity in performers’ images still existed in the postwar, post-

Paramount Decree era, however. Although Liberace, for example, never officially came out of

the closet during his lifetime, when a male ex-lover filed a palimony suit against him in 1986 and

when he died of AIDS in 1987, very few people were shocked to learn that he was gay. In the

late 1950s, however, the pianist successfully sued both Confidential and the London Daily

Mirror for libel, despite much evidence to the contrary, when the publications insinuated that he

was a homosexual. Fifteen years ago, S. Elizabeth Bird noted that there was a real reluctance in

tabloid journalism to “out” celebrities, 267 but today, tabloids, bloggers, and speculative fans are

both willing and eager to do so. Perez Hilton, for example, had a series of posts entitled “Lance

Bass: Gay, Gay, Gay!” that began seven months before the singer officially came out on the

cover of People magazine in July of 2006. In part, this development stems from a greater public

acceptance of homosexuality in the post-millennial era, when coming out might not be the career

suicide it once was. At the same time, though, it also indicates a major development in the

audience/celebrity relationship. What has changed seems to be not a greater credulity in tabloid

journalism and its ability to reveal new layers of celebrity images, but rather a cynicism about

publicity in general and a greater desire to strip away the layers of celebrity discourse, even if

one has to do so oneself.

266 For an in-depth account of these changes, see Joshua Gamson, “The Assembly Line of Greatness: Celebrity in Twentieth-Century America,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 9 (1992), 1-24. 267 Bird, 74-5.

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The difference between the studio era about which deCordova wrote and contemporary

celebrity lies in the fact that everyday star discourse, scandalous or not, seems to serve a similar

function to his notion of scandal. Reality shows like The Osbournes, Breaking Bonaduce, and

VH1’s Celebreality block all purport to show stars as they “really” are, in ways often

diametrically opposed to their earlier official images. Audiences were surprised by The

Osbournes premiere in 2002, because heavy metal pioneer Ozzy Osbourne’s home life was

quirky but relatively healthy and normal, not the expected freakish hotbed of satanic activity.

The show revealed the private and the everyday life of Osbourne, a bumbling but loving father,

in a way that would have made a 1932 MGM executive proud. Because it was so antithetical to

any previous portraits of Osbourne, though, it fully redefined his persona and reinflected the

earlier construction of his image as a Satan-worshipping hedonist—largely because of the

strange poignancy of seeing a middle-aged former hedonist unable figure out how to play a

DVD. While The Osbournes itself is clearly a type of publicity and a performative text for all

members of the family, it nonetheless presented a new version of reality for Ozzy.

To an even larger extent, dialogue about Tom Cruise and fiancée Katie Holmes in 2005

and 2006 seems to indicate a large-scale skepticism about official publicity, and a desire to find

the truth buried underneath it. Rumors about Cruise’s potential homosexuality had circulated for

years before his May 2005 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, where he screamed, jumped

on the couch, fell on his knees, and repeatedly hugged the host in an exuberant display of

excitement about his new romance with Holmes. His excessive enthusiasm, coupled with the

fact that both Cruise and Holmes were appearing in blockbuster films that summer, spawned

numerous rumors that the relationship was merely a publicity stunt, and that Cruise had paid

Holmes to pretend to be his fiancée to squelch gay rumors and promote his film. The day after

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his Oprah appearance, Boston Globe columnist Renee Graham opined, “If this is a romance, it

looks more like a tireless campaign, and he seems less like a man giddily in love than an

overbearing used car salesman.”268 Cruise’s press tour for War of the Worlds that summer

involved just as much talk about Holmes and his religion, Scientology, as the film itself—

specifically, his (and Scientology’s) dislike for psychiatry and psychotropic drugs—which

created even more buzz, especially after he attacked Brooke Shields for using Paxil to overcome

postpartum depression, and called Today Show host Matt Lauer “glib” for questioning these

attacks.

Gossip really began to fly in October 2005, when Cruise announced Holmes was

pregnant. Bloggers and tabloids hypothesized that the pregnancy was timed so the birth would

coincide with the release of Cruise’s next summer blockbuster. As time went on, there was

speculation that the pregnancy itself was staged. Defamer, for example, ran a series of posts

called “Anatomy of a Fake Pregnancy,” which documented suspect changes in photos of

Holmes’s pregnant belly on a day to day basis.”269 The same day as the first Defamer post, Perez

Hilton posted a picture of an eight-month pregnant Holmes that looked suspiciously like a skinny

woman with a beach ball under her shirt.270 Suri Cruise was indeed born on April 18, 2006, days

before the premiere of her father’s film Mission Impossible: 3. No photos of her were released

for nearly five months, though, which was surprising considering the amount of publicity that

surrounded both her parents’ courtship and her birth. Her absence created even more

268 Renee Graham, “Sure They’re in Love—with Publicity,” Boston Globe, May 24, 2005. 269 “Anatomy of a Fake Pregnancy,” Defamer.com, April 5, 2006 <http://www.defamer.com/hollywood/katie-holmes/katie-holmes-anatomy-of-a-fake-pregnancy-165400.php> (Accessed February 20, 2007). 270 Perez Hilton, “Katie Holmes Keeps It Fake Real,” PerezHilton.com, April 5, 2006 <http://www.perezhilton.com/topics/katie_holmes/katie_holmes_keeps_it_fake_real_20060405.php> (Accessed February 20, 2007).

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speculation—about whether or not she was seriously deformed to whether she existed at all.271

Even after Vanity Fair released the first photos of Suri in September 2006, bloggers speculated

that the pictures were heavily modified in Photoshop, the baby resembled Holmes’s ex-fiancé

Chris Klein more than she did Cruise, and even that the child in the photos was a plant.272

Despite photographic evidence, a birth certificate, and testimonials from family and friends, the

existence of Suri Cruise appeared to be up for debate long after her public debut.

After Tom Cruise’s initial run of strange behavior in 2005, there was a very public

reluctance to believe anything he said or did, and a desire to find the most bizarre explanation

possible for every claim he made. The reaction to Tom Cruise’s private life became less about a

search for authenticity than a craving for proof of even greater inauthenticity. While his Oprah

appearance could have been a manifestation of Cruise’s authentic personality that he had

successfully hidden for twenty years, its unnatural exuberance felt like yet another performance.

Either way, it hinted at multiple layers of artifice, both before and after the couch-jumping. The

new Tom Cruise persona clashed with the pre-2005 Tom Cruise persona, indicating that the

latter was performative as well. The pleasure in doubting Tom seems to be a reaction against his

inauthenticity, but that there is almost certainly a “real” Tom Cruise behind these performances

does not necessarily fuel this fascination. There is too much inconsistency there for his

“authentic” self to matter. Rather, the fascination involves a rejection of misleading publicity,

self-promotion, and celebrity narcissism—and of being duped. Like deCordova’s definition of

271 Alexander Hitchen, “Tom’s Fury Over Reports That Baby Suri Is Disfigured,” The National Enquirer, August 21, 2006, 20-1; Katharine Q. Seelye, “Celebrity Baby, M.I.A., Stokes a Frenzy,” New York Times, July 31, 2006. 272 “Million Dollar Baby: The Sham Continues,” Pink Is the New Blog, September 5, 2006 <http://trent.blogspot.com/2006/09/million-dollar-baby-sham-continues.html> (Accessed February 20, 2007); “Suri’s Big Day: A Suri for Everyone,” Defamer.com, September 5, 2006 <http://defamer.com/hollywood/miracle-baby/suris-big-day-a-suri-for-everyone-198872.php> (Accessed February 20, 2007).

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scandal, it involves the revelation of the celebrity industry’s mechanisms. However, unlike

1920s Hollywood, the mechanisms have already been exposed—and knowledge of the ways in

which celebrities publicize themselves only fuels the public’s speculation and skepticism about

Tom Cruise.

As Joshua Gamson explains, the public has been aware of publicity methods and means

of celebrity manufacture for decades, including during the studio era. After the end of the studio

system, though, there was a noticeable shift towards more open discourse about how celebrities

are “made.” Many texts that expose the process still attempt to “peel away the veneer,” as

Arlene Francis described television’s power in a 1960 TV Guide interview, which still gives heed

to the idea that there is a “genuine” individual behind the surface to expose.273 Towards the end

of the twentieth century, however, discourse about celebrity became increasingly ironic in tone,

to the point where celebrities themselves often poked fun at the nature of stardom. When the

audience is allowed to “see the joke,” though, Gamson theorizes that this transparency avoids

disruption in the appreciation of celebrity narratives, for the audience will stop searching for

various layers of fabrication once they feel they “get it”.274 Alternatively, knowledge about the

inner workings of the star system can also point to the idea that the “authenticity” of public

performance trumps all other forms of authenticity, and the only truth to be found is in how an

individual performs him- or herself.275 In this sense, then, Tom Cruise’s choice of public voice

in 2005 and 2006 is the only one that matters, for this is the only real means of communication

from him to us that exists. In both cases, public savviness to the idea of celebrity manufacture is

273 Gamson, “The Assembly Line of Greatness,” 16-17. 274 Ibid., 18-19. 275 Gamson, Claims to Fame, 54.

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easily diffused in ways that still retain interest in celebrity as a whole—for even if one does not

believe it as truth, it is still possible to enjoy it.

Gamson’s 1994 ethnographic study of celebrity watchers indicated a broad range of

interpretive strategies and ways to negotiate the star/audience relationship based on overall

savviness of the celebrity system. On one level are the first- and second-order traditionalists

who, to varying degrees, believe in the notion of a consistent, authentic celebrity self. True

“believers” feel the only way to impede knowledge of who stars really are is blatant dishonesty,

which is almost entirely the domain of tabloids.276 Second-order traditionalists, on the other

hand, seem more aware of the process of celebrity manufacture, but believe that there is

something authentic to be found that is noticeably distinct from publicity methods.277 At the

opposite end of the spectrum are what Gamson calls the “game players,” who tend to have a

significant awareness of the celebrity text. They can either be gossipers, who enjoy the soap-

opera aspects of celebrity narratives and for whom questions of authenticity are irrelevant, or

detectives, who make the problems associated with celebrity authenticity the crux of their

interest, but believe that the authentic and inauthentic are largely indistinguishable.278 Finally,

there are the postmodern celebrity watchers, who embrace their belief that there is nothing but

artifice in celebrity discourse. Instead of searching for what is authentic, they enjoy the process

of manufacture in and of itself.279

The current Tom Cruise fascination seems to be an amalgamation of Gamson’s game

play and postmodern positions, but with a twist. It is not just celebrity watchers toying with the

fact that the line between reality and artifice has been crossed numerous times or enjoying the

276 Ibid., 158-9. 277 Ibid., 161. 278 Ibid., 173-8. 279 Ibid., 155.

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increasingly bizarre gossip for the sake of gossip. The hostility associated with Cruise’s strange

behavior seems to come from somewhere deeper, from the fact that lines are crossed so publicly

in the first place, and of a skepticism about the nature of public performance. Scandal may be a

confirmation of an unseen reality, but this unveiling creates new problems in terms of the reality

of other layers previously revealed. It also complicates moral questions about the audience when

the celebrity narratives in which they have invested turn out to be misleading. If there exists a

desire to get closer to a star’s “authentic” self, there simultaneously seems to be a desire to

expose fraudulent authenticity and tear down performances. These competing desires are visible

in enjoyment of celebrity foibles, which remove some of the veneer from those who are

supposed to be similar to but better than the public. In addition, incidents like the Tom Cruise

mania reinforce narratives of celebrity manufacture, as opposed to those about organic talent or

democracy. Not all scandals necessarily invoke a reevaluation of cultural values, but most, as

Cruise’s case exemplifies, seem to involve a type of unconscious evaluation of the values of

celebrity culture itself. As there has been a historical shift in celebrity narratives to include the

previously hidden ideas of manufacture, there have simultaneously been more opportunities for

such examination. The reaction to Cruise, characterized by excessive speculation and

expressions of doubt, indicates that pleasure stems from feeling smarter than, and being able to

see through, the process of manufacture. Like the types of savviness Gamson describes, this

relies on an ironic reading of celebrity culture, although the irony’s target seems to have shifted

from publicity methods back to the celebrities themselves. In addition, the irony now seems to

be less about “getting the joke” than about making a preemptive joke at the celebrity’s (or

celebrity system’s) expense. It is an antagonistic pleasure to be sure, but it is not necessarily a

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full-on rejection of celebrity culture. Rather, it seems to be a means to evaluate one’s own

relationship with celebrity.

Former Child Stars and Former Children

While the contemporary cultural fascination with former child stars seems to be a special case, as

it hinges upon the audience’s changing relationships with both celebrity and notions of their own

childhood, it nonetheless illustrates the complex nature of pleasure in celebrity scandal and

revelations that stars are all too human. The specter of the former child star elicits its own

unique kind of schadenfreude, but at the same time, the transparency of the child star narrative

and the pleasures it creates highlight the irony that is integral to today’s star/audience

relationship. It is hard to escape former child stars in contemporary popular culture. They are

popular talk show guests, tabloid subjects, and fodder for episodes of The E! True Hollywood

Story. Numerous “Whatever Happened to…” specials, on networks ranging from NBC and

A&E to E! and VH1, have aired frequently for close to a decade, VH1’s 2005 series Breaking

Bonaduce showed former Partridge Family star Danny Bonaduce’s therapy sessions and suicidal

breakdown, and E!’s 2006 series Child Star Confidential shows adult former child stars

discussing the difficulties of growing up in the public eye. Following the lead of Christina

Crawford, the likes of Patty Duke, The Brady Bunch’s Barry Williams, and Father Knows Best’s

Lauren “Kitten” Chapin, among others, have written popular tell-all books that show the seamy

side of child stardom. This media presence of ex-child actors is concurrent with a wave of

nostalgia shows, like VH1’s I Love the 70s and I Love the 80s, where celebrities reminisce about

popular culture artifacts from the decade in question, as well as a number of recent prime-time

specials that revisit older texts, including the Beverly Hills 90210 10-Year High School Reunion

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(Fox, 2003) and the made-for-television movie Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of

Diff’rent Strokes (NBC, 2006). Texts about former child stars function as similar nostalgic

artifacts, reminding the audience of their own childhood relationships with media. However,

nostalgic discourses about former child stars are more likely to be tinged with irony than the

more earnest ruminations on past popular culture of VH1 and network specials, because, it

seems, so many have turned out so badly.

The problem with child stars is that they grow up, and their adult selves are unlikely to

gel with the children they once portrayed. This strange duality between idealized child and

screwed-up adult informs a great deal of the myth of the former child star in contemporary

media, adding a nastiness to the nostalgia audiences feel towards the original texts in which the

actors appeared. The 2003 film Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star featured David Spade as the

quintessential former child star gone wrong. Spade’s Dickie, the ex-star of a fictional 1970s

sitcom, now works as a parking attendant, falsely claims to be the son of David Soul of Starsky

& Hutch fame, loses to vertically challenged Webster star Emmanuel Lewis in a celebrity boxing

match, and has a bizarre glove fetish. While the film mocks the figure of the former child star,

positing that his atypical childhood has severed all of his ties to reality, it simultaneously

sentimentalizes him. In the film, Dickie tries to recapture his lost youth by living with a normal

suburban family, and during this process, he falls in love, restarts his acting career, and

essentially gains a soul.

Portrayals of real child stars may not necessarily be as sentimental, but often play with a

similar duality: derision and pity. Corey Feldman, for example, was a cast member on the first

season of The Surreal Life, which premiered on the WB in January 2003. Feldman played smart-

mouthed kids with hearts of gold in a series of successful films in the mid- to late-1980s,

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including The Goonies (1985), The Lost Boys (1987), and License to Drive (1988). After a well-

publicized bout with drug addiction in the early 1990s, though, he fell into relative obscurity for

the next decade, acting in straight-to-video horror movies and touring with his band, Corey

Feldman’s Truth Movement. In a voice-over on the premiere episode of The Surreal Life,

Feldman somewhat delusionally described his perceived role in the entertainment community as

such: “I am an icon. I am an establishment—more than an actor, more than a musician. I’ve

become a celebrity.”

Despite the fact that his last successful film, The ‘Burbs, was released in 1989, Feldman

asserted that his child star status outweighed his failures over the previous decade and a half, and

that his association with a specific cultural moment entitled him to lifelong celebrity treatment.

Immediately after this voice-over, the editors cut to a montage of newspaper articles on

Feldman’s trips to rehab. Headlines read, “Feldman Busted,” “Rehab for Corey,” and “The Lost

Boy,” followed by Corey stating, “I’m all about image repair at this point. This [show] could

end up being a good opportunity.” Later, Corey complained the loudest about the presence of

Jerri Manthey from the second season of Survivor in the house, stating that “She’s not part of

our society as we know it”—again, despite the fact that Survivor was one of the highest-rated

shows of the 2001-2 television season and Jerri its most notorious cast member. As the only

Surreal Life cast member to explicitly state that his appearance on the show was to restart his

career, and to explicitly assert his privilege as celebrity, Feldman became an object of derision,

not just from his housemates (who picked fights with him and fell asleep as he told his hard-luck

stories) and the show’s viewers, but within the structure of the show itself. A preview for the

fifth episode of Surreal Life, for example, featured footage of the houseguests playing softball

against a team of Playboy Playmates, with the voice-over, “Softball—everyone loves softball.

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Playmates—everyone loves Playmates. Corey Feldman…” The sound of crickets chirping

accompanied a shot of Corey standing alone in right field. That same episode featured a three-

minute long montage of Corey arguing with everyone in the house, accompanied by wacky

music, underscoring both his unpleasantness and its humor. The Surreal Life finale involved

Corey’s wedding, planned hastily so it would appear on television and, as he explained to his

fiancée, “everybody in the world would watch.”

The show’s intent appeared to be to guide the viewer to a pejorative reading of Corey

Feldman, based not only on his disagreeable personality but also his inability to accept his own

irrelevance. While this might not be readable as what Susan Sontag describes as “naïve camp,”

which is more satisfying than a text made to be campy, Feldman himself appears deadly serious

about his role in Hollywood, and thus wholly naïve in the context of the show—the physical

embodiment of “failed seriousness.”280 While The Surreal Life may be deliberate camp, Corey

Feldman on The Surreal Life, a former child star full of self-importance and desperate to make a

comeback, is indeed relevant irrelevance, easy to pity and despise at the same time.

Feldman’s presentation on The Surreal Life reads as if he is being punished for his failure

to acknowledge his proper place in the entertainment industry and society as a whole. Many

other former child stars, however, do not seek the public eye like Feldman. Rather, they re-

emerge in tabloids and other media when they do something scandalous, encouraging a similar

type of fascination and pleasure. The lurid tales of what happened to many former child stars

once their acting careers ended are myriad. Lauren Chapin went from being the adorable Kitten

on Father Knows Best to a heroin-addicted prostitute who once tried to chop off her own hand

with a meat cleaver in a failed suicide attempt. River Phoenix (Stand by Me, The Mosquito

280 Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador USA, 1966), 282-3.

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Coast) and Anissa Jones (Family Affair) died of drug overdoses. Trent Lehman (Nanny and the

Professor) and Rusty Hamer (Make Room for Daddy) committed suicide. Scotty Schwartz (The

Toy) became a porn star. Adam Rich (Eight Is Enough) was arrested for driving while

intoxicated, shoplifting, and breaking into a pharmacy. Mackenzie Phillips, Danny Bonaduce,

Corey Feldman, Corey Haim, and Drew Barrymore, among others, have had well-publicized

battles with drug addiction. It is the Diff’rent Strokes kids, however, who perhaps best embody

the typical former-child-star-gone-wrong narrative—which has become in turn the standard

former child star narrative. After the extremely popular show went off the air in 1986 after eight

seasons, its star Gary Coleman sued his parents for squandering his earnings. He was later

arrested for punching an autograph seeker while working as a mall security guard, ran

unsuccessfully as an independent candidate for governor of California in 2003, and was most

recently seen on an episode of The Surreal Life 2 (WB, 2004) being thrown into a deep fryer by

ex-rapper Vanilla Ice. Coleman’s co-star Todd Bridges was arrested seven times between 1986

and 1997 for, among other things, drug and weapons possession and two attempted murders.

Dana Plato posed for Playboy in 1988, robbed a video store in 1991, was arrested again in 1992

for forging Valium prescriptions, and eventually died of a drug overdose in 1999. The Diff’rent

Strokes stars’ misfortunes are in many ways more interesting and compelling than their earlier

successes. Their innocuous antics on the sitcom were enjoyable at the time they aired, but they

were clearly fictional, and serve as an ironic counterpoint to the actors’ real lives. These

misfortunes really happened, and the authenticity of what was understood to be their public

selves—wholesome, innocent, and adorable—imploded.

Indeed, the perspective of adulthood and the passage of time allows the contradictions

inherent in child stardom to emerge. Returning to childhood texts shows how different reading

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practices develop with age, distance, and the extratextual knowledge that comes with time. The

May 1988 issue of The Big Bopper, a now-defunct fan magazine aimed at tween girls, included

an article on how to win River Phoenix’s heart. Among the informative “dos and don’ts” for the

prospective River Phoenix suitor are such hints as: “Don’t forget to call him by his nickname

‘Rio’…Of course, he would answer you no matter what you called him;” and “Do like the color

blue…One look into those eyes of his, and you’d be hooked on the color anyway.” The final

“don’t”—“Don’t take drugs. River doesn’t think drugs are in the least bit cool. He would rather

experience life the natural way”—was almost certainly read without question as a noble

character attribute by many late-1980s preteen readers.281 Just a few years later, however,

Phoenix died of an accidental overdose outside the Viper Room, and thus, twenty years after its

publication, the article is almost impossible to read without irony. However, in the prime of his

career, the only knowledge girls had about River came from a conflation of the roles he played,

usually poor kids with a heart of gold, and the discourses about him in teen publications that

portrayed him as a wholesome earthy teenager. The contradictions between his roles, his

publicity, and his real life only appear in retrospect, highlighting the seedier aspects of his

teenhood that never emerged while he was still alive. This is a tragic example of the revelation

of an “authentic” self that highlights the inauthenticity of celebrity manufacture, but such

revelation is almost inevitable for child stars. The ideals of childhood they purport to represent

and their real lives are almost certain to collide at some point, even if the collision is not the

result of scandal, but merely of becoming an adult. It is for this reason that many child stars’

adulthoods, like Corey Feldman’s, are culturally disposable. A flawless child who grows into a

flawed adulthood may not have been that perfect to begin with. It is often easier, then, to ignore

281 “The Many Ways to River’s Heart!,” The Big Bopper vol. 1, no. 6, May 1988, 28.

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the adulthood in the first place, especially when it has the ability to confound idealized images of

childhood.

The arrest of Paul Rubens, a.k.a. Pee-Wee Herman, for indecent exposure at a

pornographic theater in Sarasota, Florida was one of the major media scandals of 1991.

Although Rubens himself was clearly an adult, Pee-Wee, his alias, existed somewhere on the

border of man and boy, a hyper-innocent grownup whose magical Saturday morning Playhouse

represented an ultimate childhood fantasy. Pee-Wee’s introduction to adulthood, via exposing

himself in public, resulted in parental protests, CBS’s cancellation of his show, Pee-Wee

merchandise pulled from the shelves, and, ultimately, the end of the character. As Lynne Joyrich

has indicated, the fact that there was such an overwhelming reaction to his “incident” indicates

the extent to which the Pee-Wee character was desexualized, read more as an innocent child than

an adult actor manipulating the liminal spaces between childhood and adulthood.282 When the

manipulation became transparent, however, the myth of the innocent child was called into

question, and moral panic ensued.

In a similar vein, learning that adorable Anissa Jones overdosed at the age of seventeen

confounds the image of Buffy, the doll-toting, pigtailed orphan she played on Family Affair.

Although at a rational level, most viewers were aware that Buffy was fictional and a separate

entity from Anissa, the two conflated to represent a kind of meta-innocence—Buffy as a

character and Anissa as the embodiment of that character. This purity, however, imploded upon

finding out that Anissa was not so innocent, thus challenging the meaning of Buffy herself.

Lynn Spigel has argued that debates about children and television have continually focused on

preserving young viewers’ innocence by clearly demarcating childhood from adulthood, thus

282 Lynne Joyrich, Re-Viewing Reception (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 152.

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protecting children from certain types of adult knowledge.283 Televisual childhood thus becomes

a demarcation of absolute purity. The mediated child thus must be more perfect, more innocent

than the normal child, in order to maintain the clear line between child and adult. In The Case of

Peter Pan, Jacqueline Rose argues that the child is a cultural construct, “a pure point of origin”

through which adults can define themselves.284 Questioning the purity and innocence of one

representation of childhood thus calls into question the way childhood itself is constructed. Rose

states that “Childhood is always a moment before—once it is contaminated, it is lost.”285 The

child actor is by nature an atypical child—even if she is scandal-free, she nonetheless is the last

vestige of acceptable child labor in Western culture, working full time in a largely adult world,

well beyond Rose’s “before.” Nonetheless, she must maintain the construction of childhood,

portraying the über-child, a discursive if not real state of before-ness. This is not quite the same

as Dyer’s idea of celebrities embodying culturally threatened values, for the child actor is

understood more through what her roles represent than the values she plays out in her real life. It

is not so much a question of extratextual charisma than textual ideality. Indeed, there is much

less of a serious (or at least non-ironic) drive to uncover the “authentic” child, at least during a

performer’s actual childhood, since the expectation—which the “child star gone bad” narrative

speaks to directly—is that the layers of meaning will not coalesce with one another. Even

though this type of disjunction is expected, however, we still feel betrayed when we uncover

evidence that the ideal child never existed.

283 Lynn Spigel, “Seducing the Innocent: Childhood and Television in Postwar America,” in The Children’s Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York: NYU Press, 1998), 110-114. 284 Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan Press, 1984), 7-11. 285 Ibid., 87.

253

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud argues that the Biblical

commandment to “love one another” can prove detrimental to one’s own psyche. It is an

impossible standard that makes us suffer when we cannot achieve it, but which we are

nonetheless expected to live up to.286 Not being able to live up to the “love your neighbor” law,

for Freud, inevitably leads to shame, followed by the need for penance. The impossibility of

child actors actually living up to the standards of the über-child they represent, in itself a

constructed myth, functions in a similar way. While they likely have neither asked for nor

understood its meaning, child stars nonetheless serve a public role of protecting this myth of

childhood innocence. When a scandal makes the contradictions between their fictional and real

worlds become apparent, however, they too serve a penance—mediated humiliation, feeding into

our unconscious need for retribution once the myth has been broken.

The allure of the former child star hinges on more than this disruption of the myth of

childhood. Not all former child stars go bad. Some do grow up and remain successful

entertainment personalities like Jodie Foster or Ron Howard, and many leave show business and

become productive, albeit unglamorous, members of society. However, if the child star grows

up to be good or bad, felon or homemaker, updates and “whatever happened to” specials remain

compelling, largely because it is easy to relate them to one’s own childhood. The majority of

former child stars, at least the ones profiled in contemporary media, appeared in family oriented

shows and movies, with an audience largely consisting of children or young teenagers. “Where

are they now” specials are much more likely to update us on the whereabouts of the cast of Saved

by the Bell or The Goonies as opposed to Tatum O’Neill or Justin Henry, the kid from Kramer

vs. Kramer, despite the critical acclaim and Oscar nods the latter two received for their work.

286 John Portmann, When Bad Things Happen to Other People (New York: Routledge, 2000), 67.

254

The target demographics of VH1 and E!, the networks with the most regular programming on

former child stars, are young adults under the age of 35. The oldest viewer from this

demographic would have been eight when Kramer vs. Kramer came out in 1979—barely of an

age to be interested either in the film or the hype surrounding its release. While Justin Henry’s

adult life may be interesting, it does not have the same draw as that of someone the audience

remembers being a child with, someone who they can link back to memories from their own

childhoods. One could speculate that these shows function in the same way that high school

reunions do. Both capitalize on our curiosity about the lives of people we grew up with, serving

as a basis to compare one’s own adulthood to those of our peers. However, the reunion and

“Where are they now” program also both draw upon the desire to have turned out better than

certain individuals, like the clichéd enjoyment people have in seeing that the prom queen gained

weight or the captain of the football team is thrice-divorced by the tenth reunion. The

fascination with child stars who have failed to live up to their initial successes perhaps draws

upon the fact that, for most people, the apex of their careers will not have occurred before

adulthood. No matter what one felt about the child star as a child, be it affection or annoyance,

there is a certain satisfaction to be had in turning out better than someone one was supposed to

admire, particularly when their hubris and economic worth were immense.

This does not mean that a compelling former child star story has to be about an individual

within a viewer’s age group, however. Reruns allow child actors to circulate perpetually in the

public consciousness, even if their acting careers ended decades ago. The Brady Bunch, by the

year 2006, has entertained three generations of children. Eve Plumb may now be a married

artist, but Jan Brady has remained an awkward preteen for over thirty years. At least two

generations of Brady Bunch viewers have grown to adulthood, even though the Brady kids

255

themselves have not. And as the viewing audience has become adults, it has become able to read

The Brady Bunch in ways it could not before. There is less credulity of the Brady world; it is

much more difficult to take it seriously as any sort of representation of reality, past or present.

Problems cannot be introduced and resolved within twenty two minutes, parents are not always

caring and understanding and rarely have a wisecrack ready to defuse a tense situation, cream pie

fights generally are not a solution to major family crises, and six teenage children sharing a

bathroom without a toilet should in theory cause enough problems to merit a separate television

series. All of these unrealities came to the fore in two Brady Bunch movies in the 1990s,

underscoring the fact that that Brady audience has grown up while the text has not. As children,

however, none of these implausibilities fazed anyone, and children were still able to relate to the

Brady kids, no matter how distant their two worlds were from one another.

Now that this distance is visible, though, the audience’s relationship to the Brady children

changes. The actors playing the Bradys were far removed from the world of their public—their

“peer” viewers, past or present. According to his account of his years on the show, Growing Up

Brady, Barry Williams’s actual teenage years involved intense contract negotiations, screaming

fans, and dinner dates at the Coconut Grove with Florence Henderson, yet he had the audacity to

pretend to be an ordinary teenager, “just like everyone else,” even if that representation of

normality was really far from normal. In her book on former child stars, Joal Ryan describes

their relationship to their target audience as like that of a “kid brother who won’t go away” but

rather “keeps dragging us back to the stupid little kid we used to be…when we had nothing better

to do than lie around and watch some rich-and-famous, TV Guide-cover kid—some jerk our

age—make an entire live studio audience laugh.”287 Former child stars’ virtual immortality in

287 Joal Ryan, Former Child Stars: The Story of America’s Least Wanted (Toronto: ECW Press, 2000), 3.

256

reruns is disturbing because it continually reminds adults of their own naïve childhoods. That

the actors and the characters they portrayed misrepresented this very naïveté, coupled with the

fact that the audience once believed them, contributes to the hostility towards their grown-up

selves.

While former child stars who deconstruct the myth of the innocent child may evoke

feelings of betrayal, popular texts like the E! True Hollywood Story continually dredge up new

scandals that further deconstruct this myth—and millions of people continually watch. At its

most basic level, scandal relies on exposing truth behind public hypocrisy, but at its heart, as

Colin Wilson argues, it can also serve to confirm the public’s own sense of virtue.288 An

audience member may feel disillusioned when learning that the cute kid from The Goonies was a

heroin addict, especially if one once viewed the actor as a role model. At the same time,

however, the public can take pleasure in the former child star’s failure because it is not their

failure. The mediated constructions of childhood innocence may have betrayed the audience, but

this in turn gives the audience power over them and over the myth. The ideal child as object may

be a cultural construct, but as former child subjects, the way the public reads and understands

these objects can nonetheless be an expression of personal power.

That stories about child stars gone wrong have become an almost clichéd part of the pop

culture lexicon indicates a savviness on the part of the audience, not only an acknowledgment

but an expectation that the real lives of celebrities are likely to contradict the more official levels

of star discourse. It highlights, in addition, the fact that celebrity is not only based partially on

falsity, but that being a celebrity and maintaining a constant, consistent public performance can

be destructive to an individual. While according to Gamson, this type of knowledge has existed

288 Colin Wilson and Damon Wilson, Scandal! Private Stories of Public Shame (London: Virgin Books, 2003), 3.

257

for decades, contemporary savviness creates a new kind of distance between audience and

celebrity, one that not only jokes about celebrity manufacture but also evaluates it. The result is

ironic humor at the expense of stars and the mechanisms that promote them, both of which

perpetuate inauthentic public performance. The very nature of the former child star makes the

effects of this savviness evident since, with time and distance, an idealized childhood becomes a

type of straw man for adulthood to tear down. If a more cynical reading of child stars is now the

norm, though, the information about stardom that former child star narratives offer can easily be

extrapolated out to more general celebrity culture. Although child stars feed into a different type

of nostalgia than adult performers, the public’s reaction to inauthenticity remains similar in both

cases. Child actors’ meanings are largely fixed within both a time period and an age range, but

one could argue that adult performers are even more inflexible. The longer one’s career as a

performer, the longer one is likely to be held to the same ideals. This is why, in a way, both Mel

Gibson’s arrest and Tom Cruise’s antics were such media events in 2006. Both actors had

retained relatively stable, fixed identities for over twenty years, and to see them so easily

challenged was disillusioning. However, with an already implicit belief in the inauthenticity of

celebrity narratives comes an ability to find pleasure within this disillusionment. Pleasure in

learning about celebrity scandal is not just amusement at a sudden ironic contrast between reality

and illusion, although that is clearly a part of the enjoyment. With this humor comes a desire to

see the perpetrator punished, a desire immediately whetted through the very embarrassment of

scandal itself. On top of it all is a final another form of pleasure, that of superiority—not just

feeling superior to the questionable behavior, but superior in the knowledge that one can see

through the behavior and the mechanisms that hid it in the first place, to be able to critically

evaluate it. While in many cases this multi-tiered schadenfreude may be tinged with pity or

258

anger, both still rely on the type of reflexivity that scandal opens up. And seeing through

stardom also allows us to see that, even though celebrities are often viewed as existing on a

higher plane than mere mortals, they are not always much better than us. Scandal and

embarrassment serve equalizing functions so that, despite their knowledge about the hollowness

of celebrity manufacture and the dangers of fame, the public can still desire and see a place for

themselves within it.

This may indeed be the true beauty of American Idol. At one level, Idol lays bare the

process of making and selling a recording star, catering to its audience’s celebrity savviness. At

the same time, though, it offers built-in protection against true cynicism. That the contestants are

“real people” with exceptional talent opens up the narrative to everyone, whether as a potential

contestant, or as a judge by proxy. The narrative makes it clear that the show is a democracy,

and Ryan Seacrest is sure to blame or praise America for each decision the voters make. By

constantly reminding the audience of the bad performers who do not deserve Idol status, it feeds

into the desire for celebrity schadenfreude without negatively affecting the performers who 19

Entertainment will eventually market, and while still highlighting what a good performer should

be. The audience knows that they are, at some level, participating in a months-long marketing

focus group, but the Idol process assures them that, in the end, they will receive the best product

as a result. Each American Idol winner’s success is the result of both individual talent and the

audience’s action, as “insiders,” or starmakers. By combining older forms of celebrity narratives

with an expectation of audience savviness, Idol is able to expose the celebrity manufacture

process not just with its viewers’ willing complicity, but their blessing. Indeed, Idol seems to

give viewers a type of hyper-transparency in an age of transparency, showing how talent and

image creation go hand in hand and giving them the opportunity to participate in the process.

259

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