Cheaters

Abstract

This article explores the reality television show Cheaters as a parodic-pastiche genre featuring videotaped surveillance of the romantically unfaithful within a web of preexisting fictional and nonfictional forms, including, most prominently, melodrama and detective fiction. Cheaters' claim of promoting “temperance and virtue” within a legalistic ethos of one's “right to be informed” about infidelity allows the show to cast itself as “real reality” television, though its narrative structure goes well beyond simple documentation. Especially when considered in the supertextual context of sexually, ego-centrically themed advertisements, Cheaters emerges as a parodic-pastiche narrative that easily intermingles moralistic and sensationalistic themes. I argue that the show's postmodern catch-all rhetoric borrows most centrally from fictional melodrama, and therefore Cheaters can be interpreted as melodramatic parody. It provides, on the surface, a moral framework that grants ideological cover for an otherwise salacious interest in visually documented infidelity.