From ‘American Family’ to ‘The Apprentice’: A history of reality TV

She writes that the deeper she dug into the “outrageous” origins of the reality format, the “darker “things got.

“There are people whose lives were wrecked by reality TV, she says; there are methods of production so ugly they’re hard to look at; and reality programs, like any kind of television, reflect the limits and the bigotries of their creators. 

“Early reality production,” she writes, “was utterly reliant on the innocence of its stars, their inability to understand what they were consenting to.” 

Nussbaum described this fundamental lack of agency as “the genre’s secret sauce, its original sin.”

Reality-TV shows, she writes, made visible “the sort of people” that television had “historically ignored,” from working-class single moms on “Queen for a Day” to a young gay Cuban-American with AIDS, Pedro Zamora, who became a star on “The Real World.”

Then along came the Loud family, Southern California laid-back affluence personified, with long hidden secrets buried in the walls of their Santa Barbara contemporary, a far different world from the downtrodden reality stars some two decades earlier on “Queen for a Day,” but equally desolate.

The show, “An American Family,” would have television viewers in the millions mesmerized when it debuted on Jan. 11, 1973.

Cameras following the Louds’ highs and many more lows – the father, handsome businessman Bill Loud, a secret adulterer; pretty wife, Pat, trying to maintain normality with a few drinks by the pool; typical Cali kids, Grant and Kevin, who played in bands; sister Delilah, who studied dance, the youngest, shy Michele, who liked to ride horses. 

And then there was the real star of “American Family,” the 19-year-old flamboyant Lance Loud, who had moved out and was living in New York, with a room in the Chelsea Hotel, which, writes Nussbaum, was “infamous for its louche, outrageous social scene,” and where Lance’s mother visited him on 23^rd Street for the first and quietly disapproved of his lifestyle — all of it on camera.

“This documentary footage shattered old notions of what was private and what was public,” the author maintains. “It also sent reality television down a new path. If ‘Candid Camera’ had launched the prank show, and ‘Queen for a Day’ the game show, ‘An American Family’ would initiate the third, and maybe the most powerful, thread of reality programming: the real-life soap opera.” 

The twelve-hour series chronicled seven months in the Loud’s lives, broadcast weekly from January through March on normally staid public television station WNET.

“American Family” would become the “most divisive, explosive, endlessly debated pop-culture sensation,” writes Nussbaum, and “would do something astonishing, creating the world’s first reality stars.” 

That at a time when the Watergate scandal would end Richard Nixon’s presidency; a cult leader named Charles Manson would lead his crazed followers on a Hollywood murder spree, and across America “drugs, sex and radical politics were everywhere,” writes Nussbaum.

On the heels of “American Family,” more than four decades of reality shows, great and not so great, would come and go – the likes of “Survivor,” “Big Brother,” “The Real World,” “Cops,” “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” “The Bachelor” and “Joe Millionaire” to name a few, all joyfully noted by Nussbaum — before an authentic real-life billionaire, a New York real-estate magnate and Page Six figure, would make the scene. 

Donald J. Trump would become a star on a reality show called “The Apprentice” — on the path to ultimately becoming the nation’s controversial 45^th president of the United States. 

In February 2002, Trump had a meeting at Trump Tower and signed a deal to make The Apprentice for NBC, billed as a “competitive reality show in which Trump would play ‘the universally beloved New York real estate Tycoon, legendary for his business prowess,’” writes the author, clearly with a hint of snark.

It debuted to “decent ratings” and “mocking reviews” on January 8, 2004, filmed on the fourth floor of Trump Tower, in a fake boardroom set with no windows and dramatic shadow lighting.

As Nussbaum observes, “ ‘The Apprentice’ was a blue-chip concept. It managed to unite the two most successful reality models of the era — twisty, scheming team competitions like Survivor and talent contests like American Idol — and then added a shameless capitalistic twist. It was the first reality show to treat corporate marketing itself as a creative act, a form of self-expression as joyful as ballroom dancing.”

Potential challenges on the competitive show listed by Nussbaum include “Grace Under Pressure,” “Brown Nose Your Boss,” and the very Trumpian “Avoiding Corp Tax Challenge.”

Trump could be surprisingly collegial off camera, according to staffers, and particularly with the largely black and Latino crew, schmoozing at the crafts table, scooping up M&M’s and asking, “Who should I fire?”

“Stranger yet, Trump didn’t merely say, ‘You’re Fired,’ he made a gesture as he did so, pinching his fingers together, then jabbing the air — they called it ‘the cobra.’ ” 

In the control room, there was a murmur of shock. 

“It felt like he had just shot the guy.”