For those still struggling to understand how Donald Trump could remain within sight of being our president again despite flattering dictators, inspiring an attempted coup, getting convicted on 34 felony counts, vowing to shred the Constitution and imprison opponents, and decorating his bathroom with state secrets, not to mention blustering semi-coherently in Tuesday’s debate, it’s worth looking back to a certain island in the South Pacific, and a man named Richard Hatch.
As a contestant on the first season of the CBS reality show “Survivor,” Mr. Hatch did something that, in the year 2000, seemed shocking. Instead of trying to win the show’s competition on its own terms — that is, voting in a straightforward manner on which of his fellow contestants most deserved to advance to the next round of competition — the often rude, sometimes randomly naked Mr. Hatch struck a strategic alliance to force out his strongest adversaries. Then, in full win-by-any-means-necessary mode, he outsmarted the producers by opting out of a key challenge and maneuvered himself to victory. But most shocking of all, he broke the golden rule of network television: You have to be likable. David Letterman even predicted “rioting in the streets” if “the fat naked guy” won. He was the most hated man in America.
The TV business took notice. The early 2000s were a heady time for the new reality genre, filled with madcap experimentation, wild conceptual leaps and a lot of questionable judgment. At VH1, where I worked at the time, our innovation was to program shows that were at their core in-jokes about television itself. “Flavor of Love” was a dating competition starring the giant-clock-wearing rap star (and non-obvious object of romantic ardor) Flavor Flav, but it was also a broad parody of the ABC hit “The Bachelor,” which treated the quest for TV love with great solemnity.
For those still struggling to understand how Donald Trump could remain within sight of being our president again despite flattering dictators, inspiring an attempted coup, getting convicted on 34 felony counts, vowing to shred the Constitution and imprison opponents, and decorating his bathroom with state secrets, not to mention blustering semi-coherently in Tuesday’s debate, it’s worth looking back to a certain island in the South Pacific, and a man named Richard Hatch.
As a contestant on the first season of the CBS reality show “Survivor,” Mr. Hatch did something that, in the year 2000, seemed shocking. Instead of trying to win the show’s competition on its own terms — that is, voting in a straightforward manner on which of his fellow contestants most deserved to advance to the next round of competition — the often rude, sometimes randomly naked Mr. Hatch struck a strategic alliance to force out his strongest adversaries. Then, in full win-by-any-means-necessary mode, he outsmarted the producers by opting out of a key challenge and maneuvered himself to victory. But most shocking of all, he broke the golden rule of network television: You have to be likable. David Letterman even predicted “rioting in the streets” if “the fat naked guy” won. He was the most hated man in America.
The TV business took notice. The early 2000s were a heady time for the new reality genre, filled with madcap experimentation, wild conceptual leaps and a lot of questionable judgment. At VH1, where I worked at the time, our innovation was to program shows that were at their core in-jokes about television itself. “Flavor of Love” was a dating competition starring the giant-clock-wearing rap star (and non-obvious object of romantic ardor) Flavor Flav, but it was also a broad parody of the ABC hit “The Bachelor,” which treated the quest for TV love with great solemnity.
This is what the “Real Housewives” eventually became on Bravo; on male-skewing cable networks, meanwhile, bearded barrel-chested men chopped down trees, smuggled moonshine and hunted for gold, superserving a red-state audience with fantasies of a bygone frontier America.
Reality TV soon emerged — hear me out — as a cultural form in its own right. Drawing on such over-acty “lowbrow” genres as Kabuki, commedia dell’arte, British panto and professional wrestling, reality flowered into its more mature incarnation: a fully self-referential cinematic universe, artfully levered between the authentic and confected, a winking co-creation among players, producers and audience that gleefully showcased narcissism and other antisocial character traits. Its rules no longer needed to be explained.
In the process, that hulking beast known as the modern reality star was born. The canniest knew how to command and control attention, how to extend their moment in the spotlight and build their brand — spinoff shows, social media followers, sponsorship deals, clout, influence, power. In this pursuit, villainy, far from being a detriment, was increasingly an asset.
One early adopter was the star of the VH1 show “Breaking Bonaduce,” which centered on the fraying marriage of the former “Partridge Family” kid actor Danny Bonaduce. The more unlikable he became, the better the show did in the ratings. As his behavior disintegrated in front of the cameras, becoming ever more abusive and self-destructive, he conducted a side negotiation with the network: He would go to rehab only if cameras were present. We quickly abandoned the lukewarm premise (couples therapy) and followed Mr. Bonaduce’s self-immolation. Throughout, it was far from clear whether Mr. Bonaduce’s behavior was driven by substance abuse or by a desire to remain on television. Was the whole thing an act?
On the first season of Donald Trump’s original “Apprentice,” in 2004, a former Clinton administration staff member who went by Omarosa lost the competition but, through some Hatchian antics, won the new unofficial title of most hated woman in America. Four years later, that notoriety was enough to make her the only normie invited to the inaugural season of “The Celebrity Apprentice,” a bawdier, far more showbizzy affair.
She made the most of it. After being eliminated in a subsequent season, she threatened to sue a fellow contestant for slander, then developed and sold a dating show starring herself and Mr. Trump. In 2017, literalizing the metaphor of the show that made her name, she was hired into the Trump White House. Or instead of hired, should we say cast? The lines were becoming blurred.
She was fired — rather inevitably, all things considered — later that year. Since then she has returned to reality television multiple times, continuing to use celebrity to rev up her political career and her political career to rev up her celebrity, in the process establishing a new kind of revolving-door Washington politics.
Which brings us back to Mr. Trump, 2024, Haitian cat-eaters and the end of everything. Because this unmooring, this mixing of real and unreal, this taking things literally but not seriously, or seriously but not literally, also helps to explain a lot about current American politics. Politics, it can seem, has internalized the logic of reality TV, except now the future of the planet, rather than a bachelor’s rose, is at stake.
Mr. Trump clearly understands how to operate in this particular version of the upside down, collaborating with his audience to create shareable moments that are full of in-jokes and provocations, perpetual-motion meme machines. How could he say all those outrageous things? Doesn’t he know people are going to be shocked? Well, of course, he says them specifically because people will be shocked. He has succeeded in making himself the most most-hated man in America, and the rewards, at least until this moment, have been huge.
If reality television began as a crude simulacrum of real life, today the opposite can feel true — that actual life is approximating reality television, and we’ve all been conscripted as cast members. We have arrived at the final stage of the genre’s cultural logic: people with no connection whatsoever to the genre living as if they are reality stars. The contagion has leaked from the lab. We are in a period of unchecked community spread.
Some of the most successful people in the world — like Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — now prefer to parade around crudely constructed reality-villain alter egos instead of simply being whoever it is they actually are. It works great in Congress, too. “I don’t think you know what you’re here for,” Marjorie Taylor Greene told a fellow House Oversight Committee member, Jasmine Crockett, back in May. “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”
“I’m just curious,” Ms. Crockett replied, would it be a violation of House rules “if someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach-blond, bad-built butch body?” It could have been a clip from “Real Housewives of Capitol Hill.”
And does one even need to mention George Santos, whose interest in can’t-look-away performative villainy seemed to supersede his interest in elected office? He practically begged us to hate him.
The dissociated feeling some of us have gotten watching politics play out in 2024 came in part from watching conventional media and sensibilities fail to process this brutish, multilayered, densely referential, meme-drenched idiom. When Mr. Trump promises that he will be a dictator but only on “Day 1,” is it a joke or a terrifying threat? Possibly both, but in muddying the distinctions, he makes liberal warnings about constitutional norms seem like ninnyish Karening. Traditional discourse looks for stage directions, for mainstream media, which once had the power to define reality, to referee, and judge. Big-R Reality values are judgment-free, however: Attention is attention is attention.
But if there’s one thing that’s true for all TV genres, it’s that the medium is always looking for the next new thing. Mr. Trump dominated TV during a time when the shouty, humorless alpha white guy was a dominant cable archetype. In recent years, the freshest and most popular reality shows have been more ironic, more infused with queer sensibility, more, dare one say, joyful. The light-on-their-feet “FBoy Island,” “Below Deck,” “Summer House,” and “Too Hot to Handle” have paved the way for Alan Cumming’s charming “The Traitors” and Joel McHale’s “House of Villains” (which has returned Omarosa to the spotlight). “The Mole,” rebooted and airing on Netflix, is hosted by NPR’s Ari Shapiro doing a deadpan camp turn for the ages.
Mr. Trump’s recently cast political opponent seems to have grasped the vibe shift. The playfully self-deprecating memes and the repeated invocation of joy: She’s reality lite. If Mr. Trump is still doing Gordon Ramsay, Kamala Harris is giving us Lisa Vanderpump.
The final ratings won’t be in until November. But no matter how things turn out, Mr. Trump — assuming he is capable of self-reflection — might take a moment now to consider Richard Hatch.
Shortly after winning “Survivor,” Mr. Hatch was convicted of child abuse (a conviction overturned on appeal), sentenced to more than four years on tax charges, then sentenced to more time for another tax issue. “Here I am, subjected to something that can only be described as institutionalized bullying,” he complained. He later tried and failed to start a reality show based on finding and connecting with some of the reportedly hundreds of children conceived using his sperm donations. It’s not all bad; he is in the cast for the second season of “House of Villains.”
Perhaps a more bracing comparison for Mr. Trump, should voters fail to vindicate him this November, is the fate of George Santos. Charged with wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, he recently pleaded guilty — for real. It was a one-day news item. In the greatest indignity of all, it seems the world can no longer bother to hate him.
Michael Hirschorn is the chief executive of the TV production company Ish Entertainment and was head of programming at VH1.
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