“Bravo, Bravo, (fucking) Bravo!”: The art of the limited hangout (Conspiracy and narrative, pt 3)
by RIPDCB
So shouted Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Denise Richards during a particularly heated Season 10 dinner. Under fire from her fellow cast mates about an alleged affair she was having with costar Brandy Glanville, Richards’s exclamation shocked and confused viewers. Why, in the middle of an interrogation, had she invoked the hallowed name of her show’s network? Housewives and fans alike know the unspoken, golden rule of all Bravo productions: never break the fourth wall during filming. Here Denise Richards was doing just that, staking the network’s credibility as merely a silent voyeur to the lives of its subjects. Her plan was clear: she wanted to stop production from filming the scene to save her from having to face the allegations on camera, and, sadly for Denise, her ploy failed. The dinner was aired in its entirety in the Season 10 finale, for all the world to see.
While Bravo’s motives for airing the dinner in some capacity are clear (good drama, duh), electing to keep in Richards’ “Bravo, Bravo, Bravo” is less obvious. The network has an abundant budget and top-notch editors, they could have found a way to cut it out if they had wanted to. But they kept it in, and in doing so, played a classic strategy from the handbook of American politics and intelligence: the limited hangout. First introduced into the public domain during the Watergate scandal, a limited hangout is when one offers just enough of the truth to (hopefully) quiet questions about what’s really happened. It’s the presentation of some truth, edited to disclude the truly damning information. Some reputational dishonor will be incurred, but not so much so as to be fatal. And that’s just what Bravo—a masterminding network whose tentacles stretch so far and so covertly into the production of their shows that fans are left to ponder, sometimes conspiratorially, about the extent to which the ‘reality’ being depicted is real at all—did in airing the Season 10 dinner in full. They confirmed their before-unspoken rule (to never break the fourth wall) with a wink, drawing us into the drama even deeper while simultaneously letting us into a new meta-drama. Of Richards, and the Housewives at large, vs. Bravo, of the cast members against production over control of what does and does not make it into the final cut.
See, reality TV has to walk a fine line between producing entertaining content and having people play themselves on camera. Production is tasked with keeping stakes high without letting the show become practically scripted. We do expect, on some level, for these shows to be fake—we consume despite knowing that whatever slice of reality that’s there in the frame is amplified in order for the drama to be as legible as possible. And we let ourselves believe—or better yet, suspend disbelief—enough to treat it like it’s real. And Bravo does its part by giving us just enough drama and just enough insight into how the sausage gets made so we don’t fall into believing nothing is real.
I think no concept is more important for our contemporary media ecology than that of plausible deniability, one of the intended by-products of a limited hangout. Any event, statement, or impression can become plastic as far as reception is concerned if you can create sufficient uncertainty in the surrounding circumstances. One way to do so is, as I’ve explained above, give just enough of the truth that you can plausibly claim you’ve said all there is to say. Plausible deniability is, I think, the main force behind impression management. It attempts to inject a given information state with enough uncertainty to allow for top-down molding. Some will buy the official narrative because of trust in conventional forms of authority; others will reluctantly accept what’s offered to them—sometimes even knowing it isn’t the full picture—because it becomes just a little too difficult to piece together a clear, convincing, and coherent counter-narrative. Get people to doubt their epistemologies and you can affect how information is received.
Bravo’s great heist of our faculty to distinguish between fact and fiction is its ability to create what I want to call ‘plausible believability’. Rather than shirking the burden of proof by keeping a heavy cloud of questions and ambiguities looming over situations, Bravo conveys just enough truth to satiate most fans’ desire to poke holes in the projector screen. They’re able to maintain an ambient believability, which is in part a function of reality television’s unscriptedness. So much of any given episode of reality television is made up slice-of-life snapshots of cast members in their house or at work, or meal after meal of characters recapping the previous episodes’ dramas to each other other. Not a lot happens a lot of the time! So when drama does interject itself into a season, it’s a welcome reprieve from all the stasis. In fact, I might even make the argument that all the stasis creates an appetite for the drama, to reward us for so patiently waiting.
But reality TV employs another strategy for impression management purposes: reunions. Reunions are multi-hour throw downs between cast mates about that season’s happenings, usually split into two-to-three episode segments that run after the regular season (they’re also usually filmed a couple months after filming wraps). As we’ve already established, it’s a no-no to mention the Invisible Hand of Production during filming, or any other kind of behind-the-scenes strategic set-ups intended to make the show more watchable. But reunions offer stars an opportunity to give us insight into not just how they really feel about what’s transpired, but also how what’s happened has come to be. They operate by giving us a peak behind the curtain, which, in the process of giving us this peak, tacitly admits to the existence of the Bravo’s off-screen influence. It’s during reunions when cast members will admit to refusing to film with another cast member in one-on-one situations (explaining why their scenes together were few and far between), or some will admit that production put them in the position to build relationships that they otherwise may not have. Reunions, then, are another example of Bravo’s affection for the limited hangout; this time, however, it’s not circumstantial, but a major part of each show’s architecture. Suspicion is at once sanctioned and then circumscribed, placated by a controlled admission that, for many, suffices to make reality TV believable enough. Believable enough to maintain our attention and, most importantly, our emotional engagement and parasocial relationships.