The House That Reality TV Built
Jack Balderrama Morley’s new book tracks the evolution—and cruel implications—of reality-TV interiors.
By Jesse Dorris; illustration by Lizzie Soufleris
At least in the United States, private homes have always been public spaces. Federal and local governments influence where they’re built and demolished, who gets incentives for ownership (or not), and through marriage and reproductive health policies, which kinds of families are permitted to form households in those homes, and under what rules. The arrival of MTV’s The Real World in 1992, and the multivalent genres of reality television the show spawned, didn’t so much prove that all the world, even your bedroom, is a stage. Instead, it made appealing the idea that your bedroom is a particular kind of public space: a factory floor for the manufacturing and distribution of your personality.
Jack Balderrama Morley’s new book Dream Facades: The Cruel Architecture of Reality TV, drafts a blueprint for how this happened, and what might happen next. A former architectural designer and current managing editor at Dwell, Balderrama Morley offers clear-eyed, clever explanations for why, say, the ersatz-Mediterranean mansion used by The Bachelor arouses a viewer’s faith in romance, and why the stars of The Real Housewives of Atlanta, with their specific racial and economic contexts, place so much faith in home ownership. Along the way, they note how reality-TV pioneers like Kris Jenner resemble and complicate the legacies of the Manifest Destiny–fueled settlers of California, and how the shared sexual identities of the Fire Island cast are perfumed by from the exclusionary vapors of class warfare. On an unsettling warm January afternoon, we shared a cup of tea to talk through it all.
So let’s start at the beginning.
It started with a couple essays for Dwell on Selling Sunset and The Kardashians. I have a background in architecture and I’ve always loved reality TV, so they came together pretty naturally. I wanted to write about stuff that I liked, to talk from a sympathetic point of view and then explore the complexities. Reality TV is hard to define, but it’s sort of like that definition of porn: You know it when you see it.
A lot of the shows you discuss—Trading Spaces, Fire Island, the Real Housewives series—take place in homes. You start with the first season of MTV’s The Real World, and tell the history of its SoHo loft.
The building, 565 Broadway, was one of the most celebrated buildings in the city at the time when it was built. And then its loft conversion [by Joseph Pell Lombardi in 1978] was, Lombardi says, the best one he ever did—a quintessential loft in New York. I don’t think it’s accidental that it was picked to be the location, because they were aiming for this air of bohemianism, and it easily slotted into the imagination of artists being creative and living in an unconventional home. It was totally open, so anything could happen. It was a peek inside a world that was kind of off-limits, or taboo. Crazy things happened down there!
If the location of New York City is a character on the show, so is the loft itself.
Also, a loft aligns with the logistics of filming. The San Francisco season was shot in a Victorian. I talked to someone who worked in production for that season, and he said they had to chop the whole house up and put giant windows in the rooms so the cameras could pull back far enough to get the right angles and spy on things. The architecture was adapted to become more loft-like, so it could become good not only for display, but for recording.
That progression finds a more pronounced form in your charting of the Kardashian homes.
They start out in their little Cape Cod home, very traditional Americana, with a porch and American flag pillow out front. But it’s really small and tight, clearly not a home that was designed with the intention of shooting anything in it. The cameras are in their faces, it feels invasive and zany and hyperactive. There’s too much going on. Then they move to their next house, in which Kris Jenner puts her famous black-and-white tile lobby floor. It’s more open, but I don’t think it necessarily reads like it’s designed to be shot. But the black-and-white that she introduces over time pops on camera. The whole color scheme, the production design, becomes unified. This gets disrupted by Kanye, who creates that weird minimalist home with Kim, this traditional home they remove all the details from and fill with Modernist icons. [Eventually] it becomes oatmeal, bland modernism. The corners are almost gone; it’s very fluid. It’s very easy for things to move around. The details on their faces are perfectly smoothed out. Their outfits are simplified. The hair’s got the perfect middle part. They look almost cartoonish, and the spaces do, too. They do a magic trick where they go from being tacky, trashy outsiders to the definers for what a lot of people think of as luxurious.
And for what we think of as minimalism.
What Judd and other minimalists were about is being in space, relating to an object in space. This is a box you physically relate to, with specific proportions. Kim Kardashian is not really about being in space. It’s detail-less; it goes with ease throughout all these environments. Midcentury modernism tried to soften and depoliticize some of the harder edges of European modernism. The harshness of existing with a physical thing in space, having a relationship with your body and being a body in space, becomes an image, an imagined reality that’s frictionless. And that image comes back to reshape the physical environment. That cycle kept happening. And now the Kardashian spaces are so soft. It’s more like a rendering than a physical space.
Which, by the end of the book, you’re arguing against.
I’m thinking about how detaching from the physical world and getting involved in an abstracted world that you’re actually going to live in—how that can spin out of control. Colonialism has engendered a way of thinking about the world where people feel like they don’t have anything to root you down. It’s disconnected from history.
You specifically zoom in on the TikTok-ification of homes in Salt Lake City.
Part of colonialism and Christianity is trying to create a perfect, elevated world. The Mormons have a concentrated little zone where they are really able to push that agenda. People want to see order and stability. It’s this chateau-meet-bunker style. I did a kind of official house tour for the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. There are the High Mormon neighborhoods that Heather lives in, and Angie and Brownwyn live in what seemed like very progressive enclaves to the city. Whitney’s neighborhood is crazy, it’s New Urbanism with an artificial lake. It’s very nice, but it’s very Celebration, FL. A lot of the Secret Wives wives live in Provo, which is even more Mormon and extreme. The TikTok aesthetic is shaping a lot it in a feedback loop. And online house tours are helping shape this, too. They are easier to film.
They’re veneer homes.
They’re very strange. But appealing. It’s reassuring, I think, to see that space and just float around and relax in there. The feeling is nice, but disposable. There’s no risk or stakes. Nothing builds up to anything over time. Except: you’re also seeing home as a workspace, where they do all these career-building tasks on social media and create their identity. Watching it, you’re investing your time and energy into something that’s just making money for somebody else, through ad sales or whatever. So I’ve been thinking about, well, is there good reality TV? Does there need to be? I don’t know. Someone like (YouTube sensation) Lushious Massacr is able to take the means of production and jam the culture. Instead of going into these beautiful ideal homes, she goes into the trashy marketplace of crap that’s being sold to us and tears it down in a playful way. People like her are going to find ways to make subversion possible. ⌂
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.