Author: Imagine a kind of television that’s a bonafide cultural phenomenon but one most talked about with derision. A kind of media that plays with the truths and lives of the people on the screen, presenting it as fact but is actually the result of manipulations and scripting behind the screen. All of these descriptors could be for pro wrestling, but they also intimately describe reality television.
That’s not just chance. There’s much in common between wrestling, reality TV, and the unusually high number of crossovers like Total Divas, Total Bellas, and Miz and Mrs. It’s tempting to see it as a purely cash-driven situation- a choice to use alternative mediums to promote WWE superstars, but there’s much more to it than that. Wrestling paved the way for the specific kind of "reality" that reality TV is presenting. Kayfabe is dead, but reality TV was born at its funeral.
How Reality TV Rose From the Kayfabe Grave of Pro Wrestling
At its best, the nature of truth is a slippery thing. A single event with three participants will have three different stories to describe it. When you add an audience to the mix, things get even more complicated.
From opera to carnivals, showbusiness has always been a realm of smoke and mirrors. Great entertainment somehow has the ability to not only distract us and pull us away from the mundanity of everyday life but also show the viewer a reflection of parts of themselves- some good, some bad. It’s a complicated relationship that asks the creator and the audience to dance.
Modern pro wrestling is at the extreme end of that dance. It asks you to invest your very real emotions into real people, all while being aware of the inner workings of the machine that drives the entertainment.
Any fan of the squared circle has heard the phrase, "You know wrestling is fake, right?" and a modern reply is usually some version of, "Yeah, so is Game of Thrones."
It is significant to note that all academic definitions of reality TV differentiate it from a few other mediums. Reality TV is often defined by what it is NOT. It is not a documentary. It is not a traditional game show, a talk show, news or sports television. Wrestling vibes with all of those descriptions.
So, what’s the difference between documentary and Reality TV? At its ideal- documentaries aim to educate the viewer by presenting a series of observations. Reality TV aims to entertain.
In anthropology and physics, there’s the idea that just by viewing an event, you are altering it. People act differently when there is a camera on, but where documentary warns against this idea- reality TV and pro wrestling revel in it.
We know that much of shows like the Kardashians, the Bachelor, and others are staged. Speaking to many producers and associate producers of reality shows- they often mention the handling and manipulation of those people that appear on those programs.
An associate producer who wishes to remain anonymous described how, when working on a popular dating show, part of her job was to try to keep those on camera the right level of inebriated. Though initially skeptical, it took almost no effort to corroborate this blind item. There’s literally a New York Times article on this very topic.
Drama is teased out on these programs by giving explosive personalities partial information and putting everyone together to let the tensions play out in a real location. And when the drama explodes, and they don’t have the camera angle, right? Well, they ask those involved to let the tensions play out…again.
It’s a strange in-between world whose behind-the-scenes nuance may seem familiar to fans of the squared circle.
What’s the difference between a woman mocking her competitors saying, "I am here to win and not to make friends" and the cutting of a promo?
It’s not as much a difference as it is provenance. Pro wrestling on television helped create and support the culture and the craft, which eventually became reality TV.
During the ’70s, reality TV was essentially still documentary. An early player was An American Family.
The show followed the Loud family from California, condensing hours of documentary footage into a limited series of 12 episodes. It followed the dissolution of the marriage and documented the relationships between the siblings.
The show was certainly the first step into reality television, but after initial interest, the form was essentially abandoned for almost 20 years.
The territory days of the ’60s and ’70s abound with tales of using real-life locker room beef between performers to enhance the product. It’s just a part of the business. The 1980s saw this to its logical end, not only in the ring but in confessional/promo style formats. By the mid-2000s, wrestlers’ lives began playing out via social media, and WWE had begun to invest in out-of-ring reality programming fully.
In 1986, a group of volunteers at the Springfield YMCA Abuse and Rape Crisis Hotline began protesting WWF shows asserting that the relationship between Miss Elizabeth and Randy Savage constituted abuse and promoted abuse as entertainment.
Michael Weber, the media coordinator for the company, quickly rebutted- pointing out the lack of male on female physical violence but quickly admitting that much of the way Randy speaks to Elizabeth could be termed abuse. However- he then followed with "wrestling is entertainment." Though he tiptoes around the word "scripted," the implication is clear.
If you’re thinking that was shocking to the protesters- you’d be mostly wrong. A close reading of the article indicates that even those protesting were somewhat aware of the "unreality" of the wrestling business.
They weren’t as much afraid that Elizabeth herself was battered- but that it might encourage cruelty by men towards other women. Kayfabe had long been eroding, but now it was withering away in the face of an increasingly savvy audience. Large promotions were left with a choice. All wrestling had already toed the line for years.
It seems fitting that there was a heavily documented personal feud that ended up playing out in the ring at this time. This, too, would center on Randy and Elizabeth- but in a classic soap opera angle, it included a third wrestler – Hulk Hogan. It was a 1988 match in Paris that was the center of the real-life beef. Elizabeth was acting as Hogan’s manager, and after a match where Hulkster was victorious, he lifted her into the ring since it lacked stairs.
Hulk Hogan discusses getting physical with Randy Savage over Miss Elizabeth
Randy, notoriously protective of Elizabeth, accused him of using the moment to touch Elizabeth’s breasts. The two argued backstage and got physical. The situation was only diffused after Hogan accidentally ripped a termite ridden door to the locker room off of its hinges. The two made up, but this entire incident was essentially repeated in the ring less than a year later. In fact, the Hogan-Savage-Miss Elizabeth angle simply swapped breasts for butt.
The fire behind Randy Savage’s "Lust in your eyes for Miss Elizabeth" has long been known to be based on personal truth for Randy.
He was known to be an extremely jealous person who, depending on who you ask, often locked his wife away in dressing rooms.
The fact that the in-ring incident is an almost perfect mirror to the real event is important; it’s even more interesting to note that this occurred in 1989, the same year the McMahons testified before the New Jersey Senate that wrestling was fixed to avoid taxes.
There was always interest in the wrestlers’ "real" lives. If pro wrestling were going to survive after admitting it was fixed, it would also have to become more real.
It wasn’t just the internal pressures of sports entertainment that were reshaping it. Though the show An American Family came and went, it was a workplace reality show that kicked off the reality TV revolution.
When Cops premiered in 1989, it was a last-ditch effort during the Writers Strike to add programming. The show, which followed police officers on their rounds, became a nationwide hit and is still one of the longest-running shows in existence.
The next few years showed a slow rise in this kind of programming. In 1992, the MTV Real World premiered, and Road Rules followed three years later. These programs looked to put strangers together in unusual circumstances and capture fireworks. Wrestling leads with the fireworks certainly, but it can never be said that the wrestlers don’t eventually find themselves in unusual circumstances.
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Reality and Wrestling Intersecting
Such was the case of reality and wrestling intersecting during Mick Foley’s "Cane Dewey" promo in 1995.
The Hardcore Hero was a dedicated family man by the mid-’90s, and the Philly ECW fans made use of that in their interactions with him. One went so far as to bring a sign to an ECW match that suggested the "Singapore cane" be used on Foley’s three-year-old son Dewey. This became the impetus for what was certainly the best promo ever in ECW and perhaps in the ’90s as a whole.
Using Philly’s reputation for violence against them, Mick ended up channeling his wife’s disgust. lt’s a lesser-known fact that the signmaker actually asked Foley’s permission, but it was Collette, Foley’s wife, who was the most disturbed.
"I took a combination of the way my wife felt about that sign and some of the frustrations I had regarding the state of the wrestling business and my future in it,” Foley opens up. \
“I was frustrated with the fans in ECW who I thought were asking a little bit too much from the wrestlers. And I was also frustrated by the fact that there was a pretty steady parade of weak performers entering WWE. I was frustrated, and I had a way of letting that frustration out in a positive way, which was an emotional interview segment."
Years later, it remains one of the most effective promos of all time, securing not only Tommy Dreamer as the face of ECW but positioning Foley as a complex and relatable heel.
Watch Mick Foley and his "Cane Dewey" ECW promo in 1995:
The 1996 incident known as the "Curtain Call" at Madison Square Garden has always been a sort of a mystery as the stories about it don’t add up.
At The Kliq‘s last match before Nash and Hall were supposed to leave, there was a group hug in the ring that involved them, Triple H and Shawn Michaels. Supposedly this warm interaction between faces and heels was seen as a flagrant breach of kayfabe that made Vince furious enough to bury Triple H.
If this had occurred before Vince’s own testimony before the New Jersey Senate, maybe that would make sense. Still, it points towards the theory that there is more at play than just breaking character and having the audience suspend disbelief. Even Shawn Michael’s autobiography indicates that Vince was aware that the event would happen in advance.
Though it may have been compounded by the fact that a fan had snuck a video camera in and taped the moment, what seems more likely is that the anger directed towards Triple H had more to do with the success of his friends in WCW.
With Shawn occupying the space as the top face of the company, Hunter became the whipping boy. When seen in the context of the time that it occurred, it seems more likely that Vince’s anger was more about slipping behind in the ratings rather than breaching some perception of the audience of wrestling as real.
In 1997, big personalities continued to dot the landscape of Reality TV as much as wrestling. The Crocodile Hunter was getting up close and personal with crocodiles in living rooms across America while Bret Hart was getting up close and personal with another kind of reptile- Vince McMahon.
In what is probably the most nakedly unscripted moment of wrestling television, the Montreal Screwjob launched shockwaves through the Wrestling community. In an incident considered culturally significant enough to have its own separate Wikipedia page.
"The manipulation – a “shoot screwjob” in professional wrestling parlance – occurred without Hart’s knowledge and resulted in Hart, the reigning WWF World Heavyweight Champion, losing the title to Michaels in his last WWF match before departing for rival promotion World Championship Wrestling (WCW).
The “screwjob” is generally believed to be an off-screen betrayal of Hart, who was one of the WWF’s longest-tenured and most popular performers at the time."
Bret Hart spitting in the face of Vince McMahon is a moment that transcended wrestling and became reality TV. Wrestling was always providing action without actors, but now it had passed through a door where any moment might become a true shoot. The line of truth had shifted once again.
The next ten years would continue to shift the line of truth both in pro wrestling and reality TV. Even WCW got involved with Eddie Guerrero dropping a pipebomb that would predate CM Punk by 13 years. The year 2000 welcomed Big Brother, a program from the Netherlands as well as Survivor from Sweden to American television.
Both wrestling and reality television became part of the cultural landscape. Steve Austin was coming off his feud with his boss Vince McMahon, and there was almost a cultural obligation to be aware of pro wrestling and reality TV.
It was no surprise when in 2001, WWE got directly involved in the reality TV world with its own competition show. 2001 saw the launch of Tough Enough, which sought to find the next WWE superstar.
The show was on and off the air for the next 14 years, presenting the idea that the next generation of superstars would have to provide entertainment both in and out of the ring. This was also apparent with the launch of the 2003 Diva Search.
The Miz and His Connection to Reality TV
Reality TV and wrestling began flirting ever closer with one another through the figure of Mike "The Miz" Mizanin.
Not only did Mizanin make good on his goofy 2001 MTV Real World joke that he would one day become a champion wrestler, but he would also meet his future wife Maryse on another reality TV show, Diva Search, years later.
Though his wrestler "persona" was somewhat of a joke on the 10th season of the Real World, he ultimately was second place in his season of Tough Enough, and The Miz has since carved out a place for himself in both worlds.
Their launch of Miz and Mrs on USA only solidified the fluid connection between reality TV and wrestling.
Real-Life Relationships Played Out in Wrestling
No wrestling relationship played out in a way that made wrestling "reality TV" than the love triangle of Lita, Matt Hardy, and Edge. In what seemed to be an echo of the past Hogan, Randy Miss Elizabeth angle, the mid-2000s had a whole other beast to contend with- social media.
After Matt Hardy spilled his guts about being left by long-time girlfriend Lita for another wrestler Edge, the painful real-life event was quickly transitioned into fodder for the WWE creative team.
The rise of interactive media also made people feel connected to Matt Hardy’s expressions of pain online- no longer far away inaccessible stars- this new medium made fans feel as though they were getting to see the inner thoughts of the real person.
At first, Hardy’s naked honesty cost him his job, but at the end of the day, the money in the story made the WWE talk to Lita and Edge about bringing back Matt to work on the angle.
Lita told Lillian Garcia, "Because it became such a hot story, they said, ‘We want to turn this into a story. But you guys have been professional. He hasn’t. There is money involved in the storyline, but it’s your call.'”
Eventually, Lita and Edge decided to move forward with the angle, becoming the Rated R Couple.
It’s the challenge of both pro wrestling and reality programming to make social events and emotional drama into a business. Wrestling just codified how to do so first by shaping the visual language, style of marketing, and to some extent, the culture into something primed for reality TV.
The interplay between shoot and work has always been a line that fans have chased. This search for the truth, where the performance ends, and the performer’s inner world begins, is one of the special things that draws people back to the well of sports entertainment over and over. The modern age is no exception.
Through Total Divas, Total Bellas, Miz and Mrs, and Stone Cold’s new program Straight Up Steve Austin, there is little doubt that this connection now goes two ways, with one feeding the other. The only question remains: will wrestling look more like reality TV, or will reality TV continue to head towards being a complete work? Only time will tell.
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