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Abstract
It has been over 20 years since the reality television genre attracted the attention of fans, critics and scholars. Reality programmes produced high viewing figures, suggesting a strong appetite for the form; critics dismissed the programmes as mindless and the participants as desperate for fame; and scholars assessed the formats, audiences and meanings of reality television, offering a complex, if rarely celebratory, account. While some commentators and scholars made connections between vote-based formats and electoral systems, or between opportunities afforded audiences for the deliberation of social issues and the idealized public sphere, the civic dimension of participation itself has not been explored. In this article, we take a closer look at reality television participants, drawing on press interviews and coverage in order to highlight how participants enact representative performances that might supplement more formal modes of democratic representation.
Highlights
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
When the long history of television participation by members of the public is taken into account, lessons can be learned from tragedies that may have been prevented by more sensitive regulation and from the broadened representational canvas that has been made available by reality TV programming
We argue in this article that media commentators, politicians, producers and regulators should take seriously the voices and reflections of people who have appeared on television, listening to their expectations and experiences, in light of the increasing centrality of media participation in everyday life
Summary
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. As more considered analyses have documented, reality TV has offered space for the representation of populations with a limited public voice, challenging viewer prejudices by bringing types of people into living rooms whom viewers might not otherwise encounter. We argue in this article that media commentators, politicians, producers and regulators should take seriously the voices and reflections of people who have appeared on television, listening to their expectations and experiences, in light of the increasing centrality of media participation in everyday life. By interrogating some of the explicit and implicit claims about the significance of reality television made by earlier researchers and by unpacking some of the representative performances of participants, we explore the breadth of the term ‘political’ and enhance understanding of how media get used as an alternative platform, for people who may not feel that formal processes offer them sufficient voice or visibility
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