How real is Reality TV?
Reality Television has become more popular within mainstream media over the past two decades and are inexpensive to produce and carry the potential for huge profits (Hill, 2005).
Reality Television is packaged in many formats and has become something of a “catch-all” phrase commonly used to describe a range of popular factual programming (Hill, 2005). Producing a definition of ‘What is Reality Television?’ is complex due to the range of programming, as well as the extent to which this has shifted over time with the emergence of further permutations in reality-based texts. There is no one definition however a couple of examples are:
“(Reality TV places) and emphasis on the representation of ordinary people and allegedly unscripted or spontaneous moments that supposedly reveal unmediated reality”
(Biressi and Nunn, 2005)
“an unabashedly commercial genre united less by aesthetic rules or certainties than by the fusion of popular entertainment with a self-conscious claim to the discourse of the real”
“What ties together all the various formats of the reality TV genre are their professed abilities to more fully provide viewers an unmediated, voyeuristic, yet often playful look into what might be called the ‘entertaining real’.”
(Murray and Ouelette, 2004)
These examples are evidently more cynical perspective on “ordinary” people as being vulnerable and exploited, at the mercy of ruthless commercial television producers and voyeuristic, uncaring audiences (Murray and Ouelette, 2004). Attached to this is the cliché about “Everyone enjoying their 15 minutes of fame,” which is played out again and again in Reality Television in the desire to become famous.
The range of Reality Television includes documentaries, game shows, cooking shows, talent shows, scene footage of law and order, emergency services, and more recently anything and everything from people to pets, from birth to death (Hill, 2005).
How real or not a show is central to reality television as most are a representation of the truth, unscripted real activities of real people, created for entertainment purposes as the line becomes blurred between what is real and what is fake.
British television documentary such as fly-on-the-wall and docusoaps are characterized by discrete observational filming without trying to analyze the situation, whereby audiences assess the facts presented and come up with their own conclusions (Biressi & Nunn, 2005). The capacity to let viewers see for themselves is the defining characteristic that unites the many definitions from a television industry, scholar and audience perspective to classify Reality Television. Audiences judge the ‘reality’ of reality programmes according to a fact/fiction continuum, with infotainment or docu-soaps at one end and formatted reality gameshows at the other end (Hill, 2005) and are less concerned about the absolute truth instead more interested in the experience (Murray and Ouelette, 2004).
How real is Reality Television is ultimately up to the viewer on the point of where it sits in the spaces between fact and fiction as this genre continues to develop.
REFERENCES
Biressi, A. & Nunn, N. (2005). Real Lives, documentary approaches. In Reality TV: realism and
revelation. (pp. 35-58) London: Wallflower.
Hill, A. (2005) The reality genre. In A. Hill, Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television. (pp. 14 – 40). Oxon: Routledge.
Murray, S., Ouellette, L. (2004) Reality TV: remaking television culture. New York University Press.
Smith, P. (2020). Reality Television Part One. Popular Genres (ENGL602) Week 11. Powerpoint. Retrieved from https://blackboard.aut.ac.nz
Pop Genres 2020 