Reality TV Genre Research Articles

Women, anger and emotion management in Love Island

ABSTRACT This paper uses Hochschild’s theory of emotion management as a theoretical framework to interrogate women’s expressions of anger on Love Island. Using both critical discourse and textual analysis, we provide a comprehensive analytical investigation of how anger is shaped across the intersections of gender, race and class, and how it is mediated through the genre of Reality TV. Our findings demonstrate moments in which women on Love Island do not conform to gendered, classed and racialised “rules of emotion”. Rather, we argue that they embody an abject femininity by latently expressing their anger in order to negotiate relational issues of power and subjectivity. We further understand these expressions of anger as demonstrations of female solidarity within Love Island’s strictly heteronormative power structures, which reinforces the notion that anger is a potentially productive entity, and is one that women can mobilise in order to fight oppression (Audre Lorde, 1981). However, our findings also demonstrate that women who express anger continue to be subject to provocation, sanctions and belittlement, both within production and among fellow participants. For women who are Black, and women who are working class, these processes of emotion management have intensified.

O factual e o ficcional nas imagens sobre médicos na reportagem e no drama televisivos

Este trabalho tem o objetivo de compreender as dicotomias e as imbricações nas formas narrativas apresentadas em um conjunto de imagens de dois conteúdos midiáticos veiculados na TV Globo, em 2017: a série de reportagens Tudo pela Vida, comandada pelo médico Drauzio Varella, no Fantástico, e o drama seriado Sob pressão, produto ficcional gravado e ambientado em um hospital público do Rio de Janeiro. A partir de um conjunto de frames coletados em um episódio de cada produto, refletimos sobre como o personagem médico é construído nestas narrativas e identificamos proximidades e afastamentos na sua representação, alinhada aos novos realismos e categorizadas no gênero de reality TV.

Speaking the China Dream: self-realization and nationalism in China’s public-speaking shows

ABSTRACTOne of the key impacts of the ‘China Dream‘ campaign, along with the promulgation of patriotic values, has been the proliferation of the discourse of ’dreams’ across Chinese society. While the language of dreams alludes to individualistic values, in accord with recent socioeconomic transformations in China, state-promoted practices meticulously foster associations between the self-realization of individuals and their nationalistic sentiments. In this article, I look at a new genre of reality TV shows in China that has played an intriguing role in this process – public-speaking shows. Young contestants in these shows bring forth personal stories in a highly pedagogic fashion, becoming both role models for individualistic pursuits and messengers of state propaganda. Through speech performances, these shows both enhance and mitigate tensions between self-realization and nationalism that have extended through the China Dream campaign. These shows exemplify a discursive apparatus that reconfigures self-centred values through a vision of social stability and citizens’ affiliation to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The Workmanship of Risk Meets Reality TV: The History Channel’s Forged in Fire

Recent years have seen a distinctive revival in blacksmithing and bladesmithing as seen within the genre of Reality TV in the form of the History Channel’s Forged in Fire series, which competitively pits bladesmiths, farriers, and blacksmiths against each other to produce knives and historically based weapons. This article examines the cultural representation of this craft and shows how David Pye’s classic concept of the workmanship of risk helps understand the representation of craft within the series. However, his concept of risk is rearticulated in an artificial way due to against-the-clock challenges instilled by the format of the series. Furthermore, the article explores the ways in which makers respond to such challenges and exemplifies Howard Risatti’s conception of the expression of poiesis within their metalcraft work. As such, although a Reality TV series, Forged in Fire can be situated as a potent representation of the craft production of bladed weapons and metalwork that consistently explores the technical nature of the craft and stresses the extent to which traditional skills such as bladesmithing and blacksmithing are being practiced in vibrant professional contemporary craft communities. However, the simulated and spectacle-driven nature of the series does raise questions concerning how television represents craft practice and is compelled to artificially dramatize it.

Authentic Trump

Donald Trump, known as a mogul and reality TV celebrity, is presented as horrific in the press now that he wants to be President of the United States, a position requiring controlled and civil behavior, which he cannot master. Comparisons between his candidacy for president and a reality TV show abound, forcing us to contend with the conventions, privileged behaviors and ethics of the current culture of surveillance (which includes reality TV), arising in contexts of surveillance but now exceeding these. The crossover from reality TV celebrity to presidential candidate is troubled, highlighting the uncomfortable intersection of Trump’s whiteness and wealth with his crass behavior. The reality TV genre is seen as trashy, featuring people without class in behavior and often in social and financial status. The presidency, however, is for the elite white upper-middle or upper-class (usually male)—Obama negotiates the politics of respectability to fit this ideal. Popular articulations of Trump demonstrate the uneasy alignment of elite whiteness with white behavior marked as working class or poor, displaying panic about a president unable to exhibit appropriately classed behavior. This dangerously elides the larger machinery that is the government and big business, belying our cultural preoccupation with individualism and obfuscating the systemic. Taking Trump for the system negates how the current machinery has in fact produced a string of Trumps (Palin, Bachmann, Cruz), leaving us longing for the more civil days when white elite men knew how to speak their hatred in a civil manner.

Generation Me in the Spotlight: Linking Reality TV to Materialism, Entitlement, and Narcissism

Today’s youth, the Generation Me, is deemed materialistic, entitled, and narcissistic. Individuality has become an important value in child-rearing and is cultivated in the media—especially within the reality TV genre. The aim of this study was to investigate whether adolescents’ and emerging adults’ preference for MTV reality shows fosters materialism, entitlement, and narcissism. To this end, an online questionnaire on television use, possessions, and happiness was administered to a sample of 527 15- to 21-year-olds. Our findings indicate that the more reality TV adolescents view, the more materialistic, entitled, and narcissistic they are. No such patterns were found for emerging adults. We presume adolescents’ idolization of reality TV celebrities may cause them to mimic their behaviors. Future research should indicate whether teaching adolescents about the scripts in reality TV decreases worship of reality TV celebrities and, subsequently, reality TV’s effect on adolescents’ beliefs and values.

Chinese females׳ date refusals in reality TV shows: Expressing involvement or independence?

The majority of pragmatics research on the speech act of refusals has employed production questionnaires or role-plays to elicit data. Research employing more naturalistic data is needed to explore the actual performance of refusals, particularly in those socially sensitive contexts such as date refusals and within a public domain such as the reality TV show. The present study investigates the under-researched topic of date refusals on reality TV shows in China. The corpus in the present study comprised 38 female date refusals collected from a popular Chinese TV dating programme over a year. It was found that when refusing a date invitation in the TV show, Chinese females employed a limited range of pragmatic strategies. Their date refusals were mostly realized by means of apologies, and reasons, and to a lesser degree through adjuncts to refusals (including positive comments and gratitude) and direct refusal strategies. In addition, the Chinese females demonstrated a preference for strategies of involvement politeness in their date refusals. The paper also discusses the possible impact of the genre of reality TV shows on the Chinese females date refusals.

Pop Star to Opera Star: Labour, skill and value in musical performance

Abstract The British TV show Pop Star to Opera Star (2010/2011) was a contribution to a well-worn reality TV genre in which people are challenged to undertake a professional activity in which they have no prior experience. In this article I examine the way in which popular challenge programmes such as Pop Star to Opera Star, which suggest that highly skilled activities can be ‘faked’ with no more than a few day’s training, stage what art theorist John Roberts describes as ‘the generalised deskilling of labour under capitalism’. And I argue that in particular, the historical transvaluation of musical performance skills throughout the capitalist era exposes the contradictions that are inherent in both social and cultural constructions of the value of labour under capitalism.

Customer loyalty in entertainment venues: The reality TV genre

Current knowledge regarding the drivers of consumers' loyalty in service contexts remains limited as findings from extant studies differ; possibly because in service settings drivers of loyalty are context specific. This study contributes toward better understanding of the drivers of consumer loyalty in service contexts through investigation of the $750 billion U.S. entertainment industry. Findings from the entertainment industry should generalize to several other important service areas including spectator sports, Internet and social networking sites.

Roar Like a Tiger on TV?

The genre of reality TV is a significant feature of popular culture and has grown to include shows that document diverse aspects of social life. The common element of these shows is that they use personal history as spectacle, basing themselves on the idea that the shows portray the real lives of ordinary people rather than scripted performances. This paper takes a closer look at one of these reality TV shows—A Baby Story—to examine how this “record of reality” works to challenge and/or reinforce established norms related to gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability. Based on an analysis of 24 episodes, we identify four main discourses in A Baby Story related to women and childbirth: (1) The birthing woman; (2) The birthing story; (3) The role of medicine; and (4) Agency and resistance. Through a discussion of these discourses, we argue that A Baby Story constructs a specific televisual narrative that supports established gender roles and dominant social norms in relation to the event of childbirth, rather than reflecting the diversity of women's experiences. By presenting this televisual narrative as ordinary or common A Baby Story potentially acts as a powerful element of a larger electronic panopticon that serves to surveil and discipline women and their bodies.

Food Confessions: Disclosing the Self through the Performance of Food

At the end of the episode “Crowd Pleasers,” from her television series Nigella Feasts, we see British food writer and television cook Nigella Lawson in her nightgown opening her fridge in the dark. The fridge light reveals the remnant dishes of chili con carne that she prepared earlier on in the programme. She scoops up a dollop of soured cream and chili onto a spoon and shovels it into her mouth, nods approvingly and then picks up the entire chili dish. She eats another mouthful, utters a satisfied “umm” sound, closes the fridge door and walks away, taking the dish of chili with her. This recurring scenario at the end of Nigella’s programmes is paradoxically constructed as a private moment to be witnessed by many viewers. It resembles acts of secret eating, personal food habits and offers a glimpse of the performed self, adding to Nigella’s persona. Throughout Nigella’s programmes there is a conscious tension between the private and public. This tension is confounded by Nigella’s acknowledgement of, and direct address to, the viewers, characterised by the knowing look she gives to the camera when she tastes her food, licks her fingers as she cooks, or reveals her secret chocolate stash in her store cupboard; the overt performance of supposedly surreptitious gestures. Through her look-back at the camera Nigella performs both sin and confession, communicating her guilty-pleasure as she self-consciously reveals this pleasure to the viewers. At the start of her performance Table Occasions (2000), solo artist Bobby Baker explains that there are strict rules that she must follow, the most important being that she must not walk on the floor. Baker then hosts a dinner party (for imaginary guests), balancing on top of the table and chairs wearing high-heeled shoes. When the ‘meal’ is finished Baker breaks her rule; she gets down from the table and walks freely across the performance space, giving the audience a knowing look of mock-surprise, as if everyone was seduced into believing in the compulsory nature of her rule (Table Occasions). In this performance Baker confesses her anxiety and discomfort in the act of playing the host. By breaking rules of common etiquette as well as her own abstract rules, she performatively constructs her “sins” and her “confessions.” Baker’s look-back at the audience reveals her self-conscious “confessing self.”

Communicating a ‘time-out’ in parent–child conflict: Embodied interaction, domestic space and discipline in a reality TV parenting programme

In 2003, a new reality TV genre appeared on British public television built on the spectacle of the parenting of so-called disturbed or problem children. This paper focuses on The House of Tiny Tearaways, a programme in which three families are invited to reside in a specially designed house together with a resident clinical psychologist. Such a programme allows us to explore a range of issues, including (a) how a family assembles itself spatially and coordinates its activities across the lived architectures of the home; and (b) how a child is disciplined in and through the embodied activities, spatial formations and talk of the parents. The paper draws upon mediated discourse analysis and conversation analysis – inflected by contemporary understandings of discipline, space and place – in order to analyse the phenomenon of the ‘time-out’, a generalised ‘technique’ of parentcraft that is used to discipline young children who are misbehaving. Rather than debate the merits of the ‘time-out’ as an appropriate disciplinary instrument, this paper explores the local, emergent and negotiated accomplishment of disciplinary practices of temporal and spatial restraint that involve embodied (inter)action, furniture, objects, and the lived architecture of the domestic sphere.

"That History Should Not Have Ever Been How It Was": The Colony, Outback House, and Australian History

In 2005, Australia’s public broadcasters each produced ‘reality history’ programs: The Colony, which screened on the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) in January, 1 and Outback House, produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in mid-year. Australian audiences had previously enjoyed British and American ‘reality history’ programs like Frontier House and 1940s House, and the local versions proved popular: The Colony drew SBS’s largest audiences for an Australian-made program since 2001, and Outback House attracted audiences of around 1 million per episode (Australia’s population is around 21 million). 2 Both The Colony and Outback House promised that participants and viewers would “step back in time” to different periods of Australia’s colonial history, a history that has been bitterly debated in the public domain in Australia’s “history wars”. 3 These debates have centred on conflicting interpretations of Indigenous-European history and the violence of colonisation, and have been fought not just between academics, but also politicians and neo-conservative newspaper commentators. The history wars form part of the cultural backdrop to these programs, alongside the success of the reality TV genre, which has cultivated knowing and critical audiences familiar with its constructions and artificialities. Both these factors influenced the public reception of the programs, coupled with debates over the ways Australian history is taught in schools (Clark 2006), and the preponderance of British and American history documentaries on our television screens (Arrow 2005).

Welcome to the Jungle of the Real: Simulation, Commoditization, and Survivor

Commodities are ubiquitous in contemporary society. As many have written-Karl Marx most prominently among early thinkers on the subject-these of material and/or symbolic are often socially constructed and central to everyday life, be they perceived as needs or wants. Attaching additional meaning to commodities through history (an heirloom), nostalgia (vintage clothing), image (Michael Jordan-endorsed sneakers), branding (A shirt with the word GAP stitched in the collar), or other means can inflate their value, often artificially (Peterson). Indeed today, even television shows are not immune to being commoditized. This article will examine how the television program Survivor has undergone commoditization since its debut in May 2000 and is now approaching what Jean Baudrillard called simulacra-a copy without an original, endlessly reproducible images that reference nothing. The article will first describe Survivor and the reality TV genre, then demonstrate why the show is not real, but rather a contrived construction. It will then describe how Survivor is used intertextually in parody, fan fiction, and among various seasons of the series, as well as detail the program's development as a commodity through both official and unofficial, viewer-driven means. Finally, the article will question where Survivor stands among Baudrillard's four stages leading to simulacra. Theoretical Context This article will rely on several theoretical concepts from cultural studies, cultural anthropology, and critical theory; this section provides a brief overview of some of them. First, there is the idea of commodities and commoditization. Arjun Appadurai defines the former provisionally as simply objects of economic value determined through an of sacrifices (3), be it trading money for a toothbrush, bartering a barrel of oranges for a bushel of peppers, or sending your star shortshop to a rival baseball team in exchange for that team's catcher and a player to be named later. Indeed, these days even people can be commodities. As such, commodities take on countless forms, and one of these is the commodity sign. Here refers to semiotics, or the science of signs, a field deriving from the lectures of Ferdinand de Saussure. A sign consists of a signifier and the signified it conjures. In a famous example, the signifier t-r-e-e evokes the signified, an image of what we call a tree (Chandler). The signifier and signified an indissociable unity, like two sides of the same piece of paper (McNeill). This is the sign (the word tree). Among others, C. S. Peirce further developed Saussure's concepts. Some signs, such as tree, are arbitrary or symbolic, according to Peirce-but there are two other types as well. First, indexical signs refer to a relationship of contiguity, or pointing, such as causal or part-to-whole. They also can be based on point of view (Peterson). One use of indexical signs is in intertextuality, or how one text cites and refers to another (Goldman and Papson, Sign Wars 68). second, iconic signs are the most primordial and refer by resemblance, such as a painting featuring a red stop sign. The red does not arbitrarily represent the red of a real stop sign; rather, it is the same red as the actual sign (Peterson). The aforementioned commodity signs most visibly take the form of corporate logos, such as the swoosh. Our consumer-based society has reached the point where a blank shoe is meaningless. That's right, meaningless-the white shoe is a blank if it is not marked by a sign .... In fact, the market of these products is produced by Nike's design and marketing specialists (Goldman and Papson, Nike 12). In other words, the commodity sign's is mainly symbolic, rather than derived from actual use value. Commodity signs can be iconic-for instance, the sign above a Hallmark card store resembles the sign above every other one, even though each has a different name (Leslie's Hallmark, Amy's Hallmark, etc. …

On the Popular Vote

Over the past few years, voting has become a central dramatic element on a variety of shows in the highly successful reality TV genre. Treating the “voting drama” as a shadow realm to the political, one in which anxieties and tensions produced by the practice of democracy are given free play, this essay offers a critical consideration of some of the hidden aspects of the cultural and social significance of political voting.

Political talk radio and democratic participation: caller perspectives on Election Call

There has been much recent discussion about the changing nature of ‘the public sphere’ with the relatively new genre of reality TV being viewed as a space in which the public can at least perform, if not always engage in meaningful debate. This article considers the perspectives of callers to a political talk show - Election Call- in terms of why they call in, what they think about their interactions with politicians and how they regard the programme’s potential to constitute a public sphere. It also looks at the gendered aspects of caller experiences and beliefs in order to tease out whether gender has any influence on the public’s practice of politics. Election Callis a BBC production, which has been broadcasting since 1974, going out simultaneously on radio and TV (and the web for 2001), in the days immediately preceding the British general election. I argue that while callers mostly felt very positive about the experience of appearing on the show and having the opportunity to put their point of view, and believed that Election Callfulfils an important democratic function, they were much more negative in their assessment of their interactions with politicians, believing that it continues to be difficult to get a straight answer out of those elected to serve and represent us.

Searching for the Real: ‘Family Business,’ Pornography, and Reality Television

Searching for the Real: ‘Family Business,’ Pornography, and Reality Television