Can reality TV still be thought of as a genre given the high level of hybridity that exists?
Reality TV has been considered to cover a range of popular factual programming, sometimes with comedic, theatrical and fictional elements. The various styles and approaches to reality TV has made it difficult to pin down as a singular genre that encompasses the spectrum of programmes it features (Hill, 2005). In fact, the last several decades has seen an increase in ‘hybridization’ of varying styles in reality tv.
In Wood’s (2004) analysis of the hybridization of reality tv, it is recounted that television used to be largely concerned with the realm of normal, however, the last century has proved that reality tv can be anything but the mundane. The emergence of this was encouraged by the advent of hybridization across stylistic categories in which tv programming was divided. The cultural forms of reality tv has more or less lost their formal rigidity and have become increasingly shaken. A common way of approaching media was through the distinct types and genres, however, reality tv’s hybridization has showed that it can be more flexible and cut across different styles at once. If reality tv has become extremely intertextual, it would be difficult to describe in one unique definition.
Given that, reality tv still is a unique field of its own, and can be counted as a distinct genre, but only with credit and critical analysis to its hybridization. Wood (2004) further explains that if hybridized content goes beyond the confines of one category, then one can analyze the distinctive qualities of these categories. All media aims to produce a worldliness that can be distinguished according to the different ways it accomplishes the sense of the real, and tv can be divided into four main modes. This includes factual programming, which consists of daily news, current affairs, documentaries, practical advice shows, religious broadcasts, and attempts to portray the state of affairs in a historical or natural world itself – over an imaginative one. Fictional programming tries to convey the sense of a world that is imaginatively constructed, including dramas, feature films, comedy, with contents trying to internalize reality, where the people and events depicted are not in the external world. Furthermore, entertainment programming presents people who exist farther than the confines of the content that is being shown, this consists of game shows, musical acts, talk shows, variety programmes, sports, and provide a more theatrical way of performance. Lastly, advertisements are also considered part of the reality tv hybridization, as they market products in 30-60 second segments, however these commercials are less about the product and instead images of desire and pleasure that it associated with the product. The four categories are significant when trying to divide the hybridized networks of reality tv.
Overall, reality tv does mesh many different elements of tv production into one, and the hybridization of it has made many analysts confused on how to define this genre. But regardless of this, reality tv still stands as its own genre as it combines the ultimate sense of portraying some kind of the ‘real’ using different stylistic methods.
References
Hill, A. (2005) The reality genre. In A. Hill, Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television. (pp. 14 – 40). Oxon: Routledge.
Wood, B. (2004). A world in retreat: the reconfiguration of hybridity in 20th-century New Zealand television. Media, Culture & Society, 26(1), 45-62.
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