Eric Nies, from the very first season of Real World New York, is a life coach and an advocate of ayahuasca, the Peruvian psychedelic plant medicine. Jon Brennan, from Real World Los Angeles, is now a youth pastor in Kentucky. The kids from the old Real World haven’t gone so big. So maybe it pays to be mentally unstable on camera. Others have launched wine brands, clothing lines, hit records. During her time on the Real Housewives of New York, Bethenny Frankel launched a line of bottled cocktails she later sold to Beam Global for $120 million. The Karadashian family counts two new billionaires around the dinner table. It must be said: You can get seriously rich appearing on reality television. I’m not sure exactly why, but everyone freaked out for the next half an hour, and there was lots of screaming. In an episode of The Real Housewives of New York, one of the stars removes her prosthetic leg and tosses it on the table. You stole my house! she screams at her sister, while the viewers are left puzzled and out-of-the-loop: Wait, what? Her house? How do you steal a house? In The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, former child-star Kim Richards dissolves in the back seat of a limousine, shrieking and sobbing. There’s scheming and double-dealing and endless confrontation. People are always storming off, leaping from the table, erupting in obscenities, throwing drinks. There are screaming hysterics in practically every episode. Unlike their predecessors, which tried to show real people grappling with contemporary crosscurrents, these newer reality shows aren’t really about anything at all, except highly emotional outbursts and weirdly irrational anger. The current favorites of the reality genre-Bravo Television’s The Real Housewives franchise and E!’s Keeping Up with the Kardashians-don’t touch on third-rail cultural issues or contentious political battles. In 1971, that was revolutionary television. For seven months, An American Family followed the Louds, a Santa Barbara family, capturing on film some unforgettable moments-such as when Pat Loud, the mother of the family, demands a divorce and Lance Loud, the oldest son, announces that he’s gay. (“Groundbreaking” television rarely is.) The Real World was an updated, more physically attractive version of An American Family, a documentary series that had aired on public television 20 years earlier. It may have felt groundbreaking, but it wasn’t. It also felt right on the contemporary edge: Here were young people, on the young people’s network, hashing out issues of race, sex, sexuality, class-years before these things became ho-hum parts of every high-school curriculum. The show was compelling enough to last 25 years and take place in dozens of cities. A bunch of young people hung out in a colorful loft in downtown New York and interacted with one another on camera with occasional breaks to enter a “confession room” and reveal their deepest secrets. When MTV’s The Real World premiered in 1992-arguably the first modern reality-television series-it had all the trappings of a hip sociological experiment. Reality television didn’t start this way. Not to be too rude, I said, but you’re already kind of erratic. With the right editing, even a normal person can be made to look mentally and emotionally imbalanced. I reminded her that all of these shows are created in the editing room by producers looking for the most lurid and nutty angle. The offer was tempting enough that she didn’t turn it down flat. A moderately famous friend of mine was asked by a cable network to star in her own reality-television series.
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