Reality TV Goes To Work

By James Poniewozik Monday, Mar. 01, 2004
    • On the new TLC series Now Who's Boss? Jonathan Tisch, CEO of Loews Hotels, goes to work in one of his own hotels as a room-service waiter and delivers a meal to a guest from Belgium. The Belgian is unfazed to see that he is being videotaped. In America, he must assume, you always get a reality-TV crew with dinner.

    Before long, he may be right. Now that Donald Trump's The Apprentice is the season's highest-rated new show, reality TV is discovering what sitcoms have known for decades: people love to watch other people work. In the real world, workers may be worried about outsourcing, downsizing and on-the-job surveillance, but on TV, cutthroat, anxious work under surveillance is becoming big entertainment — perhaps in the same way that horror movies and roller coasters make anxiety fun. For Fox reality chief Mike Darnell (who's making Casino , about working in, you guessed it, a casino, with Apprentice producer Mark Burnett), the series also focus on timeless universals. "In our society," he says, "you get married, have babies and go to work. Those are the important moments."


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    But most people do not end up in their dream jobs; that is, arguably, precisely why millions of people spend long evenings escaping into TV. So one group of workplace series specializes in showing that dream jobs are not always so dreamy. ABC Family Channel's Switched Up! (Sundays, 7 p.m. E.T.) — in which two people trade jobs each week — portrays the kind of working world we would live in if we all got the jobs we wanted when we were 7: a cheerleader swaps places with a cowgirl, a fire fighter with a DJ. But the episodes generally end on an amiable, grass-is-always-greener note, as when a surfer trades with a sitcom writer and concludes, "As a writer, I'd be sad knowing that there's a lot of cool stuff going on in the world, and I'm sitting there in a room telling jokes." Likewise, Showtime's quirky Family Business (Fridays, 11 p.m. E.T.), about the family-run porn studio of Adam (Seymore Butts) Glasser, shows the sex-flick trade as a humdrum business, while UPN's America's Next Top Model (Tuesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.) is addictive, partly because it depicts cover-girl life as a grueling boot camp.

    This being TV, the Holy Grail for several of these shows is working in front of a camera. ESPN's Dream Job (Sundays, 10 p.m. E.T.), in a masterstroke of self-promotion, has communications students, lawyers and comedians audition to become ... an ESPN SportsCenter host. (This is the first reality show in which the ultimate praise is, "You made bowling fun.") It's surprisingly entertaining to watch pressure-stoked Dan-Patricks-in-training wrestle with TelePrompTers and try to coin catchphrases. It's also profoundly sad. Remember when a fan's fantasy job would have been playing a sport?

    For all the work on these shows, there's little labor — at least, not in the blue-collar sense. This is partly because of our move from a manufacturing to a service economy. But service work is more telegenic; that trench warfare with a smile between hassled bargain seekers and stressed-out staff has drama built in. A&E's Airline (Mondays, 10 p.m. E.T.) follows employees of Southwest Airlines, chosen for its reputation of good worker relations. "The customer doesn't always come first at Southwest," says executive producer Charles Tremayne. "The staff comes first." On Airline , not only is the customer not always right, but the customer is often a drunk, a liar or a jerk. While Tremayne says Southwest had no editorial control, it gets the better of most conflicts here. One passenger berates a desk clerk for "losing" her bag, although it has been on a baggage carousel 30 ft. away from her the whole time. Don't believe your lying eyes and your own flying experience, Airline tells us. If there's a problem with air travel, it's you.

    In her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed , Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover to do a series of low-wage jobs on the theory that the best way to write about life at $6 an hour is to live it. If only Ehrenreich had pitched the idea to TLC. Instead, the network produced the more capitalist-friendly job-switch series Now Who's Boss? (Mondays, 10 p.m. E.T.), in which CEOs do drudge work at their own companies, critiqued by their employees. For Tisch, flipping omelets and checking in customers was not just educational but good advertising as well. "We're not as large as our competitors," he says, "so we have to use creativity."

    Now Who's Boss? may be a glorified infomercial, but it's also a fascinating dip into the service economy, with all its margin pressures and enforced hilarity. John Selvaggio, president of discount airline Song, has to wear a name tag with the moniker "Jammin' John" when he works the gate. Nicknames, the narrator tells us, are mandatory at Song, at which "they've banned grumpiness and attitude!" The screen flashes factoids (the average bed change takes 7 min.), and we learn lingo like "the 10-and-5 rule" (you look at hotel guests when they're 10 ft. away and greet them at 5). The execs descend the work ladder until we get to the money shot: the boss scrubbing a frying pan or a toilet. ("Some of our guests miss," a housekeeper warns Tisch as he tackles a commode.)

    The results are fun, satisfying and probably a decent learning experience. But while the CEOs perform tasks, they never really experience work — the pressure to meet quotas, the fear of layoffs, the need to laugh at the boss's jokes — because they ultimately hold the power. (It's as if the players on Survivor had the power to fire Jeff Probst.) In a perfect world, Now Who's Boss? might have made its Warbuckses go undercover Ehrenreich-style and live on the wages they pay. Instead, it answers its own title's question: The boss is the boss, even when bumbling a drink order or elbow deep in cleanser, and don't you forget it. At the end of one episode, a California Pizza Kitchen host asks company co-founder Larry Flax, "So when do I get to do your job?" "That's next week," Flax says. They laugh and laugh. Then the camera shuts off.