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Dec 19, 2007 · Despite the popularity of reality television and its solid roots in Western media, sociology has been underused in its analysis. In this essay, I review the research on reality television. Its definition, history, and issues of classification in the genre are addressed.
- Overview
- Types of shows
- Early reality TV shows
- Survivor and the reality TV boom
- Critical assessment
- Social impacts and criticism
reality TV, television genre encompassing a wide variety of purportedly unscripted programming. Because the genre is so heterogeneous, it can be difficult to fully define. In her book True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us (2022), American sociologist Danielle J. Lindemann defines reality TV as “a set of programs that feature non-actors (though ...
“There are reality TV programmes about everything and anything, from healthcare to hairdressing, from people to pets,” writes British media scholar Annette Hill in her analysis of the genre, Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television (2005). Subgenres of reality TV include competition shows, dating shows, self-help or makeover shows, show...
Although reality TV’s popularity exploded in the 21st century, the genre is nearly as old as television itself. The hidden-camera show Candid Camera, often identified as the first reality TV show, premiered on the ABC network in 1948 with the title Candid Microphone, reflecting the show’s roots as a radio program (various versions of the TV show aired from 1948 to 2014). Candid Camera surreptitiously filmed unsuspecting people reacting to elaborate practical jokes, such as a telephone booth that levitates during a call and a two-way mirror at a barbershop that surprises customers with startling images.
Other important mid-20th-century reality TV shows include Queen for a Day (1956–64), in which women compete for prizes by trying to tell the most compelling hard-luck stories about their lives; The Dating Game (1965–86), in which a contestant asks questions of three prospective dating partners (who are hidden from the contestant’s view) before selecting one to meet and go on a chaperoned date with; An American Family (1973), a TV documentary about the everyday life of the Louds, an upper middle-class family in Santa Barbara, California, that follows the family as the parents separate and later divorce; and Cops (1989–2023), which follows law enforcement officers as they work.
Although The Real World surfaced a winning formula to attract viewers, the premiere of Survivor (2000– ) is widely acknowledged as a turning point in the history of reality TV, a moment that catalyzed a marked increase in the genre’s production and consumption. In Survivor, contestants travel to a remote warm-weather location where they fend for themselves and compete in various team-based challenges. Every three days the contestants vote to send one of the losing team’s members home. The last person standing wins $1 million.
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Survivor was an immediate success. In 2000 it was the top-rated prime-time network television series in the U.S., attracting an average of more than 28 million viewers per episode, with a record average of 52 million viewers tuning in for the first season’s finale. Only that year’s Super Bowl commanded a larger audience than the Survivor finale. The show’s relatively low production costs compared with standard prime-time fare meant that the cost of the show had already been recouped from advertising revenue before Survivor even aired. Beyond offering the example of a runaway hit series, Survivor is thought to have upped the expectations for reality programming, bringing a sense of intrigue and danger to the genre and raising the bar regarding what a show could do to shock an audience. Between the massive financial gains and the more permissive cultural landscape in which to make them, reality TV boomed in the 2000s, becoming a ubiquitous entertainment industry institution. A 2017 study found that reality TV shows made up 18 percent of that year’s 250 most popular shows. Some demographic research indicates that a majority of American households watch reality TV, which has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry.
Although many deride the genre as noxious, lacking in substance, exploitative, and undignified, others argue that reality TV offers insight into social values and norms. Lindemann argues that careful viewers can learn from reality TV how apt Westerners are to interpret the world “in narrow and unyielding ways,” adding:
For all of its carnivalesque aspects, the genre reflects how steadfastly we cling to simplistic, collective notions about who and what is legitimate and “real.” It spotlights the categories and meanings that we take for granted as essential, biological, and unshakable. But in doing so, it allows us to poke at these assumptions, revealing the socially constructed natures of what we consider to be “true,” “normal,” “healthy,” “legitimate,” and “good.”
There is similar disagreement regarding the social impacts of reality TV. Some research indicates that such programming may have a positive effect on adolescents’ self-esteem and self-assurance and that shows such as MTV’s Teen Mom: OG (2009– ) and 16 and Pregnant (2009– ) may have a positive impact when it comes to reducing teen pregnancies. Other research suggests that watching reality TV shows may contribute to negative body image, negative perceptions of exercise, and increased aggression.
Many argue that the behaviors depicted and rewarded by reality TV have had a negative effect on how Americans relate to one another. In 2022 Time magazine TV critic Judy Berman argued that, “to the extent that the U.S. has become a harsher, shallower, angrier, more divided place in the 21st century, reality TV—which has helped normalize cruelty, belligerence, superficiality, and disloyalty, and rewarded people who weaponize those traits—bears a share of the blame.”
- Jordana Rosenfeld
Aug 15, 2016 · The cultural significance of reality television is based on its claim to represent social reality. On the level of genre, we might argue that reality television constructs a modern day panorama of the social world and its inhabitants and that it thus makes populations appear. This article presents a class analysis of the population of reality ...
- Fredrik Stiernstedt, Peter Jakobsson
- 2017
Aug 6, 2021 · Factual-entertainment television, more commonly referred to as ‘reality TV’, encompasses a range of formats that typically feature members of the public appearing as themselves in natural or constructed settings, including reality competitions, docusoaps, popular documentaries and social experiments.
- Bethany Klein, Stephen Coleman
- 2021
Apr 24, 2012 · Understanding reality television. London: Routledge. This collection examines the aesthetics and cultural politics of prime-time reality television from a range of critical, sociological, and philosophical perspectives.
Reality TV involves real people ostensibly reacting to real-world situations, which allows us to put ourselves in the participants’ shoes and see flashes of ourselves. The genre tends to traffic in broad character archetypes — the “smart one” and the “shy one” and the “athletic one,” for example.
Definition. Reality television is a genre of TV programming that presents unscripted real-life situations, often featuring ordinary people or celebrities in various scenarios.
