WE'VE GOT TO TALK ABOUT BIG BROTHER. HE KEEPS LOOKING AT ME - PHILIPPA DALY - 1 MECO3672INTERNSHIPPROJECT PHILIPPADALY
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MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 1
SID: 308151852
We’ve got to talk about Big Brother.
He keeps looking at me.
Philippa DalyMECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 2
SID: 308151852
“Love, like television, must be performed to be real.
The performance of love will generate the effects of
love, just as the performance of reality will generate
reality effects.”
Geoff KingMECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 3
SID: 308151852
Abstract
This piece aims to examine, analyze and evaluate the rise to, success of and
the present situation of ‘reality television’, and through this analysis discuss
and formulate possible ways in which this genre might likely progress in the
future. Since its inception and popularization throughout the ‘noughties’,
reality television has proven to be commercially successful and capable of
significant growth in re-action to changing industry needs and viewer
consumption behavior. This success has been confronted with stark criticism
challenging reality television’s ethical conduct and its emphasis on fostering a
voyeuristic obsession in modern culture. This piece, however, seeks to look
beyond moral criticisms of reality television and considers its role in the future
of television programming as a genre that will continue to gain huge rating
success and break previous modes of television formulas – and remains
valuable because of these capacities.MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 4
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We’ve got to talk about Big Brother.
He keeps looking at me.
Introduction
I come more and more to think that TV’s forte is as it plays on
life and that… the make believe of drama strains the
psychological and physical dimensions of the TV screen.
- Charles Siepmann1
People like to watch people. Reality television is quintessentially
entertainment offered to people based on this simple relationship – the drama
of ‘everyday life’ is seemingly amplified by the television, squished into a 20
inch (or 50inch 3-dimensional LED flatscreen) and tubed to our living rooms
so that we may play out this basic enjoyment. Although diagnostically
simplistic, this well-documented and often criticized relationship offers a likely
starting point from which to examine, analyze and discuss reality television’s
profound and arguably competition-annihilating effect on the ongoing
evolution of television.
1
Siepmann gave this as a note in response to a telecast of the Ford Foundation’s Prestige
Arts & Culture Variety Program Omnibus in 1954, Wesleyan Cinema Archives Omnibus
Collection, series 4, box 8, folder 801.MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 5
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Australia is reality obsessed. Even from looking at a television guide for any
weeknight prime-time gives a clear indication of the infatuation - X-Factor, The
Block, Dancing with the Stars, Master Chef – all of these shows, no matter
how simple or complex the premise, continue to shatter ratings barriers
proving that despite its many detractors reality television is a genre with a
significant part to play in the ongoing success of television as a medium in the
face of internet and other on-demand services. 2 As the Seven Networks
Casting Director Joanna Kerr put it to me, reality TV’s recent ratings success
proves that “reality television is definitely here to stay.”3
This piece draws on my personal experience as an intern at Network Seven,
Sydney, as well as academic and popularist analysis of the successes and
failures of reality television to develop an understanding of the genre, posing
questions to and aiming to assess fundamental questions about reality
television as a genre. These key questions, like where it came from and why it
came from there, are focused to understanding its rapid invasion of prime time
television and perhaps most importantly help in imagining where it might take
us over what seems to be an ongoing maturation into a lucrative successor to
the sit-com.
Three aspects of reality television will be examined; Firstly, reality television
as an emerging genre at the end of the 1990’s will be looked at through the
successes of shows like Big Brother, and fundamentally seek to understand
2
This season’s finale of The Block was the highest rating show of the year with an audience
of 3.43 million. Also this year, Masterchef finale reached an audience of 2.57 million and
Australia’s Got Talent had viewer of 2.86 million.
3
Personal interview conducted on 27/09/10MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 6
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those capacities of the genre that have, as opposed to morally denigrating the
genre, led to its widespread appeal and ongoing fruitful evolution and
proliferation; Secondly, evaluating reality television’s contemporary ‘state-of-
play’ and how shows airing at the present time have evolved to encompass
wider societal trends like interactivity, audience involvement and how these
capacities prove the genre to be highly adaptable into the future; and thirdly
exploring how these capacities might be paving the way for the ongoing
evolution of reality television, and what some of these avenues might be.
The question surrounding reality TV’s ‘ethical nature’, in regards to the ways
reality TV represents and treats its ‘subjects’ is not discussed directly in this
paper. It is not my intention to comment on the strategies or the subject matter
that reality TV commonly employs to ensure entertaining ‘moments’ reach
television audiences, other than to acknowledge that there remains ongoing
discourse regarding the ethical, moral and societal values extolled by reality
television’s production. It is the genre’s capacities for success that are the
focus of this paper’s ‘state-of-play’ analysis.
Genre
What is reality television?MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 7
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As a distinct genre, reality television is actually rather hard to define. Although
the reality-programming craze of today didn’t formally start until Survivor’s
explosion onto American TV in 2000, most of what we now watch as ‘reality’
programs can be seen as novel, hybrid forms of already long existing formats
such as documentary and drama programming. Although likely more extreme
in their characterizations, ‘docu-soaps’ like Keeping Up With the Kardashians,
or game-shows like Celebrity Apprentice, have been seen before - their
predecessors similarly brought television to the forefront of entertainment
through their hyper-real, simulated environments. Although the kinds of reality
programming circulating today are identifiably different, exhibiting closer links
to other forms of social media and certainly a closer link to wider commercial
networks, what is particularly interesting to understand and key to reality’s
current success is how despite clear connections being drawn to formats
already in circulation, reality programming was and still is able to be marketed
to audiences as something completely ‘all new’ to television screens.
There are certain textual characteristics that help to distinguish this genre
from its predecessors. An analysis of the decreased use of predetermined
scripts, for example, changed camera techniques relying on less-stabilized
setups to create an atmosphere of immediacy, or the decreased reliance on
studio environments might be textually analyzed to discuss how the present
examples of the genre have evolved from their more studio-based ancestors.
However, this form of textual analysis cannot adequately represent the
increasingly highly specialized and stylistically sophisticated reality formats
that we are now witnessing. Rather there is a much deeper cultural andMECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 8
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‘branding’ discourse to be had about reality television that more appropriately
speaks to understanding reality TV’s emergence and continual representation
as a genre ‘all new’ to television programming and its ongoing success. What
I wish to point out within this discourse analysis is the clear emergence of
reality TV as a genre that has been marketed and maintained as something
which can continually break the conventions of the old through a significant
adaptability to move beyond its own heritage and engage with broader
societal and cultural changes.
Genre formulas, like those common throughout reality TV, are valuable traits
when analyzing and categorizing reality TV, but are also not to be taken as
essential characteristics that cannot be themselves varied and played upon.
Media theorist Jason Mittell argues that in understanding television genres:
The goal in analyzing generic discourses is not to arrive at the
‘proper’ definition, interpretation, or evaluation of a genre, but
to explore the material ways in which genres are culturally
defined, interpreted, and evaluated.4
Mittell’s commentary here likely suggests that rather than looking only at a
checklist of traits that make up a genre, and thus judging examples of this
genre against this list to determine its legitimacy, more valuable is exploring
the ways in which examples of the genre can adapt culturally and specifically,
can be interpreted and evaluated in unique and novel manners.
4
Jason Mittell, ‘A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory’, Cinema Journal, 40.3,
2001, p. 9.MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 9
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To discuss this further, Big Brother provides a significant example where the
lineage of reality television took a sideways step, opening up new avenues
and aspects of the genre that continue to prove fruitful in reality TV’s ongoing
evolution – only making it more valuable to study the genre’s capacity for
change rather than making a checklist of its essential characteristics. In his
recent essay on Big Brother and tele-reality, John Corner argues that the
Extensive borrowing of the ‘documentary look’ by other kinds
of programs, and extensive borrowing of non-documentary
kinds of look by documentary, have complicated the rules for
recognizing a documentary […] and reality TV.5
So while some non-fiction television texts can fit squarely within the generally
agreed-on borders of either reality television or documentary, many others,
including Big Brother, still have the ability to defy easy textual classification,
and thus, have the ability to adapt to changing consumer and commercial
needs because they have proven capable of moving beyond formulaic genre
expectations that other television programming, such as news, continue to
remain slave to. 6 Big Brother is indeed both at once a dramatization
employing ‘typical’ drama/reality TV techniques like situations of enforced
interaction and pressure with the simple fact, that like a documentary, it is a
documentation of a certain time, place and happenings.
5
John Corner, ‘Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions’, Television & New Media, 3.3,
2003, p. 264.
6
Susan Murray, ‘I Think We Need a New Name for It: The Meeting of Documentary & Reality
TV’, in Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette (eds.), Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture
(New York: New York University Press, 2009), pp. 65 – 81.MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 10
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With these difficult-to-define texts like Big Brother now in common circulation,
networks need only take a program with liminal textual generic identifiers and
sell it as either documentary, reality TV or drama by simply packaging it in
ways that appear either more entertaining or informative in accordance to
audience expectations on the agreed formulas of genre classification. As Bill
Nicholas noted, “the distinguishing mark of a documentary may be less
intrinsic to the text than a function of the assumptions and expectations
brought to the process of viewing the text.”7 While Nicholas is talking about
documentary specifically, I argue that in the case of reality TV as well, the site
of ‘exhibition’ and the discourse that surrounds it plays a pivotal role in the
assignment of the generic classification and the audience’s social value given
to any these reality texts. A social value that Margaret Mead noted is
contrasted “not only with fiction, but with what we have been exposed to up
until now on TV.”8
It is in this frame then that CBS producers’ successfully marketed Survivor as
a format ‘all new’ to television audiences, even though similar contestant
game structures had already been in practice – even structures such as
Wheel of Fortune denote similar contestant structures. The viability and
success of not only Survivor but reality TV as a genre, lies in its ability to be
perceived as ‘new’, even within the generic structures that have been
assigned to its own genre. It is therefore not so much the textual
7
Bill Nicholas, Representing Reality: Images and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 3 – 4.
8
Margaret Mead quoted in Jeffrey Ruoff, An American Family: A Televised Life (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 25.MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 11
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characteristics that define this genre but rather, a social and industry
discourse on its perceived function and potential to facilitate a series of
interconnected potentials, rather than seeing value in the genre itself. Reality
TV is so successful because it is flexible in a such a significant way that it can
be used as the key catalyst for ulterior network motives – commerciality,
advertising and so on.
At this point in the discourse, I would like to offer my understanding of reality
TV, observed through my time as an intern at Network Seven Australia during
the production of The One – The Search for Australia’s Most Giften Psychic.
My experiences here, in my opinion as a result of the practices observed and
documented, have subsequently defined reality TV as a distinctly commercial
genre that is united less by aesthetic rules than by the fusion of popular
entertainment, broader changes in media dissemination (like the internet) that
has a self-conscious claim to being a documentation of ‘real’ people in ‘real’
events. The ‘real’ in reality television is fundamentally presented in the name
of voyeurism and popular commercial pleasure, unlike the news and
documentary formulas that seek to present the ‘real’ in duty to the classic
public service model. Reality television’s distance from the ‘educational’
morals that bind other television programming, predominately news, current
affairs and also those of sit-com (each episode’s dénouement for example is
where the moral lesson is learnt and everyone can therefore get on with their
lives happily), allows for the reality television genre to be singled out as the
idealized ‘modernist’ form of television formatting; formats that can take the
shape of almost anything in the name of entertainment and even networkMECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 12
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advertising needs. It is a genre that is externally defined, internally
autonomous – the perfect program for a modern commercialized network
because of its separation from any moralistic purpose and capacity to activate
attached opportunities in a way that ultimately profits television.MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 13
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Present State of Play
The Changing Nature of Industry
So, through all this history at least one thing is very clear – reality TV was and
still remains a game changer. Its impacts on the television industry have been
widespread, practically obliterating any other genre from high-ratings
commercial network primetime viewing (with the notable exception of crime-
science type dramas like “CSI” and “Law and Order” – which interestingly
share some of the hyper-reality simulation formulas common to reality TV).
Yet reality TV’s prominence is not only due to its programming structures or
the events that it seeks to represent, but is rather a result of the wider cultural
and corporate shifts that are taking place within television programming; most
notably the collapse of the three-network system and the rise of cable and
digital channels in Australia through the increasing deregulation and
privatization of television networks.
These wider television shifts cannot be underestimated as key contributors to
reality TV’s current prominence. As the emerging digital and cable channels
provide viewers with a wider consumer choice, the large commercial networks
(in this case Seven Network, Channel Nine and Ten) will increasingly look to
the de-regulated formulas of reality TV to provide ratings and advertising pull.
With its ability to critically adapt to changing media convergence strategies
and audience consumption behavior models, the reality genre provides the
necessary commercial facilities to adapt to television’s changing ideological
and advertising functions. It is within these wider cultural and industry growthMECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 14
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paradigms that reality TV has thrived in its current highly commercialized
format.
Perhaps the most evident result of these changes within commercial network
stations is that less non-network drama is being made. Reality programming
crucially provides a cheap alternative to drama, and can draw the same, if not
bigger, viewing audiences. As Catherine Mackay, regional chief executive in
US, Australasia and Asia for Freemantle Media, said of reality TV’s early
network engagement:
The networks have realized that a reality show can grab a
primetime audience just as effectively as a good drama or
comedy, but sometimes at half the price. Reality shows are a
lot cheaper to make, and yet, they are getting just as many
eyeballs in many instances and, sometimes, even more
because of the event nature of these shows.9
Reality programming is a lot cheaper to make than drama simply because it
involves a smaller crew and un-paid actors (usually these are ‘ordinary’
contestants who applied for the show). For instance, in the last 2002 season
of the hit American sit-com Friends each cast member earned $1 million an
episode, with each episode budgeted at $7.5 million. These costs are simply
astronomical for networks to pay, and is a fundamental reason behind the
current investment into reality TV. As Seven Networks Executive Producer
Paul Melville put it: “The three most sought after results to guarantee success
9
Catherine Mackay quoted in Annette Hill, Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual
Television (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 7.MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 15
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of a program are Fast, Cheap and Good. Reality TV can provide them all.”10
Indeed, the emergence of reality TV is yet another strategy in the general
effort to reduce costs and enhance audience engagement in an increasingly
commercialized television world.11
Media Convergence and Experimentation
Another business strategy that can only work with reality TV, as Ted Magder
puts it, is reality TV’s ability to engage with associated mediums and societal
trends:
“[reality TV] extends the program beyond the confines of the
box in the living room and encourages audiences to pay to
participate in the show’s dramatic arc, or to use other media to
stay in touch with the program.”12
This capacity of reality TV that Magder identifies is evident even from its
earliest proponents. Big Brother has undeniably led the way, since 2000,
when it pioneered the use of wireless participation through 24hr web streams,
and Internet and mobile phone voting systems and as a result reality TV has
remained at the forefront of developments in media convergence strategies.
From Australia’s Got Talent to The One – The Search for Australia’s Most
Gifted Psychic, reality TV presently serves as the principal testing ground for
10
Personal interview conducted 26/09/10
11
See Michael Freeman, ‘TV in Transition: Forging a Model for Profitability: Repurposing the
First Step toward Fiscal Viability’, Electronic Media, 28 January 2002.
12
Ted Magder, ‘The End of TV 101: Reality Programs, Formats, and the New Business of
Television’, in Laurie Ouellette and Susan Murray, (eds.), Reality TV: Remaking Television
Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2004), p. 150.MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 16
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emerging convergence strategies such as podcasting, user-generated
content, webisodes and even inter-active computer gaming. It is argued, that
these current convergence formats are changing the nature of viewer
consumption formulas and networks’ engagement with the audience,
symptoms that are suggested to result in reality TV’s increasing commercial
characteristics. For instance, in the first season of Australia Big Brother some
250,000 people paid fifty-cents to vote on the weekly eviction – that is around
$125,000 episode on voting alone in conjunction to the $50,000 paid by
advertisers for thirty-second advertising spots during the show’s finale.13
Media theorists Virginia Nightingale and Tim Dwyer argue that this form of
inter-active television voting is further key to reality TV’s self-conscious and
well controlled claim to ‘reality’ and immediacy:
“[interactive media convergence] creates an illusion of
immediate responsiveness to its constituent audiences – but is
particularly responsive the more people are prepared to pay
for the privilege of lodging multiple votes… making audiences
available for the program’s sponsors.”14
But again, the significant value given to the commercial outcomes of these
media convergence opportunities capitalized upon in reality TV is a clear
denotation of reality TV’s current emphasis on developing commercialized
formats, engaging with audiences for purely economic outcomes rather the
13
Figures taken from Ted Magder, ‘The End of TV 101: Reality Programs, Formats, and the
New Business of Television’, p. 139.
14
Virginia Nightingale & Tim Dwyer, ‘The audience politics of ‘enhanced’ television formats’
International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, 2.1, 2006, pp. 28 – 30.MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 17
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moralistic, ‘dutiful’ objectives still professed by documentary or news-based
programming.
The above diagram was drawn by Virginia Nightingale and Tim Dwyer to show the current
model of reality TV voting processes and its money trail.
In Sweden, the summer 2002 version of Big Brother featured live streaming to
mobile phones. As the head of interactive media at Endemol UK Chris Short
expressed it at the time;
“We’re creating this virtuous circle that excites the interactive audience
about what’s going on in the house, drives them toward the TV
program, the TV program will drive them to the Internet, the Internet to
the other ways they can get information, and the other ways back to
the TV.”15
15
Chris Short quoted in Jeremy Head, ‘Technical Advances are Turning Big Brother into a Big
Money-Spinner’, Irish Times, 24 May, 2002, p. 59.MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 18
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This two-way flow is crucially redefining the nature of the relationship between
the viewer and broadcaster, a dialectic relationship that the de-regulated
format of reality TV has proven successful in facilitating through its media
convergence directed experiments. Before the rapid increase of Internet
usage through social mediums and chat sites, TV broadcasting fundamentally
operated in a primarily one way relationship – from broadcaster to audience,
but not the other way around.
I argue, that this form of media convergence has resulted in a new dialogue –
a dialogue that feeds both ways, and also now a media dialogue that is crucial
to a shows success. The new reality talk show Can of Worms on Channel 10
is representative of this wider consumer behavior to actively engage in a
shows online presence, rather than actually watching the show itself. Although
the show’s television ratings success is small in comparison to other reality
shows airing at the same time – X Factor and The Block - its online presence
is particularly strong and speaks to its ongoing production: the show’s online
social media presence, after having only been aired for six weeks, grew from
6, 184 to 46, 865 Facebook ‘likes’ and from 2, 028 Twitter followers to 8,
220. 16 What figures like these represent is the current trend of television
viewers, predominately younger generations, to engage in a shows media
platforms rather than necessarily watching the show. The ability for reality
program to facilitate these kinds of media convergence strategies is proving
fundamental to their ongoing success.
16
These figures given to me by a Network Seven ProducerMECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 19
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Sticky
In this current climate of television commercial expansion, reality TV’s ability
to open this network-audience dialogue is particularly attractive in regards to
forming future ways in which the genre might likely evolve and continue its
rise to the top. As Paul Melville stated:
Reality in most of its forms is attractive to network
programmers because it can be stripped across a week,
engaging audiences on several key nights while exposing
them to other programs in the schedule. They are sticky. Also
this kind of program loyalty means there are more
opportunities in social media to leverage fan interest across
the other media platforms, giving a deeper, richer experience.
This adds value for advertisers.17
Not only is this dialogue facilitating inter-action between viewer and
broadcaster, but it is also creating avenues for other commercial growth,
engaging in a wider range of advertising revenue. Be this through deals with
phone companies, web sites or product placements.
17
Personal interview conducted on 26/09/10MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 20
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Ratings
Commerce
Ethics
Production
Television
Audience
Perception of Reality
Values
This diagram, drawn by author, demonstrates the new relationship that reality
TV has facilitated between network broadcaster and viewer. This current model
allows for discourse to run both ways – from broadcaster to viewer, and viewer
to broadcaster.MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 21
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So, in summing up how and why reality TV in its present state-of-play remains
successful and productive, reality TV’s emergence as a genre with key
capacities for the flexibility to pick up and engage with associated forms of
media speaks to its current supremacy. However, rather than simply
referencing other forms of media, reality TV programs seem most capable of
setting up a two-way loop with these mediums, allowing the audience to feel
most intimately connected with the happenings of the ‘real’ world on the other
end of the camera in a way that previously had eluded documentaries,
dramas, news and game shows. Ultimately, all this interaction has clearly fed
back to the modern common denominator of television production: reality TV’s
capacity to engage beyond the limitations of its own medium and genre have
given it significant commercial viability and success, and ensured it remains a
key player in the modern television landscape.
Ted Magder puts a final exclamation mark on reality TV’s success, writing;
What reality TV and formats reveal most of all is that the
traditional revenue model used to produce commercial
television is becoming anachronistic. We are entering a new
era of product placement and integration, merchandising,
pay-per-view, and multiplatform content. The emerging
business models will change what we see and how we see
it.18
18
Ted Magder, ‘The End of TV 101: Reality Programs, Formats, and the New Business of
Television’, p. 152.MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 22
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Future
More real than the real, that is how the real is abolished
- Jean Baudrillard19
So what now for the future of reality TV? As digital and cable channels grow,
so to will reality TV. As networks’ commercial outlook expands with the
proliferation of external, decentralized methods of intimacy and social
connection, and greater advertising revenue through the growth of its free-to-
air channels, reality formats have the opportunity to become increasingly
specialized to target specific audience demographics on specific digital
channels. Lifestyle related formats are more likely to move to the extra digital
channels, leaving the network’s main channel set for the big talent shows –
such as X Factor, The Block, Australia’s Got Talent – as these so far seem
able to maintain audience viewing throughout the week and gain important
prime-time advertising revenue. With more channels available, and
(theoretically) an increase in population and potential audiences, networks
have the potential for further experimentation with the genre conventions –
and give the present rapid proliferation of different variations of reality shows,
it seems unlikely that this trend will halt.
However, despite the capacity to engage with these kinds of mediums, inter-
active reality programming involving viewer voting systems may not actually
19
Sheila Faria Glaser (trans.), Jean Baudrillard: Simulacre and Simulation (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 2.MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 23
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be around for that much longer. As Joanna Kerr put it, “people aren’t voting
the way they used to – people aren’t prepared to pay 50 cents for an SMS text
anymore.”20 Even within a ten-year period devices like phone voting are no
longer proving fruitful in the face of online social media. Perhaps, then, there
might even be a greater proliferation of media-convergence strategies that
seeks to compensate for the revenue raised by phone voting systems. Or,
instead, it could simply mean that reality TV will become an even more
commercialized format, with greater product placement during the prime-time
shows.
One big question, however, that emerges when evaluating the future of reality
TV comes in its ‘end-game’. Where could this endless experimentation with
‘the real’ possibly lead – and more importantly do we like where it might lead
us? The paradigms explored by philosopher Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra
and Simulation outline some of the key dangers in reality television’s
encapsulating and manipulation of reality:
In fact it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary
envelops it any more. It is a hyper-real, produced from a
radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyper-space
without atmosphere.21
Baudrillard’s theories here lay out a dangerous, possible end-game for reality
TV – by being so successful at simulating ‘the real’ (through its environments,
challenges and other now typical genre techniques) reality TV has arguably
20
Personal interview conducted on 27/09/10.
21 21
Sheila Faria Glaser (trans.), Jean Baudrillard: Simulacre and Simulation, p. 2.MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 24
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already begun to replace documentary’s more ‘reporting’ focused initiatives
with invented situations that do not record but rather simulate reality for the
sake of melodrama, abstracting ‘reality’ from its valuable connections to
social, cultural and political contexts in order to fetishize and control TV’s key
commodity – audience ratings. Certainly reality TV is going to be faced with
this base question to its legitimacy in the future, and how it manages to
approach its own authenticity beyond the infatuation with the hyper-real
drama it presents will surely play a fundamental role in how it survives the
future.MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 25
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Conclusion
Since the emergence of reality programming, critics have consistently
attacked the genre for being cheap, sensational TV. Headlines such as
‘Danger: Reality TV Can Rot Your Brain’ or ‘Ragbag of Cheap Thrills’22 are
only some of the typically scathing critiques. In the UK report for the
Campaign for Quality Television in 2003, Michael Tracey of the University of
Colorado singled out reality TV as the “stuff of the vulgate”, that only
encourages “moral and intellectual impoverishment in contemporary life.” 23
And as Michelle Conlin put it: “In essence, this may well be network crack:
reality TV is fast, cheap and totally addictive […] the shows are weapons of
mass distraction […] causing us to become dumber, fatter, and more
disengaged from ourselves and society.”24 In the opinion of many, reality TV
is akin to a drug addiction that can only lead to the continual degradation of
our moral and social values.
And while there are big questions that undeniably surround reality TV’s
representation of the ‘real’ for entertainment purposes, such moralistic
judgments often fail to take into account the various formats of reality
programming and the avenues it has opened for developments in television
broadcasting and associated mediums. Perhaps reality TV could even be
considered responsible for ‘saving’ the TV medium in the face of on-demand
22
See The Times, 20 December 2002, pp. 4 -5, and Financial Times, 11 November 1999, p.
22.
23
In Broadcast, 20 June 2003, p. 2
24
Michelle Conlin, ‘America’s Reality TV Addiction’, 2003, online, available at:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/01/16/entertainment/main536804.shtml accessed on
26/09/11.MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 26
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Internet services through its fluidity to keep in touch with contemporary whims.
In such a short time, reality formats have had an undeniable impact on both
audience consumption behavior and network television models. Multi-media
convergence and audience inter-activity have all been facilitated by the reality
genre, strategies that are now transforming the way we will engage with
television for years to come.
Word Count: 4, 321
Bibliography:MECO3672 Internship Project Philippa Daly 27
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Broadcast, 20 June 2003.
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