November 26, 2025 • 57 mins
Thanks for listening to this season of Curse of: America’s Next Top Model. As you can imagine, we had to leave a lot on the cutting room floor. In this special bonus episode, we hear more behind-the-scenes details and stories from the models. We also take a field trip through time, to explore the surprising origins of reality television and its parallels with psychological experimentation. Plus, we revisit early 2000s body shaming and the climate that made ANTM possible.
Looking to place a face to the name and hear bonus content? Check out our Instagram account, @glasspodcasts, where we recap each episode with show notes that include the people, places, and even video clips referenced in the episode.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Now, if y'all know, I couldn't just leave you high
and dry like that. Want to beyond some, want to
beyond some. Welcome to the Curse of America's Next Top Model,
the Bonus episode. First, let me say thank you for
(00:28):
listening to the season. The response has been great and
a little overwhelming. When my team and I started researching
and reporting, we had to make some difficult decisions about
what to include in the ten episode season and what
to leave on the cutting room floor. That's one of
the hardest things about this job. My interviews to the
show usually went on for hours. As you can imagine,
(00:51):
we heard a lot of stuff that didn't neatly fit
into the season arc we decided on like the cringey
origins of reality.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
TV when we talk about epics and reality TV even
back in the fifties, we were doing some pretty suspect things.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
And of course there were more behind the scenes details
from the models that couldn't fit into the season. Some
of it was downright weird. I heard a lot about
stuff that happened on set that made me realize what
a strange world reality TV production really is. All season long,
we talked about how producers created the stories we saw
(01:29):
play out on A and TM. Casting producers find and
create characters, show producers stir up drama and manufacture storylines.
Creative producers craft over the top photoshoots and runways, and
a surprising number of contestants willingly sign up for it all. Now,
of course, there are some who walk off set and
(01:50):
others who ask to be eliminated, but for the most part,
a Tom got ten to fourteen contestants to stay through
the humiliation for twenty four seasons. People stuck it out
because they wanted the title and the prize. Others just
wanted the exposure. But still it's actually impressive. I mean
(02:11):
in a dark way that producers got contestants to cooperate
with all this. This's equip I hear a lot from
people who criticize the models for coming forward today to
talk about their negative experiences on the show.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
These were not miners. There were grown ups who knew
what they were getting into. And if you hated it
that much, you could have quit, you could have stopped.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
That was Perez Hilton standing in for the popular opinion.
There's a belief that if the models didn't like it,
they could just leave. But I don't think it's quite
that simple. From the moment you walk on set, as
a reality show participant, you have to suspend your understanding
of how the world in normal human interaction works. Reality
(02:57):
shows like A and TM are successful because the contestants trust,
to a certain extent, the version of reality the show
is creating. In order to maintain that reality, producers have
to get to contestants to do what they say. Sarah Hartthorn,
who competed on cycle nine, told me how A and
TM achieved this power dynamic and what she compared it
(03:19):
to surprised me.
Speaker 4 (03:22):
I think it's difficult to convey the power dynamic to
someone who hasn't been in it. But the closest comparison
really is a cult.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Sarah explained this using her own cult ranking system. So
the People's Temple aka Jonestown, you know, the ones who
drank the kool aid, that's a level ten. Fitness programs
like Soul Cycle or CrossFit with cult like followings are
a level one. Lots of people follow level one cults.
Even dedicated fandoms are level one cults. I'm a Beyonce devote.
(03:56):
Sarah wrote a book about her experience as a contestant
on A and TM. When she started her research, she
saw some parallels between A and TM and Colts. At first,
she felt like being a contestant on the show was
a Level two or three. Now, after writing the book,
Sarah thinks the show's actually closer to A five or six.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
It takes young girls, and it uses our labor, it
does not pay us, and then it spits us out
really poor and ill equipped to deal with the after effects.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Here's a list of parallels Sarah saw between A and
TM and Colts. Isolation from everyone you know and love.
Check a figurehead or leader the followers can believe in.
Check a group of people who are in charge and
do the leader's bidding. Check a group of followers who
are willing to do whatever is asked of them. Check,
(04:50):
and a prize or reward at the end to make
up for all the followers suffering. Also check, Sarah SAIDs
A and TM even used coercive tactics on the contestants,
some of the same ones cults have been known to use,
like language parroting.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
They would repeat the same words and phrases to us
over and over and over again.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Sarah told me that during the casting process, she and
the other finalists were kept in a small conference room
for hours.
Speaker 4 (05:21):
They were crapping us, and we spent hours just sitting
in these conference rooms.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
With lawyers and producers.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
Talking at us for hours and hours and hours and
hours and hours. They used mind control tactics.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
The lawyers and producers repeatedly told contestants that if they
ever violated their contracts, we.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
Will dock your wages for the rest of your life.
That's the phrase that they said, over and over, we
will dock your wages for the rest of your life.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Sarah said, it felt like producers were trying to drill
the message into their heads, and that wasn't the only thing.
From the start. Producers wanted the contestants to feel disposable, replaceable.
The other mantra they would repeat.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
There are a million girls that want this opportunity, and
we have their phone number. They probably said that to
us hundreds of times, different people setting it, and those
phrases just got stuck in our head. There are a
million girls that want this opportunity, and they have their
phone number.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
While it was probably true, the statement served a larger purpose.
It made the contestants more cooperative they knew if they
didn't do what the producer said, there would be someone
waiting in the wings to take their place. Once producers
established that power dynamic, they could get contestants to follow
(06:39):
rules they wouldn't normally agree to.
Speaker 4 (06:41):
They removed our ability to have any agency right. They
controlled when we could eat, when we could go to
the bathroom. Like I still remember the first time I
said can I go to the bathroom? And they said no.
That's a very jarring thing to hear, Like that's a
script that humans have, right, You say, can I use
the restroom? Someone says, oh, yeah, yes.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Of course.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
That's like a back and forth. It's like a given.
It's like a social norm. And that was removed. When
we said can I go to the bathroom? We didn't
know what the answer would be.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
While reporting this podcast, I learned A ANDTM and shows
like it have pretty strict rules contestants have to follow
if Saul producers can control what's happening on set. They
didn't want the models just wandering around while they were taping.
Another rule I heard about might seem counterintuitive. Sometimes the
models couldn't even talk to each other. Let's say they
(07:33):
were waiting to start a photo shoot or a judging panel.
Maybe the location wasn't ready or tyro wasn't there yet.
The models couldn't pass the time by just chatting with
each other. They had to be on ice. Hair Cycle
four and seventeen contestant Lisa demato Ice is being silent.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
You can't even talk to each other, so I'm not
allowed to talk.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
The whole point of a reality show is to get
everything on camera. Producers didn't want to risk missing juicy moments.
They also didn't want the contestants plodding behind their backs.
Producers didn't just draw the line at talking with each other.
There was a no socializing rule between contestants and crew members.
Even though the camera operators and sound engineers were in
(08:18):
their faces every day, the models weren't supposed to even
say hello or how you doing. Producers wanted the models
to behave as though the cameras weren't there, so they
literally told them to ignore the people behind them, although
one crew member told me that rule eventually went out
the window a few seasons in because it was too
(08:38):
hard to enforce. Even though you're surrounded by people with
these rules, you can see why so many contestants say
being on a reality show is actually a pretty isolating experience,
and that wasn't just on A and TM. Here's reality
TV psychologist doctor Steven Stein. He's worked on shows like
Survivor and Big Brother.
Speaker 5 (09:00):
Some shows are really restrictive, Like a show like Big Brother,
the only people they can talk to would be one
person in production when they're in the diary room, and
then myself and that's it.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
We see contestants on A and TM talking on the
phone to their loved ones back home, but those calls
are usually scheduled and very brief. On some reality shows,
you can't even talk to your loved ones. I don't know.
It's getting a little more culty. Removing objective reality is
a foundational part of brainwashing. Also from a production standpoint,
(09:34):
they didn't want their cast to be distracted with personal
updates and breaking news. They want the set and the
house they're filming in to be their entire world for
the weeks and months they were in production. But the
outside world doesn't stop and sometimes it trumps the reality
that's being created by the show. Doctor Stein remembers the
time when he had to burst the reality TV bubble
(09:57):
with some big news from the outside world.
Speaker 5 (10:00):
I think my worst situation was COVID. I had to
empty entire house a Big Brother Canada when COVID happened.
The city forced everything to close down and everyone's dream
sort of fell apart, and I had to deal with
each contestant, each house guest coming out.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Booming had started right before the COVID nineteen crisis. The
cast had no clue what was going on. They'd been
completely isolated, and now they had to abruptly leave and
go back into this world that was all of a sudden,
very different.
Speaker 5 (10:33):
So I had to tell them there's something that's happened.
The world has kind of changed from what it was
like when you went into the house and just go
through what some of these changes are, and it's going
to affect you, and you're gonna have to go right
home and you're gonna have to isolate And no. They
were shocked. They couldn't believe that we're telling them. It's like, like,
what what is this?
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Here's the thing. The Big Brother contestants were in such
a controlled environment already that when doctor Stein delivered the
news about the COVID lockdown, they didn't believe him.
Speaker 5 (11:03):
They're like, is this a joke? Is this part of
the show?
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Big Brother had so thoroughly conditioned the cast that they
were initially unsure if the pandemic was even real or
part of the production. To me, that says a lot
about how much of a mind fuck being on reality
TV can be. Sarah Hartthorn compared A and TM to
being in a cult, and Sarah's not the only one
(11:31):
who said something about mind controlled and reality TV. Several
people I've interviewed for this podcast compared reality television and
more specifically A and TM to psychological experiments. Here's Lisa Demato.
Speaker 6 (11:46):
It is literally a show about how to survive. The
Stanford Prison Experiment like psychological warfare.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a psychological study done in
the seventies at Stanford University. Researchers were interested in looking
at obedience, power, and control. Here's doctor Stein explaining the experiment.
Speaker 5 (12:09):
It stemmed from the Nazis in Germany. Like the question
was were the people who orchestrated the Holocaust? Were they
inherently evil and bad? Or could anybody be bad and
evil in the right circumstances. That's what he intended to
look at, which was a really good question. Were they
evil people who were doing all this stuff or were
(12:31):
they ordinary people who just did bad things.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
The Stanford prison experiment is infamous for two reasons, first
because of how unethically it was conducted, and second because
of what it revealed. The lead researcher, doctor Phillips Embardo,
took a group of twenty four college age men, paid
them fifteen dollars a day, and randomly assigned them to
two groups. The first group were the prisoners. They went
(12:58):
through a mock arrest by real police, then they were
sent to a makeshift prison in the basement of a
building on campus. They were searched, given a prisoner number,
a uniform, and led into cells. The second group, the guards,
were given fancy uniforms, including mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye contact.
The guards received the simple instruction to keep the prisoners
(13:20):
in line without physically abusing them. Needless to say, all
hell broke loose. What they learned was that given the chance,
in the right circumstances, humans will be trash. Please welcome,
doctor Philip Zimbardo.
Speaker 4 (13:39):
What did your experiment prove?
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Evil behavior?
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Can be listed in the Best of Us.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
The study was supposed to go on for two weeks,
but after six days they had to pull the bug.
Speaker 5 (13:51):
Phil Bombardo just sort of threw it out there and
let it happen, and by goodness, those bad people got
really bad. There was physical altercations, the prisoners took out
the role of prisoners like they fought back like prisoners would,
and the guards were mean and awful, an authoritarian like
guards would be. And again these were ordinary people who
(14:11):
were randomly assigned.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Now, saying A and TM is like the Stanford prison
experiment can be a little extreme, But as I looked
into the history, I learned that the comparison between reality
TV and psychological experiments isn't that much of a leap.
Hannah cat Jones was a contestant on Cycle sixteen. She
(14:37):
told me about two situations that happened on her season
that I didn't know what to make of. Producers could
argue that certain photoshoots and challenges were a test of
the contestants talent or their ability to perform under pressure,
but the situations Hannah told me about were seemingly designed
solely to fuck with the contestants and see how they
(14:58):
would react. One of those moments happened before the season
even kicked off.
Speaker 6 (15:02):
This is the final round before the show officially begins.
Mister and missus Jay walk up and they're like, okay, ladies,
the girls who have their pictures in these envelopes are
the ones going into the house, and the girls who
don't have their pictures in the envelope are going home.
Each person is their envelope and they're like, okay, Betty one,
(15:24):
two three, and I pull out a blank piece of paper.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
And I'm like.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
It's over. That crushed me. Then the contestants were separated.
Hannah's group, the ones with no pictures in their envelopes
were sent up the elevator to a room, presumably to
get their bags and go home.
Speaker 6 (15:50):
We're like picking up our suitcases, and then Tyra Banks
starts walking down this staircase and she's like looking down
at us.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Hi, ladies, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 7 (16:01):
Okay, but you guys can't give up, right, no, right,
This is like you guys got really far.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
The tears keep coming and you're trying to hold them back,
and you.
Speaker 6 (16:10):
Can't hold them back anymore because she's coming to say goodbye.
Speaker 7 (16:12):
This is it. I've gotten like so turned down the
door slammed in my face. The road to success and
to the top is not a straight line, it's a
zigzag line. So unfortunately, you guys have to go home now,
but you don't have to go far.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Because you're.
Speaker 6 (16:34):
And she pressed a button and there was like drapes
that I hadn't really noticed around the stairwell. So then
all of a sudden, these drapes fall and we're in
like a penthouse apartment with like pictures of ourselves and
toys and candy, and like we're all like it's like
the silence, like what's going on? And she's like, you're
(16:55):
on this show, and we all just start like jumping
up and down where like some of us are again some.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Of the girls were literally falling on the ground. In
shock punked was popular at the time. Tyra referenced it
on this episode. This little stunt was her sick nod
to the show.
Speaker 6 (17:13):
And that was like the first night. The next day
they're like, okay, we're gonna start filming.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
But remember there was another group of girls who had
gotten pictures in their envelopes. They thought they made it
onto the show, but they were actually getting sit home.
We didn't see a and TM break that news to them.
Speaker 6 (17:34):
The girls that didn't get on the show, Like, that's
way worse for them psychologically.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
I would have trust issues for a really long time after.
Speaker 6 (17:41):
That, because I remember running into one of the girls
like a year later that had been in the group
that thought they were on the show first, and she
said that they sat in a bus for hours and
then somebody came on the bus and said that was
all for show. You're going home tomorrow, and Tyra Biggs
did not say bye.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
I asked Hannah why she thinks A and TM did that, Like,
what was the point of setting these girls up just
for the three minute payoff of saying ha ha, we gotcha.
Speaker 6 (18:10):
I think at that point they really just loved like
the shock value of things, Like they realized that it
was a great formula for the audience too to be
surprised that this happened to them.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
I think they also did it to put their test
subjects on edge, to make them feel like they never
knew what to expect. Unpredictability can cause anxiety, and anxiety
can cause people to act out. Hannah told me after
the casting prank she didn't know what to expect.
Speaker 6 (18:41):
It was just such a strange couple of months, and like, honestly,
anytime that we walked into a room after that point,
it felt like the floor was going to fall beneath us.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Her feelings were justified. On Hannah Season cycle sixteen, A
and TM really leaned into the psychological experiment thing. There
was one more incident Hannah told me about that was
so bad it didn't even air on the show. On
her season, Hannah made it to the international trip to Morocco.
She was one of the final three. While there, they
(19:15):
had a challenge where the contestants interviewed locals about beauty products,
except the people they were interviewing didn't speak English and
Hannah didn't speak the local language. She lost the challenge,
but instead of just awarding the winner a prize, A
and TM decided to also punish the two losers just
a heads up. The punishment was nasty, even by top
(19:36):
model standards, and it certainly didn't have anything to do
with modeling. When the challenge was over, Hannah and the
other losing contestant were led to a table on the
street with a tarp over it.
Speaker 6 (19:50):
Somebody from production pulled off the tark and it has
a cow's head that severed and its tongue is hanging out,
and that's just like one of the pieces of animal carcass.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
It's on the table.
Speaker 6 (20:04):
There's like organs, and there's like a goat's foot, and
there's just like all these different like pieces of meat.
And he said, you're going to pick up these animal
pieces and you're gonna put them on the wagon that's
attashes donkey and you're gonna pull his donkey down the
road to the butcher shot. So Brittany and I have
to team up to pick up the cow's head. That's
(20:27):
how heavy it was, and we're both like gagging, like,
you know, because it's not like fresh, it's like griss.
And we finally get all the pieces onto.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
The wagon and it got worth.
Speaker 6 (20:43):
As we're picking up the pieces and everything, the Moroccans
are like around the table and like watching us do this,
they're all like Moroccan men who are like ha ha ha.
It felt like shame from Game of Arms that they
were like shame, you know, it just felt so demeaning
and like not forward at all.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Hannah told me when she looks back at that moment,
she regrets not telling the producers no but that's the
thing about the great psychological experiment that is reality TV.
It's designed to push you to do stuff that, under
normal circumstances you'd never do.
Speaker 6 (21:22):
I felt like that was a little piece of my
soul like kind of went in that meat lock or
two as far as like not putting my foot down
and saying no. Instead, I was like, Okay, I'll do
this for the sake of the show, because if I
do this, then maybe I could win the show. And
I felt like it was like just a really messed
up way for production and people who were writing those
(21:44):
pieces to just exercise their control and to kind of
laugh at us.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
A and tmfound makes their jose Taurus told me that
he and other crew members were aware of this dynamic too.
Speaker 8 (21:57):
You've signed on to live in this book. The microscopes
are going to be on immediately. We're going to dissect
every word that you say, every step that you take.
I always thought the original concept for reality TV was
to just observe and see how people react to different
(22:17):
people in different circumstances, and you document that. But as
time goes on, you amp up the stress level.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
It turns out sticking people in unnerving and uncomfortable situations.
To see how they react is the very cornerstone of
reality programming.
Speaker 9 (22:35):
Here's the candid subject.
Speaker 10 (22:37):
Here comes the cannon camera staff, three of them.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
At least. To really understand where America's next top model
came from, we have to go back in time, way
back to the nineteen forties. That's where we're going after
the Break. A and TM premiered in two thousand and three,
(23:08):
and let me tell y'all, what a time to be alive.
There were the reality shows like The Osbournes and Laguna
Beach that gave us a glimpse into the lives of
the rich and famous to let us know there are
truly nothing like us. And then there were the shows
that were making dreams come true. If you wanted to
be a singer but never got that big break, American
(23:29):
Idol could make you a star. And if you wanted
to know what it feels like to have twenty desperate
debutantes fighting for your affection, you could go on The Bachelor.
If you wanted to be a millionaire and you weren't
good at trivia, you could voluntarily strand yourself on an
island for weeks and play mind games. With strangers on
the swan self proclaimed ugly people could get plastic surgery
(23:52):
so that their inner beauty would finally be reflected outside.
This is the landscape was born into. But reality TV
didn't start in the early two thousands, and it definitely
wasn't invented by Tyra Banks.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
My name is Amanda Ann Klein. I am professor of
Film Studies at East Carolina University. I've also written a
book called Millennials Killed the Video Star.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
Y'all know Amanda. She pretty much has my dream job.
She's a reality TV historian and expert, and she's going
to be our guide for this brief journey through reality programming.
Reality based television wasn't really possible for the advent of
handheld cameras, portable sound equipment, and fast film stop. But
(24:41):
almost as soon as the tech was available, production studios
decided to use it to make fools out of everyday
people for our entertainment.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
So there was this post war belief that technology will
allow us to uncover the secrets of kind of human
behaviors that were not accessible prior to this technology.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
The first show to test out this theory was Candid Camera.
You might remember iterations of it from the seventies, nineties,
and early two thousands, but the show first premiered in
nineteen forty eight.
Speaker 11 (25:17):
Smile You were on candid Camera.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
They were like many psychological experiments, and there would generally
be a mark, so someone who didn't know that they
were being recorded. That was key. And one of the
more famous examples involves an elevator full of people who
are all part of the production.
Speaker 10 (25:38):
The gentleman in the elevator now.
Speaker 12 (25:41):
Is a candid star.
Speaker 10 (25:42):
These folks who are entering, the man with a white shirt,
the Lindy with a trench coat, and subsequently one other
member of us there will face the rear.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
When the mark walks in. The person who doesn't know
he's being recorded. The people in the elevator all turn
at once to the left, and he looks around. He's
a little confused, and then he turns.
Speaker 10 (26:05):
And you'll see how this man in the trench car,
he tries to maintain his individuality, but a little by
little he looks at his watch, but he's really making
(26:30):
an excuse for turning just a little bit more.
Speaker 13 (26:34):
It's a little all.
Speaker 6 (26:37):
I.
Speaker 10 (26:37):
We'll try it once again.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Then they all turn to the back, and he again
is like, well, damn okay, and he turns.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
And this goes on for a while, everyone in this
elevator just randomly turning at the same time, and this
poor guy following their lead. In nineteen forty eight, this
was peak television. Audiences could watch real people experiencing seemingly
real dilemmas and see how they would react. It was
punked before punped, But Candid Camera's hosts Alan Funt wasn't
(27:10):
just playing these practical jokes for shits and giggles. He
was interested in something deeper.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
A lot of this has to do with post World
War two culture and the sense of what makes group
think happen. How could these atrocities of World War Two
have happened to just normal, regular moral people.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Remember what doctor Stein said about the Stanford prison experiment
in the nineteen seventies. Those researchers were also interested in
what drove people to commit atrocities during World War Two.
This guy, Alan Funt was looking into it thirty years before,
and he made it entertaining.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
So there was a lot of investigation into that in
the world of psychology, and Alan Funt was very interested
in that. As a result, candid Camera was actually studied
a lot in the sixties by cycle cologists.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
But not all reality programming was a deep psychological exploration.
Some of it was a lot more reminiscent of contemporary
reality TV. People laying their pain and trauma bear in
front of audiences in the hopes of gaining fame, fortune,
and in this case, nominal prizes. What you like to
(28:21):
be Queen for to day.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Queen for a Day ran from the mid forties up
through the mid sixties. First it was on radio, and
then starting in nineteen fifty six, it goes on TV.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
When it comes to early reality TV shows, this one
might be the most disturbing of all, and I think
it tells us a lot about later prize based shows
like Top Model.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
The premise of Queen for a Day is pretty wild.
So women right into the show and they tell the
producers about their sob story and it's pretty bad stuff.
A woman whose son has polio and he's bedbound, so
she wants a rolling bed so she can take him
(29:10):
out into the sun. A woman who has a lot
of children she just wants would so she can build
bunk beds for them to sleep in. It's awful so
they pick four women and they're all seated in the audience.
They come up, the host interviews them, and at the
(29:30):
end of the show they place all the women on
camera and the audience claps for the sadus story, and
then the winner becomes queen for a day and they
get the thing that they asked for.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
The show was shot in front of a studio audience,
and these matronly women are escorted on stage by young
models in mini dresses to meet this host who's honestly
just over the top. Every episode is riddled with ads
and sponsorship plugs, Like literally every five minutes they're trying
to sell you saran wrap or jewelry or worcesters or sauce.
(30:05):
For some reason, this particular episode you're about to hear
was sponsored by the egg industry, so all the contestants
have something to do with eggs. The first woman works
the night shift as an egg candler, which apparently is
the person who takes the bad eggs off the conveyor
belt before they're packaged.
Speaker 13 (30:22):
Well, all, my husband's been disabled for the last ten
years and it's spin up to me and makes a living,
and I've been very thankful that I've had a good
job that I could.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
This woman went on the show because it was offering
her something she couldn't afford, a set of adjustable stools
so that she and her coworkers could sit more comfortably
as they sort the eggs. These were mostly working white
women at a time when only a quarter to a
third of white women worked outside of their homes. This
is also in an era of respectability politics, a time
(30:52):
when you didn't air your dirty laundry, even to your neighbors.
And these women are going on national television saying they're
and they're not doing it for fame. They're doing it
because they've been promised the chance to win. You can
even see it in the episode and hear it in
their voices. They're nervous, uncomfortable, even like this next woman,
(31:13):
who ran a chicken farm with her husband. She had
a pained, nervous look on her face. She's fidgeting, almost shaking.
She doesn't even know how to answer the questions how
many kids you got three?
Speaker 11 (31:25):
How many chicken?
Speaker 1 (31:26):
About seven thousand?
Speaker 11 (31:28):
Holy boy? How many eggs did the chicken lay today?
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Ours?
Speaker 11 (31:32):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (31:33):
About three thousand? Right now?
Speaker 11 (31:36):
You didn't hear the question I guess how many eggs
does up Chicken lay? Oh, if you got one to
Lady seven thousand, you and I can get pretty.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Rich on the average one to day.
Speaker 11 (31:46):
I think how many roasters per Lady Chicken. None, She's
new in the egg business.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
There's no way this woman was on the show to
be famous, like reality TV contestants we see today. She
was on Queen for a Day because she desperately wanted
to get her son an expensive gift. I would like
to have, more than anything in the world, a record
player for my boy just had open heart surgery in February.
(32:15):
Hold this little boy fifteen, he was fifteen Saturday. What's
his name? Chesterirs old chest And it only gets more
sad and desperate. Woman number three, whose husband was apparently
a teacher, pastor and egg man, wanted an entercom so
she could keep track of her five kids.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
I candle eggs and egg room quite long, and I
got to keep track of.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
The children in the house. Sure, and it's quite a
waste to run back and forth. And finally there was
woman number four, who maybe had the most odd but
sweet request.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
I like to have eighty moon moves.
Speaker 7 (32:50):
Now.
Speaker 11 (32:50):
That scared me a little bit and I too, you
could use, but she wanted eighty. And what a nice
reason tell it.
Speaker 13 (32:59):
I have a dog in Pacific State Hospital and they're
going to have a lou owl this fall, and I
wanted the moon moves.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
For the girls.
Speaker 11 (33:05):
Explain, if you don't mind, what is that school that
your little daughter attends. It's a special school.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
It's a school for the handicapped, and.
Speaker 11 (33:12):
They're going to have a luou. You want eighty little
girls to go to this luau all dressed in moon moves.
I can't think of a nicer thing for those kids.
Now we're going to have a queen right now, and
here we go. Number one, missus Irma Franklin. Number one,
Thank you. Number two, you want a phonograph of that boy?
Speaker 1 (33:32):
Number two. The crowd chose number four, the Moumoo lady,
But the moon moves were not her only prize.
Speaker 11 (33:41):
And here's a good way to start with this handsome
queen for a day watch by Hell Bros. It was
designed just for our queens and has two tiny diamond
encrusted crowns adorning the face.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Now you put in.
Speaker 11 (33:49):
A lot of work there, and I'm sure that the
perfect way to relax the days and will be a
great comfort to you.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
It's with a jacuzzi, whirldpool bat. She also got a
canopy bed, a gift certificate to shop in a catalog
and you'll love this. The woman who ran an egg
farm got a year's supply of eggs.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
What really makes the show so surreal is that not
only does she get the price she asked for, but
she gets all these sponsor gifts and they're completely inappropriate
for the women that are gonna winness. So it's like
outfits for the country club. Every woman will look chic
(34:30):
in this matching polyester tennis outfit. It's outrageous. There's this
huge disconnect. So when we talk about ethics and reality TV,
even back in the fifties, we were doing some pretty
suspect things. This point, Amanda makes is the reason why
(34:51):
we just listen to all of that, Other than I
just wanted you to hear how ridiculous that show is.
Almost from the beginning, when way to to put real
people on television to hear their real stories, the ethical
lines were blurred.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
These women were more than likely not rich. I mean,
the first women couldn't even afford some stools but producers
understood that if they dangled the promise of something people
couldn't otherwise get on their own, they would be willing
to do stuff they wouldn't normally do. It's something we
saw all the time on A and TM. Queen for
(35:29):
a Day is an early example of how desperation became entertainment.
By the time Tyra Banks and Kim Mock came along,
they intuitively understood that the most desperate people make the
best contestants. For a long time, Candid Camera, Queen for
a Day in game shows were really the only type
(35:50):
of reality television programming. That is until the mother of
reality TV as we know it premiered in the nineteen
seventies on PDS of all places.
Speaker 9 (36:01):
During the next hour, you will see the first in
a series of programs entitled An American Family.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
An American Family comes out in nineteen seventy three. It
is a PBS show and it is what we would
consider the first serialized form of reality TV. What made
An American Family different is that it told a story,
a continuous story across episodes.
Speaker 9 (36:28):
The series is about the William C. Loud family of
Santa Barbara, California. For seven months from May thirtieth, nineteen
seventy one to January first, nineteen seventy two. The family
was filmed as they went about their daily routine.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
An American Family doesn't sound like the reality TV we
watched today. It just sounds like a really mundane documentary
about the day to day lives of a typical family.
But when you think about it, being that a cap
sure the day to day life while happening to catch
the truly unhanged drama is the basis of all docusobe reality.
Think about the Kardashians, or the Real Housewives or Jersey
(37:10):
Shore and American Family pioneered the whole genre. Half of
Antium was the plot of the modeling competition, but the
other half was about the drama in the house. You know,
who'll stole my granola bar? An American Family was the
earliest example of this type of reality TV.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
It's the first time people said, come into my house,
come into my life. You're inviting the camera in which
is a very different relationship with the camera. I teach
it in my reality TV class, and one thing that
I find interesting is how the students get frustrated with
the downtime because we're so used to reality shows kind
(37:53):
of you know, give us this, give us that, give
us the reaction, whereas this was more in kind of
the direct cinema dot commentary tradition where you might just
see someone you know, their finger drumming on the table
for a while as a boring conversation happens.
Speaker 5 (38:12):
Oh, just you know, kids, Kevin.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Nothing much here, But eventually some real life drama happened.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
They got a lot of crazy content out of that,
because the husband and wife ultimately divorce by the end.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
A tense breakup unfolding before our eyes. Oh now, it's
starting to sound familiar. And that wasn't the only scandalous
thing happening in this average American family.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Their son basically comes out as gay. It's very coded,
but there's a whole episode of his mother visiting him
at the Chelsea Hotel in New York where like they
go to this crazy drag show.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
Oh now, we got some controversy, at least by nineteen
seventy three standards, and.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
It obviously caused a huge stir when it came out.
Some people were like, it's the end of America, right,
We're seeing an American family fall apart, where you know,
we've got this guy who's clearly gay.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
The family son Lance later came out as gay. I
don't think an American Family producers knew Lance was in
the process of coming out when they chose to cast
the Loud family, but it became the most interesting thing
about the whole show. Years later, when the reality genre
started to pick up, producers took a page from an
American Family. The cast people who were outsiders, who were different,
(39:40):
because that brought in viewers. Even with all the makings
of great reality TV, an American Family didn't really inspire
any other reality programming. For a while, it was seen
as an artsy docu series, not something to be replicated
season after season. After it, we had shows like Cops,
(40:01):
which presented itself as raw reality from the perspective of
the police Star Search, which I guess is a bit
like American Idol and America's Funniest Home Videos, where every
week a lucky family was rewarded for catching the moment
when some poor dad gets knocked upside the head with
a pinata sip. But nothing like an American Family, that
(40:22):
is until nineteen ninety two, when MTV premiered The Real World.
This is the True Story. True Story seven strangers picked to.
Speaker 5 (40:32):
Live in a lot and have their lives taped to
find out what happens like when people stop being polite?
Speaker 1 (40:38):
Could you get the phone?
Speaker 11 (40:39):
Can start getting real?
Speaker 5 (40:41):
The Real World.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
The reason why they decide to do the Real World
at MTV is because the ratings were kind of flagging.
They still obviously did a lot of music videos, but
people were kind of losing interest, and so they saw
that something that young audience is really loved was Beverly
Host nine O two or zero. So MTV thought, let's
(41:05):
do that. Let's do a scripted show. But it turns
out it's really expensive, right, you need writers, you need actors,
all that stuff, So instead they went for a reality
TV format.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
If you go back to the first season of the
Real World, you'll notice that everyone was an artist of
some kind trying to make it in New York City.
It was a group of young dancers, actors, rappers, and
singers all hoping to get their big break.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
They were actually led to believe that this was going
to really focus on their art and kind of launch
their careers.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
MTV's The Real World was the first time when people
started using reality TV as a platform or a means
to launch the career they actually wanted. At this point,
there was no such thing as a reality star, and
for the first two seasons the show was well boring
and the writings were bad. That is, the third season
(42:01):
featured Pedro Zamora, an HIV positive gay man.
Speaker 11 (42:04):
Now I am a person living with age, and I
am a gay man, and I am hispanic, I'm a
person of color, and simply who I am.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
You know, the AIDS crisis was kind of at its
peak at that time. It was pretty remarkable to put
an HIV positive gay man on TV.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
Pedro was a sympathetic hero you could root for, but
this wasn't an artsy docu series. They needed to bring
the drama to stay on air, and every hero needs
a villain. Enter a puck who was antagonistic and openly homophobic.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
Great idea, right, They put on someone who was abrasive,
who didn't back down, and as a result, you had
your perfect villain and you had your perfect fit. Though
very melodramatic structure.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
That structure eventually became the backbone of reality TV. Producers
understood that rooting for your fhades isn't as fun without
someone to root against, and that tried and true formula
is something we see season after season on a certain
reality modeling competition show. I don't think casting Pedro was
(43:14):
some altruistic act humanizing the AIDS crisis. I think they
were using his identity to stir up conflict, just like
I think A and TM did when they cast Isis
King as the show's first trans woman. The Real World's
success was a turning point in the history of reality TV.
After nineteen ninety five, new shows started popping up like Daisies, Judge,
(43:37):
Judy Making, the Band, Big Brother, Fear Factor, The Amazing Race,
American Idol, The Bachelor Survivor. And here's one big reason
reality TV exploded. It's a lot cheaper to make than
scripted programming. Networks realized they could get the same viewership
for a fraction of the cost of a show like
Gilmour Girls or X Files. There were no pest actors' unions,
(44:01):
no costume designers, and no writers.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
So this creates a perfect environment for something like reality
TV because of how cheap it is, because you can
avoid union labor and all of those things. The other
factor is the rise of tabloid culture. At this time.
So you know, there were always tabloid magazines. You know,
when I was a kid, my grandmother loved The Inquirer
(44:28):
and she I think she called them the scandal sheets,
which is such a great, such a great term, but
they really take off and as a society we get
very interested in seeing celebrities caught unawares and as a result,
you have these individuals who we called it at the time,
(44:49):
I think we called them like celebutants, people who were
famous for being famous. This was an outrageous idea to
people at the time. They just couldn't believe it. So
Paris Hilton, Kim Gard, Dashian people who didn't do anything.
They just kind of existed as pretty rich girls who
go and party.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
And this is where Reality TV History meets a young
Tyra Banks, who had an idea to cash in on
this newly evolved genre. And we just spent ten episodes
talking about how that went. After the break, we're revisiting
A and TM's worst tropes and their dark history, and
then I'll be signing off for real this time. Back
(45:41):
in episode seven, we explored the angry Black woman trope.
A and TM had a pattern of casting and editing
contestants to fit the stereotype that black women are loud, mean, bitter, confrontational,
belligerent divas. And we didn't get kicked off his somebody
don't ask me toe up right now?
Speaker 2 (46:01):
Shut up?
Speaker 11 (46:02):
Did she not come up to Nia State.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
Competition?
Speaker 4 (46:08):
Your better than?
Speaker 1 (46:12):
No matter what any girl say you? But a n
TM didn't invent the A b W trope, They just
did it really well. The trope has history. There was
(46:33):
a radio sitcom called Amos and Andy that ran from
the twenties until the early nineteen sixties. It was also
briefly on television. The characters Amos and Andy, were two
black men who moved up north from down South for
a better life. On the radio program, the two men
who voiced Amos and Andy were white. They used offensive
(46:54):
accents that were supposed to mock black dialect. The show
was extremely racist and extremely popular. There was one central
woman on the show. Her name was Sapphire. The character
was voiced by an actual black woman, Ernestine Wade, but
it was still a demeaning caricature of black women. Sapphire
(47:17):
didn't have any redeeming qualities. She was always loud, rude, overbearing,
and angry. You are the lazest no one.
Speaker 12 (47:25):
You ain't never supported.
Speaker 1 (47:26):
Man twenty two years.
Speaker 12 (47:28):
You ain't got no ambition. You are so weak it's
most finalss CAT.
Speaker 7 (47:31):
I don't never missed, and you ain't never done nothing
to make a home for me, And I'm.
Speaker 1 (47:36):
Leaving you sound familiar. When Amason Andy was on air,
there were very few roles for black people in Hollywood.
This actress, Ernestine Wade, was actually a theater trained for
former singer and musician, but she was relegated to one
no roles like Sapphire. The Sapphire character confirmed widely had
(48:00):
racist beliefs at the time about black women, and that
trope took root in American entertainment. I could do an
entire podcast just on the variations and evolutions of Sapphire
and media. The Sapphire character never died, she just became
the angry black woman. Okay, y'all still with me. Let's
(48:23):
take a trip to a more recent history, a time
when most of us were alive. Although we may wish
we didn't have to live through this, I'm talking about
the early two thousands, a period of rampant body shaming
antim is in the pantheon of body shaming offenders from
this era, and I want to give y'all some context
(48:44):
about the two thousands culture that birthed top model. Jess
Simms is a health writer, and she remembers just how
brutal the aughts were on women's bodies.
Speaker 12 (48:54):
America's next top model is such a tip of the
iceberg in terms of what we're looking at. We had
always say A really good example was the treatment of
Renes el Wegger.
Speaker 1 (49:04):
Renesel Wiger was in Bridget jones Diary. The movie Bridget
Jones's Diary came out in two thousand and one, and
it took America by storm. The entire premise was that
Bridget Jones was fat, from beat and looking for love.
But Bridget Jones was no more than a size ten
and weighed one hundred and thirty six pounds. Renee zel
(49:24):
Wiger put on weight for the role and lost it afterwards.
For years, she says, strangers would come up to her
on the street and ask, how did you lose that weight?
She refused to answer the question. Here's writer Jess Simms again.
Speaker 12 (49:39):
In the early two thousands, no matter what your body
looked like, it was a problem.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
We also have Jessica Simpson. In two thousand and nine,
there was a photo of popstar Jessica Simpson on stage
at a concert.
Speaker 12 (49:52):
She's wearing these high waisted denim jeans and a leopard
print belt, and it was on the news cycle for
a good two or three weeks.
Speaker 1 (50:03):
The photo went early two thousands viral, not because Jessica
Simpson was doing anything in it, but because she had
gained some weight. Jessica Simpson rose to fame in the
late nineties when she was a literal teenager and because
she had the nerve to be bigger than she was
when she was seventeen. She found her picture on the
(50:24):
cover of all the tabloids and the subject of a
lot of blog posts, blogs like Perez Hilton's. His name
kept coming up while I was interviewing people for this podcast,
and I'm glad I decided to interview him myself because
it was illuminating. I have some more clips from our
(50:44):
interview I'll share in a minute, but first, here's what
Jessims had to say about Perez's role in that body
shaming era.
Speaker 12 (50:51):
We saw people who got famous off of being cruel
to fat people. I always talk about Perez Hilton, who
tried to turn a new lead, which I always find
to be very bizarre because he was disgustingly cruel to
all women. He's such a good example of how gay
men can be so misogynistic. Beyond his calls for Britney
(51:14):
Spears to hurt herself, which he was very open about
and was very persistent, his coverage of women's bodies. It
was a really good example of how the media were
able to make money off of justs gouts of women's bodies.
And these weren't people who were journalists who not a
journalistic code of ethics.
Speaker 1 (51:34):
Writer Michelle Konstantinovsky also had thoughts about Perez's impact and
the climate of the early two thousands.
Speaker 13 (51:41):
Tabloid culture was beyond out of control at that point.
We all remember, you know, Lindsay Lohan and Parashiltan and
Nicole Ritchie either being celebrated or torn apart depending on
the day, you know, and the Perez Hilton of it all,
all of the bloggers who felt very comfortable not only
displaying woman's bodies but literally circling parts of them and
(52:02):
magnifying them and saying what was wrong with them? But
the Perez Hilton culture just kept doubling down, doubling down
on how it's not only acceptable to dissect and almost
like take glee in mocking women's bodies, but it's expected
that's what.
Speaker 1 (52:20):
We do as a culture. Perez was one of the
absolute worst when it came to body shaming. This is
the man who said one of Bruce Willis's daughters was
a fugly child. He described the OCI's Misha Barton's thighs
is being mare flicious, and he once called Britney Spears
fat Elvis in a headline. No one was off limits.
(52:44):
These days, though, Perez is singing a slightly different tune.
He's been on a bit of an apology tour. When
I interviewed him, I had prepared some hard hitting questions
about the damage he caused with his post, but he
came out swinging.
Speaker 3 (52:59):
I take full account of bit for everything I did.
I can't blame ignorance and I can't blame youth. I
was in my late twenties and I was so selfish.
I was incredibly selfish. I knew at the time that
what I was doing was wrong, and I didn't care.
(53:20):
I was selfish. I cared about me. I cared about
the clicks, the page view. I was purposefully trying to
be shocking because that worked. It got attention, it got
me views, and it got me success. I was horrible
and I was rewarded for it.
Speaker 1 (53:40):
Whether or not this maya culpa is genuine. Perez knows
what to say, and that's strikingly different than what we
hear from say Tyra Banks.
Speaker 3 (53:50):
Attention is a very powerful drug, and I was an
attention addict.
Speaker 1 (53:59):
Perez have changed his ways, But the thing is today
there are millions of Perezes. When reality TV started eighty
years ago, it was openly deemed a social and psychological experiment.
Then it became normal, and today we're in the middle
of a new psychological experiment, one that's hard to opt
(54:20):
out of. Amanda clin again.
Speaker 2 (54:23):
It feels like right now everything is reality TV because
you know, first of all, of course social media, you
can hate follow people online and come on, we all
do it because they're drama and they put all their
mess out there and you're like, oh, what's messy up
to today? So like that's your personal reality show and
(54:44):
we're all.
Speaker 1 (54:44):
The main character in our own story. Amanda thinks it's
changing the way we approach our daily lives.
Speaker 2 (54:50):
You see something happening, you pull your phone out, not
because you want to remember it later, it's because you're like,
ooh context. I don't have a big social media but
even I'm like, oh, this is so interesting.
Speaker 3 (55:02):
Let me get this.
Speaker 2 (55:04):
We're all reality TV producers. We're all curating the world
for other people, and I don't think that's a good
thing because I think that's changing the way we view
each other. We are viewing other people as content, so
we're more prone to you each other, I think as characters.
Speaker 1 (55:20):
Now, reality TV started this phenomenon of wanting to watch
real people in ridiculous situations and everyday dramas, and now,
in a way, we are all on a reality show,
whether we want to be or not. That's all for
(55:40):
this very special bonus episode. Thanks for listening to the
Curse of America's Next Top Model. Someone once told me,
in this business, the only reward you get is to
get to do it again, and my team and I
worked really hard. So if you want another season or
more episodes, the best way to let us know is
(56:01):
by leading a five star rating and a glowing review.
All right ro all the credits one last time. The
Curse of America's Next Top Model is a production of
Glass Podcast, a division of Glass Entertainment Group, in partnership
with iHeart Podcast. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass,
(56:22):
hosted and singer produced by me Bridget Armstrong. Our story
editor is Monique Leboard, also produced by Ben Fetterman and
Andrea Gunning. Associate producers are Alisha Key, Kristin Melcriy, and
Curry Richmond. Consulting producers on this podcast are Oliver TwixT
and Kate Taylor. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and
Jessica Crincheck. Audio editing and mixing on this episode by
(56:45):
Matt del Vecchio and Dean Welsh. The Curse of America's
Next Top Model theme was composed by Oliver Bains. Music
library provided by myb Music. Special Thanks to everyone we interviewed,
especially the former contestants, and for more podcasts from iHeart,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcast. Also check out the Etglass Podcast Instagram for
(57:08):
Curse of America's Next Top Model behind the scenes content
Now, if y'all know, I couldn't just leave you high
and dry like that. Want to beyond some, want to
beyond some. Welcome to the Curse of America's Next Top Model,
the Bonus episode. First, let me say thank you for
(00:28):
listening to the season. The response has been great and
a little overwhelming. When my team and I started researching
and reporting, we had to make some difficult decisions about
what to include in the ten episode season and what
to leave on the cutting room floor. That's one of
the hardest things about this job. My interviews to the
show usually went on for hours. As you can imagine,
(00:51):
we heard a lot of stuff that didn't neatly fit
into the season arc we decided on like the cringey
origins of reality.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
TV when we talk about epics and reality TV even
back in the fifties, we were doing some pretty suspect things.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
And of course there were more behind the scenes details
from the models that couldn't fit into the season. Some
of it was downright weird. I heard a lot about
stuff that happened on set that made me realize what
a strange world reality TV production really is. All season long,
we talked about how producers created the stories we saw
(01:29):
play out on A and TM. Casting producers find and
create characters, show producers stir up drama and manufacture storylines.
Creative producers craft over the top photoshoots and runways, and
a surprising number of contestants willingly sign up for it all. Now,
of course, there are some who walk off set and
(01:50):
others who ask to be eliminated, but for the most part,
a Tom got ten to fourteen contestants to stay through
the humiliation for twenty four seasons. People stuck it out
because they wanted the title and the prize. Others just
wanted the exposure. But still it's actually impressive. I mean
(02:11):
in a dark way that producers got contestants to cooperate
with all this. This's equip I hear a lot from
people who criticize the models for coming forward today to
talk about their negative experiences on the show.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
These were not miners. There were grown ups who knew
what they were getting into. And if you hated it
that much, you could have quit, you could have stopped.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
That was Perez Hilton standing in for the popular opinion.
There's a belief that if the models didn't like it,
they could just leave. But I don't think it's quite
that simple. From the moment you walk on set, as
a reality show participant, you have to suspend your understanding
of how the world in normal human interaction works. Reality
(02:57):
shows like A and TM are successful because the contestants trust,
to a certain extent, the version of reality the show
is creating. In order to maintain that reality, producers have
to get to contestants to do what they say. Sarah Hartthorn,
who competed on cycle nine, told me how A and
TM achieved this power dynamic and what she compared it
(03:19):
to surprised me.
Speaker 4 (03:22):
I think it's difficult to convey the power dynamic to
someone who hasn't been in it. But the closest comparison
really is a cult.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Sarah explained this using her own cult ranking system. So
the People's Temple aka Jonestown, you know, the ones who
drank the kool aid, that's a level ten. Fitness programs
like Soul Cycle or CrossFit with cult like followings are
a level one. Lots of people follow level one cults.
Even dedicated fandoms are level one cults. I'm a Beyonce devote.
(03:56):
Sarah wrote a book about her experience as a contestant
on A and TM. When she started her research, she
saw some parallels between A and TM and Colts. At first,
she felt like being a contestant on the show was
a Level two or three. Now, after writing the book,
Sarah thinks the show's actually closer to A five or six.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
It takes young girls, and it uses our labor, it
does not pay us, and then it spits us out
really poor and ill equipped to deal with the after effects.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Here's a list of parallels Sarah saw between A and
TM and Colts. Isolation from everyone you know and love.
Check a figurehead or leader the followers can believe in.
Check a group of people who are in charge and
do the leader's bidding. Check a group of followers who
are willing to do whatever is asked of them. Check,
(04:50):
and a prize or reward at the end to make
up for all the followers suffering. Also check, Sarah SAIDs
A and TM even used coercive tactics on the contestants,
some of the same ones cults have been known to use,
like language parroting.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
They would repeat the same words and phrases to us
over and over and over again.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Sarah told me that during the casting process, she and
the other finalists were kept in a small conference room
for hours.
Speaker 4 (05:21):
They were crapping us, and we spent hours just sitting
in these conference rooms.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
With lawyers and producers.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
Talking at us for hours and hours and hours and
hours and hours. They used mind control tactics.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
The lawyers and producers repeatedly told contestants that if they
ever violated their contracts, we.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
Will dock your wages for the rest of your life.
That's the phrase that they said, over and over, we
will dock your wages for the rest of your life.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Sarah said, it felt like producers were trying to drill
the message into their heads, and that wasn't the only thing.
From the start. Producers wanted the contestants to feel disposable, replaceable.
The other mantra they would repeat.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
There are a million girls that want this opportunity, and
we have their phone number. They probably said that to
us hundreds of times, different people setting it, and those
phrases just got stuck in our head. There are a
million girls that want this opportunity, and they have their
phone number.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
While it was probably true, the statement served a larger purpose.
It made the contestants more cooperative they knew if they
didn't do what the producer said, there would be someone
waiting in the wings to take their place. Once producers
established that power dynamic, they could get contestants to follow
(06:39):
rules they wouldn't normally agree to.
Speaker 4 (06:41):
They removed our ability to have any agency right. They
controlled when we could eat, when we could go to
the bathroom. Like I still remember the first time I
said can I go to the bathroom? And they said no.
That's a very jarring thing to hear, Like that's a
script that humans have, right, You say, can I use
the restroom? Someone says, oh, yeah, yes.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Of course.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
That's like a back and forth. It's like a given.
It's like a social norm. And that was removed. When
we said can I go to the bathroom? We didn't
know what the answer would be.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
While reporting this podcast, I learned A ANDTM and shows
like it have pretty strict rules contestants have to follow
if Saul producers can control what's happening on set. They
didn't want the models just wandering around while they were taping.
Another rule I heard about might seem counterintuitive. Sometimes the
models couldn't even talk to each other. Let's say they
(07:33):
were waiting to start a photo shoot or a judging panel.
Maybe the location wasn't ready or tyro wasn't there yet.
The models couldn't pass the time by just chatting with
each other. They had to be on ice. Hair Cycle
four and seventeen contestant Lisa demato Ice is being silent.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
You can't even talk to each other, so I'm not
allowed to talk.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
The whole point of a reality show is to get
everything on camera. Producers didn't want to risk missing juicy moments.
They also didn't want the contestants plodding behind their backs.
Producers didn't just draw the line at talking with each other.
There was a no socializing rule between contestants and crew members.
Even though the camera operators and sound engineers were in
(08:18):
their faces every day, the models weren't supposed to even
say hello or how you doing. Producers wanted the models
to behave as though the cameras weren't there, so they
literally told them to ignore the people behind them, although
one crew member told me that rule eventually went out
the window a few seasons in because it was too
(08:38):
hard to enforce. Even though you're surrounded by people with
these rules, you can see why so many contestants say
being on a reality show is actually a pretty isolating experience,
and that wasn't just on A and TM. Here's reality
TV psychologist doctor Steven Stein. He's worked on shows like
Survivor and Big Brother.
Speaker 5 (09:00):
Some shows are really restrictive, Like a show like Big Brother,
the only people they can talk to would be one
person in production when they're in the diary room, and
then myself and that's it.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
We see contestants on A and TM talking on the
phone to their loved ones back home, but those calls
are usually scheduled and very brief. On some reality shows,
you can't even talk to your loved ones. I don't know.
It's getting a little more culty. Removing objective reality is
a foundational part of brainwashing. Also from a production standpoint,
(09:34):
they didn't want their cast to be distracted with personal
updates and breaking news. They want the set and the
house they're filming in to be their entire world for
the weeks and months they were in production. But the
outside world doesn't stop and sometimes it trumps the reality
that's being created by the show. Doctor Stein remembers the
time when he had to burst the reality TV bubble
(09:57):
with some big news from the outside world.
Speaker 5 (10:00):
I think my worst situation was COVID. I had to
empty entire house a Big Brother Canada when COVID happened.
The city forced everything to close down and everyone's dream
sort of fell apart, and I had to deal with
each contestant, each house guest coming out.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Booming had started right before the COVID nineteen crisis. The
cast had no clue what was going on. They'd been
completely isolated, and now they had to abruptly leave and
go back into this world that was all of a sudden,
very different.
Speaker 5 (10:33):
So I had to tell them there's something that's happened.
The world has kind of changed from what it was
like when you went into the house and just go
through what some of these changes are, and it's going
to affect you, and you're gonna have to go right
home and you're gonna have to isolate And no. They
were shocked. They couldn't believe that we're telling them. It's like, like,
what what is this?
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Here's the thing. The Big Brother contestants were in such
a controlled environment already that when doctor Stein delivered the
news about the COVID lockdown, they didn't believe him.
Speaker 5 (11:03):
They're like, is this a joke? Is this part of
the show?
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Big Brother had so thoroughly conditioned the cast that they
were initially unsure if the pandemic was even real or
part of the production. To me, that says a lot
about how much of a mind fuck being on reality
TV can be. Sarah Hartthorn compared A and TM to
being in a cult, and Sarah's not the only one
(11:31):
who said something about mind controlled and reality TV. Several
people I've interviewed for this podcast compared reality television and
more specifically A and TM to psychological experiments. Here's Lisa Demato.
Speaker 6 (11:46):
It is literally a show about how to survive. The
Stanford Prison Experiment like psychological warfare.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a psychological study done in
the seventies at Stanford University. Researchers were interested in looking
at obedience, power, and control. Here's doctor Stein explaining the experiment.
Speaker 5 (12:09):
It stemmed from the Nazis in Germany. Like the question
was were the people who orchestrated the Holocaust? Were they
inherently evil and bad? Or could anybody be bad and
evil in the right circumstances. That's what he intended to
look at, which was a really good question. Were they
evil people who were doing all this stuff or were
(12:31):
they ordinary people who just did bad things.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
The Stanford prison experiment is infamous for two reasons, first
because of how unethically it was conducted, and second because
of what it revealed. The lead researcher, doctor Phillips Embardo,
took a group of twenty four college age men, paid
them fifteen dollars a day, and randomly assigned them to
two groups. The first group were the prisoners. They went
(12:58):
through a mock arrest by real police, then they were
sent to a makeshift prison in the basement of a
building on campus. They were searched, given a prisoner number,
a uniform, and led into cells. The second group, the guards,
were given fancy uniforms, including mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye contact.
The guards received the simple instruction to keep the prisoners
(13:20):
in line without physically abusing them. Needless to say, all
hell broke loose. What they learned was that given the chance,
in the right circumstances, humans will be trash. Please welcome,
doctor Philip Zimbardo.
Speaker 4 (13:39):
What did your experiment prove?
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Evil behavior?
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Can be listed in the Best of Us.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
The study was supposed to go on for two weeks,
but after six days they had to pull the bug.
Speaker 5 (13:51):
Phil Bombardo just sort of threw it out there and
let it happen, and by goodness, those bad people got
really bad. There was physical altercations, the prisoners took out
the role of prisoners like they fought back like prisoners would,
and the guards were mean and awful, an authoritarian like
guards would be. And again these were ordinary people who
(14:11):
were randomly assigned.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Now, saying A and TM is like the Stanford prison
experiment can be a little extreme, But as I looked
into the history, I learned that the comparison between reality
TV and psychological experiments isn't that much of a leap.
Hannah cat Jones was a contestant on Cycle sixteen. She
(14:37):
told me about two situations that happened on her season
that I didn't know what to make of. Producers could
argue that certain photoshoots and challenges were a test of
the contestants talent or their ability to perform under pressure,
but the situations Hannah told me about were seemingly designed
solely to fuck with the contestants and see how they
(14:58):
would react. One of those moments happened before the season
even kicked off.
Speaker 6 (15:02):
This is the final round before the show officially begins.
Mister and missus Jay walk up and they're like, okay, ladies,
the girls who have their pictures in these envelopes are
the ones going into the house, and the girls who
don't have their pictures in the envelope are going home.
Each person is their envelope and they're like, okay, Betty one,
(15:24):
two three, and I pull out a blank piece of paper.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
And I'm like.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
It's over. That crushed me. Then the contestants were separated.
Hannah's group, the ones with no pictures in their envelopes
were sent up the elevator to a room, presumably to
get their bags and go home.
Speaker 6 (15:50):
We're like picking up our suitcases, and then Tyra Banks
starts walking down this staircase and she's like looking down
at us.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Hi, ladies, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 7 (16:01):
Okay, but you guys can't give up, right, no, right,
This is like you guys got really far.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
The tears keep coming and you're trying to hold them back,
and you.
Speaker 6 (16:10):
Can't hold them back anymore because she's coming to say goodbye.
Speaker 7 (16:12):
This is it. I've gotten like so turned down the
door slammed in my face. The road to success and
to the top is not a straight line, it's a
zigzag line. So unfortunately, you guys have to go home now,
but you don't have to go far.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Because you're.
Speaker 6 (16:34):
And she pressed a button and there was like drapes
that I hadn't really noticed around the stairwell. So then
all of a sudden, these drapes fall and we're in
like a penthouse apartment with like pictures of ourselves and
toys and candy, and like we're all like it's like
the silence, like what's going on? And she's like, you're
(16:55):
on this show, and we all just start like jumping
up and down where like some of us are again some.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Of the girls were literally falling on the ground. In
shock punked was popular at the time. Tyra referenced it
on this episode. This little stunt was her sick nod
to the show.
Speaker 6 (17:13):
And that was like the first night. The next day
they're like, okay, we're gonna start filming.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
But remember there was another group of girls who had
gotten pictures in their envelopes. They thought they made it
onto the show, but they were actually getting sit home.
We didn't see a and TM break that news to them.
Speaker 6 (17:34):
The girls that didn't get on the show, Like, that's
way worse for them psychologically.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
I would have trust issues for a really long time after.
Speaker 6 (17:41):
That, because I remember running into one of the girls
like a year later that had been in the group
that thought they were on the show first, and she
said that they sat in a bus for hours and
then somebody came on the bus and said that was
all for show. You're going home tomorrow, and Tyra Biggs
did not say bye.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
I asked Hannah why she thinks A and TM did that, Like,
what was the point of setting these girls up just
for the three minute payoff of saying ha ha, we gotcha.
Speaker 6 (18:10):
I think at that point they really just loved like
the shock value of things, Like they realized that it
was a great formula for the audience too to be
surprised that this happened to them.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
I think they also did it to put their test
subjects on edge, to make them feel like they never
knew what to expect. Unpredictability can cause anxiety, and anxiety
can cause people to act out. Hannah told me after
the casting prank she didn't know what to expect.
Speaker 6 (18:41):
It was just such a strange couple of months, and like, honestly,
anytime that we walked into a room after that point,
it felt like the floor was going to fall beneath us.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Her feelings were justified. On Hannah Season cycle sixteen, A
and TM really leaned into the psychological experiment thing. There
was one more incident Hannah told me about that was
so bad it didn't even air on the show. On
her season, Hannah made it to the international trip to Morocco.
She was one of the final three. While there, they
(19:15):
had a challenge where the contestants interviewed locals about beauty products,
except the people they were interviewing didn't speak English and
Hannah didn't speak the local language. She lost the challenge,
but instead of just awarding the winner a prize, A
and TM decided to also punish the two losers just
a heads up. The punishment was nasty, even by top
(19:36):
model standards, and it certainly didn't have anything to do
with modeling. When the challenge was over, Hannah and the
other losing contestant were led to a table on the
street with a tarp over it.
Speaker 6 (19:50):
Somebody from production pulled off the tark and it has
a cow's head that severed and its tongue is hanging out,
and that's just like one of the pieces of animal carcass.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
It's on the table.
Speaker 6 (20:04):
There's like organs, and there's like a goat's foot, and
there's just like all these different like pieces of meat.
And he said, you're going to pick up these animal
pieces and you're gonna put them on the wagon that's
attashes donkey and you're gonna pull his donkey down the
road to the butcher shot. So Brittany and I have
to team up to pick up the cow's head. That's
(20:27):
how heavy it was, and we're both like gagging, like,
you know, because it's not like fresh, it's like griss.
And we finally get all the pieces onto.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
The wagon and it got worth.
Speaker 6 (20:43):
As we're picking up the pieces and everything, the Moroccans
are like around the table and like watching us do this,
they're all like Moroccan men who are like ha ha ha.
It felt like shame from Game of Arms that they
were like shame, you know, it just felt so demeaning
and like not forward at all.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Hannah told me when she looks back at that moment,
she regrets not telling the producers no but that's the
thing about the great psychological experiment that is reality TV.
It's designed to push you to do stuff that, under
normal circumstances you'd never do.
Speaker 6 (21:22):
I felt like that was a little piece of my
soul like kind of went in that meat lock or
two as far as like not putting my foot down
and saying no. Instead, I was like, Okay, I'll do
this for the sake of the show, because if I
do this, then maybe I could win the show. And
I felt like it was like just a really messed
up way for production and people who were writing those
(21:44):
pieces to just exercise their control and to kind of
laugh at us.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
A and tmfound makes their jose Taurus told me that
he and other crew members were aware of this dynamic too.
Speaker 8 (21:57):
You've signed on to live in this book. The microscopes
are going to be on immediately. We're going to dissect
every word that you say, every step that you take.
I always thought the original concept for reality TV was
to just observe and see how people react to different
(22:17):
people in different circumstances, and you document that. But as
time goes on, you amp up the stress level.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
It turns out sticking people in unnerving and uncomfortable situations.
To see how they react is the very cornerstone of
reality programming.
Speaker 9 (22:35):
Here's the candid subject.
Speaker 10 (22:37):
Here comes the cannon camera staff, three of them.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
At least. To really understand where America's next top model
came from, we have to go back in time, way
back to the nineteen forties. That's where we're going after
the Break. A and TM premiered in two thousand and three,
(23:08):
and let me tell y'all, what a time to be alive.
There were the reality shows like The Osbournes and Laguna
Beach that gave us a glimpse into the lives of
the rich and famous to let us know there are
truly nothing like us. And then there were the shows
that were making dreams come true. If you wanted to
be a singer but never got that big break, American
(23:29):
Idol could make you a star. And if you wanted
to know what it feels like to have twenty desperate
debutantes fighting for your affection, you could go on The Bachelor.
If you wanted to be a millionaire and you weren't
good at trivia, you could voluntarily strand yourself on an
island for weeks and play mind games. With strangers on
the swan self proclaimed ugly people could get plastic surgery
(23:52):
so that their inner beauty would finally be reflected outside.
This is the landscape was born into. But reality TV
didn't start in the early two thousands, and it definitely
wasn't invented by Tyra Banks.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
My name is Amanda Ann Klein. I am professor of
Film Studies at East Carolina University. I've also written a
book called Millennials Killed the Video Star.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
Y'all know Amanda. She pretty much has my dream job.
She's a reality TV historian and expert, and she's going
to be our guide for this brief journey through reality programming.
Reality based television wasn't really possible for the advent of
handheld cameras, portable sound equipment, and fast film stop. But
(24:41):
almost as soon as the tech was available, production studios
decided to use it to make fools out of everyday
people for our entertainment.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
So there was this post war belief that technology will
allow us to uncover the secrets of kind of human
behaviors that were not accessible prior to this technology.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
The first show to test out this theory was Candid Camera.
You might remember iterations of it from the seventies, nineties,
and early two thousands, but the show first premiered in
nineteen forty eight.
Speaker 11 (25:17):
Smile You were on candid Camera.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
They were like many psychological experiments, and there would generally
be a mark, so someone who didn't know that they
were being recorded. That was key. And one of the
more famous examples involves an elevator full of people who
are all part of the production.
Speaker 10 (25:38):
The gentleman in the elevator now.
Speaker 12 (25:41):
Is a candid star.
Speaker 10 (25:42):
These folks who are entering, the man with a white shirt,
the Lindy with a trench coat, and subsequently one other
member of us there will face the rear.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
When the mark walks in. The person who doesn't know
he's being recorded. The people in the elevator all turn
at once to the left, and he looks around. He's
a little confused, and then he turns.
Speaker 10 (26:05):
And you'll see how this man in the trench car,
he tries to maintain his individuality, but a little by
little he looks at his watch, but he's really making
(26:30):
an excuse for turning just a little bit more.
Speaker 13 (26:34):
It's a little all.
Speaker 6 (26:37):
I.
Speaker 10 (26:37):
We'll try it once again.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Then they all turn to the back, and he again
is like, well, damn okay, and he turns.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
And this goes on for a while, everyone in this
elevator just randomly turning at the same time, and this
poor guy following their lead. In nineteen forty eight, this
was peak television. Audiences could watch real people experiencing seemingly
real dilemmas and see how they would react. It was
punked before punped, But Candid Camera's hosts Alan Funt wasn't
(27:10):
just playing these practical jokes for shits and giggles. He
was interested in something deeper.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
A lot of this has to do with post World
War two culture and the sense of what makes group
think happen. How could these atrocities of World War Two
have happened to just normal, regular moral people.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Remember what doctor Stein said about the Stanford prison experiment
in the nineteen seventies. Those researchers were also interested in
what drove people to commit atrocities during World War Two.
This guy, Alan Funt was looking into it thirty years before,
and he made it entertaining.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
So there was a lot of investigation into that in
the world of psychology, and Alan Funt was very interested
in that. As a result, candid Camera was actually studied
a lot in the sixties by cycle cologists.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
But not all reality programming was a deep psychological exploration.
Some of it was a lot more reminiscent of contemporary
reality TV. People laying their pain and trauma bear in
front of audiences in the hopes of gaining fame, fortune,
and in this case, nominal prizes. What you like to
(28:21):
be Queen for to day.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Queen for a Day ran from the mid forties up
through the mid sixties. First it was on radio, and
then starting in nineteen fifty six, it goes on TV.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
When it comes to early reality TV shows, this one
might be the most disturbing of all, and I think
it tells us a lot about later prize based shows
like Top Model.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
The premise of Queen for a Day is pretty wild.
So women right into the show and they tell the
producers about their sob story and it's pretty bad stuff.
A woman whose son has polio and he's bedbound, so
she wants a rolling bed so she can take him
(29:10):
out into the sun. A woman who has a lot
of children she just wants would so she can build
bunk beds for them to sleep in. It's awful so
they pick four women and they're all seated in the audience.
They come up, the host interviews them, and at the
(29:30):
end of the show they place all the women on
camera and the audience claps for the sadus story, and
then the winner becomes queen for a day and they
get the thing that they asked for.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
The show was shot in front of a studio audience,
and these matronly women are escorted on stage by young
models in mini dresses to meet this host who's honestly
just over the top. Every episode is riddled with ads
and sponsorship plugs, Like literally every five minutes they're trying
to sell you saran wrap or jewelry or worcesters or sauce.
(30:05):
For some reason, this particular episode you're about to hear
was sponsored by the egg industry, so all the contestants
have something to do with eggs. The first woman works
the night shift as an egg candler, which apparently is
the person who takes the bad eggs off the conveyor
belt before they're packaged.
Speaker 13 (30:22):
Well, all, my husband's been disabled for the last ten
years and it's spin up to me and makes a living,
and I've been very thankful that I've had a good
job that I could.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
This woman went on the show because it was offering
her something she couldn't afford, a set of adjustable stools
so that she and her coworkers could sit more comfortably
as they sort the eggs. These were mostly working white
women at a time when only a quarter to a
third of white women worked outside of their homes. This
is also in an era of respectability politics, a time
(30:52):
when you didn't air your dirty laundry, even to your neighbors.
And these women are going on national television saying they're
and they're not doing it for fame. They're doing it
because they've been promised the chance to win. You can
even see it in the episode and hear it in
their voices. They're nervous, uncomfortable, even like this next woman,
(31:13):
who ran a chicken farm with her husband. She had
a pained, nervous look on her face. She's fidgeting, almost shaking.
She doesn't even know how to answer the questions how
many kids you got three?
Speaker 11 (31:25):
How many chicken?
Speaker 1 (31:26):
About seven thousand?
Speaker 11 (31:28):
Holy boy? How many eggs did the chicken lay today?
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Ours?
Speaker 11 (31:32):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (31:33):
About three thousand? Right now?
Speaker 11 (31:36):
You didn't hear the question I guess how many eggs
does up Chicken lay? Oh, if you got one to
Lady seven thousand, you and I can get pretty.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Rich on the average one to day.
Speaker 11 (31:46):
I think how many roasters per Lady Chicken. None, She's
new in the egg business.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
There's no way this woman was on the show to
be famous, like reality TV contestants we see today. She
was on Queen for a Day because she desperately wanted
to get her son an expensive gift. I would like
to have, more than anything in the world, a record
player for my boy just had open heart surgery in February.
(32:15):
Hold this little boy fifteen, he was fifteen Saturday. What's
his name? Chesterirs old chest And it only gets more
sad and desperate. Woman number three, whose husband was apparently
a teacher, pastor and egg man, wanted an entercom so
she could keep track of her five kids.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
I candle eggs and egg room quite long, and I
got to keep track of.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
The children in the house. Sure, and it's quite a
waste to run back and forth. And finally there was
woman number four, who maybe had the most odd but
sweet request.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
I like to have eighty moon moves.
Speaker 7 (32:50):
Now.
Speaker 11 (32:50):
That scared me a little bit and I too, you
could use, but she wanted eighty. And what a nice
reason tell it.
Speaker 13 (32:59):
I have a dog in Pacific State Hospital and they're
going to have a lou owl this fall, and I
wanted the moon moves.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
For the girls.
Speaker 11 (33:05):
Explain, if you don't mind, what is that school that
your little daughter attends. It's a special school.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
It's a school for the handicapped, and.
Speaker 11 (33:12):
They're going to have a luou. You want eighty little
girls to go to this luau all dressed in moon moves.
I can't think of a nicer thing for those kids.
Now we're going to have a queen right now, and
here we go. Number one, missus Irma Franklin. Number one,
Thank you. Number two, you want a phonograph of that boy?
Speaker 1 (33:32):
Number two. The crowd chose number four, the Moumoo lady,
But the moon moves were not her only prize.
Speaker 11 (33:41):
And here's a good way to start with this handsome
queen for a day watch by Hell Bros. It was
designed just for our queens and has two tiny diamond
encrusted crowns adorning the face.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Now you put in.
Speaker 11 (33:49):
A lot of work there, and I'm sure that the
perfect way to relax the days and will be a
great comfort to you.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
It's with a jacuzzi, whirldpool bat. She also got a
canopy bed, a gift certificate to shop in a catalog
and you'll love this. The woman who ran an egg
farm got a year's supply of eggs.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
What really makes the show so surreal is that not
only does she get the price she asked for, but
she gets all these sponsor gifts and they're completely inappropriate
for the women that are gonna winness. So it's like
outfits for the country club. Every woman will look chic
(34:30):
in this matching polyester tennis outfit. It's outrageous. There's this
huge disconnect. So when we talk about ethics and reality TV,
even back in the fifties, we were doing some pretty
suspect things. This point, Amanda makes is the reason why
(34:51):
we just listen to all of that, Other than I
just wanted you to hear how ridiculous that show is.
Almost from the beginning, when way to to put real
people on television to hear their real stories, the ethical
lines were blurred.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
These women were more than likely not rich. I mean,
the first women couldn't even afford some stools but producers
understood that if they dangled the promise of something people
couldn't otherwise get on their own, they would be willing
to do stuff they wouldn't normally do. It's something we
saw all the time on A and TM. Queen for
(35:29):
a Day is an early example of how desperation became entertainment.
By the time Tyra Banks and Kim Mock came along,
they intuitively understood that the most desperate people make the
best contestants. For a long time, Candid Camera, Queen for
a Day in game shows were really the only type
(35:50):
of reality television programming. That is until the mother of
reality TV as we know it premiered in the nineteen
seventies on PDS of all places.
Speaker 9 (36:01):
During the next hour, you will see the first in
a series of programs entitled An American Family.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
An American Family comes out in nineteen seventy three. It
is a PBS show and it is what we would
consider the first serialized form of reality TV. What made
An American Family different is that it told a story,
a continuous story across episodes.
Speaker 9 (36:28):
The series is about the William C. Loud family of
Santa Barbara, California. For seven months from May thirtieth, nineteen
seventy one to January first, nineteen seventy two. The family
was filmed as they went about their daily routine.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
An American Family doesn't sound like the reality TV we
watched today. It just sounds like a really mundane documentary
about the day to day lives of a typical family.
But when you think about it, being that a cap
sure the day to day life while happening to catch
the truly unhanged drama is the basis of all docusobe reality.
Think about the Kardashians, or the Real Housewives or Jersey
(37:10):
Shore and American Family pioneered the whole genre. Half of
Antium was the plot of the modeling competition, but the
other half was about the drama in the house. You know,
who'll stole my granola bar? An American Family was the
earliest example of this type of reality TV.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
It's the first time people said, come into my house,
come into my life. You're inviting the camera in which
is a very different relationship with the camera. I teach
it in my reality TV class, and one thing that
I find interesting is how the students get frustrated with
the downtime because we're so used to reality shows kind
(37:53):
of you know, give us this, give us that, give
us the reaction, whereas this was more in kind of
the direct cinema dot commentary tradition where you might just
see someone you know, their finger drumming on the table
for a while as a boring conversation happens.
Speaker 5 (38:12):
Oh, just you know, kids, Kevin.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Nothing much here, But eventually some real life drama happened.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
They got a lot of crazy content out of that,
because the husband and wife ultimately divorce by the end.
Speaker 1 (38:36):
A tense breakup unfolding before our eyes. Oh now, it's
starting to sound familiar. And that wasn't the only scandalous
thing happening in this average American family.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Their son basically comes out as gay. It's very coded,
but there's a whole episode of his mother visiting him
at the Chelsea Hotel in New York where like they
go to this crazy drag show.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
Oh now, we got some controversy, at least by nineteen
seventy three standards, and.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
It obviously caused a huge stir when it came out.
Some people were like, it's the end of America, right,
We're seeing an American family fall apart, where you know,
we've got this guy who's clearly gay.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
The family son Lance later came out as gay. I
don't think an American Family producers knew Lance was in
the process of coming out when they chose to cast
the Loud family, but it became the most interesting thing
about the whole show. Years later, when the reality genre
started to pick up, producers took a page from an
American Family. The cast people who were outsiders, who were different,
(39:40):
because that brought in viewers. Even with all the makings
of great reality TV, an American Family didn't really inspire
any other reality programming. For a while, it was seen
as an artsy docu series, not something to be replicated
season after season. After it, we had shows like Cops,
(40:01):
which presented itself as raw reality from the perspective of
the police Star Search, which I guess is a bit
like American Idol and America's Funniest Home Videos, where every
week a lucky family was rewarded for catching the moment
when some poor dad gets knocked upside the head with
a pinata sip. But nothing like an American Family, that
(40:22):
is until nineteen ninety two, when MTV premiered The Real World.
This is the True Story. True Story seven strangers picked to.
Speaker 5 (40:32):
Live in a lot and have their lives taped to
find out what happens like when people stop being polite?
Speaker 1 (40:38):
Could you get the phone?
Speaker 11 (40:39):
Can start getting real?
Speaker 5 (40:41):
The Real World.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
The reason why they decide to do the Real World
at MTV is because the ratings were kind of flagging.
They still obviously did a lot of music videos, but
people were kind of losing interest, and so they saw
that something that young audience is really loved was Beverly
Host nine O two or zero. So MTV thought, let's
(41:05):
do that. Let's do a scripted show. But it turns
out it's really expensive, right, you need writers, you need actors,
all that stuff, So instead they went for a reality
TV format.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
If you go back to the first season of the
Real World, you'll notice that everyone was an artist of
some kind trying to make it in New York City.
It was a group of young dancers, actors, rappers, and
singers all hoping to get their big break.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
They were actually led to believe that this was going
to really focus on their art and kind of launch
their careers.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
MTV's The Real World was the first time when people
started using reality TV as a platform or a means
to launch the career they actually wanted. At this point,
there was no such thing as a reality star, and
for the first two seasons the show was well boring
and the writings were bad. That is, the third season
(42:01):
featured Pedro Zamora, an HIV positive gay man.
Speaker 11 (42:04):
Now I am a person living with age, and I
am a gay man, and I am hispanic, I'm a
person of color, and simply who I am.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
You know, the AIDS crisis was kind of at its
peak at that time. It was pretty remarkable to put
an HIV positive gay man on TV.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
Pedro was a sympathetic hero you could root for, but
this wasn't an artsy docu series. They needed to bring
the drama to stay on air, and every hero needs
a villain. Enter a puck who was antagonistic and openly homophobic.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
Great idea, right, They put on someone who was abrasive,
who didn't back down, and as a result, you had
your perfect villain and you had your perfect fit. Though
very melodramatic structure.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
That structure eventually became the backbone of reality TV. Producers
understood that rooting for your fhades isn't as fun without
someone to root against, and that tried and true formula
is something we see season after season on a certain
reality modeling competition show. I don't think casting Pedro was
(43:14):
some altruistic act humanizing the AIDS crisis. I think they
were using his identity to stir up conflict, just like
I think A and TM did when they cast Isis
King as the show's first trans woman. The Real World's
success was a turning point in the history of reality TV.
After nineteen ninety five, new shows started popping up like Daisies, Judge,
(43:37):
Judy Making, the Band, Big Brother, Fear Factor, The Amazing Race,
American Idol, The Bachelor Survivor. And here's one big reason
reality TV exploded. It's a lot cheaper to make than
scripted programming. Networks realized they could get the same viewership
for a fraction of the cost of a show like
Gilmour Girls or X Files. There were no pest actors' unions,
(44:01):
no costume designers, and no writers.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
So this creates a perfect environment for something like reality
TV because of how cheap it is, because you can
avoid union labor and all of those things. The other
factor is the rise of tabloid culture. At this time.
So you know, there were always tabloid magazines. You know,
when I was a kid, my grandmother loved The Inquirer
(44:28):
and she I think she called them the scandal sheets,
which is such a great, such a great term, but
they really take off and as a society we get
very interested in seeing celebrities caught unawares and as a result,
you have these individuals who we called it at the time,
(44:49):
I think we called them like celebutants, people who were
famous for being famous. This was an outrageous idea to
people at the time. They just couldn't believe it. So
Paris Hilton, Kim Gard, Dashian people who didn't do anything.
They just kind of existed as pretty rich girls who
go and party.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
And this is where Reality TV History meets a young
Tyra Banks, who had an idea to cash in on
this newly evolved genre. And we just spent ten episodes
talking about how that went. After the break, we're revisiting
A and TM's worst tropes and their dark history, and
then I'll be signing off for real this time. Back
(45:41):
in episode seven, we explored the angry Black woman trope.
A and TM had a pattern of casting and editing
contestants to fit the stereotype that black women are loud, mean, bitter, confrontational,
belligerent divas. And we didn't get kicked off his somebody
don't ask me toe up right now?
Speaker 2 (46:01):
Shut up?
Speaker 11 (46:02):
Did she not come up to Nia State.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
Competition?
Speaker 4 (46:08):
Your better than?
Speaker 1 (46:12):
No matter what any girl say you? But a n
TM didn't invent the A b W trope, They just
did it really well. The trope has history. There was
(46:33):
a radio sitcom called Amos and Andy that ran from
the twenties until the early nineteen sixties. It was also
briefly on television. The characters Amos and Andy, were two
black men who moved up north from down South for
a better life. On the radio program, the two men
who voiced Amos and Andy were white. They used offensive
(46:54):
accents that were supposed to mock black dialect. The show
was extremely racist and extremely popular. There was one central
woman on the show. Her name was Sapphire. The character
was voiced by an actual black woman, Ernestine Wade, but
it was still a demeaning caricature of black women. Sapphire
(47:17):
didn't have any redeeming qualities. She was always loud, rude, overbearing,
and angry. You are the lazest no one.
Speaker 12 (47:25):
You ain't never supported.
Speaker 1 (47:26):
Man twenty two years.
Speaker 12 (47:28):
You ain't got no ambition. You are so weak it's
most finalss CAT.
Speaker 7 (47:31):
I don't never missed, and you ain't never done nothing
to make a home for me, And I'm.
Speaker 1 (47:36):
Leaving you sound familiar. When Amason Andy was on air,
there were very few roles for black people in Hollywood.
This actress, Ernestine Wade, was actually a theater trained for
former singer and musician, but she was relegated to one
no roles like Sapphire. The Sapphire character confirmed widely had
(48:00):
racist beliefs at the time about black women, and that
trope took root in American entertainment. I could do an
entire podcast just on the variations and evolutions of Sapphire
and media. The Sapphire character never died, she just became
the angry black woman. Okay, y'all still with me. Let's
(48:23):
take a trip to a more recent history, a time
when most of us were alive. Although we may wish
we didn't have to live through this, I'm talking about
the early two thousands, a period of rampant body shaming
antim is in the pantheon of body shaming offenders from
this era, and I want to give y'all some context
(48:44):
about the two thousands culture that birthed top model. Jess
Simms is a health writer, and she remembers just how
brutal the aughts were on women's bodies.
Speaker 12 (48:54):
America's next top model is such a tip of the
iceberg in terms of what we're looking at. We had
always say A really good example was the treatment of
Renes el Wegger.
Speaker 1 (49:04):
Renesel Wiger was in Bridget jones Diary. The movie Bridget
Jones's Diary came out in two thousand and one, and
it took America by storm. The entire premise was that
Bridget Jones was fat, from beat and looking for love.
But Bridget Jones was no more than a size ten
and weighed one hundred and thirty six pounds. Renee zel
(49:24):
Wiger put on weight for the role and lost it afterwards.
For years, she says, strangers would come up to her
on the street and ask, how did you lose that weight?
She refused to answer the question. Here's writer Jess Simms again.
Speaker 12 (49:39):
In the early two thousands, no matter what your body
looked like, it was a problem.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
We also have Jessica Simpson. In two thousand and nine,
there was a photo of popstar Jessica Simpson on stage
at a concert.
Speaker 12 (49:52):
She's wearing these high waisted denim jeans and a leopard
print belt, and it was on the news cycle for
a good two or three weeks.
Speaker 1 (50:03):
The photo went early two thousands viral, not because Jessica
Simpson was doing anything in it, but because she had
gained some weight. Jessica Simpson rose to fame in the
late nineties when she was a literal teenager and because
she had the nerve to be bigger than she was
when she was seventeen. She found her picture on the
(50:24):
cover of all the tabloids and the subject of a
lot of blog posts, blogs like Perez Hilton's. His name
kept coming up while I was interviewing people for this podcast,
and I'm glad I decided to interview him myself because
it was illuminating. I have some more clips from our
(50:44):
interview I'll share in a minute, but first, here's what
Jessims had to say about Perez's role in that body
shaming era.
Speaker 12 (50:51):
We saw people who got famous off of being cruel
to fat people. I always talk about Perez Hilton, who
tried to turn a new lead, which I always find
to be very bizarre because he was disgustingly cruel to
all women. He's such a good example of how gay
men can be so misogynistic. Beyond his calls for Britney
(51:14):
Spears to hurt herself, which he was very open about
and was very persistent, his coverage of women's bodies. It
was a really good example of how the media were
able to make money off of justs gouts of women's bodies.
And these weren't people who were journalists who not a
journalistic code of ethics.
Speaker 1 (51:34):
Writer Michelle Konstantinovsky also had thoughts about Perez's impact and
the climate of the early two thousands.
Speaker 13 (51:41):
Tabloid culture was beyond out of control at that point.
We all remember, you know, Lindsay Lohan and Parashiltan and
Nicole Ritchie either being celebrated or torn apart depending on
the day, you know, and the Perez Hilton of it all,
all of the bloggers who felt very comfortable not only
displaying woman's bodies but literally circling parts of them and
(52:02):
magnifying them and saying what was wrong with them? But
the Perez Hilton culture just kept doubling down, doubling down
on how it's not only acceptable to dissect and almost
like take glee in mocking women's bodies, but it's expected
that's what.
Speaker 1 (52:20):
We do as a culture. Perez was one of the
absolute worst when it came to body shaming. This is
the man who said one of Bruce Willis's daughters was
a fugly child. He described the OCI's Misha Barton's thighs
is being mare flicious, and he once called Britney Spears
fat Elvis in a headline. No one was off limits.
(52:44):
These days, though, Perez is singing a slightly different tune.
He's been on a bit of an apology tour. When
I interviewed him, I had prepared some hard hitting questions
about the damage he caused with his post, but he
came out swinging.
Speaker 3 (52:59):
I take full account of bit for everything I did.
I can't blame ignorance and I can't blame youth. I
was in my late twenties and I was so selfish.
I was incredibly selfish. I knew at the time that
what I was doing was wrong, and I didn't care.
(53:20):
I was selfish. I cared about me. I cared about
the clicks, the page view. I was purposefully trying to
be shocking because that worked. It got attention, it got
me views, and it got me success. I was horrible
and I was rewarded for it.
Speaker 1 (53:40):
Whether or not this maya culpa is genuine. Perez knows
what to say, and that's strikingly different than what we
hear from say Tyra Banks.
Speaker 3 (53:50):
Attention is a very powerful drug, and I was an
attention addict.
Speaker 1 (53:59):
Perez have changed his ways, But the thing is today
there are millions of Perezes. When reality TV started eighty
years ago, it was openly deemed a social and psychological experiment.
Then it became normal, and today we're in the middle
of a new psychological experiment, one that's hard to opt
(54:20):
out of. Amanda clin again.
Speaker 2 (54:23):
It feels like right now everything is reality TV because
you know, first of all, of course social media, you
can hate follow people online and come on, we all
do it because they're drama and they put all their
mess out there and you're like, oh, what's messy up
to today? So like that's your personal reality show and
(54:44):
we're all.
Speaker 1 (54:44):
The main character in our own story. Amanda thinks it's
changing the way we approach our daily lives.
Speaker 2 (54:50):
You see something happening, you pull your phone out, not
because you want to remember it later, it's because you're like,
ooh context. I don't have a big social media but
even I'm like, oh, this is so interesting.
Speaker 3 (55:02):
Let me get this.
Speaker 2 (55:04):
We're all reality TV producers. We're all curating the world
for other people, and I don't think that's a good
thing because I think that's changing the way we view
each other. We are viewing other people as content, so
we're more prone to you each other, I think as characters.
Speaker 1 (55:20):
Now, reality TV started this phenomenon of wanting to watch
real people in ridiculous situations and everyday dramas, and now,
in a way, we are all on a reality show,
whether we want to be or not. That's all for
(55:40):
this very special bonus episode. Thanks for listening to the
Curse of America's Next Top Model. Someone once told me,
in this business, the only reward you get is to
get to do it again, and my team and I
worked really hard. So if you want another season or
more episodes, the best way to let us know is
(56:01):
by leading a five star rating and a glowing review.
All right ro all the credits one last time. The
Curse of America's Next Top Model is a production of
Glass Podcast, a division of Glass Entertainment Group, in partnership
with iHeart Podcast. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass,
(56:22):
hosted and singer produced by me Bridget Armstrong. Our story
editor is Monique Leboard, also produced by Ben Fetterman and
Andrea Gunning. Associate producers are Alisha Key, Kristin Melcriy, and
Curry Richmond. Consulting producers on this podcast are Oliver TwixT
and Kate Taylor. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry and
Jessica Crincheck. Audio editing and mixing on this episode by
(56:45):
Matt del Vecchio and Dean Welsh. The Curse of America's
Next Top Model theme was composed by Oliver Bains. Music
library provided by myb Music. Special Thanks to everyone we interviewed,
especially the former contestants, and for more podcasts from iHeart,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcast. Also check out the Etglass Podcast Instagram for
(57:08):
Curse of America's Next Top Model behind the scenes content
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