Reality TV turns new page

NEW YORK —  Out of the blue, the unthinkable happens: Erik Barmack is shocked by a reality TV show. Barmack is the type of fan who watches every reality dating show and reads and posts notes on TV message boards. He even tapes the shows so he can replay the previews of the next episode four or five times to figure out what happens next.

His knowledge extends beyond a typical fanatic’s for good reason -- he’s interviewed former contestants and reality TV producers in researching his new novel, “The Virgin,” which may be the first book whose plot was influenced by the reality TV phenomenon.

Listening to him talk about the genre, it seems he’s seen or imagined it all. But on the second episode of this season’s “The Bachelorette,” when Matt M., a firefighter from Staten Island, asks bachelorette Jen Schefft for her autograph, Barmack actually yells at the TV in his Brooklyn apartment. “That is so weird! Why would anybody do that?” Just when it seems he has calmed down, he starts shouting again. “What?? Why would anybody do that?”

It is an unlikely outburst, considering that Barmack, a boyish 31, usually has an uncanny ability to predict what will happen on reality shows. His debut novel uses that knowledge to push the concept to new extremes: Its premise has men vying for the affections of a virgin. The prize? Being her first sexual partner.

While it sounds outlandish, Barmack says it had more insights into reality TV than even he imagined. He had edited out several bits from the book that felt too unrealistic, he says, only to witness similar events actually unfold while watching an episode of this season’s “The Bachelorette.”

When “The Bachelorette’s” Frenchman, Fabrice, appears on the screen, Barmack says, “I thought about having a French guy on the show, but I thought, ‘No, that will be too cheesy. No one will believe that.’ ”

When the neighbors call the cops on “The Bachelorette” guys, Barmack says, “In ‘The Virgin,’ there was this scene where the neighbors get sick of what’s going on in the show and they protest it, and there’s an altercation with the guys in the building.”

Watching “The Bachelorette’s” rose ceremony, he says, “Another scene that I had written that got cut had [main character] Jeb fainting in one of the tulip ceremonies.” He notes that that happened in the first episode of this season’s TV show: “Unreal.”

Without his realizing it, even the clever plot twist at the end of his book had actually happened on a reality show that aired in Britain shortly after Barmack started writing his book. He says he heard about it after his book was finished and was disappointed that his idea wasn’t as original as he’d thought.

“On the other hand, it was one of those things where you’d have to write a book that was deeper than any plot twist or hook, because anything that was in poor taste that you could come up with was going to actually happen,” says Barmack, who works by day for the Sporting News.

Not that “The Virgin” lacks a plot twist or a hook, which in this case is that protagonist Jeb Brown has lied about his identity to get on the show. But he can’t seem to escape his true self. That premise partially explains Barmack’s obsession with reality TV: He likes the idea that people think they can change their identity in public.

“On these shows,” he says, “people try to dupe other people by lying about their job, their background, in some cases, their sexual identity. The irony of that is that ultimately, that fails. Ultimately, they can’t hide.”

Jeb, paralyzed by the burden of trying to be the sweet guy he had in mind, instead winds up becoming the show’s “creep.” He kisses the Virgin when inappropriate, unexpectedly tells her he loves her and leaves the viewers disappointed on one especially romantic evening.

Critics have been positive, though not effusive. Booklist said, “Readers who enjoy the snap and crackle of pop culture will revel in Barmack’s acerbic debut.” Kirkus Reviews went only so far as to call it “a halfway decent job of ridiculing a mass-entertainment phenomenon.”

Interspersed throughout the book are “episode guides” that spoof actual websites that summarize episodes of reality shows with colorful commentary. These are some of Barmack’s favorite parts of the book, because they help explain the phenomenon of reality television.

“We’re in a very Puritanical society, so Americans like to judge people publicly,” he says. That explains the proliferation of reality TV message boards. Hundreds of thousands of people get online to discuss whether, say, Schefft is bustier now than when she was a contestant on “The Bachelor” two years ago.

Barmack is also fascinated by what the contestants say about themselves. His favorite line from the first season of “The Bachelorette” is, “That’s not me, that’s the character I played,” which he has Jeb say in the book.

That feeling is common, Barmack gathers from the interviews he conducted with eight former reality show contestants, including Alex Michel, the original Bachelor, and people from “Temptation Island” and “The Real World.” “There’s this anger that your character has been distorted and you’ve been sound-bited into something that was not your true self,” Barmack says, adding that the events of the shows are often edited out of order.

Other misrepresentations actual contestants complained about were the “on the fly” interviews, in which they comment on particular incidents on the show. Barmack says the questions are leading, so, for example, no one is asked, “How do you feel about the Virgin?” but, “Didn’t it disappoint you when the Virgin chose him over you?” Also, the show’s producers may “interrogate” or repeat the same question until that contestant gives the desired answer.

At the same time, he says, if a show has a loathsome character, the other participants never say that that person was edited into being the villain. “Somehow, despite all this stuff being rigged and the asynchronous nature of the editing, people show their true colors. You’re on camera for 10 weeks, so it’s pretty hard to be somebody different,” he says.

Alex Michel, the Bachelor who was interviewed for and read “The Virgin,” says the book accurately portrays life on a reality show: “He clearly did his research, so he understood what it was like to be behind the scenes on these shows.”

Barmack should be glad to have gotten it right after what he estimates to be a thousand hours of research -- including watching 10 to 15 hours of reality shows a week during the year he wrote and watching it five hours a week in the two years before he even had the idea for the book. It was one night, while he and a friend watched an episode of “The Bachelorette” with Trista Rehn, that they started brainstorming the most outrageous ideas for reality shows. That’s how “The Virgin” was born.

Barmack, who aims to be a pop fiction writer in the spirit of Bret Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk, has no plans to quit his day job, but he is working with another friend on a new book to be published next year about a bunch of guys in a fantasy football league. His research now requires him, of course, to play a lot of fantasy football.