Houses have always been at the center of reality TV. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous set the domestic stage in the 1980s with its quasi-documentary look into the real lives of the ultra-wealthy. It walked so MTV Cribs could run, and in September 2000, Cribs became what critic Sam Jacob called “the most popular architectural media ever”. Known for its unhinged (and sometimes fake) house tours by the celebrity owners themselves, the hit show’s Ozzy Osbourne episode spun off in 2002 into The Osbournes, which Kris Jenner used for the basis of her pitch for Keeping up with the Kardashians. The rest is history.
In the book Dream Facades: The Cruel Architecture of Reality TV, author Jack Balderrama Morley reflects on residential settings and takes us through these histories, reflecting on how homes and design in reality shows are at once aspirational escapism, sinister characters, extensions of our own desires, and artifacts of American urban history. “I’m interested in what reality TV show homes represent, and why so many of us love getting lost in them,” Morley said. “On screen, they become appendages of our own homes.”
In compact passages, Dream Facades moves deftly beyond the expected critiques of suburban homogeneity and American consumerism. “In the case of the Kardashians,” Morley writes that their “modern farmhouse” has its roots in Hidden Hills, north of Los Angeles. It is an equestrian community, so it has a real connection to the mythos of how Anglos settled the American western frontier.” He connects the self-reliance of the frontier to its contemporary mutation: the entrepreneur. Morley said, “while the Kardashian family runs a self-sufficient, global media empire from their home, like a modern day homestead”.
If Kris’s house represents success, the Chateau Shereé represents the struggles of mediated homeownership today. Born during the 2007 mortgage crisis, Chateau Shereé is the custom-built, 10,000-square-foot Atlanta mansion belonging to Real Housewives of Atlanta star Shereé Whitfield. “It is the mansion she builds over the course of the show, and it embodies Sheree’s inability to get anything done,” Morley said. “The house became emblematic of her as a person and of her worth.”
The domestic environments were not always so tied to the darker side of later reality shows such as competition and identity building through wealth. The Real World, which debuted in 1992 during the golden age of MTV, took place in a Soho loft in New York. In these early years of the show, it was an experiment in co-living, and had dramatic themes such as love, death and coming-of-age in the post-industrial big city. “It wasn’t just about wealth, it was more of a social experiment,” Morley said. “The Real World became competitive and absurd to compete with other reality shows.”
The lifestyle as portrayed was not manufactured: it was a real look into loft living of young artists – something that had flourished in New York since the 1960s when those industrial buildings were emptied out. “The Soho art scene was central to the Real World. Artists like Donald Judd had been there just a few years before actually,” Morley said. “It really was this cultural fixture that spread across the country and captured imagination.”
The show was based on 1973 documentary An American Family. “The creators of the Real World took this lifestyle and broadcast it, turning the artists into the art itself,” Morley said. “Turning themselves into media was the beginning of the downward spiral into the influencer culture we have today.”
The Real World was a less glamorous version of reality TV, closer to cinema verité than the glamorous aspirational and competitive gameshow formula of more recent concepts. However, while some of the shows seem normative on the surface, they hide underneath some of the surrealism and subversion of the older shows. For example, The Bachelor, a dating show where one man speed dates 25 women who compete to win him over. “Rather than fulfilling for the audience a fantasy of love, marriage and a nuclear family, the show is actually a bunch of single women living together in a psychotic unorthodox domestic situation,” Morley said.
The Bachelor Mansion, a Mediterranean Revival manse Villa de la Vina, has hosted all episodes of the Bachelor and Bachelorette since 2007. Like the show itself, its style is more complicated than it might seem. These SoCal mission style houses were invented in the 1920s, a reflection of the mythology of the American frontier and the constructed image of American architecture in the post-war period.
“In a job market that is so difficult, people see themselves in the zany, screwball comedy of reality TV,” Morley said. “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is an improv screwball comedy that really gives people relief in watching the zaniness of modern lives.”
Dream Facades reminds us that as frivolous as reality TV might seem, a deeper reading and some design history lays bare some of the seriously bizarre undercurrents of contemporary American pop culture, and of the nation itself. “Reality TV is a hard thing to study because it’s so ephemeral, and architecture can be hard to understand how it relates to pop culture.” Morley said. “I hope this book can help people understand both so we can try to shape the world into something we want.”
