The Reality Show That Wants to Save the World (But Probably Won’t)
By Kyle Chayka
To get to paradise, you’ll need a car. Drive north from Los Angeles into the scrubby desert hills, then veer right onto a dirt road running through the remains of Old West ranches. You’ll arrive at an idyllic five-acre landscape bounded by a split-rail fence. Behind the fence the grass on the ground is peeling up in squares of sod. There’s a barn, and though no one lives here, the barn is worn. The worn spots are new, built into the design. Dotted around the campus are robotic video cameras, camouflaged to blend in with the natural scenery. The whole thing is impossible to miss, which, when you figure the compound took a reported $50 million to build, is probably the point. There’s even a big sign above the front gate that optimistically proclaims the spot “Utopia.”
Built to look like a 1960s commune, this is the extravagant production site of Fox’s new reality television show, Utopia. The show (starting September 7) follows 15 Utopians. It’s the kind of sampling of Interesting America a new reality show typically goes for—there’s the over-worked Manhattan lawyer, the environmentalist apocalypse prepper, the devout Christian evangelist—and together they’ll cooperate to build the perfect society, armed with only the materials at hand.
The world is not, at the moment, or at any moments really, a great place. “People are unhappy, in the middle of a crisis, uncertain about their future, war everywhere,” Utopia creator John de Mol, the Dutch reality TV auteur who also created Big Brother and The Voice, rattled off to me over the phone before I visited his American set (Utopia was originally produced in Holland earlier this year, before Fox brought it to the U.S.). “Can 15 people who start all over again create a society that is better than the one we live in right now?”
I went to find out just how reality TV planned to save the world from itself.
Utopia is messy. “Sorry about the mud,” Conrad Green, Utopia’s showrunner, says as we edge around the set’s bare patches of ground. “It’s a bit of a cluster of nonsense at the moment.” Green’s crisp British accent and loose white safari shirt are fitting for the expedition. It’s his responsibility to make sure everything functions when the Utopians arrive, and that includes thousands of moving parts—animal, vegetable, and machine.
The Utopians will start out with two cows housed in a pasture surrounded by an electric fence, as well as 15 chickens that we pass clucking inside a tall wooden coop. There’s a flat area for raising crops, a few fruit-bearing trees, and a small pool filled with plants that naturally filter the lake water. The cast can even choose to hunt in the open hills of the Angeles National Forest, which sprawl out beyond the horizon of the set. And wandering into the hills for too long counts as leaving Utopia. “If they stay out for a long period of time, we’ve reserved the right to make them leave,” Green says. “You don’t want to break the bubble.”
Utopia is designed to ask nothing of the outside world. “It’s a very American thing, being able to set up your own community, to not have to rely on the government,” Green says. “It seems like a very common thread at the moment.”
The show actually has a shot at being truly organic. There won’t be any cameramen on set; the action will be captured by the 130 cameras we strolled past, mounted on fence posts or hidden in trees. (the number keeps going up as launch date nears). Adding to the set’s Hunger Games vibe is a wooden water tower that rises up on a hill outside Utopia. Except, it’s not a water tower. There’s a camera mounted there to grab extreme wide shots, as well as an enormous LED light that will rise from the top of the structure to illuminate the set every night. The light, Green tells me, is one of the largest that’s ever been used on any set. “We’re trying to make the coloring of it like moonlight so it feels more natural,” he explains.
Even as we speak, the cameras are being controlled by a team of dozens of operators and editors stashed in a nearby complex of cookie-cutter office buildings, connected to Utopia via 63 miles of cable. It’s easy to forget they’re there, though — at least until you see the heart of the operation.
Jon Kroll is Utopia’s excitable executive producer. He wears a striped polo shirt that adds to the vibe of a kid let loose in a toy store. He stands in the control room surveying his domain. It’s a dark, air-conditioned arena filled with an enormous bank of TV monitors and control panels. It’s impossible not think about The Truman Show. Here, the set’s 130 camera feeds are narrowed down to 12 that are recorded to disk for posterity, then into two “stories,” edited feeds that subscribers can stream to any online device 24/7 while Utopia runs. The show is reality television for the mobile era, “like having a real-life The Sims going on your phone,” Green says. That’s the goal, anyway.
The operators use joysticks to train their lenses on the faces of the cast, at the moment made up of substitutes wearing name cards. The choreography looks like a NASA operation, a comparison heightened by the fact that the crew won’t have direct access to their subjects in order to ensure the independence of Utopia. “This is the purest reality TV show I have ever produced,” John de Mol tells me. Purity is a difficult quality to assign to a purely invented circumstance, but de Mol’s playground is certainly impressive. They created their own moon, after all.
I sit down at an operator control panel and pan across the Utopia landscape. Twisting the joystick makes the camera zoom in, and in, and in. The experience is like playing with a real-time version of Google Maps or gaining divine omniscience. The heady rush I feel operating the system doubtless plays into the crew’s obvious passion for their surveillance. How often do you get to play God at your desk job?
For Kroll, the show has a personal element to it as well. Between the ages of 8 to 18, he lived in Oz, a utopian community that his parents helped found in the ’70s. It had “a lot of nudity, not a lot of rules, a lot of recreational drug use… boundaries were crossed,” Kroll recalls. “I can’t tell you what you need to make a utopia, but I can tell you everything that goes wrong when you try.”
Utopia, Kroll tells me, comes down to this: “How should we live?” He asks, “Are we a democracy, do we vote on everything, should we eat meat in our community, what should our next construction project be? These are the same battles I grew up with.” The question ultimately becomes, well, what do we do now? And lately, it’s reached a certain chilling urgency.
Reality TV show contestants who have not yet appeared on-screen are living with the fact of their imminent fame. Perhaps that explains the dazed, glassy look that the Utopia cast share when I meet them in the empty Italianate restaurant of a well-appointed if anonymous hotel. Or maybe it’s that they’ve all been holed up in their rooms for a week preceding their trip to Utopia, unable go online or meet one another (one cast member was allegedly kicked off the show before it started for attempting to contact her cast mates).
“In 15 people you can’t show the ethnic diversity of the U.S. as a whole, but we wanted to be at least representative,” Kroll says of the casting process. It’s obvious that some of the cast were chosen for their backgrounds and personalities, and they know it. Such conflicts are a signature of the established genre of reality TV, after all — the Virgin versus the Slut, the Conservative versus the Hippie, the Zealot versus the Nonbeliever.
Still, it’s unnerving to see some of the cast reduce themselves into stereotypes in front of me. As John Jeremiah Sullivan writes in his book Pulphead, reality TV isn’t about watching real people react to real scenarios anymore; rather, “you’re watching people caught in the act of being on a reality show. This is now the plot of all reality shows, no matter their cooked-up themes.” American viewers might happily sit on their couches and analyze the bullshit factor of scenarios and character motivations in The Real Housewives, but when they become participants in the medium, even before they’re on TV, they display a distressing awareness and acceptance of their role in the fabrication.
“I kind of wanted to portray the red-blooded American male,” says Rob Hospidor, a gruff security programmer from New Jersey with tattoos running down his arms who had to reinvent himself after selling high-risk mortgages pre-financial crisis. “The leftists are going to be more socialized, saying everyone should take care of each other. That’s not something I believe in.”
Each cast member has his or her own tagline. Kind of like Teresa Giudice of The Real Housewives of New Jersey’s infamous “Haters are gonna hate, but I just love, love, love,” Jonathan Lovelace, an Apostolic Christian pastor, will likely repeat to viewers what he told me, “I’m here to share the gospel.” Lovelace is so beatific that I wonder how long he’ll last away from his flock. The Appalachian Red Vanwinkle, whose literally toothless grin is more intimidating than charming, describes himself as “kind of like the hillbilly MacGyver.” I half expect someone to drop a, “I’m not here to make friends.”
Before Utopia, soft-spoken, red-haired Mike Quinn was a lawyer in Manhattan. “Over time, I started grabbing for money and power; you lose sight of a lot,” he says. “This is an opportunity to get back to nature and sort of do that Thoreau thing.” The utopian Transcendentalist would probably appreciate the show’s gentleman-farmer style agrarianism. Quinn appears genuinely tired, as if life in New York City were far more scarring than being on camera for a year straight. “I could have just moved upstate, which is what a lot of people are doing,” he adds. “I took it to the extreme.”
I like Quinn, but I don’t necessarily give him strong odds of survival—too soft. Around once a month the Utopians will vote out one of their number to make room for a new recruit from the real world; viewers are encouraged to apply. “Any society needs a throughput of people,” Conrad Green says.
Dedeker Winston, a slim 26-year-old—tagline, “I’m not a freak. I’m not a sex addict. This is not a kink.”—has the signature characteristic of being polyamorous, a lifestyle which will no doubt clash with the sensibilities of someone like Lovelace. She tells me, “Each of us comes in having lived in this culture that we’ve lived in for however many thousands of years with our notions about love, sex, politics, economics; we can’t exactly do a tabula rasa.” She brings up Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, a 1992 philosophical novel about what humanity lost when going through the Agrarian Revolution. “Hunter-gatherers were probably more polyamorous than we are today,” she says. “What happens when you have the opportunity to go back to tribal living, to have this little tribe of 15 people?” I tell her that I’ve been reading up on utopian manifestos prior to the visit. “Any tips?” she asks, then laughs.
The vast majority of blueprints for utopia, including the 1516 book by British philosopher Thomas More that coined the term, were never carried through into reality by their creators. The plan outlined by B.F. Skinner’s Thoreauvian novel Walden 2, for example, was put into practice then quickly abandoned by the members of the Twin Oaks Community in Virginia, a utopian commune that’s still functioning today. The Utopia cast has a unique opportunity to test their utopian ideas without risking as much as the Unitarian minister George Ripley’s ill-fated 19th-century commune Brook Farm did. That utopian venture burned to the ground less than two years after its birth, leaving its founder $17,000 in debt and its residents homeless. “The task,” Winston says, “is to make an intentional community, but instead of a bunch of like-minded people, you have a bunch of very differently minded people, and that’s where the good television comes out.”
The basic inquiry behind every utopia echoes Kroll’s question: How should we live? Each era gets the answer it deserves. Could this show be ours? Given the historical precedents, the odds aren’t good for Utopia. Still, if architectural plans, novels, and philosophical treatises haven’t worked in centuries past to create the perfect society, then why not try reality TV? After all, the barrier to a successful utopia isn’t the storytelling format; it’s us. And even if we can’t learn anything from Utopia, failure — the experiment’s only logical outcome — is fun to watch.
