Made from Humans: How Reality Becomes TV
Jul 8, 2026 · 27 min · 10 segments
This week: A dramatic reading of my very first reality TV recap—to celebrate reality blurred’s 26th birthday today! Also: recommendations, and, at the very end, life advice from a Survivor 50 player…
Andy DehnartHost
Okay, on to the department called Why I Wrote That or How I Wrote That, but today it's gonna be why and how I wrote that, where I share insight into my process as a writer and blogger.
This podcast is called Made from Humans: How Reality Becomes TV, but of course, once reality becomes TV, a big part of the reality of the people who are on the shows and us as viewers is the discourse, the conversation, the recaps, the blogging, the gossip, the news reporting, all of that stuff that happens afterwards.
And of course, I am a small part of that ecosystem with the work I do on Reality Blurred and here.
And I wanted to just kind of share how I even got into this in the first place, and I wanted to do that by sharing with you the very first recap I ever wrote because that was indirectly responsible for the creation of Reality Blurred.
So flashback to 1998, I did an internship in Boston at a website called student.com, and sitting around the lunch table in the courtyard, uh, which was covered in Cambridge, uh, with my fellow editors and interns, I would often talk about The Real World and what had happened in previous seasons or what was happening on a marathon that we, that I just watched that weekend or whatever.
During one of those lunches, Wesley Morris, who was the film or culture editor at student.com, I think he, he definitely wrote film reviews and just beautiful, incredible movie reviews, and he went on to win a Pulitzer and now is at The New York Times.
Just, just an extraordinary writer and a model for somebody who wrote about pop culture for me as an intern.
He said something to me like, "Why don't you just write about The Real World since you talk about it so much?" And honestly, that had never occurred to me.
I'd written a couple movie reviews for student.com, but mostly I was writing newsy stuff, reporting, interviews, some features, but mostly it was kind of sticking to the news side.
And so that stuck with me and w- I kept in touch with him and then the person who became the culture editor, Alex Pappademus.
The next time a season of Real World rolled around, which was in 1999 in the summer, and that was the Real World: Hawaii, Season 8.
I will be reading to you that very first recap that I wrote momentarily just to revisit it in all of its awkwardness and [chuckles] delightfulness and you can see how in some ways my writing hasn't changed at all and in some ways it's changed a lot, thankfully.
This became kind of a runaway hit on the site, and by that I mean, you know, hundreds of people were reading it for whatever.
And it's, maybe that's 'cause it was the summer, people were out of school so they weren't looking at the internet.
People didn't have phones in their pockets with internet access or Wi-Fi or anything, so you had to be in front of a computer to actually read.
What's fascinating though is writing this first recap, I do not remember how I figured out how to do this or what to do with it, and I think you can see that in a little bit of this.
Okay, on to the department called Why I Wrote That or How I Wrote That, but today it's gonna be why and how I wrote that, where I share insight into my process as a writer and blogger.
This podcast is called Made from Humans: How Reality Becomes TV, but of course, once reality becomes TV, a big part of the reality of the people who are on the shows and us as viewers is the discourse, the conversation, the recaps, the blogging, the gossip, the news reporting, all of that stuff that happens afterwards.
And of course, I am a small part of that ecosystem with the work I do on Reality Blurred and here.
And I wanted to just kind of share how I even got into this in the first place, and I wanted to do that by sharing with you the very first recap I ever wrote because that was indirectly responsible for the creation of Reality Blurred.
So flashback to 1998, I did an internship in Boston at a website called student.com, and sitting around the lunch table in the courtyard, uh, which was covered in Cambridge, uh, with my fellow editors and interns, I would often talk about The Real World and what had happened in previous seasons or what was happening on a marathon that we, that I just watched that weekend or whatever.
During one of those lunches, Wesley Morris, who was the film or culture editor at student.com, I think he, he definitely wrote film reviews and just beautiful, incredible movie reviews, and he went on to win a Pulitzer and now is at The New York Times.
Just, just an extraordinary writer and a model for somebody who wrote about pop culture for me as an intern.
He said something to me like, "Why don't you just write about The Real World since you talk about it so much?" And honestly, that had never occurred to me.
I'd written a couple movie reviews for student.com, but mostly I was writing newsy stuff, reporting, interviews, some features, but mostly it was kind of sticking to the news side.
And so that stuck with me and w- I kept in touch with him and then the person who became the culture editor, Alex Pappademus.
The next time a season of Real World rolled around, which was in 1999 in the summer, and that was the Real World: Hawaii, Season 8.
I will be reading to you that very first recap that I wrote momentarily just to revisit it in all of its awkwardness and [chuckles] delightfulness and you can see how in some ways my writing hasn't changed at all and in some ways it's changed a lot, thankfully.
This became kind of a runaway hit on the site, and by that I mean, you know, hundreds of people were reading it for whatever.
And it's, maybe that's 'cause it was the summer, people were out of school so they weren't looking at the internet.
People didn't have phones in their pockets with internet access or Wi-Fi or anything, so you had to be in front of a computer to actually read.
What's fascinating though is writing this first recap, I do not remember how I figured out how to do this or what to do with it, and I think you can see that in a little bit of this.
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