The White House recently treated the American people to one of the most Kim Jong Un moments of the five-month-old Trump presidency: a video of a Cabinet meeting and press gaggle where the President calls on his secretaries and agency heads round-robin style to report out his praises for the cameras. Mike Pence kicks it off: “The greatest privilege of my life is to serve as vice president to the president who’s keeping his word to the American people.” Chief of Staff Reince Priebus gets right to the point: “We thank you for the opportunity and the blessing to serve your agenda.” Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Who were these men and a few women only six months before? Do their families even recognize them? As George Orwell wrote of the white man in colonial India: “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”

As with most table reads from this administration, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but I laughed more because the performance reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about in ages: WKRP in Cincinnati, a sitcom about a struggling AM radio station that aired from 1978 to 1982. I loved the show as a teenager because it was about the station’s do-or-die switchover to a rock and roll format. The goal was to make this hokey little station cool, because everyone wanted to be cool. The writing was usually good (except for the racist context of the station’s Black DJ), the humor subtle, and the characters respected one another despite their oddities.

The episode I remembered was a parody of Real People, then a popular new-format TV show. Real Families, the fictional show on WKRP, features an insidious handheld camera that follows around real families while co-hosts offer commentary in front of a studio audience. WKRP’s real family belongs to Herb Tarlek, the station’s physically tacky, ethically challenged ad salesman. Herb’s plaid-suit narcissism—comic bordering on pathos—has propelled him to get his family on the show. But it’s clear from the footage that the Tarleks are not prepared for this level of scrutiny. It’s also clear that, with the cameras following Herb around the radio station, he has coached his coworkers on how they should describe him to the world.

“Herb Tarlek is a hard worker, a loyal husband, and an all-around fine person.” We hear it verbatim from the DJs Johnny Fever and Venus Flytrap, from secretary Jennifer Marlowe, Andy Travis, Bailey Quarters, Les Nessman, and Arthur Carlson.

For a while, the Real Families hosts amicably go along with the ruse. But eventually they move in for the kill. “What are these people doing?” one of them—played by Peter Marshall of Hollywood Squares renown—asks of the familiar Tarlek refrain. His audience of everyday Americans shouts back gleefully, “They’re lying!”

It’s painful to think that thirty-seven years ago, average Americans got a thrill from unmasking liars. The first reality television on record was the 1973 PBS series An American Family, about a real family going through a divorce. But this was presented as an edited documentary. It wasn’t until 1979 that America got a hit reality show in NBC’s Real People, which ran until 1984. The other networks immediately followed suit and a genre began to expand and evolve.

What WKRP sought to parody in 1980 was Real People’s implicit desire to unmask ordinary Americans, to reveal what motivates the façade of propriety they present to the world. There has always been a mass audience for this. But few could have predicted in 1980 that the desire for attention and flash celebrity would so easily trounce fears of public humiliation. Rather than run away from these shows, ordinary Americans dove into the fire. They unmasked themselves.

Reality TV didn’t take off until 2000, but two of its progenitors in the 1990s were tabloid talk shows and celebrity confessionals. Jerry Springer and Geraldo featured the same sinners, miscreants, and boundary-pushers whose broken lives would later shape reality programming. And the spectacle of celebrities breaking down on primetime ranged from Tammy Faye Bakker’s running mascara to OJ in the Bronco to Barbara Walters’s two hours of blotted teardrops with Monica Lewinsky.

The conflation of these genres in reality TV meant that its subjects were no longer ordinary Americans but not-quite-celebrities: people whose diva meltdowns and ballsy power plays audiences accepted as the way of the world.

With cheating and lying as autonomic as walking and talking, feeling superior to fatuous nobodies gave way to feeling justified to act as badly as people with money. It used to be that Americans aspired to have what their neighbors had. But with reality TV, they know the closets of celebrities better than the front yards of the people across the street. Hence they synchronize their aspirations with the accoutrements of people who throw shoes at the help, have tantrums at funerals, and fire people while admiring their cufflink.

Americans trusted reality programming because it paid dividends. It taught them to wax their pubes, juice a mango, stage a house, pawn Grandma’s musket, and fillet bluefish. It taught them the jargon of Hollywood therapists, astrologers, plastic surgeons, and focus groups. The stunts and exploitation on the lowest forms of these shows gave them a seen-it-all worldliness; witnessing contrived events with one-dimensional storylines made them hardened experts on greed and laziness with little patience for extenuating circumstances.

Reality TV made Americans dwellers in artificial communities of co-consumers. It is easy to see how Fox News has exploited this self-segregation, nudging viewers to demonize whatever exists beyond these artificial boundaries. When all members of the opposing political party are liars—half of them moochers and the other half elites—then “liar” is just another word for the person in front of you at the grocery store.

In The Apprentice, Donald Trump found everything he ever wanted: constant attention and going through the motions of having legitimate “business” to conduct on any given day. It’s hard to imagine the nirvana that show must have been to him. I doubt he reflects on anything, but he must’ve seen the frayed and raggedly throughline from all his hustling in the eighties and nineties to present himself as phenomenally successful. The work that made him tremendously busy was trying to get press about how he was tremendously busy. But of course there were never any doughnuts getting made at Trump Tower.

Like many reality shows, the premise of The Apprentice was artificial, but the promise was that the contrived situation of a bunch of randos fighting to go straight to the C-suite would be 100% real. It was just like what Marianne Moore urged poets to do: create “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” The Donald Trump of The Apprentice was the great cane toad of reality television. At the White House, surrounded by his team of trained canaries singing on cue, he had re-created his cane toad world: Donald Trump is a hard worker, a loyal husband, and an all-around fine person. Trump’s audience has evolved beyond any gleeful exclamation of “They’re lying!” Instead, they think: “Look how powerful he is, making those dudes lie on cue.” Despite all the unmasking done in U.S. intelligence reports to find out who was communicating with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, none of that unmasking was needed for the liars assembled here.

The Tarleks’ suburban Cincinnati from 1980 seems worlds away from Trump’s shiny mahogany conference table, especially the vision of happy family life that Herb and his wife, Lucille, think ideal. And yet the transgressions caught on camera are the same issues we grapple with today: Herb keeps trying to yank away the doll that his young son carries around; he refers to a football player as “colored,” and his instant realization of his fuckup is as awkward for us as it is for him.

The reason I remembered this episode so clearly is that the TV show’s violation of the Tarlek family’s privacy and dignity made you empathize with a character who is normally a jerk. WKRP took characters who at first glance seem like stereotypes and opened them up so that you saw why they might have hid behind the stereotype and what they used it to cover up. Even though the Herb Tarlek of 2017 would probably be wearing a Lock Her Up! T-shirt at an anti-sharia rally, I felt compassion for the Herb Tarlek of 1980 for being demoralized just because he wanted to put on a good face to his community.

It almost seems that the people from 1980 television are a different species—humans before we knew we were living in the Anthropocene. In their world, people still cling to the mask of propriety, even if it means sacrificing the sensational notoriety brought on by norm-shattering behavior. Lucky us, though: we know the value of the public’s attention, how it can give anyone a shot at the top. The downside to our Anthropocene selves, of course, is that in always scratching away the mask, we also scratch away everything it sought to stand for. §