W12

W12

Can reality tv still be thought of as a genre given the high level of hybridity that exists?

The original of the TV show is a complicated history of hybrid programming they associate with reality TV (Hill, 2005). It is not accessible to categories and developing within an account and culturally specific environment (Hill, 2005). Reality TV are overlapping each other through a different kind of genre, and production shows such as documentary television, an entertainment show, journalism increased during the 1980s (Hill, 2005). The hybrid format focuses on telling real stories from people and events that happen to them that they are willing to say in front of the audience that can be entertaining style, foregrounding visuals, characterisation and narrative about all else (Hill, 2005). 

The hybridity has organised in one particular program rather than exploring it in quantitative variations (Wood, 2004). Hybridity analysis needs to possess the difference between categories to defining overstep content (Wood, 2004). Hybridised television is more focus on the mixing together of styles of fiction and non-fiction to change the status of reality (Wood, 2004). 

In NZ reality TV shows such as Rescue 1, a famous New Zealand program (Lorenzo-Dus & Blitvich, 2013). In the first decade of the 21st century, “Reality TV” programme is mainly in Western network’s television schedule and developed into a global media phenomenon. 

Reality gameshows have become an international sell since the day it arrives in 2000 (Hill, 2005). The cost of reality TV has increased in the production such as drama, sitcom and it becomes an optional number of economic during 199s when the networks were looking for a quick fix to financial problem (Hill, 2005). “They were successful in the 1990s and early 2000s because they drew on existing popular genres, such as soap opera or gameshows, to create hybrid programmes” (Hill, 2005, p. 39). The mixed-gender of different genre of reality that creates a hybrid program which helps the economic problem of that period. “Reality TV has its roots in tabloid journalism and popular entertainment, but it owns its greatest debt to documentary television, which has mostly disappeared from the television screen in the wake of has popular factual programming” (Hill, 2005, p.39). I think the documentary had nearly disappeared before the reality TV show actually arrived in the audience. The documentary is a mixed genre reality together with the different genre such as gameshows to make it more fun to the way they tell factual stories rather a traditional documentary. 

“Given that the hybrid mixes what is customarily distinguished, this charge no doubt seems misplaced. However, hybridity is often treated not just as a complex of conventional modes but also as simple in its complexity” (Wood, 2004). Reality shows may be the hybrid mixes, but it is also simplification and it creates its genre. It also shows its colour.  

References:

Hill, A. (2005) The rise of reality TV. In A. Hill, Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television. (pp. 15 – 40). Oxon: Routledge.

Lorenzo-Dus, N., & Blitvich, P. G. C. (Eds.). (2013). Real talk: Reality television and discourse analysis in action. Basingstoke: Palgrave macmillan.

Wood, B. (2004). A world in retreat: the reconfiguration of hybridity in 20th-century New Zealand television. Media, Culture & Society, 26(1), 45-62.

Lou, W. (2006). Te Kura Kete Aronui Graduate and postgraduate E-journal – Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. ‘Reality’ in new documentary hybrids. A case of PBS’s frontier house(volume 2). https://www.waikato.ac.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/149252/WeiLuo.pdf