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A Companion to
Reality Television
A Companion to
Reality Television
Edited by
Laurie Ouellette
This edition first published 2014
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ouellette, Laurie.
A companion to reality television / edited by Laurie Ouellette.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-65927-4 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-118-59959-4 – ISBN 978-1-118-59962-4 1. Reality television programs–History and criticism. I. Title.
PN1992.8.R43O845 2013
791.45'75–dc23
2013030061
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: America’s Got Talent, 2011. Photo NBC-TV / The Kobal Collection
Cover design by Simon Levy Design Associates
Set in 10.5/13 pt Minion by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
1 2014
Table of Contents
Notes on Contributors
ix
Introduction
Laurie Ouellette
1
Part One Producing Reality: Industry, Labor, and Marketing
9
1 Mapping Commercialization in Reality Television
June Deery
11
2 Reality Television and the Political Economy of Amateurism
Andrew Ross
29
3 When Everyone Has Their Own Reality Show
Mark Andrejevic
40
4 Cast-aways: The Plights and Pleasures of Reality Casting and
Production Studies
Vicki Mayer
57
5 Program Format Franchising in the Age of Reality Television
Albert Moran
74
Part Two Television Realities: History, Genre, and Realism
95
6 Realism and Reality Formats
Jonathan Bignell
97
7 Reality TV Experiences: Audiences, Fact, and Fiction
Annette Hill
116
8 From Participatory Video to Reality Television
Daniel Marcus
134
vi
Table of Contents
9 Manufacturing “Massness”: Aesthetic Form and Industry Practice
in the Reality Television Contest
Hollis Griffin
155
10 God, Capitalism, and the Family Dog
Eileen R. Meehan
171
Part Three Dilemmas of Visibility: Identity and Difference
189
11 The Bachelorette’s Postfeminist Therapy: Transforming Women
for Love
Rachel E. Dubrofsky
191
12 Fractured Feminism: Articulations of Feminism, Sex, and
Class by Reality TV Viewers
Andrea L. Press
208
13 “It’s Been a While Since I’ve Seen, Like, Straight People”:
Queer Visibility in the Age of Postnetwork Reality Television
Joshua Gamson
227
14 The Wild Bunch: Men, Labor, and Reality Television
Gareth Palmer
247
15 The Conundrum of Race and Reality Television
Catherine R. Squires
264
16 Tan TV: Reality Television’s Postracial Delusion
Hunter Hargraves
283
Part Four Empowerment or Exploitation? Ordinary People and
Reality Television
307
17 Reality Television and the Demotic Turn
Graeme Turner
309
18 DI(t)Y, Reality-Style: The Cultural Work of Ordinary Celebrity
Laura Grindstaff
324
19 Reality Television’s Construction of Ordinary People: Class-Based
and Nonelitist Articulations of Ordinary People and
Their Discursive Affordances
Nico Carpentier
345
Part Five Subjects of Reality: Making/Selling Selves and Lifestyles
367
20 Mapping the Makeover Maze: The Contours and Contradictions
of Makeover Television
Brenda Weber
369
Table of Contents
21 House Hunters, Real Estate Television and Everyday Cosmopolitanism
Mimi White
vii
386
22 Life Coaches, Style Mavens, and Design Gurus: Everyday Experts
on Reality Television
Tania Lewis
402
23 Reality Television Celebrity: Star Consumption and
Self-Production in Media Culture
Julie A. Wilson
421
24 Producing “Reality”: Branded Content, Branded Selves,
Precarious Futures
Alison Hearn
437
Part Six Affective Registers: Reality, Sentimentality, and Feeling
457
25 A Matter of Feeling: Mediated Affect in Reality Television
Misha Kavka
459
26 “Walking in Another’s Shoes”: Sentimentality and Philanthropy on
Reality Television
Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi
Part Seven The Politics of Reality: Global Culture, National Identity,
and Public Life
478
499
27 Reality Television, Public Service, and Public Life:
A Critical Theory Perspective
Peter Lunt
501
28 Reality Talent Shows in China: Transnational Format,
Affective Engagement, and the Chinese Dream
Ling Yang
516
29 Reality Television from Big Brother to the Arab Uprisings:
Neoliberal, Liberal, and Geopolitical Considerations
Marwan M. Kraidy
541
Index
557
Mark Andrejevic is Deputy Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies
at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author of Reality TV: The Work
of Being Watched (2004), iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (2007),
and Infoglut (2013) as well as numerous articles and book chapters on surveillance,
digital media, and popular culture.
Jonathan Bignell is Professor of Television and Film at the University of Reading,
UK. He specializes in the history of television, and especially television fiction in
Britain. His work makes use of archival sources alongside the detailed study of the
audiovisual form and style of television programs and films. He is also interested
in comparative work, including relationships between factual and fictional television, and the different ways that television developed in the United Kingdom, in
Europe, and in the United States. His books include An Introduction to Television
Studies (2004), Big Brother: Reality TV in the Twenty-First Century (2005), and A
European Television History (ed. with Andreas Fickers, 2008). He has published a
wide range of articles and chapters, and serves on the editorial boards of journals
including the New Review of Film and Television Studies, Studies in Documentary
Film, Critical Studies in Television, and the Journal of Science Fiction Film and
Television.
Anita Biressi is Reader in Media Cultures at the University of Roehampton, London.
With Heather Nunn, she is author of Reality TV: Realism and Revelation (2005)
and Class in Contemporary British Culture (2011) and editor of The Tabloid Culture
Reader (2008).
Nico Carpentier is Associate Professor at the Communication Studies Department
of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels) and Lecturer at Charles
University, Prague. He is an executive board member of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and was Vice-President of
x
the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) from
2008 to 2012.
June Deery is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York, and author of Consuming Reality: The Commercialization of Factual
Entertainment (2012) and Reality TV (forthcoming).
Rachel E. Dubrofksy is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication
and an affiliated Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Cultural
Studies and the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of
South Florida. She has published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Theory, Television and New Media, and Feminist Media Studies.
She is author of The Surveillance of Women on Reality Television: Watching The
Bachelor and The Bachelorette (2011) and is coediting the anthology Feminist Media
Studies with Shoshana A. Magnet. She is working on a third book project, tentatively
titled Under Surveillance: Mediating Race and Gender, examining surveillance, new
media spaces, and questions of race and gender.
Joshua Gamson is Professor of Sociology at the University of San Francisco. He
is the author of Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (1994), Freaks
Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity (1998), The Fabulous Sylvester (2005), and numerous articles on social movements, sexualities, and popular
culture.
Hollis Griffin is Assistant Professor of Communication at Denison University,
Granville, Ohio. His work has appeared in Television & New Media, Velvet Light
Trap, Popular Communication, Spectator, JumpCut, FLOW, In Media Res, and
Antenna. He has articles forthcoming in Cinema Journal, Quarterly Review of Film
and Video, and the Journal of Popular Film & Television. He is currently at work on
a book manuscript, Affective Convergences: Manufactured Feelings in Queer Media
Cultures.
Laura Grindstaff is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis.
Her areas of expertise include cultural sociology, popular culture, qualitative
methods, and social inequality (gender, sexuality, class, and race/ethnicity). Her
award-winning book The Money Shot (2002) is an ethnographic study of daytime
talk shows that explores how and why “ordinary people” are incorporated into
mainstream television entertainment in ways that reproduce their class marginalization. Her series of publications on reality television likewise draw on first-hand
research with participants; in this work, she argues for a more performative understanding of identity formation and for a more dramaturgical notion of the public
sphere.
Hunter Hargraves is a doctoral student in the Department of Modern Culture and
Media at Brown University, Rhode Island. His research interests sit at the intersec-
xi
tion of television studies, affect, and cultural identity. He is currently working on a
dissertation on “viscerally uncomfortable television,” which explores the relationship between millennial television, spectatorial discomfort, and neoliberalism.
Alison Hearn is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media
Studies at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Her research focuses on brand
culture, television, new media, self-production, and economic value. She also writes
on the university as a cultural and political site. She has published widely in such
journals as Continuum, Journal of Consumer Culture, and Journal of Communication
Inquiry, and in edited volumes including The Media and Social Theory (2008) and
Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (2nd edn, 2008). She is coauthor, with Liora
Salter, of Outside the Lines: Issues in Interdisciplinary Research (1996).
Annette Hill is a Professor of Media at Lund University, Sweden, and Visiting Professor at the Communication and Media Research Institute, University of Westminster, UK. Her most recent book is Paranormal Media: Audiences, Spirits and Magic
in Popular Culture (2011). Other books include Shocking Entertainment: Viewer
Responses to Media Violence (1997), TV Living: Television, Audiences and Everyday
Life (with David Gauntlett, 1999), Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television (2005), and Restyling Factual TV: The Reception of News, Documentary and
Reality Genres (2007). She is the coeditor (with Robert C. Allen) of the Television
Studies Reader (2004). A variety of articles in journals and edited collections address
issues of film violence, media ethics, documentary audiences, reality television, and
entertainment formats. Her next books will be Media Experiences and Reality TV:
Key Ideas.
Misha Kavka is Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television and
Media Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her research interests
include Hollywood film, television, and feminist theory. She is author of Reality
Television, Affect and Intimacy (2008) and Reality TV (TV Genres) (2012).
Marwan M. Kraidy is Professor of Global Communication at the Annenberg School
for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, the Edward Said Chair of
American Studies at the American University of Beirut, and a Fellow of the John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His latest book, Reality Television and
Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life (2010), won the 2010 Best Book Award in
Global Communication and Social Change from the International Communication
Association, the 2011 Diamond Anniversary Best Book Award from the National
Communication Association, and the 2011 Roderick P. Hart Outstanding Book
Award from the Political Communication Division of the National Communication
Association.
Tania Lewis is Associate Professor and a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow
in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne,
xii
Australia. She is author of Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise
(2008), editor of TV Transformations: Revealing the Makeover Show (2008), and
coeditor of Ethical Consumption: A Critical Introduction (with Emily Potter, 2011).
Peter Lunt is Professor and Head of Department in the Department of Media and
Communication at the University of Leicester, UK. His research interests include
media audiences, public participation in popular culture (talk shows and reality
television), media regulation, consumption research, and the links between media
and social theory. He is author (with Sonia Livingstone) of Talk on Television: Audience Participation and Public Debate (1994) and Media Regulation: Governance and
the Interests of Citizens and Consumers (2012).
Daniel Marcus is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at
Goucher College, Baltimore. He is the author of Happy Days and Wonder Years: The
Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics (2004) and the editor of Roar!
The Paper Tiger Television Guide to Media Activism (1991).
Vicki Mayer is Professor of Communication at Tulane University, New Orleans. She
writes and teaches about the lived experiences of media consumers and producers
in light of widespread political-economic transformations. She edits the journal
Television & New Media.
Eileen R. Meehan is a Professor in the Department of Radio, Television, and Digital
Media at Southern Illinois University, USA. She also serves as the Interim Director
of SIU’s Global Media Research Center. Her research examines the intersections of
culture, money, and power in the media. She is the author of Why TV Is Not Our
Fault (2005) and coeditor of Dazzled by Disney? The Global Disney Audiences Project
(with Janet Wasko and Mark Phillips, 2001) and Sex and Money: Feminism and
Political Economy in Media Studies (with Ellen Riordan, 2002).
Albert Moran has taught screen studies for almost 40 years. Born in Dublin, he has
degrees from Sydney, La Trobe, and Griffith Universities. His scholarly output
includes 30 books authored or edited singly or jointly, and more than 100 refereed
papers. Recent publications include the monograph New Flows in Global TV (2009)
and the coedited collection Cultural Adaptation (2009). He helped to pioneer the
critical analysis of Australian film and television history and established the field of
transnational television format studies. His business biography of Australia’s format
mogul Reg Grundy was published in 2013. An Honorary Fellow of the Australian
Academy of the Humanities, he is Professor in Screen Studies in the School of
Humanities at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia.
Heather Nunn is Professor in Culture and Politics and a Director of the Centre for
Research in Film and Audio-Visual Cultures (CRFAC) at the University of Roehampton, London. She is author or editor (with Anita Biressi) of Reality TV: Realism
xiii
and Revelation (2005), The Tabloid Culture Reader (2008), and Class in Contemporary British Culture (2011).
Laurie Ouellette is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at
the University of Minnesota, where she teaches Critical Media Studies. She has
published extensively on reality television and is coeditor of Reality TV: Remaking
Television Culture (2004 and 2009) and coauthor of Better Living through Reality
TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship (Wiley, 2008).
Gareth Palmer is Professor in the School of Media, Music, and Performance at the
University of Salford, UK. He is author of Discipline and Liberty (2003) and editor
of Exposing Lifestyle Television (2008).
Andrea L. Press is Professor of Sociology and Media Studies at the University of
Virginia, USA. She is internationally known for her interdisciplinary scholarship on
the media audience, on feminist media issues, and on media and social class in the
United States. She is author of Women Watching Television: Gender, Class and Generation in the American Television Experience (1991), coauthor of Speaking of Abortion: Television and Authority in the Lives of Women (with Elizabeth Cole, 1999),
coauthor of The New Media Environment (with Bruce A. Williams, 2010), and coauthor of “New Feminist Television Studies: Queries into Postfeminist Television”
(with Mary Beth Haralovich, 2012). For the past 12 years she has coedited the
journal The Communication Review. Her forthcoming book Feminism LOL looks at
representations and reception of feminism and postfeminism in popular media.
Andrew Ross is Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New
York University. He has written extensively on issues of labor. His recent books
include No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs (2002), Low Pay,
High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor (2004), Fast Boat to China: Corporate
Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade – Lessons from Shanghai (2006, 2007), The
University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace
(ed. with Monika Krause, Mary Nolan, and Michael Palm, 2007), Nice Work If You
Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times (2009), and Bird on Fire: Lessons from
the World’s Least Sustainable City (2011).
Catherine R. Squires is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota, USA. She received her PhD from Northwestern University in
1999. Prior to coming to Minnesota, she was an Assistant Professor at the University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor, from 2000 to 2007 in Afro-American and African Studies
and Communication Studies. She is the author of Dispatches from the Color Line
(2007) and African Americans and the Media (2009). Her work on media, politics,
and identity can be found in many journals, including Critical Studies in Media
Communication and the International Journal of Press/Politics.
Graeme Turner is Professor of Cultural Studies in the Centre for Critical and Cultural
Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. His research and publications are
xiv
in media and cultural studies, and his current project is a collaborative transnational
study (with Anna Cristina Pertierra) of television in the postbroadcast era, published
as Locating Television: Zones of Consumption (2012). His most recent books are Television Studies after TV: Understanding Television in the Post-broadcast Era (ed. with
Jinna Tay, 2009) and What’s Become of Cultural Studies? (2012).
Brenda R. Weber is an Associate Professor in Gender Studies at Indiana University,
with adjunct appointments in American Studies, Cultural Studies, Communication
and Culture, and English. She teaches courses in reality television, gender and
popular culture, masculinity theory, the politics of representation, celebrity studies,
and theories of embodiment. Her books include Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship,
and Celebrity (2009) and Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century:
The Transatlantic Production of Fame and Gender (2012). She is presently editing an
anthology called Reality Gendervision: Decoding Gender and Sexuality on Transatlantic Reality TV.
Mimi White is a Professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University, USA. She has published a wide range of articles on television
and film, and is the author of Tele-advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American
Television (1992), coauthor of Media Knowledge: Popular Culture, Pedagogy, and
Critical Citizenship (with James Schwoch and Susan Reilly, 1992), and coeditor of
Questions of Method in Cultural Studies (with James Schwoch, 2006).
Julie A. Wilson is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of
Communication Arts at Allegheny College, Pennsylvania, where she researches the
shifting cultural politics of celebrity and stardom. She has published articles in
Velvet Light Trap, Cinema Journal, Television & New Media, Cultural Studies, and
Genders.
Ling Yang is Assistant Professor of Chinese at Xiamen University, P.R. China. She
is the author of Entertaining the Transitional Era: Super Girl Fandom and the Consumption of Popular Culture (2012) and the coeditor of Fan Cultures: A Reader (with
Tao Dongfeng, 2009). She has published articles on fan culture, Internet culture,
and web fiction in the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies, and
a number of Chinese journals.
Introduction
Laurie Ouellette
Reality television became a “phenomenon” around the turn of the millennium. In
the United States, Survivor, Big Brother, and other high-profile prime-time reality
programs (many adapted from existing European formats) arrived in 2000, setting
the stage for a reconfiguration of television schedules that continues to this day.
Television viewing habits were also transformed when audiences were invited to
vote on, comment on, and interact with new reality programs such as American Idol
(2002–present) using cell phones and the Internet. These were hybrid “reality entertainment” programs that combined the factual conventions of journalism, observational documentary, and video diaries with the plot elements and entertainment
appeals of soap operas, sitcoms, dramas, and game shows. Many were based on
generic formats that had debuted (to great success) in various national versions
on public and commercial broadcasting systems in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and other countries. Whether one loved or hated (or both) these emerging
reality formats, they became must see TV, fodder for online and face-to-face watercooler conversations bolstered by the television industry’s own publicity machines.
I was among a generation of media scholars who watched with fascination as what
we now call reality television expanded, mutated, fragmented, and spread. Hybrid
reality television entertainment became a visible staple of television culture, even as
critics and TV viewers alike recognized (and often bemoaned) its scripted dimensions, commercial manipulations, recombinant tendencies, and stage-managed emotional appeals. The boom wasn’t limited to big-budget network productions. In the
United States and many other countries, TV viewers were presented with a burgeoning swatch of reality-based entertainment featuring “ordinary people in ordinary and
extraordinary situations” (Murray and Ouellette, 2004, p. 3). By the mid-2000s, major
broadcast and specialized cable channels alike were awash with makeover shows,
A Companion to Reality Television, First Edition. Edited by Laurie Ouellette.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
2
Introduction
dating shows, every manner of lifestyle and self-help program, reality sitcoms, talent
contests and game shows, charitable interventions, adventure competitions, docusoaps, and more.
The success of the prime-time network reality shows begat imitations and variations on themes pitched to specialized cable audiences. Reality programs were
developed for mass audiences and niche markets conceived on the basis of targeted
demographics and lifestyle clusters. For example, in the United States, the MTV,
Lifetime, Bravo, and BET cable networks developed a cadre of popular reality shows
for youth, women, upscale urbanites, and African Americans respectively. While this
fare was pitched as spontaneous and real, it was also tightly edited and carefully
packaged with high doses of voyeurism, suspense, gossip, sensationalism, melodrama, affect, and cruelty. As cable and satellite systems expanded and the number
of channels requiring programming continued to proliferate, existing forms of
educational, lifestyle, and documentary television became part of the reality phenomenon, their somber pedagogical conventions revamped in the image of the
much splashier prime-time docusoaps and reality competitions.
In the United Kingdom and other countries, public broadcasting systems were
among the first to develop popular reality programming, much to the horror of
critics who protested the decline of traditional public service remits based on educational and civic development. In the United States, commercial cable venues such
as The Learning Channel (TLC), which once carried medical programming and
exercise videos, developed new lineups around the mundane everyday affairs of Jon
& Kate Plus 8 and other individuals and families pitched as simultaneously “real”
and spectacular because they had eight children, or were “little people,” or were
conjoined twins. Regional, religious, and class subcultures presented the raw material for twists on this type of reality television, as exemplified by recent TLC hits
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (about a seven-year-old child beauty-pageant star and
her white, southern, working-class, “redneck” family) and Breaking Amish (which
follows young people as they leave their religious sects).
Discovery and other cable channels formerly branded as scientific and educational have increasingly turned away from feature-length documentaries and have
developed slickly packaged reality series based on unusual, dramatic, and spectacular personal experiences with exploration and the wild, from the labor of deep-sea
fishing (Deadliest Catch) to real-life survivalism (Survivorman). Historically slowmoving and subdued nature programming was also revamped: on the Discovery
Corporation’s channel Animal Planet, programs such as Meerkat Manor, My Cat
from Hell, River Monsters, and My Extreme Animal Phobia borrow extensively from
and often mimic outright the conventions of docusoaps and reality competitions.
The makeover, long a staple of women’s daytime television and magazine culture,
developed as an especially high-profile subgenre of reality television. Television
makeover programs elevated the transformation of the body, psyche, home, and
even the family pet into a fascinating and suspenseful challenge that could be documented and ritualistically observed. Some popular makeover programs, such as
The Biggest Loser, drew elements from Big Brother and Survivor and made the self-
Introduction
3
transformation of human subjects into a quasi-communal experience and a competitive game. Real-crime television programming, which first appeared in the
United States in the 1980s, exploded and fragmented into an expanding array of
increasingly specialized police procedures and operations caught on camera and
into interactive calls for TV viewers to monitor safety, surveil neighborhoods
and borders, and help apprehend suspects. More recently, cable channels such as
TruTV, which brands itself as a venue for grittier and “more authentic” versions of
reality television, have created programs around the intake of inmates at criminal
detention centers and country jails.
In just over a decade, reality television has transformed television culture (Murray
and Ouellette, 2004, 2009) in ways that have quickly become naturalized as the
status quo. Indeed, many of my undergraduate students no longer remember a time
before the reality phenomenon: they grew up with the conventions of reality television, and have come to take its blend of entertainment and documentary, irony and
sentimentality, authenticity and scriptedness for granted. This collection encourages
a deeper and more critical view of reality television, which is too often regarded as
merely a guilty pleasure. Reality television is more than a fad or a discreet development in media culture, and A Companion to Reality Television takes it as the grounds
for tracing and examining the changing economic, social, cultural, and political
conditions in which we live.
Studying Reality Television
Reality television is not going away anytime soon, for business reasons identified
by industry scholars (Raphael, 2009). Reality productions can be produced more
quickly and flexibly than other forms of television (such as news or drama) because
they avoid (or minimize) the use of professional talent, writers, and other unionized
personnel and rely heavily on freelancers, short-term workers, and the “free labor”
of the ordinary people who appear on them. In an age of soaring production costs,
commercian-zapping technologies, digital convergence, and increased audience
fragmentation, reality television has also lent itself to experiments in integrated
branding, global franchising, and interactive marketing (Magder, 2009).
But, if the political economy of television and new media explains the staying
power of reality television, the conversation certainly doesn’t end there. The growth
and visibility of reality television worldwide has triggered a surge of new scholarship
concerned with the business, production, aesthetics, ethics, and politics of television
marketed and sold in the name of the real. In our collection published in 2004
(revised in 2009), Susan Murray and I observed a dearth of scholarship on reality
television and pointed out the need for scholars to keep pace with its transformative
impact on television culture. Today, there are many books, articles, and special issues
of journals devoted to the critical analysis of reality television. It is time to take
stock, reflect, synthesize what we have accomplished, anticipate emergent issues, and
chart what needs to be done.
4
Introduction
A Companion to Reality Television presents the major debates, questions, and
theories orienting the study of reality television today, as determined by leading
scholars in the field. The chapters provide a toolbox for studying a wide range of
factual, unscripted reality television entertainment circulating around the world
today. Together, they also map the parameters of reality television scholarship to
date. Because reality television as an object of analysis has prompted many scholars
to explore new questions and consult alternative or emergent conceptual paradigms,
the book also points to new directions in media studies. One of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of studying the reality television phenomenon involves
tracing and understanding its complex relationship to the present. A Companion to
Reality Television models this type of scholarship and provides resources for furthering its objectives and aims.
In their quest to come to terms with the surge and significance of reality television, the authors assembled here also address the broader social, political, economic,
technological, and cultural circumstances in which reality television has proliferated
and matured. In so doing, they remind us that the reality television phenomenon
is about more than individual programs or even modes of engagement (such as
following the Twitter feed of the latest reality star or voting for a contestant on a
talent show using a cell phone). As we will see, the reality television phenomenon
is also historically connected to – and therefore useful for examining – the shifting
dynamics of production and consumption, amateurism and professionalism, selfrepresentation and branding, and democracy and citizenship.
The best scholarship on reality television has engaged with conversations in social,
political, and political theory to make sense of these links. This work has in turn
helped to bring a wider range of critical perspectives and concerns into media studies,
from neoliberalism and governmentality to immaterial labor to surveillance and
the “affective turn.” Scholarship on reality television has also been instrumental in
advancing ideas and debates on more rehearsed topics. In addressing the rising visibility of ordinary people on reality television, for example, scholars have also theorized (and retheorized) media culture’s relationship to publics, celebrity, difference
(gender, race, class, sexuality), and personhood. In analyzing the adaptation and
reception of global formats across contexts, they have also refined understandings
of the media’s relationship to globalization, national identity, political activism,
cosmopolitanism, and geopolitics. A Companion to Reality Television consolidates
and extends this multidimensional approach by connecting reality television to the
changing conditions and contradictions of contemporary societies.
What Is Reality Television?
“Reality television” is an ambiguous term that encompasses the swatch of ostensibly
unscripted programming featuring ordinary people as contestants, participants, and
subjects described above. While scholars have identified shared conventions (use of
nonactors, mix of fictional and factual elements) and distinct subgenres (makeovers,
Introduction
5
dating shows, docusoaps, talent contests, and so on), it can be difficult to pinpoint
the exact lines between reality programs, documentaries, and fictional television
programs. This is because reality television as a whole revels in generic hybridity
and borrows extensively from other televisual forms. This ambiguity is even more
the case today, when Hollywood films, documentaries, and sitcoms such as The
Office incorporate the conventions of reality entertainment. In the end, it may not
be that important to determine what exactly reality television is and what it is
not. A focus on definitions may not be the best way to pinpoint and address what
is most salient about the reality phenomenon more broadly defined.
A Companion to Reality Television adopts a purposefully broad and inclusive
approach to the study of reality television and covers a wide spectrum of reality
entertainment and lifestyle formats. The collection as a whole is less concerned with
locating the borders of reality television, or with determining how real (or unreal)
it is, than with understanding how and why reality is produced, signified, marketed,
and operationalized on and through television and with examining the cultural
work that reality television currently does.
While the term “reality television” is relatively new, the history of factual and
unscripted entertainment featuring ordinary people dates to the origins of the
medium (and, before it, radio and cinema). This lineage and the historical perspective it can provide is crucial for making sense of the limitations and possibilities of
the present. Earlier scholarly debates over the precursors of reality television are too
often overlooked; they are equally fundamental to understanding reality television
today. A Companion to Reality Television provides this perspective by connecting
contemporary reality television to the daytime talk shows that afforded ordinary
people visibility and opportunities for participation in the 1980s and 1990s. Attention to the use of ordinary people in early experimental and social realist cinema,
the work of guerilla video artists, participatory media advocates and alternative
television makers of the 1970s, and the social reform tradition of documentary
provide further context for tracing historical continuities and breaks between the
past and the reality television phenomenon today.
Part Overviews
A Collection to Reality Television is organized thematically, according to the issues
and debates that currently define the field. Part One, producing reality: industry, labor, and marketing, examines the manufacture of reality television, from
its overt commercialism, product placement, integrated branding, and merchandising deals (especially in the United States) to its mode of production and labor politics. If reality television relies on the labor of nonunionized workers and the talent
of ordinary people (what Andrew Ross calls the “political economy of amateurism”
in Chapter 2), it is also related to new forms of viewer interactivity that rely on the
agency and labor of consumers. Reality television’s relationship to new forms of
marketing and consumer surveillance associated with this interactive economy is
6
Introduction
examined in this part. Other contributions examine the logic of commodification
orienting the practices of reality-casting agents, and the structure of the global
television format industry upon which reality television relies.
Part Two, television realities: history, genre, and realism, examines
the aesthetics and hybrid conventions of reality television and subgenres. The
focus is not on reality television’s failures (“not real enough,” “too scripted”) but on
the manner in which realism is defined, signified, conveyed, produced, and combined – and for what purposes. Besides providing an overview of theories of realism,
this part traces reality television’s engagement with the conventions of soap opera
and other fictional forms. It also gives an overview of reality television’s use of soap
opera and examines the complex and situated ways that audiences make sense of
reality television’s hybridity and generic claim to be a mix of fact and fiction. The
counterhistory and alternative objectives of amateur, guerilla, and participatory
video in the United States provide context for understanding how reality television
has developed and how its conventions and aims could be different. Rounding out
the part, detailed case studies examine the talent show as an aesthetic form and
an industry practice crucial to the ongoing production of “massness” in the postnetwork era, and the tensions between authenticity, creativity, and ideology in a
particular reality program, Dog the Bounty Hunter.
Part Three, dilemmas of visibility: identity and difference, explores the
politics of representation on reality television, which on the surface appears to have
diversified television culture. While reality programs do present many more opportunities for representation for women, people of color, gays and lesbians, and the
working class, the chapters in this part note that increased visibility is not always
wholly progressive and can work in the service of unequal power dynamics and the
“posting” of identity-based activism and social movements. The chapters here trace
reality television’s affinities to discourses of postfeminism and postracism and probe
how their assumption that equality has been achieved and anyone can succeed
regardless of gender or race plays out in reality television’s popular narratives. The
industrial and societal conditions for the rise of queer visibility and other forms of
difference on reality television are also mapped and analyzed. Reality television’s
fascination with working-class subjects, particularly male laborers, is traced to the
origins of documentary and situated within the contemporary crisis of masculinity.
While representation on reality television does afford new gains to marginalized
and oppressed groups, the chapters in this part note that reality television also plays
a role in policing sexual double standards, norms, and bodies.
Part Four, empowerment or exploitation? ordinary people and reality
television, examines the shifting line between amateur and professional with a
focus on the dramatic visibility of ordinary people in the media today. Ordinary
people are more visible than ever, due in large part to the explosion of reality television. The chapters here contend that, while reality television appears to “democratize” the television industry by allowing nonprofessionals to participate on screen,
this is not the same as power sharing. Questions of participation versus control,
agency versus exploitation, and democracy versus the “demotic turn” are explored
across the chapters. At the same time, this part reminds us that “ordinary” is not an
Introduction
7
essential category but a discursive construct that can vary across context, and it aims
to unpack how discourses of ordinariness intersect with the politics of class more
broadly.
Part Five, subjects of reality: making/selling selves and lifestyles, examines reality television’s high-profile role in the making and remaking of people and
lifestyles. From makeover programs to real estate shows, reality television is a fertile
ground for the current preoccupation with self-invention and self-improvement.
The chapters here unpack the reasons for this, and situate reality television as a
cultural technology of self-fashioning within broader contexts of increased individualization, cosmopolitanism, privatization, personal responsibilization, and
enterprise culture. The conventions of the makeover are unpacked to reveal the
importance of new forms of governmentality and everyday expertise in capitalist
societies and the connection between self-transformation as an individual project
and the depoliticized and commodified iconography of revolution and social
change. The role of reality television celebrities in modeling new forms of personhood and the way in which we create, market, and “test” ourselves as subjects are
situated within the larger history of celebrity culture, and reality television’s contributions to new forms of immaterial labor in which the self is a product or brand
are mapped and critiqued.
Part Six, affective registers: reality, sentimentality, and feeling, examines reality television’s affective registers and mediation of feeling. The chapters
situate reality television within the “affective turn” in social and cultural theory and
map the emotional and bodily dimensions of our experiences with reality television
(such as senses and feelings) that cannot be fully accounted for by discursive analysis. The role of affect in game shows, reality competitions, and other genres is
explored and the mobilization of sentimentality, as a key trope in charity-themed
reality television, is also historicized and highlighted.
Part Seven, the politics of reality: global culture, national identity,
and public life, situates reality television within debates over the public sphere
and the globalization of culture. While reality television is often seen as a detriment
to the operation of public life due to its commercialism and emphasis on private
issues, the authors here suggest that it may be an important site through which new
versions of public life can be mobilized. Reality television’s extension of the daytime
talk show, which broadened the class, gender, and racial boundaries of “participation” in public, is explored in relation to issues of regulation and the transformation
of public broadcasting. Finally, two case studies chronicle reality television’s complex
relationship to the state, political processes, national identity, fandom, and grassroots activism in China and the Middle East.
References
Magder, T. (2009) Television 2.0: the business of American television in transition, in S.
Murray and L. Ouellette (eds), Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, 2nd edn, New
York: New York University Press, pp. 141–164.
8
Introduction
Murray, S. and Ouellette, L. (2004) Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, New York: New
York University Press.
Murray, S. and Ouellette, L. (2009) Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, 2nd edn, New
York: New York University Press.
Raphael, C. (2009) The political economic origins of reali-TV, in S. Murray and L. Ouellette
(eds), Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, 2nd edn, New York: New York University
Press, pp. 123–140.
Part One
Producing Reality
Industry, Labor, and Marketing
1
Mapping Commercialization in
Reality Television
June Deery
It hardly seems necessary to point out that commercial media are commercially
driven, but reality television provides particularly strong examples of contemporary
forms of commercialization: commercialization referring to the process of turning
something into a commodity in order to generate a profit and, attitudinally, to a
prioritization of this process. The reality producer’s often aggressive strategies make
conspicuous the fact that most media are, at base, cultural devices for selling things
and that, though multiple agents as well as agendas are involved, it is the commercial
nature of their activities that is the most inescapable aspect of what they do.1 Not
surprisingly, both the production and content of reality television reflect broad
socioeconomic trends related to accelerated commercialization: most notably, neoliberal privatization (the prioritization of profit over public service goals); personalimage management (the need for individuals to market themselves as brands);
nonunionized outsourcing and other budget-cutting strategies; and an interlocking
expansion in the areas of celebrity production, public relations, and various forms
of oblique or indirect advertising. The purpose of this overview is to examine as
many as possible of the commercial strategies found in reality programming, some
of which I and others cover in more detail elsewhere (Deery, 2012).2 Commercialization is also itself a topic in several reality formats (e.g., those involving businesses
and trade) and, indeed, one of reality television’s strongest claims to realism may
actually be its acknowledgment that, today, commercialization is a growing presence
in an increasingly branded and mediated life, to the point where it is becoming
difficult to distinguish the commercial from the noncommercial or to conceive of
meaningful experiences that don’t have elements of both.
This chapter will at times generalize about all of reality television and at other
times pinpoint features of specific formats. In both cases, I am interested in the
12
Producing Reality
commercialization of content and of the viewing experience, whether it be a revival
of techniques, as in product placement, or the emergence of something new, as in
dynamic relations between viewers and television texts. For any media scholar,
reality programming is worth monitoring because it has in many instances spearheaded advertainment (the merging of advertising and entertainment programming) in a convergent, postadvertising era and therefore provides a useful vantage
point from which to gauge television’s present and future role in a new media
economy (Deery, 2004a). Reality television can be seen as emblematic of a wider
cultural conflation of commercial and noncommercial agendas in an era of
viral marketing, brand pushing,3 astroturfing, and numerous other forms of advertising disguised as something else. A fairly predictable effect of emphatic and
endemic commercialization is a dampening of the overtly political and investigative
approaches of the documentary. As Graeme Turner has underlined, reality television, like other media forms, must be understood as single-mindedly commercial
and as ideologically casual, meaning that the primary aim of its producers is not to
make an ideological point but to generate popular and profitable programming
(2010, p. 63). Indeed, it can be argued that the one (being casually ideological)
follows from the other (commercial pressure). The ideological import is there –
perhaps inevitably, even when not intentional – and it ought to be identified. But
the commercial foundation precedes everything else. For example, while there is
much talk of amateur participation in contemporary media, corporate participation
needs our attention too. On reality television (as in national politics), ordinary
participation is showcased and capitalized upon, but circumscribed. Employing
nonprofessional actors is a commercial rather than a deliberately political strategy,
the aim being to attract viewers and cut production costs, not give voice to the
powerless. Of course, not all media production is strictly for profit, yet a global trend
in the past few decades has been a weakening of noncommercial, public service
systems and pressure on those that remain to imitate many of the practices of commercial competitors in order to attract viewers and justify the expenditure of public
funds in a deregulated and often transnational market. Heightened television commercialization is therefore also a result of national policies of deregulation and
privatization.
Paid Programming: The Branding of Broadcast Content
Media producers have always assumed that the audience’s attitude to advertising is,
at best, one of tolerance and, when possible, avoidance. So, rather than relying only
on the interruptive commercial break, reality programming has experimented with
more integrative models in which advertising becomes vital and necessary, enabling
on-screen experiences rather than distracting from them. One major form of commercial integration is product placement, the practice of embedding brands or
products in media content for a fee or in some form of barter, as when producers
defray costs by receiving free props or services. Examples of television placement
Mapping Commercialization in Reality Television 13
can be found as early as the 1940s (and before that in film since the 1920s), but it
was not a significant practice until the end of the 1990s; it then more than doubled
at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Thussu, 2007, p. 55).4 In recent years,
placement has really taken off, appearing not only in an increasing number of programs but also more frequently within those programs (Magder, 2009), and most
especially in reality programs: for example, in 2011, nine of the 10 prime-time shows
with the most product placements in America were reality television formats (in
descending order, American Idol, The Biggest Loser, Celebrity Apprentice, Dancing
with the Stars, The X Factor, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, America’s Got Talent,
America’s Next Top Model, and The Amazing Race) (Nielsen 2011). Product placement suits the current technological environment because it counters the evasive
viewer actions of channel hopping or watching DVR recordings, and it bypasses the
increased clutter within traditional commercial breaks, producing a better recall rate
than television commercials (Jacobson and Mazur, 1995, p. 69). Hence, placements
are now tracked by Nielsen and by companies such as iTVX, which attempt to
measure the effectiveness of brand integration.
The density of product placement on reality television may be attributed to a
variety of factors. For one thing, the lack of detailed scripting means that products
can be inserted with little need for motivation or advance notice. Reality television’s
peculiar status as a staged actuality combining the planned and the spontaneous
offers considerable flexibility, as do the attitudes of participants and producers. In
many instances, placements are welcomed as positive additions rather than being
merely tolerated; for example, products can appear as prizes (gamedocs), rewards
(talent competitions), romantic gifts (dating/mating shows), or aid (makeovers).
Products can also create a dramatic affect when participants are otherwise
commodity-starved, as in the Spartan environment of Survivor (Deery, 2004a).
Indeed, some featured placements rise to the status of essential element since
without their presence there would simply be no show (e.g., some makeovers). In
other instances, the location can constitute a product placement, as when Top Chef
producers command fees of several hundred thousand dollars to locate the next
season in a particular city or state. Makeovers are a particularly fertile ground for
placements since their constructive contexts offer advertisers an integral and positive role and the programs’ dramatic arc imitates the “Before-and-After” binary of
much advertising. Other placements borrow the aura of an intense or ritualistic
event, such as a wedding. Or programs may borrow the aura of a professional
celebrity, which is essentially the use of one media product (the star) to boost
another (the television show), and vice versa. While reality television does not
usually hire professional performers, these can appear as “mentors” (in talent shows)
or volunteers (in home makeovers) and be compensated with positive publicity.
Competition formats allow some placements to become a central thematic
element, as in the products or services that contestants are charged to use or
promote. For example, on Top Chef, contestants are required to use a placed product
in the concoction of their next meal; those vying to be “The Apprentice” are asked
to come up with a marketing campaign (sometimes subsequently adopted by the
14
Producing Reality
sponsoring company) to promote another placed product or service; and Tyra
Banks’s protégés typically compete to pitch a beauty product in a television commercial (America’s Next Top Model). These “performative placements” elevate a
product’s status from object to event, making its integration more critical and
therefore more memorable (the ultimate goal). Some products may even become a
character of sorts, either during the regular program or in designer advertisements
created for interstitial commercial breaks (e.g., Ford cars on American Idol spots).
Corporations appreciate having their products appear in a program with which
viewers have a relationship rather than in an interruptive commercial break.
An hour-long episode provides enough time for the empathetic identification that
shorter advertising forms simply cannot manage. Indeed, some makeover formats
resemble the longer form of the infomercial (Deery, 2004a, 2012; Palmer, 2011),
employing the same formula of identification of the problem, offer of a solution,
and empirical proof of the desired transformation. As in infomercials, the results
are guaranteed for real or ordinary people who resemble those on camera who
testify to the product’s worth.
When polled, some viewers report that spotting placed products on reality
television is just part of “the game” and that they have a higher tolerance for placement here than in other television genres (Hill, 2005; Jenkins, 2006, p. 88); this
may in part be because they have lower expectations about the integrity and craft
of these kinds of productions. It may be that reality producers are less inclined to
wring their hands over art versus commerce than, say, serious film directors;
indeed, identifying product placement opportunities can be a selling point in a
show’s pitch (Caudle, 2011, pp. 195–204). However, other media professionals are
more concerned about the shaping of events to suit advertisers’ needs; for example,
in 2005 the Writers Guild of America (West) launched a “Product Invasion” campaign to protest this manipulation of content in all programming. One problem
specific to reality television is a potential conflict between the genre’s selling point
(being real or authentic) and its promotion of other brands. For example, on
style makeovers, viewers cannot be certain whether presenters really do like featured products and have to wonder whether they are cultural or corporate intermediaries. Paid-for recommendations can potentially, or maybe even necessarily,
weaken the whole premise of a show and therefore its ability to attract audiences
for advertising of any kind; in other words, commercial forces may be in danger
of undermining themselves. In many European countries there are regulations or
outrights bans, though these have become more relaxed since 2010. In 2006, the
European Union decided that its member states could authorize product placement but with genre restrictions: placements could not appear in news, current
affairs, or children’s programming (Thussu, 2007, p. 40). Each country is also able
to add its own restrictions: hence, in France, placement is allowed on fictional but
not on reality programming and fines have been imposed for unlawful placement
(Dauncey, 2010, p. 314). In Britain, product placement was banned outright
(2008–2011) and then reinstated with significant restrictions: unhealthy products
are still banned, placements must be editorially justified and not unduly promi-
nent, and when placements do occur the broadcaster must display the letter “P”
for three seconds at the start and end of the program.
“Made possible by”
One of the earliest models for monetizing television programming was sponsorship,
a technique television inherited from early radio. The practice diminished after the
quiz show scandals of the 1950s and in subsequent decades became mostly a backdoor strategy for companies banned from direct advertising on television (e.g.,
tobacco), which could sponsor, for example, a broadcast sports event and in this
way get their brand on air. Today, there has been a revival of sponsorship in certain
types of reality television, not for reasons of legal regulation but because of changing
technology and viewer agency, most notably the viewer’s ability to zap through
advertisements when viewing a DVR recording. As in the past, sponsors usually pay
up front to help finance a show and have varying degrees of influence, sometimes
shaping content from the show’s inception (e.g., The Restaurant) or even producing
it themselves from scratch (Ford’s Escape Routes). Examples of deep and long-term
sponsorship include Coke and Ford on American Idol and Sears and Ford on
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Naturally enough, sponsors intend their association with a show to strengthen their own brand and so Sears’s sponsorship of home
makeovers makes sense since the company has for generations been selling people
the means to build, repair, and furnish homes. Similarly, Coke, as always, seeks
a youthful demographic. Detailed figures are not disclosed to viewers, but the
sponsors’ financial support is overt because they want their magnanimity to be
recognized. Today’s packages usually involve special announcements before or
during shows, regular spots in commercial breaks (some being designer advertisements that link to a particular series), and product placement. Some companies pay
for naming rights in order to become part of the mise-en-scène, as in “the Kenmore
Pro kitchen” (Top Chef) or the “L’Oréal Paris Makeup Room” (Project Runway).
Because reality formats often have distinct segments, they can also attract partial
sponsorships: for example, contestants might use the sponsor’s product during a
particular challenge (e.g., Bertolli oil on Top Chef) and then win an associated prize
(trip to Italy). Products can be designated as “official brands” (Top Chef) or even
official “partners” (Top Chef: Just Desserts). Broadcasters can also sell packages of
advertising across diverse media in what Michael Curtin terms a “matrix-media”
strategy (2009, p. 15), and so sponsorship can be extended onto an associated web
site or part thereof (e.g., the Top Chef site at Bravotv.com).
Contemporary makeover formats have made a distinct contribution to monetizing television by elevating sponsorship into donorship, a practice that may enhance
the status of commercial support in general (see also Ouellette and Hay, 2008 on
Charity TV). The difference between a donor and a sponsor is not entirely straightforward (donors may or may not also be sponsors), but, while sponsors offset
production costs, donors offer goods to individuals on screen that are kept by these
16
Producing Reality
recipients rather than functioning as background props. While not unprecedented
(e.g., Queen for a Day, Strike it Rich), soliciting donations has not been a common
practice on popular television programming and is still comparatively rare. One
prominent example, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, relied on pre-established
capital networks but asked businesses to perform aberrantly within a middle realm
of ambiguous discourse that is neither strictly commercial nor noncommercial.
By amalgamating gift and market economies, a donation can produce appropriately targeted product placement (items people really need) as well as generate
good publicity for the donor. Both of these can be expected to lower audience
resistance to the advertising involved and it may appear almost a matter of politeness for viewers to give the donor due recognition. No one is so gauche as to
express excitement over how much anything costs, but, of course, as Marcel Mauss
(1990) underlined in 1950, even in gift economies the recipient is obligated to
reciprocate: in this instance, by allowing producers to generate profit from publicizing the exchange. Television donation creates a form of volunteerism-for-profit
in which subjects trade their privacy for goods and services and donors trade
goods and services for the opposite, for publicity: either way, the currency is media
exposure. This model therefore represents not so much a transcendence of commerce as a recirculation through less direct channels that ends up benefiting several
constituencies. But what it demonstrates most emphatically is the unmistakable
power of mass mediation, when for just one second of the camera’s attention
companies are eager to hand over valuable items without expecting direct payment.
Social television
When it comes to the commercialization of associated content beyond the television
program, reality producers have been intent on improving web-enabled brand
extension, the commodification of viewer input, and merchandising. Reality television has provided a strong example of multiplatformicity as an economic strategy
ever since John de Mol launched Big Brother specifically in order to “articulate”
(Hall, 1980) or conjoin television and Internet activity and thereby generate additional revenue streams from coveted youth audiences: at first rolled out for free,
these online videos were subsequently only available for a fee. Reality broadcasters
have also experimented with extending their brand in other professionally produced
programs such as spin-off television shows, web shows, and even radio shows
(Deery, 2012). Today, devices such as computers and smart phones have allowed
an increasing “overflow” (Brooker, 2001) from the television text. Second-screen
viewing (e.g., of a laptop while watching television) can foster greater engagement
with a program while also broadening audience reach and so, increasingly, reality
broadcasters encourage a coactive (simultaneous) or asynchronous use of multiple
devices.5 Much effort has gone into professional web development, presumably
because it is hoped that associated sites will encourage people to watch a show
so they can be part of the conversation. And, because these conversations are public,
they are commodifiable: for example, online space can be sold to advertisers as well
as used to build brand loyalty for a show. Even negative reactions can add value
to the media product, since all viewers – whether they are watching as fans or antifans – are included in the ratings. In the current phase of “social television,” networks increasingly include second-screen streaming and other supplemental
numbers such as Twitter mentions when pitching to advertisers. However, when
professionally produced, the labor status of some of this paratextual material is
currently up for debate: for example, there are discussions about whether broadcaster web sites are forms of promotion or are editorial material and how this work
should be compensated.
From its introduction, the basic premise of all commercial television has been
that viewers constitute a labor force that can be commodified in the form of ratings.
Today, reality television producers demonstrate that a mass medium can also generate income by selling back to audiences content created by audiences. For example,
viewer voting in talent contests profits telecom companies and broadcasters, which
sell back information the audience helped to create (e.g., who won the vote). Even
when voting can be seen as a form of audience resistance, as in vote-for-the-worst
campaigns, it still generates a profit: in fact, if it means some viewers become more
engaged, all the better for associated business interests. Similarly, when viewers build
their own fan/anti-fan web sites, these actions can generate interest in a television
show with no cost to the broadcaster. The audience’s “texting” – that is, continuing
to engage with a television text beyond the broadcast (Deery, 2012, pp. 34–35) –
creates a valuable buzz. But, again, this is an overflow, not a confluence. The broadcaster still owns and controls the television content; it is just that now there is a
potential (not yet a necessity) for more forms of interaction, many of which are
ripe for commercialization.
In other instances, exo-broadcast (outside and beyond the broadcast) interactivity can become another form of commodifiable participation.6 Viewers are ushered
over the broadcast threshold and given the chance to participate when their emails,
texts, or tweets are read on air, usually on reunion and associated talk shows rather
than the regular series. This material then legally belongs to the broadcaster. Another
trend is treating viewers as focus groups (in talent competitions) or as market
research when they are invited to vote in online polls or via text messages. The
viewer’s desire to participate can also be commodified when their telephone calls
fund the program (e.g., Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?). But, in what became
known as the British “phone-in quiz scandals,” it emerged that on several series
viewers were being duped into calling into a prerecorded show, so their chances of
participating were nil. Even when viewer input is legitimately managed, the odds
of anyone winning when calling in to a quiz show are low, and this caused one
parliamentary committee to consider reclassifying vote-in reality shows as a form
of gambling that should come under government control (see House of Commons,
2007).
18
Producing Reality
Merchandising
A more traditional way to convert viewers into consumers is through their
totemistic purchase of merchandise associated with the show, or “entertainment
property,” and this, too, has been enhanced by the Internet. Broadcasters can
sell physical items (coffee mugs) or media content (associated games, music downloads, ringtones). All items extend the brand, but some promise to capture a
replicable element of the show. For example, television spots advertise recipes for
meals prepared on Top Chef, enabling viewers to mimic the activity they witnessed
on television and doubly commodify it, first as television content that viewers
consume by watching the show and then as associated books or DVDs that they
subsequently buy. Banner advertisements sometimes appear on television screens
inviting viewers to purchase music being played on a current episode (e.g., Jersey
Shore, Mob Wives). Another twist involves inviting viewers to extend the show
experience by “winning” participants, as when advertisements offer the chance to
have the Top Chef winner cook for you or to meet cast members in person (e.g.,
Ice Loves Coco, Real Housewives). Such television advertisements are uncommon,
however, and most merchandising is conducted online. Broadcasters often frame
this activity as answering a demand from viewers to enrich their television experience,7 but it also clearly works for “shop-enabling” a range of shows.8 The shift
from show to “showcase” can be presented as pedagogical (online “universities”
offered by Donald Trump or Top Chef), or as a form of mentoring (“shopping
guides” and “tips” about how to achieve the same results seen on television). But,
again, what purports to inform consumers also provides information about consumers, information that can itself be sold or at least used to better target potential
advertisers (Andrejevic, 2004; Philips, 2008).
Commercialization of and by participants
In addition to being filmed for the regular series, reality television participants are
often obliged to appear in subsequent reunion and “sit in” shows, or, with the producer’s permission, they may appear on other television programming, usually on
the same network and in order to promote their own series. Some cast members
are encouraged, or even obliged, to blog on broadcaster sites as “participantviewers” – as cast members who are now witnessing the television episodes for the
first time. They are expected to comment on episodes as they are aired (they may
see a DVD just a few days before each broadcast) with a view to addressing both
audience and other cast members. This opens up new veins of drama and conflict
due to different levels of insight and viewing access: that is, they now see what others
said behind their back while being filmed and can react and retaliate. Many viewers
take the opportunity to respond to the participants’ blogs with their own posts, and
so the drama and the engagement continue. On other occasions, producers encourage a more integrated use of other platforms, as when participants tweet during or
between their shows, hoping to build fan excitement (e.g., on Bravo, VH1). Kim
Kardashian is often seen texting while being filmed; she may be engaged in commercial activity on behalf of the show or she may be fulfilling contracts to plug
other products (for which she currently commands high fees). With multiple devices
come multiple layers of commercialization.
Despite restrictive contracts, it is possible for television participants to make their
appearance profit themselves. Some mimic corporate participation by simply plugging their own wares during filming in a form of unofficial product placement.
Many create new businesses on the strength of their television fame. For example,
on Real Housewives, if the participants don’t have a business to publicize when a
series starts, most do eventually. Hence the show in part creates the wealthy lifestyle
it portrays, even if this wasn’t the producer’s original intention (though, given multiple foreclosures and bankruptcies, their cast needs the income). More specifically,
some participants afford their lifestyle in part by selling its props (clothing, cosmetics, alcohol) to others. A particularly strong example of someone deliberately
leveraging reality television fame to create a substantial commercial brand is former
Apprentice and Real Housewives participant Bethenny Frankel, who went on to
secure the spin-off series Bethenny Ever After. Throughout her many television
appearances, Frankel has relentlessly promoted her Skinnygirl brand and in 2011
sold her cocktail line to a major drinks manufacturer for many millions (though
the exact figure is under dispute).
Another self-serving use of reality television is the appearance of “media zombies”
in the form of past celebrities who stumble around in a half-dead, half-alive state,
many disfigured and unsettling because they no longer resemble their image in their
prime. Whether they are paid directly or not (often “celebrities” must donate
their winnings to charity), television face time is the hoped-for elixir. Meanwhile,
new television faces are strongly motivated to launch their media careers, though
producers expect them to hide this ambition in order to appear more “ordinary”
and novel: these people are therefore not so much amateur as “proto-professional.”
Some dream of their own spin-off series. Others are delighted to secure a part in
another reality series (e.g., Bravo’s Real Housewives stars appear on the parent
broadcaster’s Celebrity Apprentice) or in an all-star/celebrity version of their original
show. And of course it benefits the broadcaster to recycle its own pool of inexpensively produced and contractually bound celebrities. Reality celetoids (Rojek, 2001)
are sometimes attractive to advertisers, also, because they are just sufficiently recognizable to attract attention but cannot command the high fees of higher-status
celebrities and so some (but not many) endorse consumer products in straightforward advertisements (e.g., the Jersey Shore cast). As indicated, television participants
may use their official blogs to plug their own businesses: some even pose as ordinary
viewers in order to mount a stealth promotion of their image-as-brand or to defend
it when under attack – although this of course backfires if they are caught doing so
(e.g., Jill Zarin, ex-member of Real Housewives).9 For many viewers, the participants’
plugging of their own businesses reduces a show’s authenticity and the practice has
attracted considerable criticism when judged to be too greedy or clumsy – although,
20
Producing Reality
again, audience reaction of any kind may ultimately serve the show and producers
likely count on characters whose inept ambitions viewers love to hate.
Reality television regularly provides material for other professional media largely
outside the producer’s or participant’s control. Certainly, in America and the United
Kingdom, reality casts have become a sizable component of the growing circulation
of celebrity news on television (E! News), in magazines (People, Hello!), tabloids
(New York Post, The Sun), middle-brow newspapers (The Daily Mail), and numerous
web sites, some of which are well known (RadarOnline.com, TMZ.com, PerezHilton.
com) and some of which are mounted by freelancers advertising for work. It is
hardly surprising that reality stars feed this economy of gossip since all of reality
television is essentially gossip in that it reveals otherwise private affairs, with an
emphasis on sensational information. But, that even lowly reality television participants are in such demand attests to the insatiable hunger for celebrity material in
contemporary media. Some – most frequently docusoaps stars (Jersey Shore, Keeping
Up with the Kardashians, Real Housewives) – earn substantial fees by selling their
photos to magazines and granting interviews. Again, such coverage can badly
damage their image, but producers may pick cast members whom they predict will
attract free publicity, whether good or bad, in such venues.10
Cutting Costs
All of the commercialization mentioned so far is on top of cost-cutting in production, an area where reality television has also been aggressive. Without going into
great detail about industry practices, it is worth observing that on reality television
profits are made precisely because viewers enjoy the spontaneous and ordinary
effect created by spending less on production than in other programming. Reality
television is largely and properly regarded as a cash cow whose producers have come
up with several ways to shrink budgets. First, broadcasters can buy internationally
traded, prepackaged, and already successful franchises that require little further
creative development beyond some local adaptation. This suits advertisers, who
typically look for a level of predictability in their financial investment (Baruh
and Park, 2010, p. 5). Producers further oblige by setting up controlled environments – both via the physical setup (often isolated and closely monitored) and
through casting and editing – permitting just enough shock and novelty to keep the
shows from getting too tired. Then, on-screen participants expect little or no pay
and are generally underemployed aspiring actors or lower- and lower-middle-class
employees whose casting could be considered a form of outsourcing to cheaper
labor. Producers are able to draw from a wide pool of disposable talent; in fact,
candidates don’t even need to possess talent, for reality television proves one can
commodify lack of ability (witness deluded docusoap characters or embarrassing
talent-show auditions). Even the process of casting can become a commercial
opportunity since speculation about who will be cast or renewed next season often
generates free publicity for the show.
Once cast, participants are typically controlled by tight contracts that few question, presumably because they generally start without professional representation
and are desperate to sign on. Nondisclosure agreements (themselves undisclosed)
appear to be common and not only serve to control the participant (as media
property) and their ability to capitalize on their celebrity but also work to mystify
the production of the show and the degree to which it is planned and managed, in
order to preserve the selling point of realness and authenticity. A participant’s other
media appearances are also guarded to maintain suspense whenever this is profitable (e.g., on elimination formats), though new media leaks often challenge this.
On a series with multiple seasons, participants can negotiate to have their income
increased before resigning. On the one hand, this gives them leverage, but, on the
other, it binds them more tightly, for dangling the possibility of a renewal presumably enhances the producer’s control and encourages participants to fulfill expectations in their performances. There has been little investigation of the legal status of
such performers and whether they ought to be extended the same rights, protections, and compensation as other workers (for some early considerations of legal
matters, see Dauncey, 2010; Andrejevic, 2011; Jost, 2011). Some shows pay high
salaries to professional talent (e.g., judges receive millions per season on American
Idol) and some ordinary participants on very popular multiseason shows can
command increasingly high salaries (in 2011, it was reported to be $100 000 per
episode for Jersey Shore or up to $250 000 per season for Real Housewives). But these
figures are not typical. Most people who appear on reality shows earn only a small
per diem stipend that may not cover loss of wages or other expenses.
On the production side, once they have been sold an idea or an already established format, broadcasters typically outsource to small freelance production companies, which compete to deliver results as quickly and as economically as possible.
So, as Alison Hearn (2010) points out, underneath the often immaterial labor
of cast members who produce the cultural text are lowly paid and extremely hardworking production crews. With rare exceptions (Collins, 2008, pp. 87–88), reality
producers both contain creative costs and avoid strike action by hiring nonunion
workers, who enjoy few of the rights and little of the job protection won by organized labor: this means long hours, low pay, little job security, and few benefits
(Raphael, 2009). Since this employment strategy has been used to fill schedules
during writers’ strikes, it could be regarded as a form of scab labor and it certainly
weakens the bargaining position of others in the industry (Hearn, 2010, p. 244).
Reality producers typically reduce salaries by recategorizing jobs: they employ
lower-paid “story editors” or “segment producers/directors” instead of writers
belonging to a guild, even if line-by-line scripting (e.g., for presenters) as well as
story creation is required. Not having professional writers may also reduce liability
if a cast member says or does something scurrilous. As for filming conditions, these
are also generally inexpensive, although there is quite a range. For example, the
long-running Survivor series requires hire and housing of a large crew in an exotic
location, with heavy insurance and security costs. However, most formats require
only small crews with inexpensive light equipment and little need for elaborate sets,
22
Producing Reality
lights, or makeup, especially if filming on the fly. Most economize on the location,
too (though it may appear to be luxurious): for instance, by renting an existing
building or expecting participants to provide the location themselves (their own
home). However, many long-running series eventually cover more expensive travel
segments, presumably to keep viewers and participants interested (even Jersey Shore
went to Italy).
Commercialization as Topic
Several reality series illustrate, as a topic, the playing out of commercialization in
private life from the perspective of consumers or retailers. Many formats are predicated on the idea that consuming goods and services is a highly significant activity
that produces positive results. Hence, if the overarching economic point of television is to commodify leisure time, this content encourages people to commodify
other discretionary time, by shopping. Makeover narratives, in particular, promote
an energetic but strategic participation in consumer culture, while other formats
display a very high level of commercial activity as a spectacle for viewers to either
admire or condemn. Here, as elsewhere on reality television, producers rely on the
easy drama of extreme behavior and, even when some of these extravagant displays
become cautionary tales, the programs still fulfill their commercial function by
attracting viewers and advertising. The same applies to series that reveal the sometimes troubling commercialization of personal relationships, some as a direct result
of being on television. A major theme in recent docusoaps (Keeping Up with the
Kardashians, Real Housewives) has been the corruption of personal relationships as
a result of their being filmed for profit. Both cast members and their viewers speculate about the extent to which exposure and greed are turning personal relationships
into business relationships, even among family members.
Strategic consumption
The mundane act of entering a retail store can in some formats be presented as
revelatory and life changing. Since shopping is keyed to values as significant as selfesteem and identity, viewers are warned against neglecting what their own consumer choices might signal: in other words, the portrayal of consumption is meant
to stimulate consumption. Style makeovers and consumerist docusoaps suggest that
consumption is a form of mediation in that it mediates one’s role in society and
mediates between people. Shopping may even be elevated into an art form, as when
hosts on decor and real estate shows promote what Mike Featherstone characterizes
as a late twentieth-century “life of aesthetic consumption” (1991, p. 67). Whether
the budgets are modest (Changing Rooms, Trading Spaces) or high-end (Million
Dollar Decorators), these shows encourage everyone to see their home environment
as a place that should be aesthetically pleasing.
Acquiring retail items is made compelling through techniques such as time compression, where subjects move at the speed of advertising, not everyday life. The
swiftness of the makeover’s commodity-enabled transformations adds to the power
of consumption. But, in more industrial terms, the pace is rapid because mediation
makes time into a commodity and these shows underline that time on a mass
medium such as television still commands high fees. As for the sociological, television makeovers suggest one can amass instant cultural capital and a detachment
from most social underpinnings (e.g., class or race); this produces something resembling the conservative conceit of the “sovereign consumer” who supposedly makes
free choices without sociopolitical constraints. Makeover formats ratify the latecapitalist (particularly neoliberal) emphasis on self-promotion and impression
management, an instrumental relation to the self occurring in the context of postindustrial employment, and even familial, insecurity. Hence the need for the “enterprising self ” (Rose, 1996) or “belabored self ” (McGee, 2005) who is encouraged to
work on self-branding (Hearn, 2008; see also Ouellette and Hay, 2008; Redden,
2008; Weber, 2009; Palmer, 2011). This work may include a physical redesign in
conformity to the ideal imagery of media advertising as depicted in surgical makeovers, in which the body comes to be regarded as a property that one owns and
inhabits. Like other properties, it functions under capitalism as an investment
and as a commercial prospect with an assessable market value (Deery, 2004b, 2006,
2012). As part of an expanding discourse of imperative television – a type of programming that includes talk shows, news magazines, and shopping channels – all
makeover subjects are encouraged to regard themselves as commodities whose
“image” (a PR term) must be promoted. They are exhorted to improve via consumption, not by governments, family members, or friends but by representatives
of large commercial agencies that survey and discipline them in ways that would be
regarded as highly objectionable, as well as illegal, if performed by noncommercial,
governmental forces (surveillance, destruction of property, home invasion). Watching subjects bow to instructions on television makeovers hints at how consumerism
disciplines and socializes elsewhere. These makeovers’ recipes and regimes appear
to support Baudrillard’s assertion that “consumption is an active, collective behavior: it is something enforced, a morality, an institution. It is a whole system of values,
with all that expression implies in terms of group integration and social control
functions” (1998, p. 81).
Longer-form docusoaps give us a more leisurely insight into how subjects have
come to embrace a market-based understanding of human relationships and the
resultant refraction of the private into the commercial and the public into the publicized. One striking trend is the privatization of private life and professionalization
of social relationships, both of which indicate a deepening of marketization. Reality
docusoaps highlight services that previously would have been performed by oneself
or by friends and family but are now professionalized and therefore commercialized.
For example, few self-respecting “housewives” (Real Housewives) are without personal assistants, personal shoppers, or in-house stylists; in other shows, sometimes
alarming job titles emerge, such as “maternity concierge” (Pregnant in Heels). We
24
Producing Reality
witness some employees becoming an ersatz family (Bethenny Ever After) and family
members becoming employees (Real Housewives). Currently, a controversial example
of a deeply commercialized private life is that portrayed in Keeping Up with the
Kardashians. Many viewers express concern that a mother is exploiting her offspring
(including sexually) for commercial gain in this series. Similar disgust is expressed
at the portrayal of children in Toddlers & Tiaras and at the working conditions of
the multiple Gosselin children (Jon & Kate Plus 8), where parents appear to treat
offspring as commodities who are indeed more open to exploitation than child
actors on more regulated, unionized programming.
Hyperconsumption as spectacle
Another type of reality programming, prominent in the past half decade, depicts
high- or hyperconsumption and encourages viewers to enjoy its ritualistic, theatrical, or fantastic dimensions, a form of “wealth voyeurism” offered by a whole stable
of shows featuring luxurious, hedonistic lifestyles (e.g., anything with “millionaire”
in the title). Spending is lavish but socially sanctioned in an increasing number of
programs featuring the largely feminine ritual of the big wedding. This prime
example of “event spending,” the fruition of years of consumer training, provides
an intense version of several consumer patterns: positional consumption to establish status; an infatuation with goods accorded a deep symbolic meaning; the
substitution of goods (dress) for people (groom); and, of course, the pleasure of
excess. Weddings are virtually guaranteed to provide drama, but the real payoff is
how much business they generate – both on and off screen – especially as there is
frequently an “affective override” of budgets and financial concerns. In other programming more often coded as masculine, buying beyond one’s immediate needs,
as in “collecting,” is validated because subjects claim it is educational, has historical
significance, or is a skillful sport (e.g., American Pickers, Pawn Stars). Sometimes
these activities are also framed as patriotic, thus bringing nationalism into the commercial sphere either as a basic audience attractor or to stimulate more engagement
– also evident in fervent nationalistic voting in transnational talent competitions
(Kraidy, 2010; Punathambekar, 2011). In America, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
is striking for making national pride commercially productive in a post-9/11 recuperation that may be enjoyed as a substitute for government failure to deliver on
promised makeovers (nation building) in the larger geopolitical context (Deery,
2012) (on commercial nationalism elsewhere see Volcic and Andrejevic, 2011).
Incompetent consumption provides another kind of drama, especially when
attributed to lower-class vulgarity or lack of discipline (Bayou Billionaires, Bridezillas, Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food). Some formats purport to offer training or
rehab to increase consumer literacy (Bank of Mum and Dad, SuperScrimpers, You’re
Cut Off!). Others dwell on various types of consumer dysfunction, some of which
are regarded as a sign of laziness and incompetence (Clean House) and others as
requiring full psychiatric intervention (Hoarders). These portray not the drama of
successfully harnessing the power of commodities but the morbidity of letting
consumption get out of control. Launched during a recessionary cycle, hoarding
shows can be seen as a testament, ultimately, to the power of consumption and the
need to respect its impact and consequences. In actuality, hoarders may be men or
women, but the majority of those featured on television are female. This conforms
to a wider pattern when it comes to extremes, for across many television formats
extreme spending is currently enacted mostly by women (docusoaps, weddings) and
extreme (risky, difficult) earning by men (Deadliest Catch, Gold Rush) – another
affirmation perhaps of the old trope of woman as consumer and man as provider.
Business reps
Finally, an increasing number of reality programs have recently centered on retail
businesses and offer mostly positive images of the desire to make a profit. When
there are incompetencies or problems, experts are there to offer the middle-class
business owners moral support. Some teach management skills in order to improve
the profits of a family business, as in Gordon Ramsay’s many interventions into
restaurants in Britain and America or Tabitha’s Salon Takeover, both of which – after
some heavy criticism of both management and employees – ultimately reassert the
authority of the owner and the expendability of the employee. If large corporations
are involved there is often a softening of commercial motives into showcases for
“caring capitalism” (Deery, 2012), where philanthropy appears to take precedence
over profit in allegories of corporate generosity (see also Ouellette and Hay, 2008).
In some instances of social entrepreneurship, individual capitalists help strangers
(Secret Millionaire) or employees (Undercover Boss) (see Hollows and Jones, 2010;
Biressi, 2011). But these formats ultimately support the market logic of self-help
over collective welfare. They focus on a single giver and individual recipient,
someone who is usually rewarded for demonstrating great effort and initiative and
whose reward, in turn, provides valuable publicity both for specific companies
and for the often tarnished image of the rank of CEO. The fact that only a handful
of people are being helped is not criticized; rather, inadequacies are inverted and
the paucity of support is capitalized on because helping individuals generates drama
and ratings. When, alternatively, drama stems from the brutality of hard-nosed
competition (The Apprentice, Dragons’ Den, Shark Tank), viewers are encouraged to
admire effort, ambition, and the opportunities afforded by a less sentimental but
still meritocratic capitalism. Or, at least, these are the attitudes often expressed by
those on screen. For of course individual viewers will react individually to any given
content at any given time. They may or may not be stimulated to consume or to
think in a particular way about consumption practices based on what they see on
screen.
My goal has been to simply underline the commercialization that exists in reality
programming (the strategies used and cues provided) and to demonstrate that what
script this “unscripted” programming more than anything else are the commercial
26
Producing Reality
forces that are present before, during, and after production. On the one hand, commercial pressures shape and even distort program content so that it may seem less
realistic and less genuine. On the other hand, I suggest that one of reality television’s
strongest claims to realism is its representation of the increasingly commercialized
nature of everyday life in societies that produce this programming. When the commercialization is hidden or unacknowledged, this entertainment is performing at
an even deeper level of realism in that it incorporates the similarly concealed commercial undercurrents of many contemporary cultures. These, too, may shape, or
one might say distort, the content of everyday experience – whether we are aware
of it or not.
Notes
1 For an extended analysis of the commercial nature of reality television see Deery
(2012).
2 Unfortunately, space considerations mean that I cannot go into as much detail or cite
as many specific works as I would like.
3 “Brand pushers” are paid to say positive things about a brand in online
conversations.
4 The annual rate of growth of product placement between 1999 and 2004 was 16.3
percent (Lehu, 2007, p. 34).
5 Other discussions of reality television and the Internet include Andrejevic (2004),
Holmes (2004), Jenkins (2006), Ross (2008), and Gillan (2011).
6 In my discussion, subjects participate in and interact with the television text.
7 This is the sentiment expressed by NBC’s vice-president of “interactive development”
(Futon Critic 2004).
8 In 2004, NBC-Universal hired a company called Delivery Agent to enable viewers to
purchase products seen on television by visiting a show’s web site and clicking on an
online store or calling a toll-free number. See Deliveryagent.com.
9 Many fans were upset to discover that Zarin apparently posed as a viewer to defend her
television actions and, under a pseudonym, posted glowing reviews of her book on
Amazon.
10 One piece of advice for mounting a successful reality shows is: “Cast somebody the
paparazzi are going to want to chase and exploit” (Caudle, 2011, p. 144).
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2
Reality Television and the Political
Economy of Amateurism
Andrew Ross
Many commentators have recently questioned whether the profit-making of Web
2.0 platform owners depends on the exploitation of “free labor” on the part of often
unwitting users. Should we regard the techniques of crowdsourcing, data mining,
and amateur blog aggregation as examples of unfair labor practices? After all, the
ubiquitous explosion of free online content has seen the widespread closure of
newspapers, magazines, and overseas news bureaus and the scattering of their union
jobs to the winds. So, too, the growth of mini-tasking marketplace platforms, such
as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, is further slicing up and distributing fragments of
labor across a widely dispersed population, leaving no trace of actual employment
with which to implicate an employer in any legal network of obligations. Where the
user’s labor cannot be gotten for free (Terranova, 2000), it is being pulverized and
priced down to a piece rate.1
Participants in the debate about online labor often come close to assuming that
digital technology is a causal agent – responsible in and of itself for punching a
colossal hole through the universe of employment norms and for reducing professional pay scales to dust. Yet blaming new media is a sorry instance of the fallacy of
technological determinism at work. Among other things, it ignores the proliferation
of unpaid labor in “old media” and other parts of the employment landscape since
the late 1990s.
There is no doubt that new media, which has the technical capacity to shrink
the price of distribution to almost zero, is hosting the most fast-moving industrial
efforts to harness the unpaid effort of participants. But old media has also seen
heavy inroads from the volunteer, or amateur, economy. Nowhere is this more
visible than in the rise of reality television, which was recognized and nurtured as
a degraded labor sector almost from the outset. New technologies have had a role
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Producing Reality
to play in the development of the sector, though largely as enablers rather than as
brokers of the changes in employment norms. Likewise, neoliberal ideology is a
powerful component, since it has ushered in the kind of casino mentality in which
contestant volunteering has transformed much of our commerce in culture into an
amateur talent show, with jackpot prizes for a few winners and hard-luck schwag
for everyone else. But the overriding factor in shaping reality television’s industrial
profile is the drive on the part of producers and owners to slice costs by eroding or
circumventing work standards established by the entertainment unions.
The art of producing gratis media content by showcasing the vox populi has a
long history – its origins can arguably be traced to the establishment of Letters to
the Editor columns in print publications. Since these contributions were selected,
edited, and in many cases fabricated in order to support the editorial line of newspapers and magazines, they offer a good illustration of how supposedly unsolicited
public opinion can be generated, shaped, or even ventriloquized. Another example
is the advice column, popularized by agony aunts such as Ann Landers, Marjorie
Proops, Abigail van Buren, and others, which also depended on selective reader
input. Today’s web sites that depend on user input, whether for the main action or
in the form of comments posted in response to a featured item, are in direct linear
descent from the first Letters to the Editor. More raw and unfiltered by far, they
build on the popularity and cost-effectiveness of their print antecedents.
In recent years, as open comments sections (“comment is free”) have lengthened
and proliferated, more and more online newspaper versions have turned to crowdsourcing appeals for readers to generate free columns, images, videos, designs, factchecking, and other information supplies (see Howe, 2008). The principle underlying
these appeals is that readers will be gratified to participate, and that the results will
be more authentic, especially if they are drawing on skills and knowledge unavailable to a commissioned reporter. Outside the mainstream media, this principle also
applies to the widespread uptake of crowdsourcing as a semi-industrial technique
for extracting ideas, opinions, designs, and intelligence with little or no compensation for the provider other than name recognition. Informal evidence suggests that,
as long as a task can be advertised as fun or cool, there is a good chance you can
get it done for free, or for a pittance, by the seemingly ever-obliging crowd. Moreover, if some of the input seems to be very professional, that is because either
the crowdsourcing call is specifically crafted to appeal to professionals on their
downtime or else because it quite probably comes from someone who used to be
a professional employee and has been cast into the amateur demimonde of the
volunteer content provider.
One of the ways to contextualize the rise of the “creative industries” over the
course of the past decade is to interpret it quite literally as an effort to industrialize
creativity, aimed, of course, at the market prize of intellectual property. Adapting
the tempo of creative work to an industrial template is an acute managerial challenge, however, and, in a jackpot intellectual-property economy, the costs of
competing are considerable. The turn to crowdsourcing offers a more impersonal
solution that slices costs and delivers owners from any employer-type obligations.
Reality Television and the Political Economy of Amateurism
31
Not only is the crowd smarter than trained employees but also you don’t need to
make social security contributions to take advantage of its wisdom, or put up with
the wayward personalities of the creatives on payroll.
Crowdsourcing has become the latest business technique for extracting free
amateur input. But the first significant lurch in the direction of using free content
as a business model occurred in the television industry of the late 1980s, when
producers responded to the explosion of cable channels and the concomitant fragmentation of audiences by introducing reality television genre formats that drove
down production inputs and professional labor costs.
The Assault on Labor
Chad Raphael (1997) has shown that the networks and production companies took
advantage of the newly deregulated landscape to launch an attack on labor, initially
on below-the-line workers (such as technicians, engineers, and extras) who had
weaker unions than the more well-paid talent.2 But this assault, which included
outsourcing production to nonunion locations as well as squeezing existing pay
scales, was followed by efforts to bypass the talent unions (the American Federation
of Television and Radio Artists, the Writers Guild of America (WGA), the Directors
Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild, and the American Guild of Variety
Artists), which had more bargaining power. The response was a strike wave on the
part of several of these media unions and craft guilds. The 22-week-long 1988 strike
by the WGA was especially significant in the annals of reality television, because it
opened the door to the sector’s longest-running show, Cops. Faced with an acute
content shortage, and on the lookout for scab material, the Fox network greenlighted this unscripted show, which required no actors’ salaries and boasted extralow production costs. Indeed, much of the cinema verité feel of reality programming
was pioneered by the use, in Cops, of handheld cameras to capture real-life police
officers as they pursued their more action-oriented assignments. So, too, the series
initiated the intimate association of the reality genres with law enforcement, surveillance, and criminality, a recipe that has been so popular, and profitable, with the
viewing public.
Since 2001, with the jumbo success of Survivor and Big Brother, the programming
share claimed by reality television and amateur “challenge” game shows has ballooned. The production costs of these shows are a fraction of what producers pay
for conventional, scripted drama, while the ratings and profits have been mercurial.
Indeed, these shows are so cheap to make that virtually all the production costs are
earned back from the first network showing – syndicated or overseas sales are pure
profit. From the outset, owners have insisted that producers and editors are not so
much “writers,” who pen scripts and dialogue, as editors, who patch together chunks
of real life. Anyone who views raw footage of reality shows can see that the dialogue
is carefully scripted and plotted, and that the “real-life” scenes, usually shot in multiple takes, are highly constructed. Nonetheless, this fiction is used to keep the WGA
32
Producing Reality
out of reality programming. So, too, networks have begun to categorize game shows
as “reality” in order to produce them without contracts. Nonunion shows such as
Hollywood Squares, Let’s Make A Deal, and Star Search were at one time covered by
a WGA contract.
Because the fledgling reality shows, and the new ones that sprang up in their
aftermath, were unaffected by the 1988 strike, they very quickly assumed the status
of a scab genre, and efforts to unionize their production workforce have been
unceasing. The WGA strike of 2008–2009 is generally remembered, and lionized, as
the writers’ struggle for their share of residual payments – basically royalties from
rebroadcasts or reuse of film, television, or commercials. This time around, the
union was claiming, for its members, revenue from online versions of content to
which they had contributed. In the public mind, this was generally seen as a fair
claim because creators of intellectual property surely deserve to enjoy the fruits of
their labor. Less well known is what the union had to bargain away in return for
recognition of these claims. Since 2005, one of the WGA’s top campaign goals has
been to organize employees of television reality shows, and, while union leaders
entered the 2008 strike vowing to achieve this goal, the ultimate condition for reaching an agreement on the part of the media moguls (represented by the Alliance of
Motion Picture and Television Producers) was that the WGA take off the table its
claim for jurisdiction over the reality sector (and the animation sector). The WGA’s
above-the-line talent – the writers who feed the industry’s copyright milk cow –
were able to win their residuals but only by sacrificing the right to organize their
peers on reality shows.
This raw deal speaks volumes about the ongoing restructuring of the creative
industries (or the copyright industries as they are more bluntly termed in the United
States) into doughnut economies – with a small high-wage core of intellectualproperty generators surrounded by a periphery of contingent, or precarious,
workers. As these industries have expanded their ability to distribute overseas
through each new technological generation of media formats, the additional residuals have brought benefits to those above the line. However, the capacity to produce
overseas, in right-to-work states, or in the new reality genres has only degraded the
livelihoods of below-the-line workers, even those who belong to unions.
Not surprisingly, the nonunionized reality sector teems with substandard con
ditions. Below-the-line workers, such as production assistants, loggers, assistant
editors, drivers, and other technical crew, are often asked to work 18-hour days with
no meal breaks and no health or other benefits, and they face employer coercion to
turn in time cards early. Wage rates are generally half of what employees on scripted
shows are paid, and most overtime goes unpaid (Elisberg, 2008). Writers, pressured
to produce by just-in-time network schedules, are faced with the same roster of
wage and hours violations, and, since they are usually hired at will, suffer chronic
job instability (Writers Guild of America, West, 2007). Many have been threatened
with blacklisting if they were to take steps to organize. When writers seeking to
organize on America’s Next Top Model walked off the job in the summer of 2006,
the entire story department, along with their jobs, was eliminated. In 2008, the WGA
33
organized a “Truth Tour” to publicize the numerous labor violations logged by
FremantleMedia, the reality giant that produces American Idol (the highest-rated
show on US television) and other prime-time programs such as America’s Got
Talent. A former American Idol production coordinator, Justin Buckles, described
his experience working on the show: “When I was hired I was told to expect to work
12 hour days. What I wasn’t told was that it would actually be 15 to 20 hour days,
many times working seven days a week.” He estimated that “for all my work I was
paid a flat weekly rate of $550. When I did the math it came out to less than $4.50
an hour” (Writers Guild West, 2008).
Nor are the amateur contestants much better off. They are not considered “actors,”
and so do not enjoy the rights and protections that an actors’ union would afford.
Yet, as befits a jackpot economy, talent on the top shows can make a bundle. Indeed,
some are paid very handsome fees for each episode, though most of their remuneration comes from aftermarket revenue in the form of endorsements. However,
the vast majority receive trifling stipends, if anything, and the price for their
shot at exposure is to endure conditions – deprived of sleep and plied with hard
alcohol – that are designed to spark tension, conflict, and confrontation on screen.
Indeed, a jumbo budget allocation for alcohol is often a standard feature of exposés
of off-screen treatment of fresh recruits. A growing number of lawsuits in the United
States, United Kingdom, and France are aimed at establishing legal protections for
talent as well as for writers, editors, and production assistants. In the fall of 2007,
New Mexico’s attorney general even investigated allegations that the producers of
CBS’s Kid Nation had violated child labor laws by forcing the participants, aged 8
to 15 years, to haul wagons, cook meals, manage stores, and clean latrines as part
of the reality show.
Legal scrutiny and public attention to the chronic labor violations have resulted
in some victories. In late 2010, writers and producers working as “permalancers”
(long-time freelancers) for Atlas Media and ITV Studios (which produces shows
such as The First 48, Four Weddings, and Steven Seagal: Lawman) voted to be represented by the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE). ITV fired a long-term
producer who was active in the union drive and appealed the union victory, but
WGAE organizers ultimately prevailed in a landmark National Labor Relations
Board decision. The WGAE also won a bargaining unit at the nonfiction production
company Lion Television (Cash Cab for Discovery Network, History Detectives and
America Revealed for PBS, and Megadrive for MTV).
A Symmetrical Bargain?
Reality television’s violations of work standards occur in the sector of old media
that is most clearly aligned with the mentality of neoliberalism. It is an ethos that
demands that we are all participants in a game that rewards only a few, while
the condition of entry into this high-stakes lottery is to leave your safety gear at the
door; only the most spunky, agile, and dauntless will prevail, but often at high
34
Producing Reality
psychic cost. The creative economy itself is promoted as a sweepstake with lavish
rewards in the form of blockbuster hits and returns on intellectual property. Once
they are in this game, some of the players do indeed hit the jackpot (shades of
Slumdog Millionaire), but most subsist, neither as employers nor traditional employees, in a limbo of uncertainty, juggling their options, massaging their contacts,
managing their overcommitted time, and developing coping strategies for handling
the uncertainty of never knowing where their next project, or source of income, is
coming from. The toll on mental and physical health can be considerable.
One of the more high-profile examples was Susan Boyle’s bout of medication and
institutionalization after she was vaulted into the limelight on Britain’s Got Talent.
Boyle was the would-be Scottish Édith Piaf, whose vocal prowess on the show
on April 11, 2009 (singing “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables) brought her
instant global fame. The stark contrast between her humble station and the nobility
of her voice seemed to catch the mood of the recession. Indeed, the story of this
unemployed and socially isolated woman who hit the media jackpot was an effective
public parable for hard times, redolent of the Depression genre of “rags to riches,”
which brought us Seabiscuit and other unlikely peoples’ champions. The lucrative
talent-show industry was in the right place at the right time to sell us this kind of
solace.
The psychic toll visibly borne by Boyle and other contestants is not simply a result
of exposure to the intense scrutiny that comes with instant celebrity. The high stress
is also generated out of the kind of emotional labor that is demanded of amateur
on-air participants. This is most illustrative in genre formats that require them not
to act so much as to “act out” the legacy of highly traumatic experiences in their
lives – breakups, marital discord, accidents, deaths, layoffs, profound humiliations.
Alternatively, they may be forced to react, with a largely improvised affective toolkit,
to unforeseen scenarios, unwanted encounters, or revelations of personal information that producers insert to generate on-screen drama. More mundanely, the
requirement to “be real” while on the air dissolves the boundaries that are ordinarily
observed in conventional dramatic play between being “in character” and “out of
character.” Highly trained actors can typically earn kudos by messing with these
boundaries, but they retain their professional understanding of the distinction
between life and work. But amateurs are not conditioned to assimilate the experience of being on camera and under scrutiny at any waking moment, as in, say, a
surveillance-based reality show. Some of them “graduate” in the art of exposure
management and turn their short-lived star turns into a career asset, rather like
one-hit performers who try to live off the diminishing audience warmth generated
by their moment in the sun. Many more are undone by the struggle to reconcile the
acute public display of their interiority with the need to reclaim their privacy in its
aftermath. Was I really famous? And, if so, what do I have to show for it?
Some commentators gloss this predicament by citing Andy Warhol’s quip that
“in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” Warhol’s axiom was the
quintessence of what Pop represented. It was aimed at taking down the hierarchy
of taste. With no gatekeepers in place, anyone could climb up on the klieg-lit stage
35
of fame. Warhol’s career focused more and more on the machinery of star-making,
and, in this regard at least, he was the godfather of reality television. Members of
his coterie were personally averse to recognizing the tragic underbelly of highprofile exposure, instead displaying it in full.
Today’s celebrity culture has seen an industrial uptake of Warhol’s maxim. It is
based on production cycles where the product has to be replaced on a regular basis.
As Graeme Turner points out, “television’s production of celebrity can truly be
regarded as a manufacturing process into which the product’s planned obsolescence
is incorporated” (Turner, 2006, p. 155). The most extreme examples are the fleeting
attention-getters that Chris Rojeck calls “celetoids”: “lottery winners, one-hit
wonders, stalkers, whistle-blowers, sports’ arena streakers, have-a-go-heroes, mistresses of public figures and the various other social types who command media
attention one day, and are forgotten the next” (Rojek, 2001, p. 20). The use of ordinary people as raw material for the production of celebrity is a low-cost profit
engine, but it is not the chief purpose of the industry. As Turner argues, the point
is to generate more and more low-overhead programming for the producers and
the media organizations that employ them. Old, or familiar, genres are provided
with a universe of new content by this seemingly inexhaustible formula of performing ordinariness.
As is often pointed out, a high degree of performative labor is more and more
expected in a whole range of service occupations and is routinely organized to
provide customer gratification. The spectrum of requisite skills can run from meek
politesse to virtuoso camp, and, in this respect, the amateur talent show is only a
formalized showcase for this norm. Even when they do not win, participants are
supposed to draw some bankable advantage from on-air exposure. In general, in
the reality sector, the prospect of free self-promotion on a wide broadcasting platform is considered to be an adequate form of compensation – it is a potentially
more lucrative asset in the attention economy than the fixed, or measurable, wages
of industrialization. As Alison Hearn puts it, “reality programming provides the
means for individuals to produce their own image personae, or ‘branded selves,’
which, potentially, can be traded for cash down the line” (Hearn, 2008a, p. 203).
In recent years, it has become a realistic career option for would-be contenders
to pursue fame, regardless of which genre or sector of performance can deliver it.
They begin by making the casting rounds – some are now coached in schools
devoted to these reality television careers – and they become freelance fixtures on
the circuit, ready to plug their persona into whichever show is recruiting. In some
cases, this can involve being paid as an audience member to supply a variety of
walk-on roles that fit the bill. In others, they have to prepare their persona for a
makeover, by rendering themselves legible as characters in desperate need of a conversion. Indeed, in Hearn’s view, the “transformation television” genres, which
instruct the insecure and downtrodden (usually female and underemployed) in the
art of self-improvement are the purest expressions of self-exploitation in the reality
sector (Hearn, 2008b). The entertainment industry has always been staffed by challengers, extras, and bit players who eke a living out of unsung roles. They are able
36
Producing Reality
to do so because of relatively stable union pay scales. But, for the contenders in the
reality sector, their meal ticket is more indirectly related to their shot at fame.
The outcome, for the producer or owner, is a virtually wage-free proposition. So,
too, as Mark Andrejevic (2004) has argued, they can always bank on audiences who
watch in order to learn how to be watched themselves.
So, is there any symmetry in this trade-off? Do participants extract enough benefit
for themselves to justify the lack of remuneration for their efforts? To be sure, recognition of their image or talent can, over time, bring some measure of security,
because social capital has a utility well beyond the moment. No doubt, this is a
kind of labor power with its market price. Seasoned freelancers who navigate the
turbulent air of the creative industries get used to assessing the risks of playing the
attention game, and they make their investments of time and energy accordingly.
Those who can stay afloat make a living, however precarious, out of piecing together
lumps of income from multi-gigging in various genres. Youthful entrants are the
most roundly exploited in this kind of economy. Lured by the glamour of media
and entertainment, they are eager to get a foothold in these industries, and have
little choice but to sacrifice short-term compensation in hopes of building a resume.
For college graduates with family money to keep them buoyant for a year or two,
serial unpaid internships are more and more common (Perlin, 2011). Yet the institutionalization of working for nothing in an internship further degrades the industry’s employment norms.
On the employer’s side, there are considerably fewer pitfalls. The unpaid internships, nonunion wages, and at-will employment contracts are all clear assets to
producers scrambling to compete for network slots. The networks get cut-price
programming, and the industry as a whole enjoys untold benefits from a booming
sector that eats away at the work standards of occupations that are still heavily
unionized by US norms. In addition, the financial risks involved in production are
minimal compared to those incurred by conventional scripted shows, which may
not see a return for investors until they have been in syndication for some time.
Given this balance of hazards, it is difficult to conclude that there is all that much
symmetry in the trade-off. Yet it is not so easy to diagnose the experience of the
contenders as unfairly exploited. What counts as “fair labor” in this kind of working
environment? Today, there is fairly broad agreement on what constitutes fair labor
in the waged workplace of industry, or, to be more accurate, there are limits to the
range of disagreement on the topic. People understand, more or less, what a sweatshop is, and also recognize that its conditions are unfair. By contrast, we have no
yardstick for judging fairness in deregulated sectors of the creative industries such
as reality television, especially when the generational norms are rapidly shifting. The
under-40 workforce who have known nothing but precarious underemployment
have their own understanding of what counts as fair or unfair labor, and it is highly
contextual and subject to continual readjustment. Are they not the arbiters of their
own exploitation? To argue otherwise is to come close to charging them with “false
consciousness.”
37
Yet, for those critics who argue that reality television and its kissing cousins in
DIY new media are new forms of democratic access that offer a way to circumvent
the traditional gatekeepers of taste and opportunity, it is important to bear in mind
that media ownership is becoming more consolidated and monopolistic (Hartley,
2007). As fast as these opportunities for self-fashioning open up in the attention
economy, access to the everyday business of culture and information is more and
more concentrated in the holdings of a handful of corporate giants such as Bertelsmann, Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, and Viacom, while AOL, Facebook, Google,
Microsoft, and Yahoo now account for the overwhelming majority of daily Web
traffic.
Much has also been written about the formal aesthetics of reality television,
including claims about its democratic embrace of ordinary people’s lives and the
populist thrust of its DIY, participatory feel. After all, Eisenstein, Bresson, and other
film auteurs used untrained, ordinary people as actors to generate fresh cinematic
performances. The Italian neorealists made this a point of principle, in the understanding that professional actors were not always well equipped to convey the
authentic flavor of the communities where scenes were located and filmed. Many
of their film formats were dictated by limited budgets, but that was not the primary
reason for preferring amateur talent. Media theorists have long called for democratizing the means of production. Few would put reality television in a line of
descent from Eisenstein, but is it not a response, in part, to these utopian pleas for
a more progressive kind of media? According to Hearn, “any insistence that ‘reality’
refers to radical innovations in television show formats, or innocently depicts
unstructured, free-flowing, improvised action is a red herring.” Its “entire raison
d’etre,” in her opinion, “is to bypass traditional production formats and business
models in order to increase profit for producers and networks” (Hearn, 2010, p. 71).
A similar line of argument applies to the promise of interactivity that reality
television offers. Many shows and genres do not expect the audience to be passive,
and openly invite home viewers to pass judgment on the contestants. For sure, this
development has energized media critics enaged in the field of audience studies.
After all, the audience is now “in the text” as Su Holmes (2004) pointed out, rather
than simply being its consumer. While many viewers may feel empowered by being
given a vote, it is clear this is not the kind of participation that will alter the relations
of production, let alone the ownership of cultural expression in these industrial
formats.
Online connectivity is not just providing the interactive component for select
reality television shows. Internet alternatives have become popular in their own
right in recent years. Google is moving to capitalize on the mass following generated
by YouTube’s homegrown stars such as Ray William Johnson, Shane Dawson
(ShaneDawsonTV), Dane Boedigheimer (Annoying Orange), Justine Ezarik (iJustine), and Freddie Wong and Brandon Laatsch (the Freddiew channels). Amateurs
like these share advertising revenue if they sign up with Google’s AdSense program,
which places advertisements all over the Web. When the performers start to attract
38
Producing Reality
large enough audiences, they can sign up for the YouTube Partner Program, which
gives them a larger portion of the revenue. These celebrity YouTubers enjoy the
advantages of a more direct relationship with advertisers and other forms of revenue,
relatively unmediated by industry middlemen. Some of them are reported to be
earning six figures a year. But YouTube is fast developing its own channels to establish more control over this new talent base with a goal to setting up shop as an
explicit alternative to broadcast television. As is the case with all grassroots online
ventures, the window for independents to flourish before industrial uptake by an
Internet giant is narrowing by the year.
Faced with this dispiriting assessment of the political economy of reality television, those of us weaned on media studies’ classic eulogies (Walter Benjamin, Hans
Magnus Enzensberger) about the concept of active media audiences and independent producers might be forgiven for mouthing “watch what you wish for.” Is it
possible that all of the sector’s rich sociality could be little more than a free input
for the latest model of capital accumulation? If so (and it looks as if a significant
component of the answer is yes), we need to ask how and why contemporary media
has emerged as an optimum field for realizing the long-standing capitalist dream
of stripping waged labor costs to the bone while diffusing the work of production
into what Mario Tronti and other operaismo theorists of the Italian school called
the “social factory.”
Notes
1 The debate about online free labor was initiated by Terranova’s 2000 Social Text essay
“Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” and it entered mainstream
public discussion with the publications of The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace,
YouTube and the Rest of Today’s User-Generated Media are Destroying Our Economy, Our
Culture, and Our Values (Keen, 2007) and Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Anderson,
2009). The contributors to a special issue of Ephemera touch on various elements of the
debate as well: see Burston, Dyer-Witheford, and Hearn (2010); see also Ross (2012).
2 The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which represents video editors,
courted controversy by stepping in to unionize the struck show.
References
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citizens, Ephemera, 10 (3–4), www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/10
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(accessed May 29, 2013).
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Hartley, J. (2007) “Reality” and the plebiscite, in K. Riegert (ed.), Politicotainment: Television’s
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3
When Everyone Has Their Own
Reality Show
Mark Andrejevic
Not long after the 9/11 attacks I received several related media requests about, oddly
enough, reality television. The reporters who contacted me had more or less the
same question: now that there was enough tragically “real” reality on our collective
national plate (I was working in the United States at the time), did that mean that
we were going to stop bingeing on junk-food culture such as reality television? The
calls were part of the “time-to-get-serious” response to the attacks: for a brief
moment we were told that the media would turn its attention to meaningful issues
and that the rest of us should wake up, get sober, and shake off the languor caused
by an unhealthy diet of trivial and empty culture. Time magazine famously (and
prematurely) proclaimed the end of “The Age of Irony” (Rosenblatt, 2001) and the
New York Times told us that we’d been jarred out of our “deep cocoon of selfgratification and self-improvement” to remember “how little all our baubles and all
our booty have to do with who we really are” (Dowd, 2001).
Reality television, according to the reporters who contacted me, had become a
lingering symptom of the pre-serious culture of cheap glitter and shallow trivia –
one more exhausted trend rendered obsolete by our new sense of focus and purpose.
Now that we (finally?) had some real reality to deal with, we could dispense with
the ironic oxymoron of reality television. Clearly the reporters got it wrong – and
not just because they were assuming that reality television served as cheap compensation for a dearth of reality (as if there were not enough of it to go around until
the United States was attacked). The other mistake they made was thinking about
reality television as cultural critics and pundits often do: as one more genre trend,
like medical dramas or police procedurals. In fact, as subsequent developments have
demonstrated, it is exceptionally hard to pin down reality television as a genre since
When Everyone Has Their Own Reality Show
41
self-help shows and behind-the-scenes-at-work shows, jungle competitions and
office competitions, dating shows and medical shows (to name just a few) all huddle
together under the reality television umbrella.
What the reporters did not understand is that reality television is a different way
of making television – a type of production that fits with broader economic and
cultural shifts. As Chad Raphael (1997) observed, reality television addressed the
economic pressures faced by television in the massively multichannel era – in particular the need for relatively inexpensive, easily generated content. Morever, as I
argued in Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (Andrejevic, 2004), the reality
format aligned itself with the interactive zeitgeist and availed itself of the promise
of interactivity ushered in by the spread of networked, digital media. Understood,
as Anna McCarthy (2005) has put it, as a mode of production, reality television
fit neatly with the economic logic of the Web and anticipated the Facebook era
insofar as it relied on the participation of audience members to create content,
promising to “democratize” the process of cultural production. In sync with the
online economy, reality television took as its raw material the collection of the
details of daily life, helping to underwrite the equation between self-disclosure and
self-expression that has become one of the marketing formulas of the digital era.
As reality television has grown and diversified as a programming phenomenon, it
has come to encapsulate the logic of the interactive economy, thematizing, for
example, the way in which the monitoring process itself redoubles the activities of
daily life in productive form.
At the time I started writing about reality television, these truths had not yet sunk
in. The reporters who called me reproduced a tendency, both popular and academic,
to fetishize culture by endowing it with an apparent autonomy and thus with a
powerful influence over the rest of society. According to this perspective, television
trends came and went according to the whims of the creative apparatus (and presumably the vagaries of consumer demand) – but did so according to their own
internal logic. This way of thinking also influenced the persistent journalistic imperative to endow reality television with real “effects.” As someone who wrote about
the connection between reality television and surveillance, I was repeatedly asked
to explain how reality television was “changing” public attitudes about privacy and
publicity, about voyeurism, exhibitionism, celebrity, and emerging cultures of surveillance. As the reality television terrain shifted, these questions turned to questions
about how reality television instructs us and teaches us to be productive workers,
effective parents, desirable mates, engaged citizens, and responsible workers. In the
face of this persistent tendency to imagine that reality television affects the society
that produces it, the ongoing challenge is to explore, rather, how it picks out aspects
of that society and represents these to us. Reality television does not do things to
us – but it can represent to us some of the things we are doing to ourselves. In this
regard, reality television remains a fruitful site for ongoing cultural study because
it has something potentially interesting and instructive and therefore “real” to say
about the society that continues to produce it. The remainder of this chapter will
explore some of the dimensions of the portrayal of monitoring and surveillance on
42
Producing Reality
reality television, and how this might inform an understanding of broader surveillance practices in the digital era.
Getting Real
The standard savvy response to reality television by cultural critics, both self-styled
and credentialed, has become such a familiar chorus that it hardly bears repeating:
reality television is not really real. This standard response is odd for a couple of
reasons – first, the term itself concedes the notion of artifice: we are speaking
of reality television, after all, and an ingrained understanding of the mediated, constructed character of televisual representation has become a commonplace in our
media-savvy era. Second, this response is a formulation that posits a mysterious
group of dupes who believe that reality television really is real (in some unspecified
but clearly fallacious way). In fact, as my own research and Annette Hill’s (2005)
has revealed, viewers have much the same reaction to reality television as the savvy
punditry who reflexively emphasize the mediated artificial character of reality
formats. Viewers do search for moments of authenticity, and they recognize a kind
of sliding scale of shows from more to less real, but they clearly understand that
they are watching an edited, mediated artifact and not an unadulterated, unmediated bit of reality. In a brief spasm of hyperreflexivity, the short-lived reality format
The Joe Schmo Show staged the figure of the dupe who really believes reality television is real by creating a fake reality show around one cast member who was told
he had been cast in a reality show. The show staged the “truth” known by the audience – that reality television is (in reality) a contrivance – and invited the audience
to take the savvy position in relation to the duped cast member who did not know
how fake the reality show was. Paradoxically, and somewhat dizzyingly, the very fact
that this cast member was being tricked heightened the “reality” of the show:
because he did not know what the show was about, he could not craft his performance accordingly, and thus his reactions could be portrayed as authentic responses
to a contrived situation: an extended version of a Candid Camera prank. The “Joe
Schmo” character thus became a stand-in for the absent but imagined figure of the
naive audience member who fails to see through the ruse.
Like The Joe Schmo Show, the widespread, self-consciously savvy response to
reality television posits an imagined “subject who believes” in the reality of reality
television. At the same time, it evokes Jean Baudrillard’s diagnosis of the fate of the
real in the wake of the triumph of the simulacra: “When the real is no longer what
it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning . . . [there is a] panic-stricken production
of the real and of the referential” (1994, pp. 6–7). Reality television participates in
this “panic-stricken production” but perhaps not in the way one might imagine. It
is not the promised access to the real that participates in this logic so much as the
incitation of a savvy response that desperately seeks to preserve the principle of a
seemingly threatened reality. The reality principle, in short, is conserved as much
by the cry of “that’s not really real” as by the more straightforward claim of direct
When Everyone Has Their Own Reality Show
43
access to reality. In a roundabout fashion, the nonreality of reality television serves
as a kind of negative proof of the unspecified reality of which it falls short. Insistence on the nonreality of reality television has thus become one of the strategies for
the panic-stricken production of the real.
The Work of the Real
Rather than asking whether reality television is really real or not, perhaps the more
fruitful question is to ask about the work that the notion of the real does in the
context of reality television. It serves as something related but not reducible to “lack
of artifice” – invoking a host of associations with notions of cultural authenticity
and (alleged) challenges to the rationalization of the culture industries. As a form
of self-promotion, the promise of reality deployed by reality television – at least
during its growth spurt in the early years of the new millennium – opposed the real
not simply to artifice but also to the forms of rationalization that have come to
characterize culture in general and media culture in particular over the course of
the twentieth century. In this regard, reality television’s promise of the real was
continuous with the mobilization of “new media’s” promise to recapture aspects
of cultural life (community, the dedifferentiation of work, labor, and leisure) that
were eclipsed by the rise of mass culture and the industrialized mass media
that produced them.
Thanks to the mobilization of a certain type of nostalgia that emerged over the
course of the development of the advertising industry, pre-mass society can be
portrayed from the perspective of modernity as the locus of nonalienated handicraft
production and of a rich and participatory community life (Marchand, 1985). One
of the dominant themes of modernity (and, along with it, capitalism, industrialization, and rationalization) is that of the move beyond traditional society and, with
it, the attendant forms of loss (of tradition, community, etc.). It is the cumulative
effect of these losses (and the retroactive nostalgia that, in some instances, comes
to characterize them) that is captured in Max Weber’s (1946) invocation of the
“disenchantment” of the world. Marx and Engels targeted this note of retroactive
nostalgia with their ironic invocation of the “feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations”
(1948, p. 11) surpassed by modernity and the rise of capitalism. The recurrent
theme of loss has served not just as modernity’s self-critique but also as an incitement to modernization itself: if we just move ahead fast enough, perhaps we can
recapture the desirable elements of what has been left behind.
With this context in mind, the promise of the “real” opposes itself to the forms
of abstraction, alienation, and differentiation associated with the rise of the mass
media and the rationalization of industrial society. Reality television is allegedly
“real” not simply because it focuses on the lives of nonprofessional actors (or, in
the case of shows that feature the “behind-the-scenes” lives of actual actors and
performers, on candid, unscripted moments) but also because it blurs the boundaries that separate the rarefied realm of cultural production from the daily lives of

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