How real is reality tv?
Discounting a significant amount of asterixis, you could say that reality tv is real. Ultimately though, the reality that gets presented to the audience has been through several layers of artificiality that result in a highly questionable product in terms of authenticity. People are interested in watching conflict, and people find conflict to be far more interesting when it is real, reality tv then seems like the perfect storm of real conflicts and drama that is uncomplicated and easy to understand and therefore consume. The way in which this reality is brought to the screen is what ultimately makes reality tv unreal. According to Hill (2005), “reality TV Is a range of popular factual programming”, the term factual implies that there are no scripts, no second takes, and only a small amount of editing, these are claims that many reality tv shows make that we are going to look into.
The first suspicious claim is that reality tv only has a small amount of editing. Reality tv has turned manipulation of reality through editing into an artform, there are a number of ways that editing is used to present a false reality to the audience. A common convention of reality tv is the confession cam, where a contestant stares at a camera and talks about their feelings or opinions. The editors will only pick the quotes from the contestants that leave the strongest impression or may be the most controversial statement. Editors will go as far as mixing up different things the contestants say to form sentences that the contestant never said. Editors also pick scenes that will highlight the relationships of contestants in however way they want that relationship to be seen by the audience. Editing doesn’t necessarily create a lie, but sometimes it makes the truth more apparent then it should be or less nuanced than it really is.
The claim that there are no scripts may be true, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t staged. Although not all events are staged, it’s exceedingly difficult to believe that several vitally important things happen to these people in the span of a week, and the no second take claim is the one that is most false, even compared to the low editing claim.
The use of editing and staged incidents in reality tv does hurt its authenticity considerably, but what makes RT unreal in my opinion is how it is set up, and what I mean by that is the contestants themselves. Reality tv casting is one of the most calculated processes in any entertainment medium. The contestants are picked to fit specific character archetypes, and are picked as antithetical counterparts to other contestants. These contestants are also incentivised to act in a disagreeable or extreme matter. Love or hate, if the audience feels strongly about you there is an incentive for the showrunners to keep you on longer, and since there is usually some form of reward for ‘winning’ the show, that is often the most important thing to the contestant.
To conclude the very premise of reality tv is often false and reality tv is almost never entirely real.
Kilborn, R. (1994). How real can you get?: Recent developments in ‘reality’ television. European Journal of Communication 9.
DOI: 10.1177/0267323194009004003
Pop Genres 2020 