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      Their Fascination With ‘Real Housewives’ Is Anything but Fake

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      A cadre of Yale drama graduates have followed up a first streaming hit with “This American Wife,” a reality-blurring look at the long-running reality TV franchise.Last fall, the theater company known as Fake Friends had one of the most attention-getting shows of the season, and not just because of its title. The troupe’s livestreamed production “Circle Jerk” was a viral hit, amassing Twitter love from Sarah Paulson, Roxane Gay and Hari Nef, and extending its run before briefly returning on demand in January.Its dynamic use of a real theater space mapped a live experience against a landscape of (literally) inside-the-box Zoom plays, while also tackling those restrictions head-on, thanks to self-aware, meme-ready campiness and sharp commentary on lives lived increasingly online.With a production co-sign from the playwright Jeremy O. Harris and his very digital following, the show propelled two of its members, Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley, into internet fame. They were tapped to adapt “Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical” for the virtual stage, and secured funding to turn their first-ever collaboration into another work of live internet theater.Along with the company’s dramaturges, Catherine María Rodríguez and Ariel Sibert, the two have reworked “This American Wife,” a half-confessional, half-delusional treatise on gay men’s worship of TV’s “Real Housewives” franchise, which they first staged at Yale Cabaret in 2017.Though the company is a four-person operation, they have enlisted a group of “friends of Fake Friends” (as Rodríguez put it) for this production, which begins streaming May 20: the director Rory Pelsue, the performer Jakeem Dante Powell, and Harris as a co-producer — all graduates of the Yale School of Drama.Foley, left, and Breslin say the show will examine the tensions that come with living one’s life significantly on camera.Michael George for The New York Times“We’re all huge theater nerds who can break out deep conversations about ‘Fefu and Her Friends’ in the same breath that we’re talking about Lady Gaga’s last tweet,” Harris, Breslin’s former New Haven roommate, said on a recent FaceTime call. “It’s a real love of high and low, and a rigorous relationship to both.”Breslin and Foley met backstage at a Yale production of Harris’s “water sports; or insignificant white boys” in 2017, where they discovered a mutual love of both experimental theater and the popular Bravo franchise.“Spoiler alert: They’re the same form,” Foley quipped on a recent Zoom call.“We’re really fascinated with what a camera does to a performer,” Breslin added. “What does the presence of a camera change about your behavior, about how you present yourself?”Unlike “Circle Jerk,” a satirical takedown of white gay culture laden with musical theater references, this project takes formal cues from lensed images. It’s styled as an episode of “Real Housewives” run amok, and the team cites French surrealist film, the photography of Man Ray, and the melodramas of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk as major inspirations.Foley and Powell being filmed for segments that will be part of the livestream.Michael George for The New York Times“This American Wife” follows autofictional versions of Breslin, Foley and Powell as they arrive at a glamorous McMansion and recount their relationships to reality television and the impulse to humiliate oneself for attention.Fused with a litany of the Housewives’ actual phrases, the three performers detail personal, often traumatic, facts about themselves, echoing the franchise’s televised oversharing.And as their competing narratives become increasingly revealing and damaging, the show becomes a semi-improvised, high-concept dialectic on identity and “realness.”“The show directly confronts this visual internet world of the Housewives and how they’re endlessly used as GIFs, decontextualized from possible tragedies in their lives,” Breslin said.The addition of Powell to the cast allows the creators to surface prickly questions about race that have dogged the “Real Housewives” franchise.Michael George for The New York TimesWhile the “Housewives” shows draw steady social-media chatter, the intensity of attention seemed to reach a fever pitch during lockdown. “Because we’ve had this year off, a lot of people were watching the ‘Real Housewives’ on both a surface and an intellectual level,” Powell said.Queer viewers have a particular interest in debates over how real reality TV really is. “I think queer people have a real stake in this division of reality and fakery — what gets deemed real and what gets deemed fake,” Breslin said.“Within the gay community there’s a big tendency to look at the pre-coming-out period as a dark age — to foster this narrative of being a fake self, or playing a character and telling narratives that weren’t true, while still living a life,” said Foley.“That experience of a lie that is lived-in is integral to me,” he added.Early rehearsals at a West Village townhouse previously owned by Sarah Jessica Parker saw the team spend hours reviewing “Real Housewives” footage, determining which eye-rolls and gestures would best evoke the essence of the conspicuous rich, and which could be included as pre-existing GIFs.There and at the Long Island mansion where the company completed tech rehearsals — and from which it will livestream — flowed a heady combination of after-hours grad school discourse and pure farce. Wigged performers yelled Kandi Burruss quotes at refrigerators and other domestic essentials, which would later be fitted with livestreaming GoPro cameras.The character played by Powell, a Black actor, is new to this iteration — the fourth, following two at Yale and one for Next Door at New York Theater Workshop. It brings race into the former two-man show, responding to a crucial element Breslin and Foley felt missing from their original script.Breslin and Foley said that incorporating Powell — an understudy in Harris’s Tony Award-nominated “Slave Play” on Broadway — was an obvious choice, given his “encyclopedic knowledge” of the franchise, and what his addition would do for the piece’s dramaturgy.Ariel Sibert, left, a dramaturg and Rory Pelsue, to her left, is the director of “This American Wife.” Michael George for The New York Times“I remember talking to them about the Housewives that they gave voice to in the show,” Powell said. “For obvious reasons, there were voices that were not there, but who were alluded to in the text.”“There is something easily identifiable for me with how femininity lives within the body of a Black woman that didn’t resonate with me in the white women,” he added, describing that exploration as “really enticing.”The show, which to him now “feels like a brand-new piece,” aims to critique the role of race, not just within queer fandoms, but within the franchise itself, whose lack of diversity has been called out in major publications, from The New York Times to a Hollywood Reporter essay by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.“We have the first Black woman on ‘The Real Housewives of New York’ in 2021,” Breslin pointed out. “What does that say about what these shows are instructing people on what New York is?”In 2020, the “Real Housewives of Atlanta” star NeNe Leakes called its creator Andy Cohen racist on Twitter, shortly after exiting the show.“The conversation around what’s going on behind the scenes with NeNe and Bravo is fascinating to me,” Powell said. “It’s the same conversation that’s happening around the country — how the tenets of white supremacist culture exist everywhere.”Harris, who has used his recent financial success to fund several, mostly Black-led, theater initiatives, said he finds Fake Friends’ mission “really exciting.”“If you are a person of color, you are generally demanded to write something that puts your entire identity on the line,” he added. “I get very annoyed that it’s very easy for a white person to write something mundane that risks nothing, to get acclaim. Having friends who are so willing to ask hard questions about what their personhood in this country means is exhilarating.”FourthWall Theatrical, a two-woman production company composed of Jana Bezdek and Jen Hoguet, is producing the work with Harris. “This American Wife” will be their inaugural production.According to Breslin, Bezdek introduced herself as a lover of “three things: feminist theater, Brecht, and musicals.”“I used to work in reality TV so I can’t watch it for relaxation,” she said. “But this is such a complex, intelligent piece, that is not just reflecting our obsession with ‘The Real Housewives’ back on us, but reflecting ourselves back on us.”This American WifeThrough June 6; thisamericanwife.live More

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      Netflix Chronicles Byron Bay’s ‘Hot Instagrammers.’ Will Paradise Survive?

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      Tensions between protecting and capitalizing on the image of the famous Australian beach town have exploded over a new reality show.BYRON BAY, Australia — The moral quandaries of life as an Instagram influencer in the famously idyllic town of Byron Bay are not lost on Ruby Tuesday Matthews.Ms. Matthews, 27, peddles more than vegan moisturizers, probiotic powders and conflict-free diamonds to her 228,000 followers. She is also selling an enviable lifestyle set against the backdrop of her Australian hometown’s crystalline coves and umbrellaed poolsides.It’s part of the image-making that has helped transform Byron Bay — for better or worse — from a sleepy beach town drawing surfers and hippies into a globally renowned destination for the affluent and digitally savvy.“I do kind of have moments where I’m like, ‘Am I exploiting this town that I live in?” Ms. Matthews said recently as she sat at The Farm, a sprawling agritourism enterprise that embodies the town’s wellness ethos. “But at the same time, it’s my job. It puts food on the table for my children.”The tensions between leveraging and protecting Byron Bay’s reputation, always simmering in this age of entrepreneurial social media, exploded last month when Netflix announced plans for a reality show, “Byron Baes,” that will follow “hot Instagrammers living their best lives.”Local residents said the show would be a tawdry misrepresentation of the town and demanded that Netflix cancel the project. One woman started a petition drive that has gathered more than 9,000 signatures and organized a “paddle out” — a surfer’s memorial usually reserved for commemorating deaths — in revolt.Byron Bay is the most expensive place to live in Australia, with a median house price of $1.8 million.Mullumbimby, a town near Byron Bay. The announcement of the new show from Netflix has raised questions about who is entitled to capitalize on the cult of Byron Bay.Several store owners, many of whom have substantial Instagram presences, have refused permits that would allow Netflix to record on their premises. A number of influencers who were approached by the show also said they had decided not to take part. More

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      Bethenny Frankel Is Back on TV Because ‘I Know What People Want to See’

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      In “The Big Shot With Bethenny,” on HBO Max, millennial strivers will compete to help Frankel run her Skinnygirl empire.If reality television is a game, Bethenny Frankel belongs among its M.V.P.sFrankel, 50, began her on-camera career in 2005, during the Martha Stewart season of “The Apprentice.” She came in second, with Stewart telling her, “You’re spunky, you’re a show-off, you feel you have to make a physical impression.”If that made Frankel wrong for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, it made her right for “The Real Housewives of New York City,” which premiered in 2008, even though she wasn’t a housewife then and has never really been one since.Frankel spun a tossed off cocktail order in Season 1 — “the skinny girl’s margarita” — into the premixed cocktail brand Skinnygirl. She sold it to Beam Global for $100 million in 2011, retaining her rights to the brand name. (Beam got the premixed drinks business; Frankel kept everything else.) She has since parlayed her reality fame into food stuffs, supplements, cookware, shapewear and under her Bethenny label, eyewear.She is, in her words, “the H.B.I.C. of a major empire.” She recently signed a multiyear deal with iHeart Radio to bring her “Just B with Bethenny Frankel” podcast to the network and to produce others.Her endemic hustle extends to the disaster-relief initiative, B Strong. While raising money for hurricane and earthquake relief, the initiative, in partnership with Global Empowerment Mission, has distributed more than $19 million in aid and personal protective equipment during the Covid-19 crisis.“The Big Shot With Bethenny” is the “authentic modern version of ‘The Apprentice,’” Frankel said.Krista Schlueter/HBO MaxOn television, Frankel used “The Real Housewives” as a vaulting horse toward a couple of Bravo spinoffs; a single season of a syndicated talk show, “Bethenny”; and a bunch of appearances on “Shark Tank.” She quit “The Real Housewives” in August 2019 after eight on-and-off seasons, citing spiritual corrosion.“I was making great money, but I didn’t feel good about it,” she said. “If I’m really as successful and smart and savvy and legit and the-Emperor-does-have-clothes as I think I am, then that’s not really where I should be anymore.”But she didn’t stay away from reality television long. She teamed with Mark Burnett (“The Apprentice,” “Survivor”) and MGM Studios to create “The Big Shot with Bethenny.” “In business and television she is a clear force of nature, deservedly so,” Burnett wrote in an email.  In “The Big Shot,” premiering April 29 on HBO Max, millennial strivers attempt to become Frankel’s vice president of operations at Skinnygirl. Nominally a business competition show, it dispenses with most hallmarks of the genre — imagine “The Apprentice” with 100 percent more entropy.“I can let two people go. Hire everybody. Fire everybody,” Frankel says in the first episode. “I can do whatever I want.”On a recent afternoon, Frankel arrived at a Soho loft where some of the show was shot — lipped, lashed, bronzed, glamorous even through the Zoom screen. During an hourlong interview, she discussed entrepreneurship, her Martha Stewart beef and how to make reality TV more real. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did you end up on “The Apprentice” in the first place?I’d never watched a ton of television, but I said, “I could get on ‘The Apprentice.’” I said to my partner, “Go buy the least expensive video camera you can find and just videotape me selling cookies.” I got called, which was the craziest thing of my life, and I went to Bloomingdale’s and used my credit card to buy a Moschino red jacket. I went to this hotel, they interviewed me. I didn’t make it. But I’ve always been a connector, like, follow through, send a card, send a gift. Connect. So I kept in touch with the same producers and casting directors without looking too desperate. And they said, “OK, now it’s the Martha Stewart ‘Apprentice,’ here’s your chance.” I wanted it more than anything in the world. I didn’t want the fame per se. I wanted the job.You made it to the finale, then lost. Do you feel like you were robbed?I ran into Martha Stewart shortly after. I was wearing a really sexy dress. Intentionally. She was standing next to Jon Bon Jovi. And she said to him: “This is Bethenny, she was just on my show. And she’s mad at me because she didn’t win.” And I said: “Martha, I’m not mad at you. You’re like an ex-boyfriend that I hate but I’m still in love with.”Frankel and Dawna Stone were finalists in the Martha Stewart season of “The Apprentice.”Virginia Sherwood/NBCFrankel with Alex McCord, left, and Jill Zarin in “The Real Housewives of New York City.” Frankel left the franchise in 2019.Barbara Nitke/BravoThen you went onto other reality shows, “Housewives,” the Bravo spinoffs, “Shark Tank,” “Skating With the Stars.” How do people who know you only from TV see you?People think I’m scathing, abrupt, aggressive, intense, passionate, smart, successful, secretive, stealthy, a baller, manipulative, funny. I think I said intense? Economical, organized, efficient, reliable, honest.What do we get wrong? What don’t we see?What people probably don’t realize or believe is I am the most private person that I know, which is the craziest irony. I’m private about moments and experiences. I’m more of a homebody than anybody that I know, short of someone being agoraphobic. I do not leave my house and I do not put on hair and makeup unless I’m being paid to.Few people have used reality TV as successfully as you have. Was that always your plan?Going on “Housewives” was strategic. It’s not that easy to get on TV. I wanted to be a natural food chef. I wanted to be on the Food Network, and this is a place to show that I’m a natural food chef. Once it started, I thought: This is going to be a game changer. This is going to be very disruptive. But I was always honest about what I was doing.The premise of “The Big Shot With Bethenny” is that you need to hire a vice president of operations for Skinnygirl. What does a vice president of operations do?I wanted a second in command. The people at MGM wanted the title because the audience can digest and understand the title. What I really needed in my business was my person, who can think like me, manage the shop like me, edit a social post, have a vision.“What people probably don’t realize or believe is I am the most private person that I know,” Frankel said.Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesIs a reality show the best way to find that person?I’ve never looked at a résumé, ever. Headhunters give you people that are like, “Next Tuesday, I have a doctor’s appointment, and two years from July, I need to take a three-week trip, and what time is my lunch break?” I didn’t come up that way. We just worked. It’s hard to find people like that. That’s who I go for. I don’t care if you know anything — you’re loyal and you’re smart and you work hard. That is all you need.People competing for a job on a reality show sounds a lot like “The Apprentice.”Initially, I wanted to be disassociated from “The Apprentice.” It’s not real. It’s manufactured. Everything going on with our projects was really going on. So for example, I really have a shapewear brand; we really had to create a campaign for it. That was really happening. I really have salad dressings and preserves. The built-in projects are real; they have real stakes. Also, when you watch “The Apprentice,” do you ever see him in his pajamas? You ever see him at home with his wife? I imagine Donald Trump eats cereal. Do we see that? No. Do you see me in my life? Yes. The authentic modern version of “The Apprentice,” that’s what this really is.“The Apprentice” has a very predictable structure. Watching your show, I had no idea what would happen.Our executive producer produced “America’s Top Model.” Mark Burnett has produced “The Apprentice,” “Shark Tank,” “Survivor.” I get that they feel safety in format. I feel trapped and suffocated by it. Like, I’m back on my talk show directing traffic between a soufflé and fall florals. On my own reality shows and on the “Housewives,” I would say, “Let’s do real.” So all of the things that are shocking are not contrived. There were so many things not planned. It’s a very different show for that reason because it’s based in authenticity.So without too many spoilers, did it work out? Did you get your person?This experience gave me the person and I’m so excited.What have you learned about being good at being on television?People always say get out of your own head — it’s not entirely true. Reality television is the highlights. Something’s a sound bite. Something’s a takeaway. Something’s entertaining. I know what people want to see. I know what people want to drink. I understand what people think is entertaining. More

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      Colton Underwood, ‘Bachelor’ Star, Comes Out as Gay

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      The 29-year-old former football player had written about questioning his sexuality in a memoir, published in 2020.Colton Underwood, a star of “The Bachelor” and a former football player, came out as gay in an interview with Robin Roberts that aired Wednesday on “Good Morning America.”He described 2020 as a year of self-reflection, one that “probably made a lot of people look in the mirror and confront what they were running from or what they’ve been putting off in their lives.”“I’ve ran from myself for a long time,” Mr. Underwood, 29, said in the interview. “I’ve hated myself for a long time. And I’m gay. And I came to terms with that earlier this year and have been processing it, and the next step in all of this was sort of letting people know.”He said that coming to understand his sexuality has been a “journey,” and now he is “the happiest and healthiest” he’s felt in his life. He had reached a low in 2020, he said, that led to thoughts of self-harm and suicide.“I got to a place where I didn’t think I was ever going to share this,” he said. “I would have rather died than say, ‘I’m gay.’ And I think that was sort of my wake-up call.”In his 2020 memoir, “The First Time: Finding Myself and Looking for Love on Reality TV,” Mr. Underwood described being confronted by his parents about his sexuality as a teenager.“‘You know, Colt, we’d still love you and support you if you were gay,’” he recalled his mother telling him.His father was more confrontational. “He’d pulled up the history of recent Google searches, which included gay porn sites and a variety of questions: ‘Am I gay? How do you know if you’re gay? Why don’t I like having sex with my girlfriend?’” Mr. Underwood wrote in the book. “At first, I denied responsibility. Then I owned up to having been curious. He asked if I wanted to talk about it. I said no, explaining that I’d figured things out on my own.”Mr. Underwood appeared on “The Bachelorette” in 2018 and quickly became a fan favorite on the reality dating show. But Becca Kufrin, the season’s star, worried that he was unprepared for a lifelong commitment and eliminated him after their “hometown” date, where she met his family. (The show’s producers had made Mr. Underwood’s sexual inexperience a major plot point.)He starred on “The Bachelor” in 2019, where again his virginity was a central theme. Near the end of the season, as the stress of the show increased, he said he was “done” with filming and “jumped the fence” of a resort in the Algarve region of Portugal in an effort to escape the set.After the show ended, Mr. Underwood and Cassie Randolph, 25, the front-runner of his season, began dating. Ms. Randolph’s family helped him recover from Covid-19 in March, around the time his memoir was published.The couple announced their split in May 2020. In November, Ms. Randolph filed a restraining order against Mr. Underwood, who she said had placed a tracking device on her car. Viewers of his “Good Morning America” segment inferred that this was the personal low to which he was alluding.The “Bachelor” franchise had its first onscreen same-sex relationship in 2019 on “Bachelor in Paradise.” Demi Burnett, who appeared on Mr. Underwood’s season of “The Bachelor,” and Kristian Haggerty, who was flown out to the set midseason, ended up getting engaged. (They later broke it off.)In its 20 years, the franchise has never featured an all-gay cast. More

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      Pat Loud, Reality Show Matriarch of ‘An American Family,’ Dies at 94

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPat Loud, Reality Show Matriarch of ‘An American Family,’ Dies at 94A mother of five, she unapologetically laid bare the drama of her family life as a star of the first reality show.The Loud family (clockwise from top): Kevin, Lance, Michele, Pat, Delilah, Grant and Bill.Credit…John Dominis/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty ImagesJan. 11, 2021Updated 5:11 p.m. ET Before “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” before the Kardashians, before the idea of living large and unscripted on camera became a TV staple, there was a startling program on public television called “An American Family” with a startling female character named Pat Loud.Ms. Loud was a California mother of five. She drank, she plotted her divorce, she adored, and accepted, her openly gay son. She did it all in Santa Barbara and all on camera — in 1973. Loving, boisterous, witty, resilient and sometimes angry and hurt, she did not act like most women on television at the time. But she was ostensibly not acting at all. She was the first reality television star on the first reality show — and she paid a price for breaking new ground.Critics called her materialistic and self-absorbed. An “affluent zombie,” one said. What wife and mother would do such a thing? Newsweek put Ms. Loud, her husband, Bill, and their children on its cover with the headline “The Broken Family.”Many others, however, saw her as honest and brave, uninhibited and unconditional in her love for her children.Ms. Loud died on Sunday at her home in Los Angeles, her family said in a Facebook post. She was 94. She was 47 when the show that made her famous first aired, and she spent much of the rest of her life explaining why she had done it and how it had changed her family. She made few apologies.She told the talk show host Dick Cavett in no uncertain terms that she had no problem with her son Lance’s homosexuality. She wrote in her autobiography, “Pat Loud: A Woman’s Story” (1974), that given how she felt that her family had been mistreated after the show aired, “now we are all unabashedly trying to get anything we can from the instant fame.”But life went on. Once a homemaker and Junior League volunteer, Ms. Loud found new work with Ron Bernstein, a literary agent, and later with the fashion designer Rudi Gernreich. She moved to New York, then England, before returning to California in the late 1990s to be with Lance after he became sick with H.I.V. in 1987. (He died of complications of hepatitis C in 2001.) She divorced her husband, though they reunited many years later.Ms. Loud with her son, Lance, in 1990. She was forthright in asserting her acceptance of his open homosexuality when “An American Family” was generating wide publicity in the 1970s.Credit…Ann Summa/Getty ImagesBy the time she was in her 80s, public perception of her had shifted. Where once she had been seen as an unmitigated self-promoter, now she was a wise, refined matriarch of a genre gone astray.Speaking of the “Real Housewives” franchise, Ms. Loud told The New York Times in 2013, “It just seems like all these beautiful blond girls, all made up, with stem glasses of white Chablis, and they’re all just fighting at dinner somewhere.”Critics of “An American Family” accused it of being contrived, but the Louds long maintained that they had behaved as normally as they could with cameras constantly trailing them. Craig Gilbert, a producer for WNET, chose the Louds for his subject because the family had lots of children — and because they said yes.“We asked the kids, and they all agreed,” Ms. Loud told The Times in 2013. “It seemed like a fun thing to do.”The family expected the filming to last for just a few weeks and doubted that the final product would find many viewers. In the end, more than 300 hours of film captured over seven months was reduced to 12 one-hour episodes.“They just went for the sensational stuff,” Ms. Loud said.The most sensational involved scenes from Lance Loud’s flamboyant life in New York — where he performed in a rock band and where his mother visited him, accompanied by cameras — and the breakup of the Louds’ marriage.Bill Loud had been unfaithful for years, and his wife knew it. In one wine-saturated conversation captured on film, she complained about his affairs to her brother and sister-in-law. She told The Times in 2013 that she had been “coerced” into letting the scene be filmed. Mr. Gilbert rejected that assertion.“I said, ‘Pat, we must shoot that,’” he told The Times in 2013. “She said, ‘I do not want you to.’ I said, ‘We must, Pat, because otherwise it’s going to come out of the blue. No one will understand it.’ She finally agreed, and her brother and sister-in-law were in the room when she agreed to it. And now she says she was coerced.”In a later episode, Ms. Loud told her husband that she wanted a divorce. “By the time she asked Dad for a divorce, she didn’t care if the entire city of Santa Barbara was watching or the whole world,” her daughter, Delilah, said in an interview for this obituary in 2014. “She just wanted Dad out.”Ms. Loud in 2013. By the time she was in her 80s, public perception had recast her from a self-promoter into a wise matriarch of a genre, reality TV, that had gone astray.Credit…Robert Caplin for The New York TimesPatricia Claire Russell was born Oct. 4, 1926, in Eugene, Ore., the daughter of an engineer. Her family was close with another family that had a little boy named Bill Loud. They met when she was about 6. Years later, when she was studying history as an undergraduate at Stanford, Mr. Loud would visit her from the University of Oregon.“He would drive down and pick her up and then go to Tijuana to see bull fights,” Delilah Loud said. “They had quite a courtship.”Ms. Loud graduated from Stanford in 1948. The Louds eloped to Mexico in March 1950. By the time the cameras showed up, in 1971, Mr. Loud had built a successful business making parts for mining equipment, and the family was living an affluent life. They had a house with a pool and a Jaguar in the driveway. They took long vacations to Europe.Ms. Loud was widely read, and she talked with her children about art, music and books. Life was bigger than Santa Barbara, she told them.“They were adventurous types,” Delilah Loud said, recalling the family conversation about whether to participate in “An American Family.” “They wanted us to experience the world and they thought, ‘Well, what the heck, it’ll be a new experience.’’’Bill Loud, with whom Ms. Loud reunited in 2001 at the request of Lance, died in 2018 at 97.Ms. Loud’s is survived by Delilah and another daughter, Michele, as well as two sons, Kevin and Grant, according to the family’s Facebook post.Ms. Loud moved to New York with her daughters in 1974 and lived in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for more than a decade while working as a literary agent and doing other work.She lived in Bath, England, in the early 1990s before moving back to California to live with Lance. In 2001, Lance, who had led the rock band the Mumps and was a freelance writer, asked the original camera and sound equipment operators of “An American Family” to document his final days. He did not tell his mother that the cameras would show up.“I don’t know why Lance did that, but he wanted to do it,” she told The Times.In 2003, public television aired “Lance Loud! A Death in an American Family.”Alex Marshall and Alex Traub contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Donald Trump Lost His Battle. The Culture War Goes On.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCRITIC’S NOTEBOOKDonald Trump Lost His Battle. The Culture War Goes On.The reality-TV president was a practitioner, and a product, of a style of pop-cultural grievance that will outlast him.President Trump gloried in inviting conservative celebrities like Kid Rock, right, to the White House.Credit…Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesDec. 14, 2020You could say that the Trump presidency effectively ended when the polls closed election night or when news outlets called the contest for Joseph R. Biden Jr. four days later. You could say that it ended when the Electoral College voted on Monday to make Mr. Biden the president, or that it will end when Mr. Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20.But by one measure, the Trump presidency ended in mid-November, when online conservatives went bonkers over a picture of Harry Styles in a dress.The photo of the British singer on the cover of the December Vogue prompted the YouTube personality Candace Owens to tweet, “Bring back manly men.” To Ben Shapiro, the photo shoot was an assault on the concept of manhood itself: “Anyone who pretends that it is not a referendum on masculinity for men to don floofy dresses is treating you as a full-on idiot.”What does all this have to do with the president’s impending exit? First, it suggests that other conservatives are retaking the role of Troll-Warrior-in-Chief that Mr. Trump conferred on himself.But it’s also a reminder that the kind of button-pushing cultural politics that predated him — that in many ways helped make a President Trump possible — will survive his tenure.‘Duck Dynasty’ PoliticsA million years ago in the Obama era, proxy wars over culture were handled on the periphery of conservatism, in social media and right-wing talk. It was the era of the Gamergate attacks on feminists in the video gaming community, of umbrage over the foreign-language lyrics of a Coca-Cola commercial and over a female-cast reboot of “Ghostbusters.”With the election of President Trump, a pop-culture figure himself who intuited the connection between cultural fandom and political tribalism (he himself made a “Ghostbusters” outrage video the year he announced his campaign), the political and culture-war wings of conservatism merged.For four years, we had a president whose portfolio of concerns included protests at N.F.L. games, speeches at TV awards ceremonies, the loyalty of Fox News and the reboot of “Roseanne.” He scoured and fretted over Nielsen ratings — his own and those of shows he saw as allies and enemies — with the intensity a wartime president might devote to troop movements.Now, with a waning Mr. Trump self-soothing with OANN and Newsmax and tweeting out the elaborate sci-fi serial that the election was stolen from him, command of that battle is returning from the White House to the field.Phil Robertson, who was briefly suspended from the reality show “Duck Dynasty” in 2013 for homophobic and racist comments, with Mr. Trump at a 2019 rally.Credit…Larry W Smith/EPA, via ShutterstockFor decades, the expression of politics through culture war has been a staple of conservative media. Andrew Breitbart, the right-wing online publisher, declared that “politics is downstream from culture” (borrowing an idea from Marxist theorists like Antonio Gramsci). Fox News made an annual production of the “war on Christmas” (with occasional spinoffs like “Santa Claus and Jesus are white”).The appeal was emotional; people have a personal connection to family holidays and their favorite shows that they don’t to, say, marginal tax-rate policy. But it was also a way to appeal to a specific audience in a country where, increasingly, people had not just different political beliefs but entirely different cultural experiences.As far back as the early 1970s, the “rural purge” in TV — which eliminated bucolic sitcoms like “Green Acres” to make room for urban ones like “All in the Family” — reinforced the idea that there were different Americas with different, and even competing, popular cultures. This dynamic only spread with cable TV and the internet, which sliced and diced us into a nation of niche demos, sharing a geography but occupying different psychic spaces.As the historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer write in “Fault Lines,” their study of American polarization since the 1970s, all this led to “a world with fewer points of commonality in terms of what people heard or saw.” This was true in politics and in entertainment, and the two often overlapped.There was now identifiable red and blue pop culture. A 2016 Times study found a TV divide that mirrored the rural-urban split in the election. “Deadliest Catch,” the reality show about Alaskan crab fishing, was popular in red America; in blue zones, “Orange Is the New Black,” the Netflix drama and critique of the prison system.The brief suspension of Phil Robertson, the patriarch of the “Duck Dynasty” clan, had divided the country.  Credit…Gerald Herbert/Associated PressA 2014 poll found that 53 percent of Democrats, compared with 15 percent of Republicans, believed “Twelve Years a Slave” should win the best-picture Oscar. Neither party had taken a position on the movie; the culture war was just well-enough ingrained that people could intuit where their side would land, just as the Iraq War movie “American Sniper” became a conservative favorite and liberal target.Knowingly or not, audience members enlisted in the culture war as volunteers. For conservatives in particular, the liberal tilt of Hollywood was a useful font of grievance, allowing them to claim cultural victimhood no matter how much political and judicial power they held.And people increasingly saw their favorite stars as their proxies and champions. When Phil Robertson, the bayou patriarch of “Duck Dynasty,” was briefly suspended from the reality show in 2013 for homophobic and racist comments, one America saw it as political correctness taking down a beloved star for speaking his mind. Another America — if they had ever heard of “Duck Dynasty” at all — saw a bigot getting what he had coming to him.The Culture-Troll-in-ChiefAll of this, in retrospect, was an advance trailer for the it-came-from-“The Apprentice” Trump era.Politicians, especially on the right, have dabbled in culture war before: George H.W. Bush vs. “The Simpsons,” Dan Quayle vs. “Murphy Brown,” Bob Dole vs. rap. But their forays tended to be awkward, tone-deaf and often as not, self-defeating.But Mr. Trump, a child of TV who made himself into a TV character as an adult, understood media instinctively. It was where he lived, ever since he gave up his youthful fantasies of running a movie studio, vowed to “put show business into real estate” and forged his tabloid persona in the 1980s.Having used media to build a reality-show career and a business-success myth, having experienced the rush of primetime celebrity, he knew that culture makes the kind of gut connection that mere politicians can only dream of. Ordinary politics argues: Those other people don’t believe what you believe. Culture-war politics argues: Those other people don’t love what you love.So Mr. Trump’s campaign, as much as it was about wall-building or Islamophobia or “law and order,” was also about a promise to defend and uphold his followers’ culture over the enemy’s. His rallies combined a concert vibe with the theatrics of pro wrestling (another genre Mr. Trump had experience with).To an audience that had been told for years that showbiz celebrities disdained their values, here was one of their celebrities, a real celebrity from TV, taking their side. An alt-rightist essay on Breitbart.com hailed the erstwhile NBC host as “the first truly cultural candidate for President” since Patrick J. Buchanan, the CNN “Crossfire” co-host who declared a “cultural war” for “the soul of America” at the 1992 Republican National Convention.Ted Nugent performed at a campaign event for Mr. Trump in Michigan in October.Credit…Rey Del Rio/Getty ImagesTrump’s 2016 RNC didn’t have a lot of high-profile politicians, but it did have a “Duck Dynasty” star. As president, he gloried in inviting conservative celebrities like Kid Rock and Ted Nugent (who once called President Obama a “subhuman mongrel”), as well as the newly conservative-curious Kanye West, to take photos in the Oval Office.The pictures felt like spoils of war, a political end-zone dance. And his fiercest celebrity critics often played into his me-vs.-Hollywood narrative, cursing him out at the Tony Awards or feuding with him on Twitter.He praised Western culture as superior because “we write symphonies,” tooting a white-nationalist dog whistle from the orchestra pit. And he threw himself wholeheartedly into fights like the one over ABC’s reboot of “Roseanne,” whose star, Roseanne Barr, had become a real-life, vituperative Twitter Trumpist, and which worked her politics into the story lines.He didn’t, like previous presidents attending the Kennedy Center honors or sharing a something-for-everyone Spotify playlist, see culture as a way to find common ground. He saw it as a battleground with winners and losers, and one full of opportunities to inflame divisions.When the “Roseanne” premiere dominated the ratings, he crowed about it as his team trouncing the enemy. “It’s about us!” he told a crowd of supporters.Later, when ABC fired Ms. Barr from the show over a racist tweet, Mr. Trump joined the argument, not to condemn Ms. Barr’s remarks but to accuse the network of hypocrisy because of “HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC.” It echoed his Twitter attack on the network in 2014 when it picked up the sitcom “black-ish”: “Can you imagine the furor of a show, ‘Whiteish’! Racism at highest level?”His bellyaching against Hollywood wasn’t just a bread-and-circuses distraction. It was political messaging. Pushing back on Ms. Barr’s firing — for likening a Black former Obama aide to an ape — echoed the right’s fixation on “cancel culture.” The message: Your stars are being canceled. Your shows are being canceled. You are being canceled. Only I am the network executive who can ensure your renewal.After ABC fired Roseanne Barr from the reboot of “Roseanne” over a racist tweet, Mr. Trump accused the network of hypocrisy.Credit…Brinson+Banks for The New York TimesHis fixation on ratings (dating back to “The Apprentice,” whose ratings he routinely lied about) vibed with his worldview of competition and scorekeeping. Fights about representation, American identity and the boundaries of acceptable speech aligned with messages expressed, in more blunt and ugly ways, by Mr. Trump’s campaign and supporters — especially the insidious language of “replacement.”“Now they’re making ‘Ghostbusters’ with only women. What’s going on!” was a way of telling men that he would protect them from becoming superfluous. “We can say ‘Merry Christmas’ again” was a way of saying: Your culture used to be the assumed default in America, and I’m going to bring that back. The enemy wants to demote you to a supporting player; I’m going to make you the star again.The Tug-of-Culture-War Goes OnMuch of this, of course, was a reaction to the expansion of the American story implied by the election of America’s first Black president and by the representative pop culture of Obama’s era, like “black-ish” and “Hamilton.” Often, there’s a sense (at least in retrospect) of a new cultural era beginning with a new presidential administration: JFK, the New Frontier and youth culture; Reagan, “Family Ties” and “greed is good.”Though the Biden administration has yet to begin, it doesn’t feel like that kind of definitive shift at the moment, so much as the flag moving to the other side of the centerline in a continuing tug of war. Things may get quieter on the surface; Mr. Biden is neither as big a pop-culture guy nor as zealous a culture warrior as the president he’s replacing.But as every tempest over a Vogue cover proves, the fight goes on. The divides are too deep, the incentives for widening them too great. Whether Mr. Trump continues to have a major part in this after he leaves office, or whether his ratings ragetweets simply echo in some musty corner of the internet, the ongoing narrative he has left us with will continue.The secret of a long-running show, after all, is that it can survive a cast change.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More