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Television & New Media

2002; 3; 255 Television New Media
John Corner

Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions

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Television & New Media / August 2002Corner / Performing the Real

Performing the Real
Documentary Diversions

John Corner
University of Liverpool

This article places Big Brother in the context of shifts in factual television’s forms and func-
tions. Having identified some of the distinctive features of Big Brother’s construction of tele-
reality, it reviews the category of “documentary” across some of its dominant modes. The
current emphasis on formats that divert as much as they inform or question is given particular
attention, and the wider social and cultural coordinates of this trend are noted. The possibil-
ity that we are moving into a “postdocumentary” culture is posed. This is a culture in which
many conventional elements of documentary will continue to develop, but in a radically
changed setting—economic and cultural—for all audiovisual documentation.

Where do we locate Big Brother, and the shift in the relationship between
television and everyday life that it signals, within the generic system of the
medium? This generic system is not, as we know, a neat and stable set of
discrete categories of work. It is a changing and increasingly hybridized set
of practices, forms, and functions, one in which both cultural and commod-
ity value lie most often in the right blend of the familiar and the new, of ful-
filled expectation and shock.

We might place Big Brother within the history of the game show—this
would certainly be true to some of its ingredients and part of its appeal.
Location with the history of the talk show, particularly in its newer variants
of revelation and confrontation, would be instructive too. At times, the
tones and values of a “Jerry Springer experience” are closely shadowed. We
might see it as an experiment in a kind of drama—a less direct connection
perhaps, but questions of theatricality and the performance aesthetic nev-
ertheless hold the possibility of illuminating some of its shape and impact.

255

TELEVISION & NEW MEDIA
Vol. 3 No. 3, August 2002 255–269
© 2002 Sage Publications

Author’s Note: Some of the material in this article was first used in a web paper for
the European Science Foundation project, “Changing Media/Changing Europe.” I
am grateful to the ESF project for allowing my ideas an initial airing.

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However, “documentary” is the category that seems most obvious to start
with and work from. This, despite the clear disjunction between the terms
of the series and those even of most other types of “reality TV” variant on
the observational documentary model, let alone those of the more estab-
lished, mainstream formats. For it is clear that right at the heart of the series
is the idea of observing what is a mode of “real” behavior. Such observation
finds its grounding reference, and a large part of its interest and pleasure, in
the real characteristics of real people, even if the material and temporal con-
ditions for that behavior have been entirely constructed by television itself.

Big Brother comprehensively and openly gives up on the kinds of “field
naturalism” that have driven the documentary tradition into so many con-
tradictions and conundrums for near on eighty years, most especially in its
various modes of observational filming (e.g., cinema vérité, direct cinema,
and the various bastardized “fly-on-the-wall” recipes of television).
Instead, Big Brother operates its claims to the real within a fully managed
artificiality, in which almost everything that might be deemed to be true
about what people do and say is necessarily and obviously predicated on
the larger contrivance of them being there in front of the camera in the first
place. Documentary has a lengthy and various history of concern for the
historical and social world, the imaging of which in terms of followable and
significant action (even for the duration of a scene) continues to pose con-
siderable problems of accessibility and scopic coherence, despite new tech-
nology. Alongside this concern with the outer world, an interest in inner
stories has developed too, particularly in the last decade of work on televi-
sion. The development of inner stories often requires extensive use of inter-
view and sometimes of part-dramatization to get the personal and the
microsocial fully realized on the screen. The inner story (for example, about
the road accident, about the crime, about the illness) has tended in some
treatments to be pulled rather sharply away from its broader social condi-
tions and contingencies. The documentary foreground has frequently
become a highly defined narrative of localized feelings and experiences
presented against what is often a merely sketchy if not entirely token back-
ground of social setting. Clearly, both the changing formats of the talk show
and the soap opera have mapped out in advance some elements of the
“structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s phrase is entirely appropriate
to the affective emphasis) toward which a new documentary energy has
been drawn. An adjustment in, as it were, the “focal length” of documen-
tary has been required, together with a changed tonality of the documen-
tary voice (quite literally, in the case of the registers required of commen-
tary in routing us through inner stories with optimum satisfaction). The
viewing invitation slides from the dynamics of understanding to the
involving, but at the same time more passive, transaction of vicarious wit-
ness and empathy.

256 Television & New Media / August 2002

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Big Brother in a sense takes the next logical step in this process and dis-
penses with the difficulties of extracting the personal from the social (e.g.,
all those problems about authenticity in docusoap, all that debate about
“directorial intervention”) by building its own social precisely for the pur-
pose of revealing the personal. This social is comprehensively available to tele-
vision, it has indeed been built for the daily delivery of behavior to camera.
Strictly speaking, then, the circumstances are not so much those of observa-
tion as those of display; living space is also performance space. The avail-
ability is both tightly spatial and urgently temporal, clearly. But it is also, in
its scopic comprehensiveness, emotional. “Outside” and “inside,”
objectification and subjectification, empathy and detachment, fondness
and dislike—these are positional variables on a spectatorial grid across
which rapid switching can occur. The interplay between observed action,
the “cameos” of to-camera participant testimony, and the framing of
voiced-over commentary is the required communicational mix for deliver-
ing this form of viewing experience. The use of the internet to extend fur-
ther the public existence and availability of the event, to create optional and
selective viewing opportunities “beyond the edges” of the television text
itself, enhances the sense of a concurrent, live, and open narrative (perhaps
previously most marked in sports coverage). It also provides another
resource in exercising spectator control (voting participants off the show).
Whereas Orwell’s Big Brother used surveillance to inhibit the terms of nor-
mal living in private space, Big Brother promotes abnormal terms of living
within surveillance space. Whatever the more serious justifications for this
that may be advanced in self-justification (for a popular “experiment” in
modern human interaction, a few hired psychologists always need to be on
hand), the clear purpose of the whole microsocial event is to deliver fun.

Yet to say this does not amount to claiming that Big Brother is trying (and
failing) to be a “proper documentary.” That would be a wildly inaccurate
misreading of its design and success as well as begging big questions about
what precisely constitutes the “proper.” It is simply to suggest that in com-
ing to terms with how the series works, we need among things to see how
its practices, forms, and functions are placed within what I am calling the
“postdocumentary” culture of television. We also need to note how, within
that culture, the legacy of documentary is still at work, albeit in partial and
revised form.

In this article, I want to develop some points about postdocumentary
television as one way among others of approaching the new and entertain-
ing forms of tele-factuality that will directly concern most other contribu-
tors. I will, at stages, want to review and reconsider some of the elements of
documentarism in its more established forms in order to plot more clearly
the nature of current shifts.

Corner / Performing the Real 257

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We can start by reviewing the idea of “documentary” itself. As I sug-
gested above, this might now be an unhelpful category with which to assess
the changes occurring in factual television and particularly unhelpful in
thinking about the new links between popular knowledge and audio-
visual experience. The problem is that too many assumptions and, I think,
too many idealizations have now gathered around the notions of the
“social” and the “public,” which the term mobilizes. Paradoxically, for us to
understand much of the current change in television’s factual output, the
term needs pressing back toward the broader category of “documentation”
from which it initially sprang (most explicitly, for Britain, in John Grierson’s
written advocacy of a documentary cinema during the early 1930s—see
Hardy 1979). In doing this, we are not only going from narrowness to
breadth, we are being descriptive rather than evaluative. We are trying to
re-locate the rich, generically ambitious (in some versions, rather prepos-
terous) idea of documentary within the bewildering range of practices now
available for depicting the real on screen, including the screen of the com-
puter. Big Brother is just one particular, highly successful, formula within
this range.

I have noted in recent writing (Corner 2000) that the term documentary is
always much safer when used as an adjective rather than a noun, although
its noun usage is, of course, a form of abbreviation, championed by the cin-
ema pioneers and established through sheer familiarity. To ask “is this a
documentary project?” is more useful than to ask “is this film a documen-
tary?” with its inflection toward firm definitional criteria and the sense of
something being more object than practice. This is particularly true of docu-
mentary work within television, and my feeling is that in the next few years
it will become more obviously so. Documentary within cinema (in many
countries now a marginal form where it exists at all) still has the strong con-
trast with its dominant Other—feature film—against which it can be sim-
ply defined as “nonfiction.” Television nonfiction describes half the sched-
ule, and so the question of generic identifiers becomes immediately more
troublesome. Before I address directly the question of change, and the sorts
of change, like that indicated by Big Brother, which seem to warrant my
postdocumentary label, I want to say a few things about documentary
functions.

Documentary Functions

The functions of documentary work have been at least as important in its
history and generic identity as its forms. Both function and form have an
unstable, historically contingent character, but there has been enough
broad continuity across national histories of media development for us to
talk about a documentary tradition. One might introduce a third element

258 Television & New Media / August 2002

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here—production practices. Specific production practices, forms, and func-
tions all work to hold together (or not) the documentary identity at differ-
ent times and places. Briefly put, they concern how a film or program was
made (according to what recipes, methods, and ethics), how it looks and
sounds, and what job it was designed to do, what kind of impact and use-
value it was to have for audiences. Only in relation to at least one of these
features, and probably by reference to more than one, we will identify
something as documentary work, thus placing it at the intersection point of
a number of lines upon which can be plotted matters of degree rather than
of categoric kind. These lines lead to and from other things, including news,
advertising, and drama as well as a whole range of presenter-led television
(e.g., cooking, travel, motoring, sport) and, of course more recently, the var-
ious possible formats and settings for location “games,” tests, and
challenges.

It seems to me that there are three classic functions to which documen-
tary exposition, testimony, and observation have variously been harnessed.

1. The Project of Democratic Civics. Documentary is regarded here as pro-
viding publicity and propaganda for dominant versions of citizenship.
This is documentary cinema in its classic, modernist-realist phase, funded
(directly or indirectly) by official bodies. In Britain, it is certainly this func-
tion that Grierson saw the documentary as primarily fulfilling in the 1920s
and 1930s. Not surprisingly, extensive and “heavy” use of commentary is a
defining feature. It should also be noted that a directly affective, as well as a
cognitive, impact is often sought, an intention for which the use of music
and a range of rhetorical tropes, visual and verbal, gives support. The pro-
tocols of informational rationalism that frequently govern broadcast jour-
nalism do not hold sway across documentary discourse in this mode, given
its function as a form of promotionalism, indeed often a form of national
advertising.

2. Documentary as Journalistic Inquiry and Exposition. This is essentially the
documentary as reporting, possibly the most extensive use of documentary
methods on television (at least, until very recently). Through in-camera
presentation, or commentary voice-over, and perhaps with interviews
interspersing either or both, the documentary work grounds itself not in an
idea of “publicity” (see above) but an idea of “reportage,” which impor-
tantly includes an experience of looking at kinds of visual evidence, an
experience of witness (see Ellis 1999 on the importance of this notion).

3. Documentary as Radical Interrogation and Alternative Perspective. This is
documentary as developed initially within the independent cinema move-
ments that have maintained a presence in some national audio-visual

Corner / Performing the Real 259

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cultures (the work of Bill Nichols—see Nichols 1991—is the major text for
U.S. developments and an essential reference for all writing on this topic).
The authorial position is not “official” nor does it claim journalistic war-
rant. Implicitly, sometimes explicitly, the documentary discourse attempts
a criticism and a correction of other accounts in circulation. Some public
broadcast systems have tried to develop work of a parallel kind (Channel
Four in Britain would be a good example). A wide range of styles has been
deployed, including techniques of disruption and distancing taking their
cue from nonrealist cinema but also including direct-cinema styles of
observationalism, modes of dramatization, and kinds of personal testi-
mony extending well beyond both the duration and format of the conven-
tional interview. The anthropological levels of scrutiny offered by some
projects in observational and oral history television could be included here.

This typology leaves out many important variants that have flourished
within different national television systems, but I believe it has a certain
rough adequacy (in Corner 1996, I explore examples across all three catego-
ries over a sixty-year period). It is worth noting that all of the above func-
tions tend to produce, by design, work quite low in commodity character.
Use value is stronger than exchange value (leaving aside for the moment
the question of how the audience realizes this use value).

To these three functions, there has been added, by a process of steady
development (involving one or two periods of faster change), a fourth func-
tion to which I have already alluded in my opening comments. This started
within the established documentary parameters but is now evolving
beyond them by a process both of “longitudinal” subgeneric developments
and intensive cross-fertilization with other formats.

4. Documentary as Diversion. At one time, this was most often manifest in
the occasional “lightness” (of topic and/or treatment) shown by many tele-
vision documentary series as part of their mix. In many countries, it has
become a new documentary imperative for the production of “popular fac-
tual entertainment.” Performing this function, documentary is a vehicle
variously for the high-intensity incident (the reconstructed accident, the
police raid), for anecdotal knowledge (gossipy first-person accounts), and
for snoopy sociability (as an amused bystander to the mixture of mess and
routine in other people’s working lives). Propagandist, expositional, or
analytic goals are exchanged for modes of intensive or relaxed diversion—
the primary viewing activity is onlooking and overhearing, perhaps
aligned to events by intermittent commentary.

In seeking its new pact with the popular, documentary-as-diversion has
tended to shadow previously established fictional formats. So the early
reality TV shows, focusing on the work of police and emergency services,
learned a lot from the style of dramatic action narratives (Bondebjerg 1996

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and Kilborn 1994 remain suggestive accounts). “Docusoaps” have clearly
learned a lot from the more relaxed rhythms of the soap opera and a good
bit, too, from the newer styles of talk show (Dovey 2000 offers a critical
review in the context of broader intergeneric shifts). We are, of course, pres-
ently seeing a whole range of documentary-style projects emerge that have
made strong and successful connections with the idea of the “game” (one
often also cast as an “experiment,” with location spaces—interior or exte-
rior—as “laboratory”).

Clearly, Big Brother’s preplanned group surveillance within a “game
frame” that permits a measure of viewer intervention through the regular
voting-off of participants, is the outstanding example of this. Other
instances would include the BBC’s rather more ambitiously anthropologi-
cal Castaways, with an entire small community assembled on a remote Scot-
tish island for the purposes of a social and psychological scrutiny by televi-
sion, a scrutiny at once both informative and entertaining. Channel 4’s The
1900 House and now the The 1940s House, worked with the idea of taking a
family back to the conditions of previous periods for a sustained experi-
ment in domestic living. They combined observationalism, participant
direct address, and commentary to develop family narrative, historical
exposition, and elements of the game-show challenge with great success.

Within the basic framework of taking a number of people to a compre-
hensively tele-available location for some form of “experiment in living,”
clearly quite a wide range of options present themselves. Most examples
use a constrained time-frame to provide a structure and an urgency of plot
to the narrative. The more obvious titles (e.g., Shipwrecked, Survivor) have
been quite quickly gone through. Social cohesion, personality, and capacity
to perform tasks can variously be emphasized within combinations of the
instructive and the entertaining. The “self” can be put on display in various
modes of affection, solidarity, insincerity, confrontation, and downright
aggression (two, phased onscreen captions before an advertising break in
one episode of Big Brother are more generally revealing of its dynamics—
“ALLIANCES . . . and ALLEGATIONS”). Participant self-reflection and
commentary can deepen the plots thrown up by interaction. Self-knowledge
can strengthen viewer empathy, while “self-ignorance” (along with its
partner, overconfidence) holds, as ever, its classic potential for comic effect.
A good deal of embarrassment and humiliation is assured, with the “outra-
geous” always there as an engaging possibility within the pressures and
play of relationships—a moment of personal confrontation or the transgres-
sion of group or game “rules.” The mutually modifying interplay of rela-
tionships and identities delivers the crucial open plot of the program’s nar-
rative. One might use the term “selving” to describe the central process
whereby “true selves” are seen to emerge (and develop) from underneath
and, indeed, through, the “performed selves” projected for us, as a

Corner / Performing the Real 261

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consequence of the applied pressures of objective circumstance and group
dynamics. A certain amount of the humdrum and the routine may be a nec-
essary element in giving this selving process, this unwitting disclosure of
personal core, its measure of plausibility, aligning it with the mundane
rhythms and naturalistic portrayals of docusoap, soap opera itself, and, at
times, the registers of game-show participation. Karen Lury (1996) gives a
very useful account of some of the paradoxes and tensions of “ordinary
performance” that this type of portrayal encourages from its participants.
She also emphasizes how crucial these are in regulating the viewing experi-
ence as a kind of para-social encounter in which, as it were, the risks of
“being and seeming” taken by others are part of the pleasure.

Here, the relative failure on British television of Survivors (ITV 2001) is
interesting. This format replaced an enforced domesticity with the exoti-
cism of group life on a desert island setting. Its viewing figures were only
half those expected, and the show had to be radically rescheduled within a
week or so of opening. One of its problems may well have followed from
the way in which its emphatic, indeed almost camp, exoticism (a sub-
Malinowski stress on tribes, gods, and the mythic force of the natural ele-
ments) pulled away from viewer fascination with the more familiar dimen-
sions of “living together” that characterize Big Brother.

I would not want to underestimate the real degree of innovative adapta-
tion and creativity that has gone into these developments. Questions of
scopic appeal, forms of talk, and narrative system have been vigorously
readdressed in all but the most dull and imitative of formats. The organiza-
tion of an observed spectacle that is both personal (sustained by forms of
personal talk as well as by personal depiction) and social (sustained by
interaction, at least some of which needs to be confrontational enough to
provide the appropriate intensity) requires a high level of prior stage man-
a g e m e n t . T h i s i s s u c h a s t o d e f y m o s t p re v i o u s p ro t o c o l s o f
documentarism, with their various anxious (and sometimes concealed)
playoffs between authenticity and artifice.

In documentary as diversion, by contrast with the previous three func-
tions, we have forms that are very high in exchange value, strategically
designed for their competitive strength in the television marketplace. They
are far less clear in their use value (although this cannot be dismissed
merely because it does not seem to conform to traditional knowledge crite-
ria). It is important to see the newer forms of documentary as having an
identity quite distinct from that provided by the longstanding requirement
for documentary to do some entertaining to gain and keep a popular audi-
ence. Their identity is also different from those many other forms of pre-
senter-based factual formats (including importantly travel programs and
the more adventurous types of cooking and motoring series), which, as I
noted earlier, have an established link with selected elements of

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documentary portrayal. Television documentary producers have often
produced work that entertains, sometimes in surprising and subversive
ways, sometimes with populist calculation. However, when a piece of work
in documentary format is entirely designed in relation to its capacity to
deliver entertainment, quite radical changes occur both to the forms of rep-
resentation and to viewing relations.

Elements of a Postdocumentary Context?

There has, then, been a decisive shift toward diversion. This has not had
the effect of completely displacing “serious” output but it has certainly had
the effect of reworking the identity of this output both within television’s
generic system and within the pattern of viewing habits and expectations.
In what ways might this constitute a postdocumentary setting?

First of all, and most obviously, because audio-visual documentation,
under the drive of diversion, has become too extensive and varied to allow
documentary what one might see as its minimum sufficient level of generic
identity. There has been a quite radical dispersal of documentary energies
across the schedules. As a category of work, documentary has required cer-
tain things to be assumed, taken as given (it is, indeed, a question-begging
category and always has been). Looking and sounding different from other
kinds of program helped this process along, supporting what we might call
“documentary authority.” Extensive borrowing of the “documentary look”
by other kinds of program, and extensive borrowing of nondocumentary
kinds of look (the dramatic look, the look of advertising, the look of the pop
video) by documentary, have complicated the rules for recognizing a docu-
mentary. They have thereby contributed to a weakening of documentary
status.

Second, as I noted earlier, a performative, playful element has developed
strongly within new kinds of factual production. This is evident not only in
documentary styling (including the much wider scope given to musical
accompaniment) but also in such features as the degree of self-consciousness
now often displayed by the participants in observational sequences. This
self-display is no longer viewable as an attempt to feign natural behavior
but is taken as a performative opportunity in its own right. As such, it con-
stitutes a staple element of docusoap in contrast with the self-restrained
naturalism of demeanor, speech, and behavior in classic observationalism.
Such naturalism, often highly …

Updated 10:23 AM ET, Thu July 12, 2018

Washington (CNN) Despite reality television’s junk-food TV reputation, the genre has lasted and evolved

for more than two decades. And what’s more, it’s grown into a political force in America.

“The Real World” is often credited as the first modern American reality TV show. It debuted on MTV in

1992 and aired for 32 seasons. Politics was a theme in the show’s first season, which brought young

people from across the country to live and be filmed together in New York City.

And the show has the distinction — along with “The Apprentice,” of course — of being one of the few

reality shows that has produced a real-life politician: Rep. Sean Duffy, a Wisconsin Republican, who

appeared on the 1997 Boston season.

Reality television took off in the 2000s with hit shows like “Survivor” and “American Idol,” and in 2007,

they filled the space left by a dearth of new scripted shows due to the writers strike. They featured

democratic plot devices, like voting off the island or voting for your favorite contestant. Some shows

featured casts more diverse than the typical TV show or movie, offering viewers a glimpse at the

experience of people of different races, genders, and sexual orientations. American networks took

concepts from foreign reality shows and reimagined them for American audiences, while US-made

shows were spun off into international versions that exported American values.

While many of the early reality TV shows were set in big, stereotypically liberal cities, networks

eventually began airing shows set in red states, like “Duck Dynasty” and “17 Kids and Counting,”

featuring the ever-growing Duggar family in the late ’00s and early ’10s. Former vice presidential

candidate Sarah Palin got her own reality show, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” as did Republican Caitlyn Jenner,

with “I Am Cait” after she came out as transgender.

(Sidenote: During the 2016 campaign, a Hollywood producer approached John Kasich’s campaign about

possibly producing a reality show, Kasich’s chief strategist John Weaver told CNN’s COVER/LINE. The

idea was to show a presidential campaign on the ground, but “once we got into the details of it, it didn’t

work out the way we wanted,” Weaver said.)

These shows created a new, less famous but parallel class of stars for conservatives, who’ve long lagged

behind liberals in a celebrity arms race. During the 2012 campaign, Barack Obama was supported by

some of America’s biggest stars. Meanwhile, Republicans received celebrity endorsements from people

like the Duggars, who backed Rick Santorum, and Kelly Clarkson, who once tweeted praise for Ron Paul.

And the eventual nominee Mitt Romney was endorsed by reality star and future president Donald

Trump.

The great irony of reality TV is that it isn’t necessarily real. While some shows hew more closely to being

a documentary than others, the constructed plot lines and heightened drama are staples of the genre.

For many viewers, the manufactured aspects of reality TV are accepted as part of the spectacle, not

unlike in professional wrestling.

But there’s evidence that for some viewers, it can warp their sense of reality. A 2013 study published in

Psychology of Popular Media Culture of 145 young adults, for example, found that heavy viewers were

more likely to believe that women in the real world behaved like stereotypically dramatic reality stars.

Danielle Lindemann, an assistant sociology professor at Lehigh University who teaches about reality TV,

believes these shows fuel skepticism in our culture about what is real. “We kind of all know that it’s sort

of curated and … it’s scripted in some ways,” she said in an interview with COVER/LINE. “We have this

skepticism about the images being portrayed to us, the reality of those images, and that extends now to

media and politics. It’s all sort of connected.”

It’s something Donald Trump has used to his advantage, she said, as a candidate and president.

“To say, ‘Well I have these data points, but that’s not real, that’s fake news,'” she said. “To call into

question everything — it’s something we’re used to doing from our viewing of reality TV.”

Trump often runs his presidency like a reality show. He frames his rivalries with name calling, attempting

to box fellow Republicans, Hillary Clinton, and the media into simple, made-for-TV archetypes. He builds

story arcs in which he is the hero, whether taking credit for ending his own administration’s family

separation policy at the border, or claiming to ease tensions with North Korea that he helped ramp up.

But no moment better encapsulated reality television’s political power than the other Kim summit,

between two celebrities who got their reality TV starts on NBC properties in the ’00s.

When Kim Kardashian West, the star of “Keeping Up With The Kardashians” and the most famous and

polarizing reality star not named Donald, got an Oval Office meeting with the star of “The Apprentice,” it

was more than a photo-op, it influenced policy, with Trump commuting the lifetime sentence of a

nonviolent drug offender.

Reality TV has grown up since “The Real World”: there are reality shows about dating, baking, hoarding –

– you name it — dominating the lineups on MTV, TLC, the History Channel, and other networks.

But despite its growth and pervasiveness — and despite launching the political career of the 45th

president of the United States — reality TV still isn’t taken entirely seriously.

It should be. Reality TV has taken over American politics, and shaped our culture and our very

perception of truth.

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Is this the year that TV broke TV? The great fragmentation and why peak TV didn’t die

By Lorraine Ali

Dec 25, 2018 |

The flat screen on your living room wall, the cable box below it and that digital program guide

that help you find your way through an increasingly congested universe of shopping networks,

reality show repeats and the eight channels you actually watch might as well have been

inhabitants of a dying star in 2018.

Television, already bursting at the seams with peak programming and lots of filler, finally blew

apart this year, fragmenting into a dizzying constellation of nearly 500 new original series and

destinations we’ve yet to explore (the forthcoming launch of subscription streaming services

from Apple, Warner Media, Disney and, yes, Costco and Walmart), plus a whole lot of space

debris that includes “Terrence Howard’s Fright Club,” a Fox Nation cooking show and 98% of

the offerings on YouTube TV.

A record 495 original scripted series dropped this year, and for the first time, streaming

platforms such as Hulu and Amazon Prime delivered more original series programming than

broadcast and cable networks.

Forget arguments about when and how peak TV will peak. Judging from the last 12 months, it

doesn’t appear we’re anywhere close to the summit. More interesting is what’s been happening

below those lofty heights. After a decade or more of seismic shifts across the industry, 2018

became the year television broke TV. The very structure of the medium morphed and changed so

rapidly over the last year that we still haven’t wrapped our heads — or attention spans — around

exactly what it is we’re watching.

Was the YouTube live stream of Beyoncé’s performance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts

Festival a TV event or something else? And what about the wonderfully bizarre formatting of

“Atlanta’s” second season? It was shown on FX, but the series’ self-contained episodes

resembled nothing else on TV.

The fragmentation of America’s most popular medium seemed to fit the popular mood —

excitement and confusion as the usual order lapsed into unprecedented chaos. A record number

of viewers became cord cutters in 2018. From July to September, 1.1 million subscribers opted to

sever ties with their longtime cable and satellite TV providers for the cheaper subscription

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models offered by Netflix, Apple TV, Sling TV and many more. It was one more way in which

viewing habits and industry norms were upended in such a dramatic fashion that it made the

premium cable revolution of the early 2000s look quaint.

The flood of fresh content and platforms in 2018 didn’t necessarily equal a drop in quality,

though it arrived with the usual complaints that this year could never top the one before it:

“Killing Eve” is no match for “The Handmaid’s Tale’s” first season. There were so many must-

see shows that it was physically impossible to watch them all and live a life outside the confines

of pajamas, unless you possessed the combined powers and stamina of Jessica Jones, Daenerys

Targaryen and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

And when it came time to honor TV’s top-shelf entertainment at the Emmy Awards, the usual

recipients faced some firsts of their own. It was Netflix, not NBC or FX, that tied HBO for the

most wins, ending a winning streak for the cable network that dated back nearly two decades to

the golden age of “The Sopranos.”

What’s next

2019 is already shaping up to be a battle between media giants for control of wherever it is that

we’re heading. Apple will compete with Netflix by spending way more than it should on

originals by big-name producers such as J.J. Abrams and top-tier stars like Reese Witherspoon

and Jennifer Aniston. Netflix has a plan of its own and it involves pricey production deals with

Ryan Murphy, Shonda Rhimes and the former leading couple of the free world, Michelle and

Barack Obama.

CBS All Access, which already has half a dozen original series, including “The Good Fight” and

“Star Trek: Discovery” on the streaming platform, is going big in 2019 with a “Twilight Zone”

reboot executive produced by Oscar winner Jordan Peele, who will also narrate and host. A big

budget, live-action “Star Wars” series starring Diego Luna is expected to launch Disney+ into

the stratosphere.

And we haven’t even began sorting through what’s on the books for the networks and services

we’re already watching. Expect lots of reality show reboots, the return of water cooler shows like

“Game of Thrones” and “Stranger Things,” and the prospect of never feeling caught up with

what TV has to offer.

At least 2018 did away with any residual guilt that may have existed about watching too much

television. It was replaced by a solider-like duty to consume as many premium shows as possible

or risk being called out by one’s peers: Have you watched “The Little Drummer Girl” yet? How

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about “Succession”? Not even “The Great British Baking Show”?! Oh, the shame of taking time

out for career, family, grooming and sleep. We’ll all have to work on that in 2019.

We have an excuse, though. Half of the year was spent trying to find all those weird little

networks and services — Ovation, Britbox, Acorn — and the search required at least three

different remotes and three failed password-recovery attempts. Sorry, you’ve been locked out.

Network telecasts still boast the highest ratings, according to Nielsen, and football was at the top

of 2018’s most-watched list, followed by the short-lived “Roseanne” reboot. But that’s likely the

next convention to be broken by the great fragmentation, especially given that this was the year

that an estimated 147.5 million people in the U.S. watched Netflix at least once a month,

followed by Amazon Prime Video (88.7 million), Hulu (55 million) and HBO Now (17.1

million).

Netflix hopes to kill off that old ratings standard by introducing more and more original series

and films, an approach that “Saturday Night Live” recently satirized in a fake ad for the

streaming service. The breathless “commercial” promised a new year with even more content to

choose from.

“That’s right, we’re spending billions of dollars and making every show in the world. Our goal is

the endless scroll. By the time you reach the bottom of our menu, there’s new shows at the top.

And then singularity will be achieved.”

A joke that makes perfect sense in the fragmented universe of post-everything TV.

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https://www.vice.com/en/article/88amg4/reality-television-is-the-winner-of-2020-real-housewives-survivor

VICE

2020 Is the Year Reality TV Won

During an extremely dark year, even the harshest skeptics were converted to the real-life

simulacrum of our normal problems.

by Katie Way

Brooklyn, US

December 18, 2020

As cities began locking down in late February through early April, reality TV, filmed almost

exclusively pre-pandemic, became less a crystal ball and more a window into the carefree world

we used to inhabit. Nostalgia dominated, and reality TV delivered—remember partying, like

they do on Vanderpump Rules? Falling in “love,” like they do on The Bachelor[ette]? (Dating

shows in particular saw a spike in popularity this spring, per Parade.) Navigating workplace and

bachelorette party drama, like they have on Selling Sunset? Competing for a $100,000 prize and

the title of Ink Master, like they do on Ink Master?

Advertisement

Not a lot of entities can be said to have “come out on top” at the end of 2020. Jeff Bezos and

his little billionaire friends, the Home Office Industrial Complex, Pete Buttigieg, and Zoom’s C-

suite all stand out as this year’s big winners—but that shortlist doesn’t exactly feel… inspiring.

There is, however, one thing worth rooting for that flourished in 2020: reality TV, in all its

schlocky, larger-than-life, trash fire glory. Through the strictest stages of lockdown until now—

when a new wave of shutdowns seems advisable if not inevitable—reality TV’s simulacrum of

life before COVID has buoyed us through all the cartoonish horror of 2020.

Many skeptics derided late-aughts reality show hits and cast them as synonymous with low

culture, especially the shows divorced from any notion of competition like The Jersey Shore,

The Hills, and Keeping Up with the Kardashians, as trashy, stupid, and unrealistic (while

dismissing reality TV stars as “famous for being famous”). But this year, the polarity reversed:

Life itself was trashier and stupider than ever—politicians, influencers, celebrities behaved

selfishly and irresponsibly as regular people struggled.

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Even reality TV’s harshest critics came around to see the value its longtime fans arguably always

have: Where prestige TV is jam-packed with plot and Performances from Hollywood’s finest,

reality TV is a (mostly) harmless venue for distracting ourselves with low-stakes drama. One

franchise that’s reaped the rewards of interpersonal-conflict-as-entertainment this year: 90 Day

Fiancé and its deluge of spinoffs which, Vulture noted in August, “built an audience and

expanded its footprint over a six-year time frame during which linear TV ratings have been

cratering,” with two offshoots pulling in “monster Nielsen numbers” this summer in particular.

We started the year like any other; watching our little shows, sure, but also going outside;

spending time indoors with people who we didn’t live with; bumming cigarettes; and not

washing our hands after using public transit or running to the grocery store. Eerily enough, two

of the first hit reality shows this year, Netflix’s The Circle and Love Is Blind, both revolved

around even stricter quarantines than were typical of bubble reality shows, with contestants

individually locked in their rooms. On The Circle, contestants lived alone in an apartment and

attempted to become as popular as possible by projecting a certain image of themselves on an

insular social media platform—sound familiar? On Love Is Blind, contestants were physically

separated from their potential objects of affection and had to “fall in love” without any physical

context—huh, wouldn’t that be weird?

Tanya Horeck, associate professor in film, media and culture at Anglia Ruskin University, told

BBC.com in April that reality TV is particularly enticing in a pandemic because it helps us cope

with the now, and remember better times gone-by. “People are using reality TV as a way of

trying to process how we’re feeling during lockdown. I’ve seen countless posts on social media

of people saying things like ‘It’s Day 35 in the Big Brother House’,” Horeck said. “Reality TV has

an intimacy that’s quite powerful at this time… It’s also quite fascinating to watch shows about

human interaction at a time when that’s the one thing we’re not really able to do.”

In these truly absurd times, reality TV became a welcome source of entertainment (or relief),

even for people who’d never touched the stuff before, like BuzzFeed News reporter Shannon

Keating, who admitted she’d “never been much of a reality TV person” before tumbling

headlong into the Real Housewives extended universe during the pandemic.

In her full-throated praise of the franchise, particularly Real Housewives of Potomac, Keating

pointed out the appeal lies way the various “traumas” and “delusions” its subjects perform.

“For me—and for my friends and fellow critics who take Housewives deadly seriously—taking

comfort in our distance from these women isn’t a factor at all,” Keating wrote. “Rather, what’s

so much fun… is finding the ways in which their ridiculous, petty, hilarious, and even harmful

behavior relates to our own lives and relationships.” These pre-packaged dramatics feel as

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though they were engineered to serve as a way to slake the collective thirst for gossip that’s

raged all year long.

Reality TV also slots well into the rise of “ambient television,” ID’ed in the New Yorker by writer

Kyle Chayka as programming that provides “a numbing backdrop to the rest of our digital

consumption: feeds of fragmented text, imagery, and video algorithmically sorted to be as

provocative as possible.” While older reality TV shows like Flavor of Love or Parental Control are

anything but placid, it is similarly geared toward the inattentive, with near-endless recaps

padding every episode to catch viewers up wherever they happen to stumble in.

As a very indoors winter yawns before us, the sheer volume of reality TV also makes it a

particularly apt companion for the now, when our free time can feel just as bottomless. In a

world in which people expect to be able to binge-watch everything, the huge back catalogue of

shows like Survivor or The Challenge means fans are never left waiting to find out what

happens next: There’s always more drama ready. With competition shows easily entering

double-digits worth of seasons and franchises with so many spin-offs it’s disorienting, it’s

possible to burn hours gazing directly into the funhouse mirror reality TV holds up to reality—

maybe even preferable. When current events are this vulgar, and time this unlimited, it only

makes sense to tune in to an augmented version of “real life.”

Democracy in America

Reality television and teenage pregnancy
Tuned in, turned off
Jan 15th 2014, 19:02 by The Economist | NEW YORK

“IT’S always my turn,” Maci, a tired young mother, complains to her loafing boyfriend when their baby

needs a nappy-change, during an episode of “16 and Pregnant”, a reality TV show about teenagers with

tots. “16 and Pregnant”, which started airing on MTV in 2009, and its spinoff series “Teen Mom”, are big

hits—and, if new research is to be believed, they are also an effective form of birth control.

A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found that “16 and Pregnant” helped

reduce teenage births in America by 5.7% in the 18 months following its release. The two authors,

Melissa Kearney of the University of Maryland and Phillip Levine of Wellesley College, tracked Google

searches about the show and birth control, along with Tweets, all of which spiked when the show went

out.

It portrayed teenage parenthood realistically, with young mothers suffering sleepless nights, howling

brats, money worries and the blank incomprehension of their still-partying childless contemporaries.

According to the authors, seeing all this drudgery helped deter young viewers from becoming mothers—

although the study only affirms that it reduced birth rates among blacks, who are more likely than

whites or Hispanics to become pregnant as teenagers—and 30% more likely to watch “16 and

Pregnant”.

Despite what you see on TV, teen birth rates are at an all-time low: in 2010 there were 34.3 births per

1,000 women aged 15-19, which is down 44% from a peak in 1991. More information about disease and

contraception probably helped, and the recession may have played a part. Proving that a TV show made

a difference is hard, not least because it is tricky to measure how many people watched it in the first

place. More youngsters are seeing programmes days after they air, or are streaming their favourite

shows online; data cannot always capture this.

Fewer kids with kids

The NBER study should please parents who have “traditionally viewed MTV as the axis of evil”, quips Bill

Albert of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancies, an advocacy group. MTV

itself has morphed from a televised storehouse for music videos into a collection of offbeat reality

shows reflecting issues important to young Americans.

“Generation Cryo”, for example, follows youngsters who were conceived through a sperm donor as they

look for their shared biological father. “Catfish” is about deceit in internet dating (the word is slang for a

lying online lonely heart). Later this year MTV will introduce a new show called “Virgin Territory”,

featuring youngsters who try to remain pure and chaste. Whether this will drive horrified viewers to do

the opposite remains to be seen.

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By Stinson Carter

Dec. 6, 2018 10:50 a.m. ET

STREAMING VIDEO on demand has changed the audience experience more in a few years than cable

television did over a few decades, and industry executives are unanimous in the belief that the new

model has not reached its full potential. Technology continues to revolutionize how we experience

entertainment, which programming we have access to and which storytellers are given the means to tell

the stories. Some of the most valuable companies in the world are placing big bets on what’s coming

next.

“What might we see coming down the road?” says Beau Willimon, creator of The First, Hulu’s sci-fi

drama starring Sean Penn and Natascha McElhone. “Perhaps like [the characters] in my new show,

we’re all wearing augmented reality glasses, and we’re experiencing television shows in a more intimate

way—a way that feels much more experiential than simply watching it on a rectangle.”

When Willimon’s first show, House of Cards, premiered in 2013, it was the first time an entire season of

a Netflix-produced show had been made available all at once to audiences. “It had never been tried

before,” says Willimon. “It all felt very experimental. We were a bit shocked at how quickly the world

glommed onto the idea of streaming shows over the internet and binge-watching seasons.”

Netflix has since grown from 34 million paid memberships in 40 countries to 130 million in more than

190 countries. Competing services such as Amazon Prime Video and Hulu have experienced similarly

explosive growth, and successful cable channels have seen their business shift increasingly to a

streaming, on-demand model. Apple has significant plans for original content in the works, but perhaps

the biggest development on the horizon is Disney’s direct-to-consumer service, coming in late 2019.

After the Walt Disney Company’s purchase of the entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox is complete,

it will own an approximate 60 percent share of Hulu and will control an SVOD (subscription video on

demand) portfolio that includes Hulu, ESPN+ and a Disney-branded subscription service called Disney+

that will be home to content from Disney, Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar and National Geographic. Disney+

will be global, and Disney intends to expand Hulu—currently available only in the U.S.—to international

markets. Almost everything Disney companies have made in the past, and everything they’ll make in the

future, will eventually end up on their streaming service.

Television, as most people have known it for most of their lives, is no more. “At some point you’ll get to

a place where thinking about television from a linear standpoint will be like dial-up internet,” says Hulu

CEO Randy Freer. “It’s a great time for content; not a great time for cable networks. I think what will

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happen is: Cable networks that have been able to create brands for themselves will have an opportunity

to expand and figure out how they present to consumers.”

Cable networks with a clear identity have a critical advantage in a subscription-based world, while

networks with less-defined name recognition—those that have been just another channel in the cable

lineup—will likely find it hard to entice the growing ranks of broadband-only consumers to buy an à la

carte monthly subscription service.

HBO is moving into the new era. “In the domestic market of the United States, where there is a surfeit of

content more than ever, I personally think that brands matter more than ever,” says HBO chairman and

CEO Richard Plepler. In 2017, HBO had its biggest subscriber growth yet, proving that premium cable

brands can still thrive alongside the likes of Netflix. “This isn’t binary; Netflix can grow and HBO can

grow,” Plepler says. “We’ve always wanted to make HBO available however, wherever and whenever a

consumer wants it.”

David Nevins, chief creative officer of CBS Corporation and the chairman and CEO of Showtime

Networks Inc., is also focused on the power of brand as the key to success in the new age: “The great

thing about this era of television is, if you can create in customers’ minds a sense of sustained

excellence—‘Their stuff is good, their stuff is consistent quality’—you get the benefit of the doubt.” But

what is the limit to the number of subscriptions most people will shoulder? “We’re all competing to be

one of the five or six must-have subscription offerings,” says Nevins.

“The thing that I fear is that at some point when people have five or six of these that they’re paying for,

they’re gonna go, ‘Wait a minute, let me go right back to cable.’ Where does that end?” says Soumya

Sriraman, president of the SVOD service BritBox, the joint venture between BBC Studios and ITV that

provides classic and new British programming in the U.S. and Canada. Ann Sarnoff, president of BBC

Studios-Americas and BritBox board chair, sees Netflix and Amazon as the broadcasters of today, with

smaller platforms like BritBox “super-serving” specific fan bases, and she envisions a future in which

both “hyper-local” and “hyper-global” programming will thrive.

“I think you’re going to see a division,” says Thomas Benski, CEO and founder of Pulse Films, a global

content studio with offices in London, New York, Los Angeles and Paris. “I think it’s going to be either

very big and very broad or very specific. It’s supermarket versus deli, and I think we’re going to see more

deli-sized platforms emerging.”

Executives have learned that audiences are interested in bingeing 10-to-12–hour stories, at a time when

some had predicted that ever-shortening attention spans spelled the end of long-form entertainment

altogether. A recent survey conducted by Morning Consult and the Hollywood Reporter found that 76

percent of viewers ages 18 to 29 prefer to binge-watch, compared with 45 percent of viewers ages 55 to

64.

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“Our ambitions are to entertain the entire world’s population,” says Cindy Holland, Netflix’s vice

president of original content. “In the old Hollywood model, a filmmaker in Italy would make a great

Italian film and then would have to come to Hollywood and make an English-language film in order to

have that next level of success. Now we’re enabling that storyteller to stay home and make a movie or a

series for us, and we will take that story around the world.”

Mainstream U.S. audiences are finally shedding their historic aversion to subtitles—a fact proven by

shows like Narcos, 3%, Money Heist and My Brilliant Friend, HBO’s first foreign language original series,

filmed in Italian to remain faithful to the Elena Ferrante novels on which it’s based.

“The most important decision we made is that we stood with the idea to do [Babylon Berlin] in the

German language,” says Stefan Arndt, the Academy Award–nominated executive producer of the

international hit series, distributed by Netflix in the U.S. in both subtitled and dubbed formats.

Worldwide, Netflix is spending big to keep pace with growing demand and competition, with Goldman

Sachs predicting that the company will spend $13.4 billion on content in 2018.

Shows like Game of Thrones set a new bar for global success—something Disney hopes to find with The

Mandalorian, a scripted Star Wars series written by Jon Favreau that is currently in production, as well

as a Rogue One prequel series starring Diego Luna. According to Plepler, however, original content made

by and for individual markets abroad generally outperforms content exported from the U.S. “Once in a

while there’s an exception like Game of Thrones, which resonates everywhere,” he says, “but mostly

local trumps everything.”

HOLLYWOOD’S RULES about what works and what doesn’t work have been debunked by the whims of

subscribers, which have pushed executives to take more creative risks. “Stories that in the past would

have been seen as niche are suddenly becoming global phenomena,” says Benski, who points to the

Israeli political thriller Fauda as an example: an international hit that “none of us would have heard of

without Netflix,” he says.

There’s also been a loosening of structural conventions. “The model has changed everything for

creators—liberating them from traditional episodic structures,” says Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon

Studios. For example, writers of streaming shows don’t have to write around commercial breaks,

episodes can be as long or as short as desired, and the number of episodes in a season is no longer

dictated by the traditional network schedules.

Audiences drive programming decisions more than ever before, because platforms are able to monitor

their habits, likes and dislikes with more detailed metrics than in the past. The same technology that

provides people with complete control over their viewing experience gives information in equal

measure to those providing it. “We can see from the data how many people start watching a show, how

many people complete the season, and that tells us a lot about how popular it is and how sticky it is, so

we use all that information to help us decide whether to make another season,” says Holland. “So when

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I have a producer or a creator come to us with a new idea, we look at the information we have and try

to project what is the potential audience size and how much could we invest in an idea like that.”

Audience behavior can determine the fate of shows before they are produced, in unexpected ways. At

YouTube, user data is a major factor when considering a pitch for original content. “When Sony [Pictures

Television] asked me if we wanted to hear a spinoff [idea for] The Karate Kid as a series, I was able to

map Karate Kid’s success on YouTube in terms of its search popularity and viewership of clips,” says

Susanne Daniels, YouTube’s global head of original content. “That helped me know that if I liked the

pitch, it would be something I wanted to aggressively pursue.” But shows can both live and die by the

user-data sword: “Sony called us recently and asked whether we wanted to hear the pitch of the Mad

About You reboot, a show that I loved personally when it was on originally. My first instinct was, ‘Yes, I

want to hear that pitch.’ But that’s not a title search at all on YouTube, so that was not a pitch [meeting]

that I ended up scheduling.”

According to Kevin Mayer, the Walt Disney Company’s chairman of direct-to-consumer and international

segment, whatever model consumers want is the one that will ultimately succeed: “Those who embrace

that and serve consumers in the way they want to be served will win. And those who keep fighting and

try to provide friction and try to put up barriers will lose. And be dinosaurs, very quickly.”

“Live TV will likely still have an appointment component to it, in that people will carve out time in their

schedules to come together to engage with a live event,” says Salke. “We see our customers bingeing

our series and putting them on their watchlists in anticipation of being able to see them as soon as they

are available.”

If audience choice, enabled by technology, was enough to upend a television broadcast model decades

in the making, then what changes may be in store when technology opens the door for audiences to not

just influence programming but also participate in it? The Netflix series Black Mirror will reportedly

feature an interactive episode in its upcoming season. (Netflix declined to comment.) Meanwhile,

videogames like the recent blockbuster Red Dead Redemption II and the upcoming The Last of Us Part II

are on a parallel course—delivering interactive sagas and mature drama rivaling anything on TV.

“What happens when you start giving choice to the audience member? You give them the tools to

collaborate in the art form. Is that any less valuable or artistic?” says Beau Willimon. “The traditional

part of me says yes, you need to be experiencing one person’s vision. But maybe we need to break out

of that mind-set.”

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Wall Street Journal

New-Media Companies Shift Attention to TV

BuzzFeed, Vice Media, Huffington Post turn toward

television as new source of revenue

By Lukas I. Alpert

Updated Oct. 12, 2015 7:19 p.m. ET

Companies like BuzzFeed, Vice Media and Huffington Post are known as “new-media”

specialists—makers of lists, articles and videos designed to go viral online and lure young

audiences.

Now, they’re venturing aggressively into a decidedly old-media stronghold: television.

There are a variety of potential models, most of which involve some sort of tie-up with

traditional media companies: BuzzFeed says it may create TV shows with Comcast Corp. ’s

Universal Studios. Vice Media is in talks to take control of a cable channel from A+E Networks.

Complex, a network of websites focused on fashion, music and pop culture, says it may funnel

video content into Hearst Corp.’s television properties after receiving an investment from the

company. And the Daily Mail is working to develop a syndicated program with daytime TV king

Dr. Phil that is set to air next fall.

On one level, it’s a jarring and seemingly illogical shift for companies that have prided

themselves on being the opposite of traditional. The TV business is in turmoil, as networks fret

over young audiences lost to cord-cutting and the fragmentation of viewing from having so much

original content on so many cable channels.

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The new-media outlets appear to have been a beneficiary of this: many young viewers have fled

in their direction, industry executives say. Why, then, would they want to launch into the TV

business?

For one thing, TV offers new—and more predictable—revenue streams for digital-media upstarts

that until now have been largely dependent on advertising. The owner of a TV show gets the

right to license it in many ways, to TV networks, mobile-phone companies and international

media players.

“Even having a little exposure to those platforms can be pretty lucrative for us,” said Jonah

Peretti, founder and chief executive of New York-based BuzzFeed, which has a staff of 230 in

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Los Angeles creating around 75 video segments a week and is working on developing content

for television. “The economics of traditional platforms are still so much richer,” he said.

Trying to break into television has become the next logical step for many sites that have watched

valuations climb to eye-popping levels in their investment rounds and now have to deliver on

those expectations.

Despite its problems, TV is still a bigger business than online advertising: TV ad spending is

forecast to be $70 billion this year, compared with $7.8 billion for online video, according to

eMarketer, a research firm.

In August, BuzzFeed received a $200 million investment from NBCUniversal, valuing the

company at about $1.5 billion. Mr. Peretti said BuzzFeed may produce its own TV shows but

will also seek to team up with traditional studios like Universal to create half-hour comedies or

hourlong dramas.

“There are a lot of possibilities—if we were doing something that felt like a traditional show on

broadcast TV we’d want to do that in partnership with people who know how to make TV and

film,” he said. Mr. Peretti said in early September that he would soon be moving from New York

to Los Angeles, where the company’s video operation, BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, is based.

Making TV is costly and can be a frustrating process even for veteran Hollywood tastemakers.

An hour-long drama can easily cost $3 million or $4 million an episode. And media companies

place a number of bets every year, only to decide that most of their pilots, or new shows, aren’t

worth picking up, and many of those shows aren’t popular enough to get to a second season.

Digital media executives argue that they can improve on that process by testing ideas on their

online audiences and avoiding unnecessary investments.

“We can do a short-form Web version and test audience reaction instantaneously without having

to do third-party focus groups and the typical way of testing that TV has to do because we can

just look at our comments and the views that it gets and get a gut-check sense of what’ll work,”

said Andrew Creighton, co-president of Vice Media, which has been producing content for

television since 2010. “If things start doing very well, then you put more money behind it.”

Vice, which was valued at more than $2.5 billion in an investment round last year, has become a

model for other companies on how to shift away from being too reliant on advertising. The

company, which doesn’t disclose its financials, says a significant chunk of its revenue now

comes from various licensing deals and content partnerships around the world.

At the core is a multiyear programming arrangement with HBO. Vice has also been in

negotiations to take over the H2 channel owned by A+E Networks and made its programming

available on Verizon Communications Inc.’s new Go90 wireless video service. Overseas, the

company has signed deals to create Vice channels in Canada and Greece, and has sold its

programming to TV channels in Germany, France and Italy.

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The lifestyle site Refinery29 has hired 60 people in recent months to create documentary and

scripted video content, some of which it hopes will find its way to TV.

The Huffington Post, whose parent company AOL Inc. was recently acquired by Verizon, is

building an operation that will broadcast a mix of live programming, short- and long-form video

and documentaries 24 hours a day. That will include HuffPost TV, which will develop and

produce programming with the intention of striking licensing deals with broadcasters around the

world.

“There are changes happening in the television business, and digital media now resembles in

many ways what cable looked like in the 80s,” said Arianna Huffington, the site’s founder.

“There are tremendous opportunities to reach audiences in new ways.”

Write to Lukas I. Alpert at [email protected]

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http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/10/reality-

tv/382004/

THE ATLANTIC

The Collective Conscience of Reality Television

In a format without a code of conduct, viewers drive the limits of the

exploitation and privacy invasions allowed onscreen.

SERENA ELAVIA OCT 29 2014, 3:01 PM ET

Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

Once famous for flipping dinner tables on The Real Housewives of New

Jersey, reality star Teresa Giudice and her husband Giuseppe “Joe”

were recently sentenced to one and three-and-a-half years in jail

respectively. When Giudice and her husband pleaded guilty to numerous

counts of conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud in March, Bravo’s

cameras captured every drama-filled moment for the show’s sixth

season.

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Bravo managed to film the sentencing just in time for the season finale,

which even showed Teresa’s enemies crying. Teresa and Joe may be

convicted criminals, but it’s difficult to not feel for the couple throughout

the season as viewers watch footage of their four young daughters

celebrating what may be their last Christmas together as a family for a

long time. Or when the eldest daughter looks at her mother and says “I

obviously know what’s going on. I’m old enough to comprehend and

understand what’s going on,” as tears stream down her face.

Most reality shows in the vein of Real Housewives just feature dinner

parties gone wrong and screaming matches, which viewers avidly

consume. Networks are willing to show almost everything, regardless of

the impact on its cast members, until their viewers get upset, lash out on

social media, or threaten to stop watching entirely. What viewers will or

won’t watch matters immensely to networks; in fact, they seem function

as the networks’ sole “conscience.”

There is, of course, content that producers will not air, though “that

varies from production company to company,” a reality-television

producer who asked not to be named said in an email. “Personally, I

believe a producer, and then in turn the network, will air anything that

does not put them at serious risk of lawsuit.”

Producers set few boundaries when it comes to airing non-litigious

content with potentially damaging consequences for its stars. MTV found

itself facing backlash after the series premiere of Jersey Shore when

trailers for upcoming episodes showed Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi getting

punched in the face at a bar by a stranger. The network pulled the

footage after receiving complaints from viewers about depicting violence

against women. Producers give viewers what they want to see, but at a

certain point the audience begins to empathize with the cast members

and turns on producers.

Showing Snooki being sucker-punched is extreme, and viewers objected.

But if viewers don’t care, then the networks essentially have free rein to

show what they want. Take the case of The Real Housewives of Beverly

Hills: Former cast member Taylor Armstrong discussed on-camera her

husband Russell’s physical abuse toward her and her five-year-old

daughter throughout seasons one and two. Then three weeks before the

second season premiered and just one month after Taylor filed for

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divorce, Russell committed suicide. While season two was packed with

stories of Taylor’s abuse, Bravo suddenly found itself being blamed for

Russell’s death, as critics said that the network unfairly portrayed him

and drove him to suicide. The producers did edit out some scenes, like

Taylor buying lingerie to spice up her marriage, but still showed a dinner

party she attended with a black eye. One housewife asked her “Is this

what it took for you to leave?,” to which Taylor responded

“Unfortunately.” For Bravo, pushing the envelope proved beneficial—the

second season of the show has so far had the highest ratings of the

show’s four-season run.

A year later during season three of the Beverly Hills series, another

housewife, Brandi Glanville, announced castmate Adrienne Maloof’s

family secret at a dinner party. Bravo muted out the revelation, but after

the episode aired, the tabloids began to investigate the secret, and

ultimately the Maloofs admitted that Adrienne had used a surrogate to

have her twin boys. After the incident, Maloof told Us Weekly that from

the beginning of the show, her children would not be a part of the

storyline. With a secret like that, Bravo couldn’t resist, even if it meant

almost going against Adrienne’s contract, and found a way to weave it

into the season. In an interview with Life and Style after the season,

Adrienne said the revelation “destroyed her family” and put a strain on

her marriage that ended in divorce.

Reality-television fans want to see what’s “really” happening to other

people, as long as it isn’t too real.

Then there is the humiliation that some reality show participants have to

endure. In 2009 on the 13th season of ABC’s The Bachelor, Jason Mesnick

originally proposed to one contestant on the finale but then six weeks

later in a reunion episode, he confessed that his true love was the

runner-up and dumped the teary-eyed winner on live television (as if

break ups weren’t difficult enough already). Mesnick in an interview later

said that because of his contract with ABC he couldn’t give his fiancé any

advance warning before dumping her on the reunion show. Critics said

that producers manipulated the show for ratings, but viewers didn’t

seem to mind, and airing it paid off for ABC. The show is the highest rated

episode of all time in the series with about 17 million viewers.

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Sometimes networks preempt viewers’ reactions. After news surfaced

that “Mama June” Shannon of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is dating a

man convicted ten years ago of molesting her own daughter, TLC

canceled the series effective immediately. In announcing the decision,

the network said, “Supporting the health and welfare of these

remarkable children is our only priority. TLC is faithfully committed to the

children’s ongoing comfort and well-being.” As a result, TLC hasn’t faced

any criticism from viewers or accusations of condoning child molestation.

This question of empathy should not be restricted to producers and

networks. Because the whims and tastes of viewers drive the content of

reality shows, some have argued that viewers should consider their own

complicity in what happens to the show’s stars. Dr. Bruce Weinstein, who

writes an ethics column for Bloomberg, says “if people didn’t want to

invade people’s privacy, nobody would watch these shows.”

Even with deaths and families being torn apart, there is an audience for

these shows and so networks continue to produce them. People want to

indulge in the drama and the hair-pulling as a guilty pleasure, but most

people don’t enjoy watching others experience tremendous emotional or

physical suffering. These shows continue to be defined by a strange

conundrum among reality-television fans: They want to see what’s

“really” happening to other people, as long as it isn’t too real. For

producers, who don’t think in terms of sympathy, it’s a delicate balance

of exploiting their stars’ stories for ratings while trying to determine what

viewers will shun. There is no sympathy “code” for producers to follow

when choosing what material to air, but it may be wise for them to

consider creating one instead of only relying on fan reaction.

Non-scripted series – Key Narrative Elements

• Constructed ↔ Organic

• Format

• Series Structure

• Story Arcs

• Character(s)

• Stakes

• Motivation

• Conflict

• Climax

• Resolutions

• Interpretation of Events

• ‘Take Aways’

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http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/09/the-reality-principle

The New Yorker

A Critic at Large MAY 9, 2011 ISSUE

The Reality Principle

The rise and rise of a television genre.

BY KELEFA SANNEH

Unlike its 1973 antecedent, today’s reality TV has acquired the rotten reputation that once attached to

the medium itself. CREDITSEAN MCCABE

On January 6, 1973, the anthropologist Margaret Mead published a startling little essay in TV Guide. Her

contribution, which wasn’t mentioned on the cover, appeared in the back of the magazine, after the

listings, tucked between an advertisement for Virginia Slims and a profile of Shelley Winters. Mead’s

subject was a new Public Broadcasting System series called “An American Family,” about the Louds, a

middle-class California household. “Bill and Pat Loud and their five children are neither actors nor public

figures,” Mead wrote; rather, they were the people they portrayed on television, “members of a real

family.” Producers compressed seven months of tedium and turmoil (including the corrosion of Bill and

Pat’s marriage) into twelve one-hour episodes, which constituted, in Mead’s view, “a new kind of art

form”—an innovation “as significant as the invention of drama or the novel.”

“An American Family” was a hit, and Lance Loud, the oldest son, became a celebrity, perhaps the world’s

first openly gay TV star. But for decades “An American Family” looked like an anomaly; by 1983, when

HBO broadcast a follow-up documentary on the Louds, Mead’s “new kind of art form” seemed more like

an artifact of an older America. Worthy heirs to the Louds arrived in 1992, with the début of the MTV

series “The Real World,” which updated the formula by adding a dash of artifice: each season, a handful

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of young adults were thrown together in a house, and viewers got to know them as they got to know

one another. It wasn’t until 2000, though, that Mead’s grand claim started to look prescient. That year, a

pair of high-profile, high-concept summer series nudged the format into American prime time: “Big

Brother,” a Dutch import, was built around surveillance-style footage of competitors locked in a house;

“Survivor,” a Swedish import, isolated its stars by shipping them somewhere warm and distant, where

they participated in faux tribal competitions. Both of these were essentially game shows, but they

doubled as earthy anthropological experiments, and they convinced viewers and executives alike that

television could provide action without actors.

We are now more than a decade into the era that Mead, who died in 1978, saw coming. “I think we

need a new name for it,” she wrote, and in the past decade we have mainly settled on “reality

television,” although not without trepidation. “Reality” is, if not quite a misnomer, a provocation—a

reminder of the various constraints and compromises that define the form. Certainly, “reality television”

is an amorphous category; Mark Andrejevic, a cultural theorist, notes that “there isn’t any one definition

that would both capture all the existing genres and exclude other forms of programming such as the

nightly news or daytime game shows.” If Mead were alive today, she might be surprised at the diversity

of the form, which has proved equally hospitable to glamorous competitions, like “American Idol,” and

to homely documentaries, like “Pawn Stars,” which depicts the staff and clientele of a Las Vegas

pawnshop. But she might also be surprised to see how many programs hew to the “American Family”

formula: one of MTV’s biggest current hits is the riveting “Teen Mom” franchise, which follows a handful

of young mothers as they negotiate shifting cultural realities and stubborn biological ones, building

American families of their own. This season, one of the stars, Chelsea, unloaded the dishwasher in her

new house, watched closely by her father, who had agreed to pay the rent.

“I’m just standing here, watching you pretend like you’re a little housewife,” he said, fondly.

“I am,” she said, and then she drew a fine distinction that any scholar of kinship structures would

appreciate. “A housemom.”

One of the biggest differences between today’s reality television and its 1973 antecedent is the genre’s

status. Having outgrown PBS, it has inherited the rotten reputation that once attached to the medium

itself. In an era of televised precocity—ambitious HBO dramas, cunningly self-aware sitcoms—reality

shows still provide a fat target for anyone seeking symptoms or causes of American idiocy; the

popularity of unscripted programming has had the unexpected effect of ennobling its scripted

counterpart. The same people who brag about having seen every episode of “Friday Night Lights” will

brag, too, that they have never laid eyes on “The Real Housewives of Atlanta.” Reality television is the

television of television.

No surprise, then, that a counter-movement has arisen, in the form of books that urge us to take these

shows more seriously. Jennifer L. Pozner is a journalist and activist, and in the past decade she has

watched, by her count, “more than a thousand hours of unscripted programming,” which is a lot if you

think of it as work, but not much—two hours per week, which may be less than the average American

watches—if you don’t. For Pozner, it certainly was work. The book she wrote about her experiment is

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“Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV” (Seal; $16.95), and, halfway through,

she sums up her verdict: “I’ve found most of it painful (‘Dr. 90210’), aggravating (‘The Bachelor’), or

mind-numbingly boring (‘The Hills’).” Still, her target audience is her fellow-viewers, not her fellow-

activists, which lends the book a pleasingly unpretentious attitude: readers unfamiliar with

Schadenfreude can find a definition in the footnotes, but readers unfamiliar with “Paradise Hotel” are

on their own. (For the record, it was a complicated 2003 show, on Fox, in which the evolving

cohabitational arrangements of dozens of bronzed young people helped determine which one would be

expelled next.)

Having logged those thousand hours, Pozner can attest that reality shows have a tendency to blur

together into a single orgy of joy and disappointment and recrimination. In her view, this is no

coincidence: the shows are constructed to reinforce particular social norms, she argues, and she finds

examples from across the reality spectrum. There is an expectedly acerbic analysis of “Who Wants to

Marry a Multi-Millionaire,” one of the first shots fired in the current reality revolution (it aired on Fox, as

a one-time special, in February, 2000), in which the winner of a televised beauty pageant agreed to

marry, sight unseen, a “multimillionaire”—who, it later emerged, was possibly a thousandaire, and

definitely the target of a restraining order filed by a former girlfriend. That show was a gleeful train

wreck, powered by its female contestants’ desperation to be picked, which is to say, married. Pozner

detects a similar anxiety in a more venerable show, “The Bachelor,” which recently ended its fifteenth

season on ABC. Although the producers pile on signifiers of romance—ball gowns, candles, roses,

breathy declarations—the weekly eliminations are what give the show its cruel but satisfying rhythm.

Pozner zeroes in on a contestant who, despite having been a vegetarian for twelve years, accepted a

piece of lamb from the man she was trying to impress:

“My stomach will probably never be the same, but at least I touched his hand,” she said, grateful for

crumbs. After she got the heave-ho, she batted her big brown eyes at the camera and moaned: “You

wanna see a girl that’s crushed, you got her.”

For Pozner, this figure—the woman “crushed” for our amusement—is the driving force behind much

reality television. She charts the various programs that punish women for their alleged greed, like “Joe

Millionaire,” in which the titular millionaire finally reveals himself to be more or less broke, and “Charm

School,” which promised to “tear down and rebuild” its female participants. She is aghast at the

cosmetic-surgery makeover show “The Swan,” which she calls “the most sadistic reality series of the

decade.” (The second and final season was broadcast in 2004, so Pozner’s superlative arrives too late to

be of any use to the show’s publicists.) And she is scarcely kinder to “What Not to Wear,” a nonsurgical

makeover show in which, she writes, “an ethnically and economically diverse string of women are

ridiculed for failing to conform to a single upper-middle-class, mainstream-to-conservative, traditionally

feminine standard of fashion and beauty.” For Pozner, the ridicule is more vivid, and therefore more

effective, than whatever rote transformation comes next.

This idea—that pernicious images and ideas are more powerful than benign ones—shapes Pozner’s

analysis in every case, and explains how she manages to extract clear messages from messy exchanges.

To demonstrate that reality television promotes the idea of female incompetence, she mentions a

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particularly stubborn and notably unsympathetic man from “Wife Swap,” who informed his temporary

wife, a police detective, that gender-integrated police departments “put people’s lives at risk.” But she

doesn’t mention that the man recanted a few scenes later, after a vigorous training session with some

female officers.

In the same vein, Pozner tells the story of Toccara Jones, a curvilinear model—she describes herself as

“vivacious and voluptuous”—who was the sixth runner-up on the third season of “America’s Next Top

Model.” In a pitch-perfect impression of a “Top Model” partisan, Pozner derides the verdict of Tyra

Banks, the show’s materfamilias (who declared Jones to have “lost her drive” and “checked out”), and

lists various post-show successes: “To the rest of the mainstream media, Toccara is recognized as one of

the most successful African-American plus-size models working today. To reality TV producers, she’s just

a fat Black girl who needs to lose weight.” But isn’t she pointing to one of the form’s greatest strengths?

Reality stars, unlike their scripted counterparts, outlive their shows, and sometimes find ways to defy

them. For millions of viewers, the story of Lance Loud began in 1973, but it didn’t really end until his

death, from hepatitis C and H.I.V., in 2001, at the dawn of the reality-television era that he helped

inspire.

There is a taboo that left-leaning critics of popular culture are obliged to observe: never criticize the

populace. Pozner tries her best to honor this proscription, following the trail blazed, half a century ago,

by the theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who lamented that “the deceived masses” were

easy marks for a cynical and self-perpetuating “culture industry.” Because she writes about reality

television, Pozner must observe this taboo twice over—the deceived masses are represented by the

people onscreen, too. Starting in 2004, Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, an African-American contestant

on Donald Trump’s business competition show, “The Apprentice,” became reality television’s

preëminent villain, possessed of an impressive ability to enrage the people around her; Pozner

scrambles to explain this phenomenon without casting aspersions on either the antiheroine or her

legions of detractors. First, she assures us that, whatever inspired Manigault-Stallworth’s “Black

villainess diva” reputation, “it wasn’t her behavior.” Then, two pages later, she allows that “Omarosa

has capitalized on a virulent stereotype about Black women, a path ‘Apprentice’ producers laid out for

her.” She is eager to let audiences off the hook: in her account, “American Idol” (which she finds mean-

spirited) was a success because energetic cross-promotion “guaranteed ratings gold,” and “Survivor”

was a success “largely because the endless, from-all-corners buzz made viewership seem almost like a

cultural imperative.”

Because Pozner isn’t really interested in viewers, she doesn’t have much to say about why they reject

some reality shows while embracing others. And she doesn’t distinguish among passing fads, like “Joe

Millionaire” (which lost eighty per cent of its audience between its first season finale and its second—

also its last); hardy perennials, like “The Bachelor”; and obscurities, like “When Women Rule the World”

(which was scrapped by Fox months in advance of its scheduled première, though the series was

eventually broadcast in the U.K.). She isn’t really interested in the shows’ participants, either, and,

despite her attempts to shield them, sometimes they become collateral damage in her assaults on

greedy executives. “Producers build on our derision by carefully casting women who are, let’s just say, in

5

no danger of being recruited to join Mensa,” she writes. This judgment, at least, has the virtue of clarity:

producers are bad, though probably smart; participants are dumb, though possibly good.

Viewers wanting a subtler verdict should seek out “Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity”

(Duke; $23.95), Brenda R. Weber’s strange and thoughtful survey of makeover shows. Defined loosely,

this category, built around twinned narratives of physical and spiritual transformation, includes a wide

range of reality programming: not only “The Swan” and “What Not to Wear” but also “Dog Whisperer,”

which tames rowdy pets; “The Biggest Loser,” a weight-loss competition; and “American Idol,” which is,

after all, about the transformation of amateurs into pop stars. (Even “The Real World” is, in some sense,

a makeover show, precisely because of its artificiality: having been thrown together in a strange house

with strange people, the participants generally assume that the experience will be educational, or even

therapeutic.) Weber, a professor of gender studies at Indiana University, takes care to avoid snap

judgments. Her approach is informed by the work of the feminist scholar Kathy Davis, who has rejected

the idea that cosmetic surgery and other aesthetic interventions are inherently or purely oppressive.

Weber quotes one of Davis’s insights with approval: “Women are not merely the victims of the terrors

visited upon them by the beauty system. On the contrary, they partake in its delights as well.” The

thought of women renovating their wardrobes or their faces inspires in Weber not horror but a

tantalizing question: “Why shouldn’t the painful vestiges of class and circumstance that write

themselves on the body be not only overwritten but erased altogether?”

Weber sees in these makeover programs a strange new world—or, more accurately, a strange new

nation, one where citizenship is available only to those who have made the transition “from Before to

After.” Weber notices that, on scripted television, makeovers are usually revealed to be temporary or

unnecessary: “characters often learn that though a makeover is nice, they were really just fine in their

Before states.” On reality television, by contrast, makeovers are urgent and permanent; “the After-body,

narratively speaking, stands as the moment of greatest authenticity.” We have moved from the

regressive logic of the sitcom, in which nothing really happens, to the recursive logic of the police

procedural, in which the same thing keeps happening—the same detectives, solving and re-solving the

same crimes. In fact, Weber points out that a number of makeover shows present their subjects as

crimes to be solved: in the British version of “What Not to Wear,” makeover candidates line up in front

of a one-way mirror, like perpetrators awaiting identification; “Style by Jury,” a Canadian show, begins

and ends with the target facing a jury of her peers.

Makeover shows inevitably build to a spectacular moment when “reveal” becomes a noun, and yet the

final product is often unremarkable: a woman with an up-to-date generic haircut, wearing a jacket that

fits well; a man who is chubby but not obese; a dog with no overwhelming urge to bare its fangs. The

new subject is worth looking at only because we know where it came from, which means that, despite

the seeming decisiveness of the transformation, the old subject never truly disappears. “The After

highlights the dreadfulness of the Before,” Weber writes. “In makeover logic, no post-made-over body

can ever be considered separate from its pre-made-over form.” She might have added that no makeover

is ever really finished; there is no After who is not, in other respects, a Before—maybe your dog no

longer strains at the leash, but are you sure that sweater doesn’t make you look old and tired? Are you

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sure your thighs wouldn’t benefit from some blunt cannulation? Weber’s makeover nation is an eerie

place, because no one fully belongs there, and, deep down, everyone knows it.

The transformation, however partial, of a Before into an After usually requires accomplices, who may go

through their own transformation during the show, “from cranky witches to good friends to benevolent

fairy godmothers (or superheroes),” as Weber puts it. Often, these accomplices, like their fairy-tale

counterparts, live outside the social worlds of the people they help. “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,”

which began its run in 2003, epitomized this tendency: the title implied (and the show seemed to

confirm) that the makeover targets needed a kind of help that no member of their tribe—the “straight

guy” tribe—could provide. Weber argues that the “Queer Eye” experts, like other gay makeover agents,

“function as a foil against which to read the emerging hegemonic masculinity of the made-over man.”

But, surely, their marked difference is often related to the authority they project. (Think of Simon

Cowell, for years the toughest “American Idol” judge: his British accent and his status as a lifelong non-

singer made his judgments seem all the more definitive.) “Mostly male doctors on plastic surgery shows

are relentless about the horrors of looking masculine,” Weber writes, and yet some of the same doctors

who upbraid “masculine” women playfully defy gender norms: Robert Rey, the celebrity-obsessed star

of “Dr. 90210,” is known for his smooth skin, and for the sleeveless scrub shirts he prefers, many of

which are equipped with plunging V-necks, the better to display his pectoral cleavage.

Sometimes these agents of change seem purposely to sabotage their own messages. In her book, Pozner

reserves special condemnation for “Charm School,” the VH1 program that purported to offer social

rehabilitation to ill-mannered dating-show veterans; she protests that the “smug, white, wealthy ‘dean,’

Keith Lewis”—a modelling agent and pageant judge—“offered only condescension.” Weber, more

astutely, argues that arbiters like Lewis function effectively as parodies of authority: “the lessons are so

shallow, the uptight behavior of the experts so much less engaging than the ebullience of the subjects,

that these ‘learn to be proper’ shows in many ways rebuke the very transformations they portray.” A

show like “Charm School” is, at heart, an expression of the audience’s strong but mixed feelings about

makeovers in general: we like the idea of melioration, but how much change do we really want? Weber

returns to this question at the end of her book, when, in an autobiographical turn, she describes a visit

to an orthodontist, who offers to straighten her teeth for five thousand dollars. She declines, but finds

herself tempted—and she can’t help but notice that the orthodontist might benefit from otoplasty to

pin back his ears. And so she returns, implicitly, to the question of whether the body’s “painful vestiges

of class and circumstance” can be overwritten or erased. The answer is yes—but not for free and not for

good.

In Weber’s estimation, the most successful makeover show of all time has been off the air for almost

half a century. It was called “Queen for a Day,” and during its long run—from 1945 to 1957, on the

radio, and from 1956 to 1964, on television—it gave hundreds of women the chance to testify to the

arduousness of their lives; the woman whose tale of perseverance earned the most applause was

awarded a ceremonial enthronement and an assortment of prizes. Weber renders this plot in economic

terms, writing that the show “established a mediated affective economy where miserable subjects trade

stories of abjection for the bounty promised through televisual benevolence.” The terms have barely

changed in fifty years: this kind of exchange still forms the basis of the reality-television economy. In the

7

view of Mark Andrejevic, the cultural theorist, basic models of economic exchange can help explain not

only how the form works but why it emerged with such force when it did.

Andrejevic’s contribution to the field, “Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched,” arrived in 2004,

relatively early in the reality boom, by the slow-motion standards of academe. For Andrejevic, reality

television is a logical outgrowth of the rise, in the nineteen-nineties, of “interactive media,” which made

it easier for consumers to provide instant and constant feedback to corporations. In this way,

commercial advertising was joined with its obverse, commercial surveillance: in one, companies pay to

have you watch; in the other, companies pay to have you watched. The reality era began in earnest just

as the dot-com boom peaked, and if the shows felt uncannily “real,” Andrejevic says, it was not because

they depicted behavior that was somehow authentic but because they were structured in a way that

mirrored viewers’ lives:

The Illinois housewife who agrees to move into a house where her every move can be watched by

millions of strangers to compete for a cash prize exhibits more than an incidental similarity (albeit on a

different scale) to the computer user who allows Yahoo to monitor her web-browsing habits in exchange

for access to a free e-mail account.

Although reality television is often mocked for its frivolity, Andrejevic argues that its success is

symptomatic of an age in which labor and leisure are growing ever harder to separate. He tells the tale

of DotComGuy, a briefly popular Internet celebrity, who planned to live his life online, funded by

corporate sponsors. “To the extent that his life is the show, he is working all the time,” Andrejevic

writes, and the same could be said of anyone who appears on any reality show. Pozner asserts that “on

series from the ‘Real Housewives’ franchise to MTV’s ‘Paris Hilton’s My New BFF,’ ‘real life’ is all about

leisure.” In fact, Hilton’s show, in which she claimed to be searching for a B.F.F. (best friend forever),

was an example of how reality television turns social activities into professional ones. Similarly, the

“Real Housewives” shows, despite the name, feature very few actual housewives and lots of working

women (not all wives or mothers), every one of them eager to sacrifice time, not to mention privacy, for

a small payment and a less small portion of notoriety. This is the opposite of leisure, and it may also be a

sign of the end of leisure—the end, that is, of our ability to spend long stretches happily engaged in non-

work. If this possibility makes us anxious, we’re not alone: judging from their frequent and intricate

disagreements, the various “real housewives” are feeling a little anxious, too.

Andrejevic quotes Walter Benjamin, who, in 1935, distilled from his wanderings in the Paris arcades an

axiom: “The utopian images that accompany the emergence of the new always concurrently reach back

to the ur-past.” For Andrejevic, this is key to an understanding of the strong sense of nostalgia that

pervades reality television, which often promises to give us glimpses of the way things might once have

been. Hence the pseudo-tribal imagery of “Survivor,” which transports participants to an ersatz village,

far from home, where the logic of the surveillance economy becomes harder to distinguish from the law

of the jungle. In “Big Brother,” the contestants share a house that is modern except for the general

absence of digital screens; it is, as Andrejevic says, “a mass media experiment in watching people

deprived of the mass media.” Shows like “The Bachelor” revive old-fashioned ideas of courtship and

marriage, just as “American Idol” validates an earlier generation’s idea of pop stardom.

8

In 2004, when Andrejevic’s book was published, the conventions of reality television were still being

codified. Some early scholars emphasized the form’s debt to “Cops,” the longest-running reality show of

all. It is now in its twenty-third season, on Fox, and the format has barely budged: viewers ride with

police officers as they drive around, in search of perpetrators. “Cops” makes it easy to think of a video

camera as a weapon, there to keep the peace and to discipline violators. “Big Brother,” with its winking

title, also emphasized the regulatory power of surveillance: there were low-resolution cameras hidden

in the walls and tucked behind the plants, offering nearly total scrutiny of the house and its residents;

fans could watch footage online, in real time. It’s now clear, though, that the surveillance model was

overblown; the future of reality television didn’t belong to hidden cameras and fugitive subjects. “Big

Brother,” though it lumbers on, has never been very popular in America, and its grainy video and relaxed

pace—the housemates, like inmates, are always searching for ways to kill time—seem more dated with

every year. “Cops” has been succeeded by shows like “Police Women of Cincinnati,” on TLC, which

shunts aside the shadowy perpetrators to zoom in on the telegenic women who pursue them.

There is no longer any need for surveillance. The nightly schedules are full of brightly lit reality dramas

and comedies, driven by participants eager for screen time, and increasingly good at justifying their

share. Andrejevic was amused by our eagerness to “hand over airtime to the real people,” even though

putting them on the air makes them celebrities, which is to say, unreal. The various “Real Housewives”

shows have gradually revealed themselves to be makeover shows, too, transforming the most popular

cast members into self-sufficient celebrities. (Bethenny Frankel, from the New York cast, has branched

out with a series of books, a low-calorie margarita drink, and a couple of spinoffs.) The celebrification of

the genre has weakened the participants’ link to the viewers, while underscoring their similarity to other

famous people. The celebrity magazine In Touch Weekly recently ran a cover depicting three of the

young women from “Teen Mom,” accompanied by a headline in caution-sign yellow: …