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And unlike TV actors, VTV stars don't know what their "characters" will be like until the show airs. In 1973 the Loud family of California became the test rabbits for the genre when PBS filmed their lives--including the coming out of son Lance and the breakup of the parents' marriage--in the seminal cinema-verite documentary An American Family. The Louds were utterly unprepared to become national symbols of suburban angst. "My mom was very proud of the family she had raised," says Lance, now 49. "It ultimately crushed her how much of the show's emphasis was on the divorce." Sister Michele, now 42, remembers the first screening. "The opening title card read An American Family, and then the words cracked and fell to the bottom of the screen," she says. "We all just looked at each other and said, 'Uh-oh.'" Lance, who parlayed his notoriety into a writing career, says his father Bill, 79, called Survivor "No. 1 on my must-not-see list."
Ironically, the mainstream embrace of voyeurism comes precisely as many Americans feel their own privacy is in danger, be it from surveillance on the job, marketers on the Net or database-wielding bureaucrats in their HMOs. "The notion that people should be able to go home and close their front door and shut out the outside world seems to be breaking down, especially in light of the new technologies," says Reg Whitaker, political science professor at York University in Canada and author of The End of Privacy (New Press; $25). "These shows are a kind of acting out of the mingled fascination and fear that surrounds this, a way of playing it out in a kind of harmless way." For some, anyway. Survivor rates best with the young and the well-off--those who grew up with computers as helpers and playmates, those who use "nannycams" to watch the hired help from the office monitor. Where you stand on VTV, it seems, largely depends on where you stand on technology.
Thus far, though, TV's voyeurism has not met the organized moral outcry that European groups--religious, political, psychological--have directed toward the Continent's reality freak shows. (Although People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has protested against CBS because the Survivor contestants monstrously killed animals in order to eat them.) But Americans have not yet met Big Brother.
Walk through the nearly completed seven-room house in Studio City, Calif., where 10 contestants will spend 89 days being filmed for edited, same-day broadcasts five nights a week (starting July 5), and you get an idea of what so unsettled some continentals. Built from prefabricated modular units, it is perhaps the least homey-looking house $10 million can buy. The walls are lurid yellow and purple here, dead blue-gray there; the Ikea furniture is spare in the extreme. It is Martha Stewart's hell, a cold Bauhaus panopticon riddled with cameras.