OpinionGuest Essay

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By Michael Hirschorn

Mr. Hirschorn is the chief executive of the TV production company Ish Entertainment and was head of programming at VH1.

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.

Over time, the genre dispensed with any pretense that it was a form of “Real World”-style pop documentary, and leaned into people behaving badly, love-to-hate personalities who let their id run wild, saying and doing things that many viewers wished they could.

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,........

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