In one widely viewed White House press briefing, in April, Trump outlined the government’s plan for battling the coronavirus. The usual props were there: the President wore a sombre navy suit and a striped blue-and-white tie; a small American flag was pinned to his lapel, and another, larger flag was positioned behind him. And yet, as I watched, I wondered if I was tripping. “I see disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute, and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning,” Trump said, suggesting, incredibly, that one treatment for the coronavirus might involve absorbing bleach. (Later, responding to the general alarm raised by his comment, Trump said that he was speaking “sarcastically.”) The outside world, with its people and relationships and rules, was now gone, and what was left was here before us, onscreen. What could we do with this sort of spectacle but sit back, openmouthed, and watch, frightened, but also mildly entertained?
Like Trump’s press briefings, the series didn’t feel strictly real, nor was it scripted entertainment. If anything, it was suggestive of a new permeability between the world of documentary filmmaking and that of reality TV, also evident in other recent popular docuseries, such as “Cheer” and “The Vow.” As Kathryn VanArendonk wrote in a piece for Vulture, documentaries tend to first find their subjects and then seek out a narrative—shaping and prodding it only minimally—while reality television determines a narrative first and then populates it with eminently proddable, shapeable subjects. “Tiger King” ’s outlandish personalities, melodramatic plotlines, and surprise twists made the docuseries appear less Frederick Wiseman and more “Duck Dynasty” or “Intervention.” (...)
On the night of November 3rd, we sat down to watch what was arguably the greatest instance of reality TV this year—a gripping competition with unduly high stakes, and a rash, horribly behaved returning champion. Who would win America? The Presidential election lasted for several days, and with the results trickling in, ever so slowly, to our screens, as the very real labor of vote counting took place on the ground, it was an almost interminable viewing experience. We refreshed and scrolled and flipped through the channels endlessly, waiting to find out would happen next.
When the results did arrive, Trump’s refusal to accept his loss to Joe Biden was, as David Remnick noted, a continuation of the President’s familiar assault on truth, his stubborn upholding of what Kellyanne Conway had once dubbed “alternative facts.” In reality-TV terms, what Trump wanted was, essentially, to be granted a better edit, actual reality be damned. He was not just our reality-TV President; he was our alternate-reality-TV President. He was this show’s main star, its forever Survivor: How could he be eliminated now? As I watched this drama unfold in slow motion, I was reminded of an incident in July, in which Trump bragged to Fox News of his supposed facility in passing a mental acuity test, telling an interviewer that not only was he able to memorize the words “Person, woman, man, camera, TV,” but he could repeat them in order. These words were apropos. “Person, woman, man, camera, TV”: not just the building blocks of the Trump Administration but those of the reality medium as well.
In the new era of unreality TV, however, we might no longer have a need for reality television itself, which is perhaps why this was also the year in which it was announced that the E! network’s “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” would be coming to an end after twenty seasons and fourteen years. The series, which has sparked several spinoffs, multiple smartphone games, a robust array of products, and even more gossip scandals, has molded the family at its center into a kind of monolith of the reality-TV world, an always-ready-for-a-closeup hydra that stands shoulder to shoulder perhaps only with the President in creating the texture of life around us. In recent seasons, the show itself has seemed almost beside the point, its characters existing independently of its contrived story lines, surfing the ever-roiling waters of Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and the Daily Mail, like iPhone-scrolling Venuses on half shells.
Without the “KUWTK” anchor, the family will finally emerge free, now able to compete with its peers in the expanded reality world, a sort of “Garden of Earthly Delights” that the Kardashians’ early innovations in obsessive self-documentation gave birth to: 2020 protagonists like Chris Cuomo and Carole Baskin, or Hilaria Baldwin, the wife of Alec—whose response on Instagram to suggestions that she had a disingenuous Spanish accent slipped in just under the wire in December—or the surprise TikTok star Nathan Apodaca. In late September, Apodaca, a warehouse worker from Idaho, filmed himself skateboarding while swigging from a jug of Ocean Spray cranberry juice, as Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” lilted in the background. The video went viral, reaching twenty-seven million views by October 4th. The song, meanwhile, which last charted in 1977, reëntered the Billboard Top Ten a week later. When asked about the popularity of the video, Apodaca said, “There’s just too much chaos now. Everybody just needed something to relax to and vibe out with.”
