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\n Vulture\u2019s longtime Bachelor recapper wrote the book on learning to appreciate any, and every, reality show.
\n Photo: Bravo\/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been doing this a long time. By this, I mean \u201cwriting increasingly long essays about reality TV.\u201d Only the machinations of ABC\/Disney<\/a> and my own rogue immune system have kept me from writing recaps here on Vulture over the last 11 years. ELEVEN YEARS. Back then, Below Deck hadn\u2019t yet launched in the Mediterranean, the Housewives hadn\u2019t yet conquered Potomac, and there were no Traitors, Summer House, or Mormon Wives to speak of. But someone had to recap what was happening on Chris Soules\u2019s season of The Bachelor<\/a>, and that person was me. It\u2019s only now, with more than a decade of recaps, a late-night TV writing job, and five Emmys to my name that I can let you all in on a little secret: Before writing about The Bachelor for Vulture, I had never watched the show. I confessed this in an early recap of that season, but my editor at the time promptly cut it, saying the commenters would eat me alive. So to avoid future embarrassment, I asked a friend who watched to give me a list of some easy-to-remember moments that I could slip into my recaps to appear like I had a long, rich history of watching The Bachelor.\u00a0<\/p>\n At the time, my editor and I were assuming that the fandom would be hostile to interlopers who didn\u2019t possess the ancient knowledge of Andi self-eliminating rather than spending one more minute with Juan Pablo. But the truth is, reality-TV fans love nothing more than indoctrinating new converts. For us, there is no moment more thrilling than hearing a friend say, \u201cI\u2019m thinking of starting Vanderpump Rules from the beginning.\u201d You\u2019re about to watch Scheana ask her husband for a divorce on camera for the first time? You\u2019re about to watch Jax politely ask for someone to save him from drowning for the first time? You\u2019re about to live the entire Scandoval arc for the first time!!?? Any reality-TV fan will tell you that you\u2019re about to embark on an incredible journey, and frankly, they\u2019re a little jealous they can\u2019t watch it with fresh eyes. That thrill is what inspired me to write Reality TV for Snobs: Everything You Need to Know About the Shows You\u2019re Too Intellectual to Watch<\/a>, which I hope can convince even the most hardened reality-TV skeptics that a genre often dismissed as shallow can have hidden depths if you view it from the right angle.<\/p>\n It\u2019s understandable to be intimidated by the vastness of reality TV as a whole. There are series with 20, 30, 40 seasons! Plus reality TV is one of the few places on television where we\u2019re still getting more than 15 episodes a season, and that\u2019s before you add in the seemingly endless string of after-shows, podcasts, bonus content, cast members\u2019 livestreams, and spinoff series. Most people assume that the only way to really appreciate a show is to immerse yourself in the hours and hours and hours of content and scour the comments of every Love Island cast member\u2019s socials to figure out who\u2019s following whom. But over the last 25 years of watching reality TV \u2014 I started with The Real World: Hawaii when I was 11 and never looked back \u2014 I came to realize something. The secret to understanding and appreciating reality TV isn\u2019t absorbing every scrap of related content; it\u2019s understanding and appreciating everything else.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ever since I started out doing improv and sketch comedy in Chicago, being a voracious pop-culture junkie has been beneficial to my career. Back then, when an audience member shouted out a suggestion of a genre or a show or a famous director, I had a huge toolkit of references at my fingertips. Today, working on Last Week Tonight, it\u2019s a whole lot easier to write 30 jokes about the most depressing news stories imaginable when you\u2019re able to spot the reality-TV rejects and fame-seekers in the current administration, or compare the lack of affordable housing with the latest season of Selling Sunset. (One of my proudest moments is writing a long joke praising Chrishell Stauss for her work ethic and valiant eighth-place finish on Dancing With the Stars that she saw and put on her Instagram Story.) And some of the most fun I had writing Reality TV for Snobs was the short \u201cRecommended If You Like \u2026\u201d section that begins every essay, attempting to capture the cinematic aura that each show in the book brings to our TV. I can tell you that Top Chef is about food, restaurants, and high-stakes competition, or I can tell you it\u2019s recommended for fans of \u201cBig Night, Uncut Gems, and leaving detailed Yelp reviews.\u201d I can tell you that the Real Housewives franchise is full of beautiful women of a certain age in beautiful locations making each other\u2019s lives miserable. Certainly, that paints a picture. But to say that Real Housewives lives in the same spiritual neighborhood as Big Little Lies, White Lotus, Girls Trip, and The Substance better captures the drama, the comedy, and the eternal fight against aging. And sure, I can ask if you like the idea of \u201chot people behaving carelessly.\u201d Or I can just sell it to you the same way I drunkenly bragged about my book to Ariana Madix and Katie Maloney at the Creative Arts Emmys: \u201cI think Vanderpump Rules is like the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald! Can we get a picture?!\u201d<\/p>\n Too often reality TV is thought of as separate from, or even in opposition to, scripted entertainment \u2014 not to mention our actual reality \u2014 but I prefer to think of it as a prism reflecting all of pop culture. In the genre\u2019s early days, many reality shows were conceived as unscripted versions of familiar scripted programming, and being able to spot and identify the tropes they were pulling from television and film gave viewers a shortcut to understanding the style and messages of these shows. Early \u201cfamily oriented\u201d reality-TV shows were unscripted versions of family sitcoms: MTV\u2019s The Osbournes subverts a wholesome \u201950s sitcom like Father Knows Best or Leave It to Beaver with Ozzy\u2019s heavy-metal persona and past; even the title graphics hinted toward mid-century modern design. The Housewives franchise as we know it originated on Desperate Housewives\u2019s Wisteria Lane. Teen dramas got the reality treatment on both coasts: NYC Prep was a play on Gossip Girl, while MTV\u2019s Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, as the title suggests, was an unscripted version of The O.C. The latter spawned its own universe of spinoffs, and as the genre continued to develop, it was increasingly able to reference itself: Early seasons of RuPaul\u2019s Drag Race function as a groundbreaking platform for queer art and a not-so-subtle parody of America\u2019s Next Top Model, with RuPaul as Tyra Banks as benevolent dictator.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s the Bachelor franchise, which had roots in game shows like The Dating Game when it premiered in 2002 but has since turned reality dating shows into a distinct subgenre that\u2019s constantly playing off romance tropes: a kiss under fireworks, a makeover montage, a sexy virgin struggling whether to listen to her heart or her Savage X Fenty matching set. When I first started recapping, that list of Bachelor moments my friend gave me was helpful, but not as helpful as being able to recognize these tropes, which are all bound up in cultural attitudes toward dating, marriage, and sex.<\/p>\n For example, a common moment in the Bachelor Cinematic Universe is a potential love interest weepingly worrying that their parents\u2019 divorce makes them unworthy of love. It\u2019s easy to view this as just another rom-com trope: the love interest with a complicated and sympathetic backstory. But in the context of something unscripted and allegedly real, we\u2019re watching an actuary\/Pilates instructor\/professional cheerleader suggest that even the hottest and most flexible baddies have to apologize for being from a \u201cbroken home.\u201d Or take the most recent season of Love Island USA<\/a>, where Islanders would characterize other contestants who smooched or shared French fries<\/a> with more than a couple of Bombshells as behaving in a \u201clustful\u201d way. Yes, the language of Love Island USA is part of its strategic gameplay, so painting your villa-mates as more interested in playing the field than finding love is a beneficial move. But the use of a Bible-adjacent word like \u201clustful\u201d goes beyond accusing someone of not being there for \u201cthe right reasons,\u201d and gives voice to the unspoken sexual morality percolating beneath Love Island\u2019s raunchy antics. (See also: sex before the Fantasy Suites still being frowned upon in the Bachelor Cinematic Universe.) Close-reading these shows as a text can provide insight into how our society feels about casual sex or traditional gender roles or marriage as an institution, and that\u2019s what keeps me coming back season after season for more.<\/p>\n Much like those dastardly Sirens on the rocks in Christopher Nolan\u2019s The Odyssey: First Blood, reality TV calls to us with its endless discourse: Did you see \u2026? Did you read \u2026? Do you follow \u2026? But I hope that this book can remind readers that they already have the tools and references required to understand and appreciate reality TV. I hope that this book explains not just the what and who of reality TV, but the how and why: how to watch reality TV as a pop-culture text and why fans love it so much. I hope this book is like that conversation I had with my friend who quickly got me up to speed on The Bachelor: informative, funny, and welcoming. Because to me, the best outcome for someone picking up Reality TV for Snobs would be them feeling empowered to jump in and join the conversation, just like I did all those years ago.<\/p>\n
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