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Reality Television and the Rise of Donald Trump
No reality tv, no Trump.
Once upon a time, there was only one American reality television show: COPS. From COPS, the phenomenon grew into the cultural hydra we know and love/loathe today.
Maybe it was an inevitable byproduct of the Information Age; maybe it was the great Hollywood writer’s strike. Whatever the cause, “unscripted television,” once a nonexistent genre, soon became ubiquitous.
Reality-type entertainment shows instantly popped up everywhere. There were singing competitions, dancing competitions, fashion competitions, and cooking competitions.
We ignored the old adage, “Peek not through a knothole, lest ye be vexed,” and got a thorny backstage look at everything. A rapt nation reveled in the otherwise-boring lives of commercial truck drivers, fishing boat captains, and soldiers enduring the rigors of elite military training. Nothing was off-limits. We watched strangers bicker together in a house, bicker in the wild, eat bugs for money, and worse.
Reality television became more exploitative over time. Programs like The Jerry Springer Show started as outliers and then morphed into a new genre: Embarrassment television.
In one early season of MTV’s The Real World, the trendy young roommates picked to live in Hawaii were faced…