How real is reality tv?

Studies into reality television and how ‘real’ it truly is have largely come to the conclusion that although it does show aspects of ‘reality’ – people, places, and situations – these are very rarely, if at all shown as they truly are. Instead, they are edited or filmed in certain ways that allow the ‘director’, producer, filmmaker, etcetera to portray what is on screen in a specific way. Therefore, it can be said that the ‘reality’ of reality television varies – but it is never wholly ‘real’.

In ‘’How Real Can You Get?’: Recent Developments In ‘Reality’ Television’, Richard Kilborn writes, ‘There is now a general recognition that all notions of ‘realism’ are historically determined and that the criteria for judging the realism…of a text have just as much to do with the audience expectations and with a set of established conventions…for the viewer the realism of an audio-visual text depends to a large extent on how closely it conforms to the style or mode of presentation he or she has come to accept as ‘realist’’. (Kilborn, 1994) Reality television, from the outset, has drawn on established styles of presenting ‘the real’ on television and film – most notably, the documentary style. However, within reality television, these techniques can – and often are – used to manipulate the audience and change the portrayal of what is happening on screen from how it really happened.

In his essay comparing 1966 British classic ‘docudrama’ ‘Cathy Come Home’ and the 2014 British reality show ‘Benefits Street’, Ben Lamb points out how both television programs make use of the same ‘documentarian’ techniques, but have drastically different effects on the audience and how they view the disadvantaged people on display in the shows. One such technique is the use of captions, often used within documentaries to provide extra context or information that isn’t immediately available to the audience through the filmed content. In Cathy Come Home, these are used at the end of the text, where it informs the audience that the events (unemployment, homeless, child uplifting) in the drama occurred within then-current day Britain, along with statistics on homelessness in the country. This is accompanied by a shot that mirrors the opening shot of the drama, with Cathy on the side of the road hitchhiking, only this time appearing much more dishevelled and beaten down. Lamb writes of the effect of the use of captions along with the image on screen, ‘Such a visual contrast between the opening and conclusion functions to emphasise the stark downfall of her character and the accompaniment of the captions stresses the typicality of her situation…The words on screen are an essential component within these emotional scenes to demonstrate how this harrowing downfall was commonplace for many.’ (Lamb, 2016)

Captions are also used in Benefits Street, as Lamb points out, but to a much different effect from that which is seen in Cathy Come Home. These captions come in the form of subtitles dictating dialogue that has just been said on screen; although often used to make muffled or accented dialogue more coherent for viewers, as Lamb points out, this is not always the case in Benefits Street, where it is instead often used to emphasize ‘controversial’ pieces of dialogue or manipulate them to portray the speaker or situation in a certain way. This takes place in one such scene where a member of the community on the street, after buying essentials from a neighbour who goes door-to-door selling them, says ‘the government cuts are fucking up everyone’. (Lamb, 2016) This captioned dialogue is accompanied by a shot of her young son eating lollies. Otherwise perfectly audible dialogue, the effect of emphasizing this statement with captions set over the shot of her son has the effect, as Lamb writes, of focusing ‘our attention towards Becky’s bad language and lack of personal culpability for the conditions her child lives in’. (Lamb, 2016) Instead of cultivating sympathy for the disadvantaged, as Cathy Comes Home does, it instead ‘others’ the people being portrayed in Benefits Street and positions the audience against them. This is a clear example of how documentarian techniques can be used to both portray the ‘real’ on television and film, but also manipulate the ‘real’ to the point that it can have two entirely different effects on the audience watching and how they react to what they are viewing.

It is also worth noting that while the ‘reality’ of reality television, as laid out previous, is dubious at best, it can be undisputed that reality television can have very real effects. As mentioned in Lamb’s comparison of Cathy Come Home and Benefits Street, the 1966 docudrama led to nationwide support of real-life support networks for homeless people and families; the 2014 drama, on the other hand, worked to garner support for the real life ‘Big Society’ government initiative, which made welfare and benefit cuts. (Lamb, 2016) These real life effects can be seen in other, more recent reality television programs as well – from the spate of suicides effecting the cast of Love Island UK to the suicide of reality star and professional wrestler Hana Kimura after her portrayal in Japanese reality show Terrace House led to relentless cyberbullying. (Codrea-Rado, 2019) (Margolis, 2020) Regardless of how questionable the reality of what is being portrayed on the screen is, it cannot be argued that it has a very real effect on people off the screen, within the real world.

References

Codrea-Rado, A. (2019, June 4). ‘Love Island’ Returns Amid Debate About Contestants’ Mental Health. Retrieved from The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/arts/television/love-island-mental-health.html

Kilborn, R. (1994). ‘How Real Can You Get?’: Recent Developments in ‘Reality’ Television. European Journal of Communication, 421-439.

Lamb, B. (2016). Cathy Come Off Benefits: A comparative ideological analysis of Cathy Come Home and Benefits Street. Journalism and Discourse Studies.

Margolis, E. (2020, July 17). The Fall of ‘Terrace House’. Retrieved from The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/arts/television/terrace-house-suicide.html