Lucas Mann - Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV

If Mann doesnt quite elevate reality TV to an art formand thats unlikely his intentionhe makes a persuasive argument for readers to sit up and take notice. The cultural implications are perhaps more potent than wed like to believe. An immensely captivating consideration of reality TV and a moving reflection on marriage.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Im an ardent admirer of Lucas Manns work. Captive Audience shows us how to do media criticism the right way or rather the wrong way, the more electric and exciting way: the target is never out there; its in here. A galvanizing, illuminating, and nervy book.

David Shields, author of Other People and Reality Hunger

I was initially drawn to Captive Audiences smashing critical analysis and savvy pop-culture apologies, but what I ended up cherishing most of all is this books vivid portraiture. Mann has written a soulful recounting of not just a decade of watching reality TV as it has evolved past entertainment into something more complex, public, and even sinister, but a story of doing so alongside another persona beloved life partner, nonetheless, with whom his shared reality also evolves and deepens. Who could have imagined that one of the most evocative love stories Ive read in ages would be mixed into heady investigations of Joe Millionaire, Cops, and Vanderpump Rules?

Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses

There is no cultural critic in America like Lucas Mann. Perhaps thats because he turns on the television and sees what you dontin the vulgar and striving world of reality television, he finds beauty and heart in the ambition that drove these overtanned and underfed people to perform for usand that brought us in to watch. Manns voice is filled with empathy, irony, and a tenderness that will make you laugh and then ache, sometimes within the span of a single, perfectly constructed sentence. Captive Audience is the definitive book on the aging but perennially renewed genre of reality TV, and there isnt an author alive who could have written it better.

Kristen Radtke, author of Imagine Only Wanting This

Epistolary writing is custom-made for immodesty and oversharing, the kinds of filterless self-display, as Lucas Mann shows us, that we happen to want from reality TV stars. But in this epistle to his wife, Mann explores their shared enthusiasm for reality television and proves there is insight and virtue to be found in examining the desire to be seen. He gets closer to that dimension of intimacy and love, in fact, than any spotlight-seeker yet who has beguiled us from our most private screens.

Gregory Pardlo, author of Air Traffic

What other book goes so boldly into the insatiable need to be seen? Who else is as tough on his own perceptions? I already knew Lucas Mann was a wonder of a writer, but Captive Audience is his best book yet: a tender, humane, comic, brainy, unsettling achievement.

Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship

Lucas Mann was born in New York City and received his MFA from the University of Iowa, where he was the Provosts Visiting Writer in Nonfiction. He is also the author of Lord Fear: A Memoir, which was named one of the best books of 2015 by the Miami Herald, Kirkus Reviews, Paper magazine, Largehearted Boy, and Oprah.com, and Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere, which earned a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and was named one of the best books of 2013 by the San Francisco Chronicle. His essays have appeared in Guernica, BuzzFeed, Slate, and The Kenyon Review, among others. He recently received a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife.

www.lucasmann.com

ALSO BY LUCAS MANN

Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere

Lord Fear: A Memoir

A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, MAY 2018

Copyright 2018 by Lucas Mann

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN9780525435549

Ebook ISBN9780525435556

Cover design by Joan Wong

Author photograph Matthew Celeste

www.vintagebooks.com

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Contents

For Ottavia

1

[REQUEST FOR AUDITION]:

Hi (: I am ______, I am a 17 year old with a story.

I want to quit feeling like I am not important. I want to be somebody in my life, I do not want to be remembered as some face in the yearbook, I want to be heard. Currently, I make youtube videos, and I have 317 subscribers. I know it is not a big number, but I am finally being heard by some people and I love it. I just want to make people happy, in any shape or form. Putting a smile on peoples faces is my dream! If I could be casted on this show, my life would be complete. I just want people to know me more than just some girl who likes makeup. I want people to know who I am. My family is not against this, but they do think I should focus on school, which I agree with but this is my dream.

Height: 5 feel 5 inches

Age: 17

Gender: Female

Dream: This.

Please help me reach for the stars, this is my dream and if it comes true, I cant even imagine my life. Help me out (: Help me be heard.

from www.castingcallhub.com

I have, for a long time, suggested that we get rid of cable. I have even suggested that we throw out our TV altogether so that we may eat at our actual kitchen table and play more Scrabble. Id say these suggestions come biannually, on averagethey used to be more frequent, then ebbed, and are now increasing again. They have been going on for the better part of a decade. They arise, as most of my impulses toward change do, out of feelings of shame. They arise when we open up our home and visitors see the way we liveby which I mean what we watch and the frequency with which we watch itand make remarks that I take to be scornful:

I cannot believe you guys have all the channels.

Or: How can someone retain so much information about Bravo?

Or: How do you do it?If I had cable, I think I would forget how to live. Its just too easy to let your mind get lost in the slush and forget to look up.

The relationship between television and life is loaded. The relationship between television and love is, perhaps, even more so. Life, the way I think the term is most commonly used, is about action. Go out and live