Narrative Dynamics in the Competitive Reality Show

Abstract

Although the genre of reality television is mocked by critics and rarely discussed by narrative theorists, reality shows confront diffi cult storytelling problems that the best shows resolve in highly creative ways. As nonfi ction, the reality show shares some of the norms associated with the documentary fi lm, with the producers and editors assembling a story from an unwieldy mass of largely unscripted recorded footage. As a genre of television, however, the reality show, like the fi ctional episodic serial, must confront the challenge of maintaining viewer engagement through the commercial breaks and over the course of a long, multiepisode season. Together, these two sets of constraints serve to establish the reality genre as a distinctive mode of storytelling, one reducible neither to the fi lm documentary nor to the fi ctional episodic serial, yet drawing storytelling strategies from both. Th is essay will show how these strategies can produce surprisingly complex narrative dynamics, and here I use the term “dynamics” in the sense proposed