Time to Face Reality
EMILY NUSSBAUM, THE PULITZER-WINNING television critic and New Yorker staff writer, ends her well-researched, somewhat grueling book on the history of reality television, Cue the Sun!, with a reminder that critics have historically dismissed reality TV as a fad. Yet reality TV has not gone away. It’s more than just a fad, she writes, because “in the end, all our faces got stuck that way.”
It’s a strange phrase to insert out of nowhere. Parents say it when their kids make funny faces—keep it up and your face will get stuck that way. The idea here, I guess, is that we-the-audience, all of us, including those critics who dismissed it, wear the childish face of reality TV because we participate in it as a matter of course, whether we want to or not. Reality TV is the air we breathe as well as the face we make. We and television are mutually stuck with the same idiotic expression, reflections of each other, in a metaphorical mirror like Groucho and Harpo in Duck Soup, unsure of who’s imitating who. Now we all stream old episodes of Survivor and make TikToks, trapped in a televisual loop of mutually assured self-regard.
But in non-notional reality, most people aren’t like that at all. And reality shows, a product of the broadcast-TV era, don’t even make the top ten in the weekly Nielsen ratings anymore.
