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

While the roots of reality television stretch back as far as early 20^th century documentary making, it is only since around the 1980s and 1990s (particularly for New Zealand) that it has grown into the beast that wider society knows it as today. In her essay Heroic endeavours: flying high in New Zealand reality television, Phillipa Smith writes of the history of reality television, both abroad and within New Zealand, ‘Rupert Murdoch’s launch of the Fox Television Network in the United States in the late 1980s in the newly deregulated and fiercely competitive broadcast environment of television saw the introduction of RTV that was not only cheap to produce, but also attracted attention through dramatic raw footage using newly developed technology such as satellite cameras and mini-cams.’ (Smith, 2013) These early television shows largely focused on true crime, such as shows like Cops that followed around American police forces.

However, in the almost forty years since, there has been much evolution within the stratosphere of reality television that does bring into question whether it can now all be considered one genre, or whether ‘reality television’ as we know it has really become not merely a multi-headed beast but something else entirely. Conventionally, there have been four main ‘types’ of television programming recognized: ‘Fact’, which covers such programming as news and documentaries; ‘Fiction’, covering feature films and fictional drama programming; ‘Entertainment’, which features real people and events but for the purpose of entertainment, such as game shows and talk shows; and ‘Advertisement’, with the aim of selling and increasing the desirability of certain commodities, such as commercials and infomercials. (Wood, 2004)

Reality television has already been identified as a unique hybrid of several, if not all of these modes of television programming. It has also been previously suggested that reality television could then de divided into ‘subgenres’ of theme, ‘everyday dramas of courage, talk about feelings and civic action’. As argued by Brennan Wood, however, ‘these thematic unities do not distinguish hybridized reality from many other sorts of television content’. (Wood, 2004)By it’s nature of blurring reality with fiction, to the point where the difference is unrecognizable to some, a reality television show focused around any of those themes can have a far different impact than a clearly fictional drama about the very same themes, or a news report on them, etcetera. As an example, one could compare the soap opera Coronation Street (1960-) to E! Network’s reality television show Keeping Up With the Kardashians (2007-). From a purely thematic point of view, both shows focus upon similar themes surrounding the drama of various relationships with family and friends, love and heartbreak and parenting. However, they are both wildly different in terms of aesthetics, audience, and, most importantly, reach and influence – Keeping Up With the Kardashians has turned the entire Kardashian-Jenner household into incredibly wealthy and powerful cultural influencers and celebrities, for better or for worse, which no star from Coronation Street, past or present, has come close to touching. This is a clear example of how further hybridized reality television shows are from even the fictional drama shows such as Coronation Street, and why there is a need for more in-depth classification of them.

However, television in general has changed in large amounts since the rise of reality television. More and more, there are television shows that focus on and blend themes and genres otherwise not seen together previously (such as The Good Place (2016-2020), a comedy series with a particular, if subtle focus on philosophies around life and death, and Sense8 (2015-2018), which combined a supernatural/sci-fi concept of interconnected humans with strong queer themes). There is also the problematic existence of ‘fake news’, such as what is seen on the Fox Network, which has heavily influenced world politics with ‘news reports’ heavily sensationalized to the point of being outright false. This then suggests that it is perhaps not just reality TV that has become increasingly hybridized, but television as a whole, and that the system through which we previously categorized and assessed television has become outdated and in need of an overhaul in the new, 24-hour, interconnected digital age.

References

Smith, P. (2013). Heroic endeavours: flying high in New Zealand reality television. In N. Lorenzo-Dus, & P. Garces-Conejos Blitvich, Real Talk: Reality Television and Discourse Analysis in Action (pp. 140-165). Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wood, B. (2004). A World in Retreat: The Reconfiguration of Hybridity in 20th-Century New Zealand Television. Media, Culture & Society, 45-62.