Taking Reality TV Seriously

Trump brought drama. Bravo sheds light. Brian Moylan has seen and covered it all.

When Brian Moylan graduated from college, in 2000, he landed a job as an editorial assistant at the Washington Blade, the biggest gay newspaper in Washington, DC, and started covering reality television. It was the early days of the boom: Survivor, which debuts its fiftieth season tonight, had just premiered. “I started paying attention to reality television because that’s where the gay people were,” Moylan told me.

Over the years, he has made his way through a crumbling media industry (the Blade is the only publication he worked at full-time that still exists) to become an expert on Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise—and on Bravo itself—at a time when reality TV has come to dominate and define much of American culture. Donald Trump, who burnished his reputation as the star of NBC’s The Apprentice—created by Survivor’s Mark Burnett, and which appeared from 2004 to 2017—was fired from the show the same year he started his campaign for president. (In a statement at the time, NBC said that it would cut all business ties with Trump because of his derogatory statements about immigrants.) Now Trump, in his second term as president, has just delivered the State of the Union. “Politics used to be boring, and now Trump brought the ‘drama,’” Moylan observed. “But any reality TV producer will tell you that if you had as much mess, as many storylines, as many fights, as much conflict as Trump and his cronies are pumping out on a daily basis, everyone would be exhausted by the show and it would be canceled.”