Reality Television

The TV Phenomenon that Changed the World

Ruth A. Deller

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781839090233
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

Reality television is one of the defining genres of the 21st century. It is shown worldwide, features people from all walks of life and covers everything from romance to religion. It has not only changed television, but every other area of the media.
So why has reality TV become such a huge phenomenon, and what is its future in an age of streaming and social media?
This book provides an overview of key theories and debates in the study of reality television and discusses industry practices in their global and national contexts. Deller also explores, through interviews with participants and analyses of key programmes, why people take part in reality TV, how they are represented and impact this has on their lives.
From its documentary roots to its social media present and future - this is a guide to Reality Television: The TV Phenomenon that Changed the World.

1

UNDERSTANDING REALITY TV

Reality shows can be deeply serious or deliriously silly. They deal with the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary’. They have covered everything from colonialism to colonic irrigation and featured everyone from porn stars to priests. Interested in farming, tattoo artistry, pottery, Islamic dress, cocktail making or conducting an orchestra? Reality TV has got it covered. Do you want to get an insight into birth, death, marriage, divorce, friendship, work and community? The same applies.

Graeme Turner (2010) argues that it ‘may well be the most exorbitantly “noticed” form of programming in television’s history’ (p. 33), and Jon Dovey (2000) calls it the ‘perfect televisual form for the contemporary cultural moment … [it has become] a crucial component of the fabric of popular culture’ (p. 78).

Reality brings together techniques from documentary, game show, soap opera, melodrama and sitcom, yet is not readily classifiable as any of these things. So, what binds a diverse set of programmes and themes together and makes them ‘reality’? And, where did these shows come from in the first place?

Unfortunately, these questions are not easy to answer! There is no clear consensus on either what reality television is, or where it comes from. Multiple programmes have been cited as ‘the first’ reality show, including Candid Camera (1947–2004) and its radio predecessor, Candid Microphone (1947), …Up (1964–), An American Family (1973), The Family (1974), Unsolved Mysteries (1987–2010), Cops (1989–), The Real World (1992–), Survivor (1999–) and Big Brother (1999–) (for longer discussions on the history of the genre, see Bignell, 2005; Bonner, 2003; Dovey, 2000; Hill, 2005; Kavka, 2012).

In a way, it is not a surprise that all of these (and more) have been considered originators of the reality genre. They are all considered landmark television programmes that marked a watershed moment in TV production by offering something ‘different’. All have served as pioneers in factual TV production, with many imitators coming in their wake. Whilst they used different filming, editing and narrative techniques – each was concerned in different ways with the ‘ordinary’, and aimed to unearth social and personal ‘truths’ in new ways.

Part of the reason that it is hard to establish a single text as the key point at which a phenomenon was born lies in the fact that it is hard to pin down exactly what we mean by ‘reality television’. All of the shows listed above could be seen as reality television, as, in topic and format, they clearly resemble the kinds of programmes we identify today as belonging to the genre, including: a focus on the personal; ‘ordinary’ people and their experiences; highly constructed and formatted presentation; a blend of factual reportage with entertainment values such as humour and emotion (Dovey, 2000; Kavka, 2012). However, we could also argue that none, or at least very few, of these are technically reality TV – because when they were broadcast, the term had not been invented yet, and television schedules had yet to be saturated by this kind of programming.

Academic and journalistic accounts have included almost the full range of factual programming under the banner ‘reality television’, including genres we may not always see as ‘obviously’ fitting its remit, such as quiz shows, antiques programming, chat shows and nature programming. Indeed, news coverage is possibly the only factual genre to escape the term, and even that has been discussed in terms of its relationship with reality (Bennett, 2005; Hill, 2007).

WHERE DID ‘REALITY TV’ COME FROM ANYWAY?

The term ‘reality television’ became commonplace in different academic studies during the 1990s, with early literature focussing on crime, consumer affairs and disaster formats (e.g. 999, Cops, Crimewatch). The makeover, talk show and ‘docusoap’ formats of the 1990s (e.g. Changing Rooms, Jerry Springer, Airport) meant that the focus of the literature and the use of the term ‘reality television’ expanded to include these genres. ‘Social experiments’ (e.g. The 1900 House, Survivor, Big Brother), which emerged at the turn of the millennium, expanded the genre further, as did the early 00s’ resurgence in talent shows heralded by the Popstars and Pop Idol franchises – to the point where reality has moved away from being a single genre, and, instead becomes more of what Nick Couldry (2009) terms a ‘meta-genre’ (p. 47) encompassing several subgenres.

It is hard to pinpoint the first use of the phrase within the TV industry, or in journalistic and academic accounts of the phenomenon. Academic studies have certainly been using the term since at least the 1990s (e.g. Dauncey, 1996; Kilborn & Izod, 1997); however, it is harder to trace its origins in industry or popular discourse. For example, searching for the term in English language news database Nexis returns very few articles using the term ‘reality television’ before the late 1990s, and a modest number between 1997 and 1999 – and the returned results do not always use the term to indicate a genre, more to describe the ethos of an individual show. In contrast, when searching in 2000–2001, Nexis returns thousands of hits, as the arrival of popular global formats such as the Idol franchises, Big Brother and Survivor saw the term ‘reality television’ become a common component of media culture.

The way academics, audiences and the industry use the term ‘reality TV’ also fluctuates over time. Dovey (2000), for example, considers British crime show Crimewatch (a studio-based show involving crime reconstructions and public appeals) to be reality television; whereas now, it would be considered unusual by broadcasters and audiences to think of Crimewatch as a reality show when compared to an observational programme dealing with crime such as 24 hours in Police Custody, which more closely fits the template of what we consider reality television in terms of its use of on-the-spot filming, strong characters, social commentary, voice-over narration and story-like narratives.

DEFINING REALITY TV

Most academic studies, rather than attempting to pin down a definition of reality TV, highlight that it is almost impossible to coming up with strict rules as to what it is and is not:

to narrow the definition [of RTV] is not necessarily helpful; it obscures the flexibility inherent to ‘reality TV’. (Couldry, 2003, p. 10)

However, even if it is difficult to completely pin down a definition, there are some features that seem to be common to reality programming. Dover and Hill (2007, p. 25) argue that it usually features a combination of information, education and entertainment; and Hill (2005) also points out that it ‘implicitly and explicitly addresses the viewers about good and bad ways to live their lives’ (p. 184) whilst Corner (2004) says it is about ‘ordinary people doing ordinary things’ (p. 295).

At the heart of all ‘reality’ TV, however, is some sort of claim to the ‘real’. However, the term ‘real’ can sometimes seem to be the antithesis of what is actually involved in reality TV – when I mention to people that I am researching the field, the most common response I get is along the lines of ‘well, they’re all fake, anyway’. I will look at issues of ‘real’ versus ‘fake’ in more detail in later chapters, but at the heart of this tension is that ‘real’ can be interpreted in many ways.

Naturally, the confines of a TV time slot mean that showing unvarnished reality ‘as it happens’ is impossible – there has to be a process of selection and editing (not least as unvarnished reality contains a lot of mundane activity that does not make for good television!). Reality shows vary in what they mean by the ‘real’ – there are observational and hidden camera formats that attempt to show people ‘naturally’ going about their daily lives, for example, but there are also shows that place people in contrived situations that may be very different from their ordinary life. In historical reality TV like The 1900 Island or Back in Time For…, the idea is for contemporary participants to experience something of the reality of their historical peers. In a format like I’m a Celebrity: Get Me Out of Here! however, the focus is on the ‘real’ people behind the celebrity façade – they do not ‘really’ live in the jungle and eat bugs, but the show uses these testing situations to reveal their emotions, personalities, make-up free faces and other aspects of the ‘real’ person. As Turner (2010) explains:

The formats usually included under this label have a quite varied relation to ‘the real’: some are highly narrativized and mediated, some are actually just updated game shows for whom the ‘reality’ descriptor is more an indicator of format style than any claim to be capturing real life, and still others are essentially documentary in their format and in their ethical relation to the material they put before viewers. (p. 33)

According to Bignell (2005), one of the chief points of reality TV is:

For people to reveal themselves to each other and to the audience, to establish a ‘structure of feeling’ that the television audience can share and adduce to understand the foibles, embarrassments and triumphs of the participants, who are most often presented as familiar and ordinary. (p. 172–173)

June Deery (2015) argues that what many reality shows deal in is ‘staged actuality’ – by which she means they contain a mixture of contrived and spontaneous situations (p. 29).

If the term has many uses, then, and these not only shift according to time but also according to context and, even, to the individual using it, is the term reality television still fit for purpose? I would argue that it is, insofar as it still has resonance and meaning in different contexts. There are perceptions of what reality television is, even though they differ. It is seen as something that has value for audiences and participants as much as it is also seen as an object of derision and low culture elsewhere. And if we were to abandon the term altogether, how then would we categorise some of the shows that typically come under its banner, and examine what we might learn from thinking about them in connection with one another?

I would argue that ‘reality television’ has about as much, and as little, usefulness as comparative genre terms like ‘documentary’ or ‘game show’. There are almost infinite permutations of what each term means, yet they still echo something that connects with audiences, in however limited capacity. For the purposes of this book, I am taking a broad approach to the term. Rather than trying to narrow down its definition to a select group of programmes, I would prefer we open up the definition and consider the breadth of content that it can encompass. Therefore, I am including any television programme that has, at its heart, an emphasis on the ‘real’ lived and or felt experiences of people – be they ordinary citizens, celebrities or even elites.

I have kept a deliberately broad definition to recognise the diversity of the format, and acknowledge how blurred the lines are between ‘reality’ and ‘documentary’, ‘game show’ or ‘entertainment’. For example, The Only Way Is Essex, which is a non-competitive show (unless we are talking about the competition for airtime and attention) has, perhaps, more in common with a so-called observational documentary such as 63Up than it does with a skill-based competition such as MasterChef.

I am not arguing against using other terms like documentary or game show to describe programmes – on the contrary, I believe that in many cases, more than one genre classification is not only helpful but also necessary. I consider it perfectly possible that something could be a documentary and a reality show at the same time, for example. I am also concerned with challenging the discourse found particularly within the world of programme makers and broadcasters, that implies that documentary as a genre is more ‘serious’ than RTV, has something more ‘substantial’ to say, or has in any way a greater claim to ‘truth’ – after all, documentaries involve the same processes of selecting, editing and framing their material.

That said, there are some programmes that I am excluding from my discussion – even though others may decide to include them in their own analyses. I will be focussing on programmes that deal with humans, rather than animals. There are certainly some nature programmes that take a similar approach to human-focussed reality shows (eg Meerkat Manor, Orangutan Island), and try to anthropomorphi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1. Understanding Reality TV
• 2. How Reality TV Changed the World
• 3. The Business of Reality TV
• 4. What Happens in Reality TV?
• 5. Reality TV and Celebrity
• 6. Reality Television in an Age of Social Media
• References
• Acknowledgements
• Further Reading
• Index