Week 11

How real is Reality TV?

Reality TV as we know it today has been around since the 1940s and comes under the term factual television which is also shared with things like documentarys even though reality tv is so old it only hit its peak during the late 80s and into the 90s

in an effort to popularize the genre they hybridized it with successful genres such as soap operas and Gameshows with the start to this being the 2 different approaches the UK and US had take US taking the approach of ordinary people doing extra ordinary things while Brittan took the opposite approach Hill (2005) With the lifestyle shows they found that it wasn’t the action that mattered it was the reaction bouncing off this and adopting the formats for things such as Gameshows we got big brother and Survivor which focused on the physiological and emotional aspect while providing a prize. Reality tv is meant for us to be able to see the real life’s of people. But in reality we are only shown what provides the most reaction providing us scripted drama with sprinkles of truth. With Entertainment Weekly showing a statement from the producers of House Hunters Stating that “we go back and revisit some of the homes that the family has already seen and we capture their authentic reactions.”(Erin Strecker 2012) which shows that they aren’t really their authentic reactions and within the same article one participant claims that their story for why their moving was changed. Following suite with House Hunters E News (Piester, 2018) has a source that claims that one of the participants used their friends house as the one that they were supposedly buying. From these examples you can see that reality tv is more Entertainment value than reality, They will recast shots that were unfavorable which takes away from the authenticity of it and some are even just fabricated.”They blend fact and fiction in a way that is impossible for the viewer to decided how much is based on factual evidence”(Kilborn, 1994).

Refences:

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

Erin Strecker Updated June 12, & Strecker, E. ‘House Hunters’ scandal: Is the show a fake? EW.com. https://ew.com/article/2012/06/12/house-hunters-fake-scandal-hgtv/.

Piester, L. (2018, November 10). Real or Fake? The Truth About Some Of Your Favorite Reality TV Shows. E! Online. https://www.eonline.com/news/985791/real-or-fake-the-truth-about-some-of-your-favorite-reality-tv-shows.

Kilborn, R. (1994). `How Real Can You Get?’: Recent Developments in `Reality’ Television. European Journal of Communication, 9(4), 421–439. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323194009004003