‘For the first time in ________ history…’: microcelebrity and/as historicity in reality TV competitions

Abstract

ABSTRACTNearly two decades after the explosion of primetime reality programming, many reality series claim a stylised historicity: an intentional and constant citational practice that stages the seasons, contestants, and events from a programme’s past as a way of reminding its audience about the programme’s impact on popular culture. This article examines this historicity and the production of microcelebrity within gamedocs. The creation of a programme’s history legitimises it as commodity, with the ‘history’ of a reality television series further extending the brand of a gamedoc. I turn to historicity – the affective perception of history – to describe the spectator’s investment in reality TV’s historical authenticity. Reality television uses microcelebrity as a vehicle to reroute history into collective memory, and chart two techniques (all-star seasons and the re-circulation of microcelebrities across a reality franchise) that gamedocs use to this effect. These techniques expand our understanding of microcelebrity through their affective production of fame, a fame that does not necessarily exist but is instead simulated through the rem(a)inders of a series’ archive. In shifting emphasis from history to historicity, I demonstrate how gamedocs must continuously update and reinvent its microcelebrities in order to sustain their own histories in a fast-paced convergent mediascape.