Reality TV: The Great Experiment | BONUS

Hi, Curse Up listeners, I know you miss me on your feed. Don't worry. We're working on an all new season of Curse Of coming out later this year. In the meantime, if you can't stop thinking about the shocking stories you heard about America's Next Top Model, you'll definitely want to check out our new docuseries from E Dirty Rotten Scandals. In the series, you'll hear from the America's Next Top Model participants you heard from on Curse Of, and a few you didn't like former A and TM

When we talked about ethics and reality TV even back in the fifties, we were doing some pretty suspect things.

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 play out on A and TM. Casting producers find and

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.

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 shows like A and TM are successful because the contestants' trust, to a certain extent, the version of reality the show

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. 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. 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 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.

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.

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, and a prize or reward at the end to make

They would repeat the same words and phrases to us over and over and over again.

Sarah told me that during the casting process, she and the other finalists were kept in a small conference room for hours.

They were prepping us, and we spent hours just sitting in these conference rooms with lawyers and producers talking at us for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. They used mind control tactics.

The lawyers and producers repeatedly told contestants that if they ever violated their contracts.

We 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.

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 and replaceable. The other mantra they would repeat.

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.

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 rules they wouldn't normally agree to.

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, yes, of course.

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.

While reporting this podcast, I learned A ANDTM and shows like it have pretty strict rules contestants have to follow. If so 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 were waiting to start a photoshoot or a judging panel. Maybe the location wasn't ready or tyro wasn't there yet.

You can't even talk to each other, so I'm not allowed to talk.

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 contestantspply 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 their faces every day, the models weren't supposed to even

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.

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, they didn't want their cast to be distracted with personal

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 guests coming out.

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.

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?

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.

They're like, is this a joke? Is this part of the show.

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 who said something about mind controlled and reality TV. Several people I've interviewed for this podcast compared reality television and

It is literally a show about how to survive.

The Stanford Prison Experiment like psychological warfare.

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.

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 they ordinary people who just did bad things.

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 through a mock arrest by real police. Then they were sent to a makeshift prison in the basement of a

Please welcome, doctor Philip Zimbardo.

What did your experiment prove?

Evil behavior?

Can be listed in the Best of Us.

The study was supposed to go on for two weeks, but after six days they had to pull the pug.

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 on the role of prisoners like they fought back like prisoners would, and the guards were mean, an awful, an authoritarian like guards would be. And again, these were ordinary people who were randomly assigned.

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 told me about two situations that happened on her season

This is the final round where 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, two three, and I pull out a blank piece of paper.

And I'm like.

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.

We're like picking up our suitcases, and then Tyra Banks starts walking down this staircase and she's like looking down at us, Hi.

Ladies, I'm so sorry.

Okay, but you guys can't give up, right, no, right, This is like you guys got really far.

The tears keep coming and you're trying to hold them back, and you can't hold them back anymore because she's coming to say goodbye.

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.

Because you're.

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 on this show, and we all just start like jumping up and down.

We're like, some of us are crying again.

Some of the girls were literally falling on the ground. And punped was popular at the time. Tyra referenced it on this episode. This little stunt was her sick nod to the show.

And that was like the first night. The next day they're like, okay, we're gonna start filming.

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 sent home. We didn't see A and TM break that news to them.

The girls that didn't get on the show, like that's way worse for them. Psychologically. I would have trust issues for a really long time after 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.

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 hah, we gotcha.

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.

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.

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.

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 had a challenge where the contestants interviewed locals about beauty products, except the people they were interviewing didn't speak English and

Somebody from production pulled off the tarp and it has a cow's head that's severed and its tongue is hanging out, and that's just like one of the pieces of animal carcass. It's on the table. 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 attashed his 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 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.

The wagon and it got worth.

As we're picking up the pieces and everything, the Moroccans are like around the table like watching us do this, and they're all like Moroccan men who are like ha ha ha. It felt like shame from Game of Arms, and they were like shame.

You know.

It just felt so demeaning and like not fashion forward.

At all, 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.

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 pieces to just exercise their control and to kind of laugh at us.

A and TM found makes their hose. A Taurus told me that he and other crew members were aware of this dynamic too.

You signed on to live in this bubble. 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 people in different circumstances, and you document that. But as time goes on, you amp up the stress level.

It turns out sticking people in unnerving and uncomfortable situations to see how they react is the very cornerstone of reality programming.

Here's the candid subject.

Here comes the candid count of staff, three of them.

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, 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

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.

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 before the advent of handheld cameras, portable sound equipment, and fast film stop. But almost as soon as the tech was available, production studios decided to use it to make fools out of everyday people for our entertainment.

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.

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, Smile You were on Candid Camera.

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.

The gentleman in the elevator now is a candid star. These folks who are entering, the man with a white shirt, the lady with a trench coat, and subsequently one other member of us there will face.

The rear 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.

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 an excuse for turning just a little bit more. A little all I would try it once again.

Then they all turn to the back and he again is like, well damn okay, and he turns.

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 punped before punped. But Candid Camera's hosts Alan Funt, wasn't just playing these practical jokes for shits and giggles. He was interested in something deeper.

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.

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.

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 psychologists, but.

Not all reality programming was a deep psychological explorer. 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 be Queen for to Day.

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.

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.

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 holy and he's bedbound, so she wants a rolling bed so she can take him out into the sun. A woman who has a lot of children, she just wants wood 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.

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 some ran rap or jewelry or wash sauce. For some reason, this particular episode you're about to hear was sponsored by the egg industry, so all the contestants

Well, all, my husband's been disabled for the last ten years and it's beIN up to me to make a living, and I've been very thankful that I've had a good job that I could.

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 when you didn't air your dirty laundry, even to your neighbors.

Many kids you got three?

How many chicken?

About seven thousand?

Holy boy? How many eggs did the chicken lay today?

Ours?

Yeah?

About three thousand? Right now?

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 rich on the average one day.

I think how many roasters per Lady Chicken.

None, she's new in the egg business.

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 expensive gift. I would like to have, more than anything in the world, a record player for my boy. You just had open heart surgery in February.

I was this little boy.

Fifteen, he was fifteen Saturday.

What's his name?

Chesterirs, Old Chester? And it only gets more sad and desperate. Woman number three, whose husband was apparently a teacher, pastor and egg man, wanted an tercom so she could keep track of her five kids.

I candle eggs and the egg room quite long, and I got to keep track of 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.

I like to have eighty moon moves.

Now.

That scared me a little bit, and I too, you could use, but she wanted eighty And what a nice reason tell it. I have a daughter in Pacific State Hospital and they're going to have a blue owl this fall, and I wanted the moon moves the girls explain, if you don't mind, what is that school that your little daughter attends. It's a special school.

It's a school for the pandicapped, and.

They're going to have a luau. You want eighty little girls to go to this luau all dressed in moon moos. 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?

Number two. The crowd chose number four, the Moomoo lady, but the moon moves were not her only prize.

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. Now, you put in a lot of work there, and I'm sure that the perfect way to relax the day's end will be a great comfort to you. It's with a jacuzzi whirlpool 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.

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 going to witness. So it's like outfits for the country club. Every woman will look chic 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

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 a Day is an early example of how desperation became entertainment.

During the next hour, you will see the first in a series of programs in time, An American Family.

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.

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.

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 there to capture the day to day life while happening to catch the truly unhanged drama is the base of all docusob reality. Think about the Kardashians, or the Real Housewives or Jersey Shore.

It's the first time people said, come into my house, come into my life. You're inviting the camera in, which

Oh, just you know, a bunch of kids, Kevin.

Nothing much.

Here, But eventually some real life drama happened.

They got a lot of crazy content out of that, because the husband and wife ultimately divorce by the end.

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.

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.

Oh now, we got some controversy, at least by nineteen seventy three standards.

And 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.

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 are different,

This is the True Story True story Seven strangers picked.

To live in a lot and have.

Their lives taped to find out what happens.

When people stop being polite?

Could you get the phone.

And start getting real?

The Real World.

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 audiences really loved was Beverly Host nine O two and zero. So MTV thought, let's 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.

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.

They were actually led to believe that this was going to really focus on their art and kind of launch their careers.

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 until the third season featured Pedro ol Zamora, an HIV positive gay man.

I am a person living with age, and I am a gay man, and I am Hispanic, I'm a person of color, and this simply who I am.

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.

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.

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.

That structure eventually became the backbone of reality TV. Producers understood that rooting for your faiths isn't as fun without someone to root against. That tried in true formula. It's something we see season after season on a certain reality modeling competition show. I don't think casting Pedro was 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

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.

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 in episode seven, we explored the angry black woman trope.

And we didn't get kicked off for hinting.

Somebody yn't ask me toe up right now?

Shut up?

Did she not come up to me and say that.

Honest competition no matter what any girl say. But A N T M didn't invent the A b W trope, They just did it really well. The trope has history. There was 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

You are the laziest no one.

You ain't never supported me.

In twenty two years. You ain't got no ambition.

You are the weakest, most finalss cat.

I'm never miss and you ain't never done.

Nothing can make a home for me, and I'm.

Leaving you sound familiar. When Amazon 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 held racist beliefs at the time about black women, and that trope took root in America entertainment. I could do an entire podcast just on the variations and evolutions of Sapphire

America's next top model is such a tip of the iceberg in terms of what we're looking at we had, I always say A really good example was the treatment of Renees Elweger 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 Zelwicker 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 in.

The early two thousands, No matter what your body looked like, it was a problem. We also have Jessica Simpson.

In two thousand and nine, there was a photo of popstar Jessica Simpson on stage at a concert.

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.

The photo went early to 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 cover of all the tabloids and the subject of a

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 disgusting, cruel to all women. He's such a good example of how gay men can be so misogynistic. Beyond his calls for Britney 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

Writer Michelle Konstantinovsky also had thoughts about Perez of impact and the climate of the early two thousands.

Tabloid culture was beyond out of control at that point. We all remember, you know, Lindsay Lohan and Parashltan and Nicole Ritchie either being celebrated or torn apart depending on the day. You know, in the Perez Hilton of it all, all of the bloggers who felt very comfortable not only displaying women's bodies but literally circling parts of them and

But it's expected. That's what 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 OC's Misha Barton's thighs as being mar faalicious, and he once called Britney Spears fat Elvis in a headline no one was off limits. These days, though, Perez is singing a slightly different tune. He's been on a bit

I take full accountability for everything I did. I can't blame ignorance, and I can't blame you 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. 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.

Whether or not this Maya Kulpa is genuine. Perez knows what to say, and that's strikingly different than what we hear from say Tyra Banks.

Attention is a very powerful drug, and I was an attention addict.

Perez might have changed his ways, but the thing is, today there are millions of ress. 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 out of. Amanda clin again.

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 we're all the main character in our own story. Amanda thinks it's changing the way we approach our daily lives.

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 following, but even I'm like, ooh, this is so interesting. Let me get this. 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

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 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