From MTV Cribs to The Bachelor Mansion: What Reality TV Houses Reveal About Viewers | Reality TV

HHouses have always been at the center of reality television. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous paved the local way in the 1980s with its semi-documentary look at the real lives of the wealthy. It worked so MTV Cribs could operate, and in September 2000, Cribs became what critic Sam Jacob called “the most popular architectural media of all time.” The Ozzy Osbourne episode of the hit show was best known for her tumultuous (and sometimes fake) house tours of 2002’s The Osbournes, which Kris Jenner used as the basis for her Keeping Up with the Kardashians speech. The rest is history.

In Dream Facades: The Harsh Architecture of Reality Television, author Jack Balderrama Morley contemplates residential space and takes us through these histories, contemplating how homes and design on reality shows are simultaneously aspirational escapes, sinister figures, extensions of our own desires, and artefacts of American urban history. “I’m interested in what reality TV homes represent, and why so many of us like to get lost in them,” Morley said. “On screen, they become accessories to our homes.”

In compact passages, “Dream Facades” deftly moves beyond predictable critiques of suburban homogeneity and American consumerism. “In the case of the Kardashians,” Morley writes, their “modern farm” has its roots in the Hidden Hills, north of Los Angeles. It’s an equestrian community, so it has a real connection to the legends of how Anglos settled the American western frontier. He links frontier self-reliance to its contemporary mutation: the entrepreneur. “While the Kardashians run a self-sustaining global media empire from their home, like a modern-day home,” Morley said.

If Chris’s house represents success, Chateau Sherri represents the struggles of today’s homeownership. Born during the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis, Chateau Shereé is a 10,000-square-foot custom-designed Atlanta mansion that belonged to Real Housewives of Atlanta star Shereé Whitfield. “It’s the mansion she builds over the course of the show, and it embodies Sherri’s inability to get anything done,” Morley said. “The house became a symbol of her as a person and her worth.”

Domestic settings were not always associated with the darker side of later reality shows such as competition and the construction of identity through wealth. The Real World premiered in 1992 during the golden age of MTV, and was set in a loft in New York’s SoHo. In these early years of the show, it was an experiment in communal living, and had dramatic themes of love, death, and coming of age in the post-industrial big city. “It wasn’t just about wealth, it was just a social experiment,” Morley said. “The real world has become too competitive and ridiculous to compete with other reality shows.”

The lifestyle as depicted was not artificial: it was a real look into the loft life of young artists – something that had flourished in New York since the 1960s when those industrial buildings were emptied. “The art scene in SoHo was central to the real world. Artists like Donald Judd were only there a few years before they actually were,” Morley said. “It was this cultural construct that spread across the country and captured the imagination.”

The show was based on the 1973 documentary American Family. “Real world creators have taken this lifestyle and infused it, turning artists into art itself,” Morley said. “Turning themselves into media outlets was the beginning of the descent into the influencer culture we have today.”

The “real world” was a less glamorous version of reality TV, more like Real cinema From the ambitious, glamorous competitive game show format to cutting-edge concepts. However, while some of the shows seem standard on the surface, hiding underneath is some of the surrealism and subversion of the older shows. Take The Bachelor, a dating show where a man dates 25 women who compete to win him over. “Instead of pandering to the audience with a fantasy of love, marriage and a nuclear family, the show is actually a group of single women living together in an unconventional, psychotic domestic situation,” Morley said.

The Bachelor Mansion, a Mediterranean-style Villa de la Vina mansion, has hosted all episodes of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette since 2007. Like the show itself, its style is more sophisticated than it might seem. Invented in the 1920s, these SoCal mission-style homes are a reflection of the myths of the American frontier and the built image of postwar American architecture.

“In a job market that is so tough, people see themselves in the screwball comedy of reality TV,” Morley said. “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is an unscripted comedy that really puts people at ease watching the joys of modern life.”

Dream Facades reminds us that although reality television may seem trivial, a deeper reading and some design history unveils some very strange undercurrents of contemporary American popular culture and the nation itself. “Reality television is difficult to study because it is so ephemeral, and it can be difficult to understand how architecture relates to popular culture.” Morley said. “I hope this book helps people understand both so we can try to shape the world into something we want.”