Speaking to Reality TV
What can be said about reality television? To begin with, is it even one cohesive thing? Or is it an entity made up of numerous component parts, many of which operate independently? How does this reality speak and express itself? How real is this reality? One thing is certain: if we the viewers are to speak of reality television, we must first understand how it speaks of itself. The following argument is an attempt at decoding this strange new vocabulary, which appears almost ubiquitously in every reality programme.
Although the focus of this entry is the language of reality television, the above questions bear investigating. Reality television is becoming an increasingly relevant component of the modern weltanschauung, and yet it is composed of a curious paradox: the more clearly these objects (i.e. reality shows) purport to authentically relate their “reality” to the audience, the more occluded this” reality” becomes. Initially, this occurred on the side of production, where producers and executives angled for more sensationalist situations and encounters regardless of their adherence to "reality."
This opacity is not a one-way street, either. As these shows obscure reality to a greater degree, the general population demands increasingly fantastic and incredulous iterations of this reality. In short, the “realer” these shows claim to be, the less they are; and this, strangely, is not troublesome to us. Far better writers than I have explored the concept of this new reality, which is realer than real. Here, I hope to demonstrate how this reality is instantiated by the parlance of its participants-how their very speech informs the entire notion of reality television.
Composition
To perform this analysis, I must establish a rough outline of this thing called “reality programming.” As indicated above, it is not a homogenous set of items. Throughout this entry, I will refer to televised reality programmes and shows as objects or texts, including long-running franchises and series. Those individuals appearing on these shows are contestants and participants, although in rare cases they may also be celebrities or terrible people.
Reality television as a genre can be divided in two ways. Firstly, we can sort the texts thematically, and here we see natural categories emerge: competition, docudrama and prank show. These three thematic groupings function somewhat ahistorically, in that many of the constitutive elements of these categories are present throughout reality television’s lineage. That is to say, reality television has not so much evolved as it has recombined many tropes which it had employed from the start. Secondly, we can divide reality television chronologically into early and modern periods, separated primarily by the sheer proliferation of reality programs in the late 1990s. These disparate eras are nevertheless populated by analogous forms and themes, making it more sensible to begin this discussion thematically, rather than chronologically.
The most common modern form of reality television is the competition, which sees contestants compete for romance, employment, prizes, or self-improvement. These competitions will typically all bear the following hallmarks: weekly eliminations, weekly challenges, minor rewards (such as phonecalls home, “alone time” or “one-on-one time,” luxury items, etc.), judges/juries, and a host/commentator/MC. The “employment” competitions frequently have a job offer, contract, or apprenticeship as their ultimate reward.
Competition shows are a peculiar breed as they take particular pains to isolate their contestants from the world at large. Big Brother presents the clearest example of this, with houseguests who are, for all intents and purposes, incarcerated. Even the airspace above the house is patrolled and protected, to prevent enterprising individuals from delivering airborne messages to the houseguests. Survivor is highly similar, with the contestants squirreled away in some inaccessible region of the world. What these examples point to is the lengths to which producers go to insert the contestants in a closed system where all the variables are tightly controlled. This stands in stark contrast to the other common reality genres, which thrive on interaction between subject and audience.
There is also the docudrama, which usually follows one or many personalities in their ostensibly “everyday” lives. The docudrama is marked by its claim to being an undiluted glimpse into the reality of a situation. It films one or several individuals over the course of “real” (but most likely heavily-scripted) events. Sometimes the subjects are celebrities, while other times they’re professionals. Many docudramas capitalize on the fame of their subjects, and promote outrageous behaviour to drum up interest in the show-fights will be exceptionally loud, minor injuries will be treated as life-threatening, ordinary events will be treated as extraordinary. Consequently, the documentary element of the show is sometimes subsumed to the need for “drama.” “Drama,” as used in the context of reality television, will be elaborated upon later. Other times “drama” will be substituted for hyper-sexualized situations, as is the case with shows centred on celebrities such as Paris Hilton, Brooke Hogan, Kim Kardashian, Ray J, and Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends.
Docudramas come in two varieties, character-centric and host-centric. Character-centric docudramas follow the same individuals from week to week (The Osbournes), while host-centric docudramas follow the same host interacting with different individuals each week (The Dog Whisperer). Note that some host-centric docudramas do not have a distinct host personality (in cases such as Wife Swap, there is an unseen narrator to provide structure to the wives’ experiences but no real host), but they nevertheless have a consistent format with new participants every week.
Some shows employ elements of both the above categories, with Trading Spouses as a notable example. The show follows two different families each episode in a host-centric docudrama fashion. However, for the duration of the spousal trade the family members (except the wives) are effectively competing for a portion of a potential $25000 reward. Each wife is allowed to allocate the money amongst the host family according to her wishes, so family members who “play nice” are usually suitably compensated. Other shows, such as Dancing with the Stars, retain the weekly eliminations of a reality competition, but also focus on the lives of the participating celebrities in the manner of a docudrama. While these kinds of crossovers are becoming more frequent, the categories of competition and docudrama are not weakened by these amalgamations. In fact, the above two formats have always been highly connected. Competition shows frequently rely on the “drama” amongst contestants to attract new viewers, while docudramas will occasionally employ hosts and narrators to give structure to the story.
Lastly there are prank shows, which typically present hidden-camera footage of “unsuspecting” victims of pranks. This category is possibly the earliest and most traditional form of reality programming, and relies primarily on the premise of embarrassing or scaring ordinary individuals. As it so often happens, the members of the general public are replaced by celebrities who are “in on” the prank. Consequently, these shows become increasingly personality-based, (such as devoting more time to Ashton Kutcher as he devises his next brilliant prank than to its actual execution) and tend to lay more and more in the realm of docudrama.
Modern prank shows increasingly rely on the supposition that what attracts viewers to such shows is the promise of someone else's pain or humiliation. In the early 90s, this gave rise to shows such as America's Funniest Home Videos, collecting user-submitted clips of everyday embarrassments. However, contemporary pranksters have learned that the public doesn't much care who the recipient of the prank is. What counts instead is the shock. Which is why we have shows like Jackass and Wild Boys, wherein the hosts play pranks on each other, and the allure stems from seeing how much these individuals are willing to debase themselves.
After completing some preliminary research for this entry, I decided to create the above set of thematic divisions on my own. This was mostly motivated by the concrete fact that the pre-existing divisions were riddled with redundancies and inaccuracies. Problematically, they proved unwieldy when considering many of the “hybrid” programmes which are common nowadays.
Reality competitions can also be distinguished from traditional game shows through the continuity of the contestants-since most game shows have unique contestants every week, while reality competitions follow a stable of competitors through numerous episodes-and the stability of the weekly challenges. Reality competitions employ different “challenges” with different goals each week, while game shows always play the same game. Here, you might be tempted to argue that a show like The Price Is Right uses different games or “challenges” with different goals every week, but this is to misunderstand the show. On TPIR, the games appear to be different, but this is a superficial difference. The mini-games played on the show are all of a singular type: games with two rewards, the immediate (whatever can be won in the space of that single competition) and the eventual (a chance at the best position during the showcase showdown); even the spinning of the wheel can be examined using this distinction. These can be contrasted with the mini-games played in reality competitions, which will almost always have but a single, immediate reward. More importantly, this single reward will sometimes be at odds with winning the entire competition. Consider the relatively stable Survivor trend: one of the final challenges almost invariably features a car as a prize, with the downside being that other contestants are much more likely to vote to evict the survivor who wins the car. This holds true of other competitions as well, where contestants who win minor cash prizes, trips or other luxuries are much more likely to be targeted by their peers for elimination due to the perception that the contestant has already won something. In other words, game shows form a distinct category in their own right, and one which shares only a few common elements with reality television.
Another debatable configuration is the membership of “talk shows” or “talk TV” to the club of reality television. In one sense, very little is “realer” than these supposedly mundane individuals who enact their private lives on a national stage-the revelation of paternity on Maury is an intimate, private affair that is writ large across daytime television. One could even make the case that talk shows are an example of a host-centric docudrama. However, talk shows bear more in common with staged plays and dramas than with the visual style of reality television. More importantly, the host plays a far more invasive role in a talk show than in reality television. The host typically directs the proceedings of a talk show to construct a new story for the audience, while the host of a reality programme attempts to maintain pace with the contestants by eliciting elaborations and reflections on incidents that the viewing audience has already seen. In any case, talk shows are no doubt inextricably related to reality television but they are distinct enough in format and presentation to retain their own category.
It should finally be noted that “fear-based competitions” is a useless description of reality programmes. Consider a show such as Fear Factor, which places contestants in situations where they must perform unpleasant or frightening tasks (such as eating spiders or being attacked by dogs). The general concept of these challenges-motivating contestants to perform demeaning or disgusting challenges-is present in many other forms of reality television. Tila Tequila once notably forced contestants to eat pig vagina to demonstrate their love for her. Survivor contestants are often compelled to eat bugs and other unsavoury items. Wives on Wife Swap and Trading Spouses are occasionally confronted by a host family with peculiar eating habits (such as the family that only ate rotten meat) or unsanitary living conditions, and must choose to brave the situation for a week or drop out of the show. Fear-based challenges are a staple of almost every form of reality television, making the idea of a “fear-based competition” a worthless distinction. Saying that a programme is a competition which uses exclusively fear-based competitions is far more precise.
A Brief History of Reality TV
We can also divide reality television chronologically. Although the distinction is a basic dichotomy (of early and modern periods), it is useful to mark the sea change that occurred in the 1990s in reality programming. The medium evolved drastically in the space of a decade and became one of the most thriving, profitable and ubiquitous genres on television. I suggest that the early period was hampered by the limitations of broadcast television and the trammelled nature of advertising and market reach. The modern period, which experiences no such obstacles, has fine-tuned the format to outperform most scripted shows while promoting the products of subsidiary corporations. Big Brother offers a classic example of this: the houseguests are offered the chance to watch an early copy of an upcoming summer movie release, and they all give lengthy, glowing, televised reviews. The movie, of course, is released by the same company that produces Big Brother (CBS and Paramount Films are both owned by Viacom), so both branches benefit from the tie-in. There are countless other examples of this, from the cars on Survivor to the make-up on America’s Next Top Model. This relationship, of producer and purveyor, is a complex one that warrants further investigation.
For now, I set the start date of “reality programming” at 1948, the year Candid Camera premiered in the United States. This early period lasted for the next four decades, and the shows ranged from prank shows to talent competitions and pageants. From these early pieces, we retain quite a bit in our modern iterations of reality programming. Pageantry is still televised, and if anything has expanded into a veritable industry. In fact, many of our reality competition shows follow the same basic model of a pageant, but expanded across several weeks. A stable of contestants are slowly eliminated as they compete in various minor challenges along the way to their ultimate goal, a process which is found in everything from American Idol to RuPaul’s Drag Race. Pageants and other such esoteric displays of skill and prowess-from lumberjack competitions to cat shows-are now infrequently seen on television unless actively sought. They are far eclipsed by their more sensationalized and marketable brethren, such as American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance.
Prank shows are also present on television in various forms, though almost entirely reliant on the fame of the host for success. And while we are still fascinated with watching individuals operating on faulty assumptions (such as assuming that they are not being filmed during revealing moments) we have now refined that format from harmless one-time pranks to long-cons which play out over the course of a dozen episodes (such as deceiving contestants in a competition about the true nature of the game or the prize for which they compete). Both these types of shows are now rare, mostly due to an increasingly savvy pool of reality contestants-after the first season of Joe Millionaire, wherein contestants were led to believe they were competing for the hand of a wealthy bachelor who turned out to be a poor construction worker, the show’s producers were forced to film the second season in Europe to increase their odds of finding women unfamiliar with that particular ruse.
Some of these early offerings aimed at being more than mere populist fare. In 1964, the BBC in Britain broadcast the first instalment in the groundbreaking Seven Up series, which documented the lives of 12 seven-year-old British children every seven years. Somewhat ironically, the fact that this series is so very authentic means that it cannot be accurately classified as reality television, and instead belongs in the realm of documentary. However, it can be seen as the precursor to many of the child-oriented reality shows which are currently in high-demand, and of docudramas in general. The success of child-rearing docudramas and social experiments such as CBS’s 2007 Kid Nation can no doubt be traced back to innovative televised documentaries like Seven Up which aimed to realistically portray the social lives of children.
Shortly thereafter, three shows premiered in North America during the 1960s and 70s which introduced some of the more classic elements of reality television. The first, The Dating Game, laid the foundation for what we would later recognize as the Bachelor/ette franchise-an eligible individual quizzes three potential suitors before selecting one for a date. The second, The Newlywed Game, was hardly a reality competition in any current sense of the word, but it paved the way for one of the primary tenets of modern reality programming: that the revelation of someone’s intimate feelings, experiences and thoughts on television will attract viewers. And the third, The Gong Show, can be seen as an early analog to the format of American Idol-on both shows contestants perform for a panel of judges with no credibility who then comically ridicule the contestants. The rationale behind these three shows informs much of our current experience of reality television, despite the fact that all three are more properly considered traditional game shows.
An Introduction to the Modern Era
Our contemporary era is knee-deep in the modern period of reality programming, which began in 1992 with the first episode of MTV’s The Real World (although in 1991 a show aired in the Netherlands with the exact same premise). Alongside Survivor (2000, although the Swedish version aired in 1997) and American Idol (2002, again predated by a British version in 2001), The Real World ushered in the era of reality program with which we are most familiar, and which many critics have affectionately termed “ShameTV.” The moniker is not entirely undeserved-long-running shows like Jerry Springer and more recent fare like Moment of Truth indicate a deep cultural fascination with seeing other people’s “dirty laundry” aired on television.
In contrast to the early period of reality programming, which focused on ordinary individuals, the modern period is primarily concerned with individuals with “issues.” “Issues” in this context can be political, religious, family, psychological, or sexual. Participants in the modern era or reality television are prized for their capacity for controversy. Reality texts of all type rely on this ideal-The Real World casts houseguests who are riddled with psychological disorders; you cannot watch an episode of America’s Next Top Model without watching one of the girls tearfully confess her dyslexia/eating disorder/suicide attempt/wheelchair-bound mother/trick baby; even rehab-oriented docudramas like Wife Swap profit more from a dysfunctional family than a mundane one.
No doubt part of this shift toward a hyper-dysfunctional reality contestant, as opposed to the more “everyman” persona of the early era, can be traced to our modern fascinations with sensationalism and voyeurism. After all, there’s no point to being a voyeur if there isn’t anything interesting to witness. More often than not, this tendency manifests itself as the audience’s desire to watch flawed characters make poor life-decisions.
The Fetishization of the Rehabilitated Individual
This viewer craving for schadenfreude invariably shifts to a different focus, that of rehabilitation. Currently a prominent feature of modern reality television, rehabilitation (or restoration or reconciliation or even reparation) is present in both docudramas and competitions. Cognizant of the audience’s love for ugly-duckling stories and happy endings, reality television has colonized the realm of self-improvement. Beginning in 1996 with the British broadcast of Changing Rooms, reality television has been reformulating itself as an educational experience. Whether it’s teaching you what not to wear or how to parent your child, reality TV is presenting itself as an idealized version of life-even in less-than-ideal circumstances like debt, divorce, obesity, unemployment or obscurity. Its intention is to function as a primer: for youth, beauty, success, romance, sobriety, etc.
At first, this urge for rehabilitation was confined to the more practical forms of reality television, such as the “how do I get out of debt?” and the “how do I look good naked?” and the “how do I stop mainlining heroin?” professional docudramas. The subjects of the show are taught how to exercise control over their lives, and as they learn, so does the audience. Many of these “rehab dramas” had a positive spin to them (except, of course, the one about mainlining heroin), and attempt to portray negative circumstances in a manageable light. Rehab dramas, particularly those about serious conditions, may even provide links to further resources about seeking help. In this sense, they can and must be distinguished from the “self-improvement” docudramas and competitions. Rehab dramas retain elements of both these categories, but are sufficiently focused on the sorry state of the subject and his potential rehabilitation to earn their own category.
Soon enough, however, this driving need to have contestants and participants on reality shows experience a moment of rehabilitation or reconciliation or perhaps even “genuine” regret became widespread and painfully apparent. Consider the first season of the US Big Brother, where the winner was selected through audience votes. This system was scrapped in favour of the more traditional “ousted contestants return as jury members” format. Contestants now prostrate themselves before former houseguests, and plead and grovel to atone for past sins. Acceptance by one’s peers has become an overriding principle in most reality competitions. In Survivor and Big Brother, contestants rely on votes to remain in the game, while in From G’s to Gents and The Girls of Hedsor Hall, the contestants must earn the respect of their fellow players lest they be seen to be unfit for civil society. These types of shows thrive on conflict, since that provides the host an opportunity to function as mediator and force two people to admit their faults on television. More than that, season-long “storylines” of redemption and growth can be tracked, and the audience can follow the changes made in each individual on their path to improvement. In more modern contexts, we see this urge to rehabilitation in the endless “reunions” of reality cast-members, and in the spin-offs earned by jilted contestants of dating programs and the C-list hangers-on in celebrity docudramas.
Terminology
If we are to speak meaningfully about reality television, then part of this conversation must be conducted using its own language. Problematically, this language is most often employed by the most inarticulate of individuals, making it somewhat difficult to map properly. However, there are several key concepts which appear in almost every show.
The first, and possibly most interesting, is the dichotomy of “fake” and “real.” These two terms see use primarily in reality competitions, but are not uncommon in celebrity and professional docudramas. When “fake” is used to describe contestants or participants on reality television, it typically denotes that they are present for ulterior, hidden motives. These can include fame, money, exposure, and exhibitionism. Being “fake” is always an accusatory claim, made by one individual about a fellow contestant/participant. “Real,” on the other hand, is always employed as a personal assertion of sincerity and loyalty (i.e., “I’m the realest person in this house!”). It is synonymous with authenticity, honesty and transparency of motive. Most importantly, “real” denotes playing the game the way it was meant to be played. This “intended ruleset” is often subject of great debate amongst participants (for instance, should one individual deceive another to win a reality competition?), but most agree that the quality of being “real” is commensurate with “playing the game properly.” “Reality,” within a reality show, becomes a matter of adherence and obeisance-a voluntary submission to certain conditions and stipulations in order to achieve a specific goal.
Fakeness takes on new meaning at this point as well. If being “real” is voluntary proper conduct meant to convey authenticity, then being fake is not merely misconduct but intentionally misleading conduct. A contestant who is fake is one who presents one face to her peers and another to her betters. In self-improvement competitions, contestants will often feign improvement in front of the judges while breaking rules indiscriminately when unsupervised. Morality, in the sense of reality television, suddenly becomes less contingent on the actions of individuals and more focused on the faces they present to each other. Being caught in a lie is far worse than lying, and successfully lying to the judge/jury/host is the worst sin of all for they are the arbiters of “realness.” Fakeness is a circumvention of one of the fundamental principles of reality television: that the cameras will capture everything. Participants exploit the inescapable fact that judges, hosts, juries and even colleagues are not privy to all the footage. Authenticity emerges as a sort of undeniable moral imperative.
Both these terms, fake and real, occupy opposing positions on the same spectrum, and most reality competition contestants appear to instinctively speak of themselves and others using these terms. This dichotomy is further reinforced by hosts who encourage this kind of thinking-on Paris Hilton’s My New BFF, the girls had to classify each fellow contestant as real or fake, and a continuum was established once the votes were tallied with Paris commenting on each contestant’s placement on the real/fake scale.
Before we progress to the next idiom I wish to dissect, there is a tension here that I want to explore further and it concerns the idea of “playing the game for the right reasons and in the right way.” We can look first at the idea of being in a competition “for the right reasons” in the context of the Bachelor/ette franchise. Although the turn of phrase is common enough in other shows, it is most relevant when considered in terms of dating competitions. In the 11th season of The Bachelor, Deanna Pappas makes the claim that she’s “not here to win, she’s here for Brad.” Later, once Pappas was given her own spinoff as the Bachelorette, she comments in episode 7 that Jason, one of the contestants, is definitely “here for the right reasons.” In the first instance, Pappas is attempting to convey her sincerity by first acknowledging that she is aware of the constraints of the game (namely, that winning is everything), then subverting that awareness by declaring a relationship with “Brad” as more important. Bignell notes that in “reality TV, key moments are when the performance façade of the contestant falls away. This seems to reveal the real person.” Pappas’s attempt is aimed at simulating this moment between performer and audience.
In the second instance, Pappas is evaluating the merit of one of the contestants competing for her affection. Here, the phrase is used to connote that Jason, the contestant in question, has demonstrated the appropriate level of deference to Pappas’s interests. It refers not at all to his actual motivations for entering the competition, nor to his stated goals, but rather to the manner in which he has treated Pappas thus far in the competition. A devoted competitor in this game is one who dotes on Pappas and acquiesces to her demands, and this kind of behavior is indicative of being in the competition for the right reasons. It is in this example that the notion of “right reasons” becomes clearer, and once again Goffman provides a useful frame through his examination of idealization.
Goffman argues that most performances involve an element of idealization, whether negative or positive. These performances “tend to incorporate and exemplify the officially accredited values of the society” even if those values are in direct conflict with the performer’s actual behavior. In the course of these performances, such discrepancies must be managed by the performer so as not to ruin the illusion. One of these discrepancies in particular, that of the “end product,” is relevant to this discussion. In the case of the Bachelor/ette franchise, it can be argued that every contestant is engaged in the creation of an “end product” which they continuously present to their eligible host. Much the same way that competitors on American Idol and Project Runway are forced to complete a “product” each week, competitors on reality dating shows must present themselves as an end product when they interact with the host on a weekly basis. Success or failure in such a game relies on the perceived authenticity of the product. The more “authentic” it is, the more likely that the individual is in the competition for “the right reasons.”
“Authenticity” in this sense varies based on which show is being discussed. Certain shows, like the Bachelor/ette, promote a more chaste depiction of courtship than something like Rock of Love, while a competition such as Survivor demands a more cerebral approach than The Real World/Road Rules Challenge. As a result, a competitor from Flavor of Love may be deemed authentic within the confines of that show, but considered to have unsatisfactory motives from the perspective of The Bachelor.
Accordingly, this discourse of motives is a conscious negotiation of the process of production. Whether it is a whispered debate about the hidden goals of another contestant, or a personal claim to authenticity and “realness,” this type of discourse is “strategic, both in terms of constructing social relationships between [contestants], and maintaining a positive self-image in the game.” Contestants see their performances gain or lose currency based on how often they’re instantiated by other contestants. If one contestant is frequently “called out” for duplicity, real or imagined, then his stock with the host (and ultimate prize) will fall proportionally. Thus, in the case of Jason from the Bachelorette, having Pappas claim that he was “here for the right reasons” is a further solidification and reinforcement of his performance of sincerity and devotion.
This is, quite rightly, a somewhat paradoxical idea. From a cynical perspective, it stands to reason that a competitor committed to sycophantic and idolatrous behavior has more to conceal than someone who is not. Goffman is sympathetic to this, commenting that “an honest, sincere, serious performance is less firmly connected with the solid world than one might first assume.” In other words, the actual correspondence of performance to reality is not what is at issue. Rather, what is crucial is delivering a performance which may be subsequently ratified and instantiated by peers and judges.
Another critical concept present in most (if not all) reality television is that of “drama.” Here, drama does not refer to a theatrical performance, or a set of events “involving interesting or intense conflict of forces.” Instead, it refers to the manufactured strife amongst participants on a reality show. These are the petty squabbles about talent, honesty, and granola bars. “Drama,” in this sense, is commonly instantiated in two ways. First, a contestant or participant on a reality show will confront another about a (real or imagined) grievance. The ensuing argument constitutes “drama.” Second, in the aftermath of such events, many participants will be heard to say that they do not condone causing “drama,” and this may even come in the form of an accusation against another participant (i.e., “All you do is start drama. I don’t play like that.”). Ironically, this accusation of “drama-causing” inevitably precipitates more “drama.”
Because it is so strangely removed from its vernacular counterpart, drama on reality television comes across as particularly contrived. As I will soon demonstrate, this impetus to cause drama, as well as the incentive to discuss it endlessly, are oddly endemic to the genre as a whole. What I mean is that not only do the producers of these shows appear to covertly promote the generation and sustainment of drama, but in situations where there is little producer-prompting the contestants seem naturally aware of the fact that causing drama is a surefire guarantee of longevity within the show. Thus drama will always be present with the system, regardless of whether it was prompted by producers or not.
There is also the set of clichés deployed by reality television participants when facing certain situations, namely those of betrayal and isolation. When an individual feels as though he has been slighted or used as a scapegoat, he will claim to have been “thrown under the bus.” Humorously, since most reality show participants are inarticulate yet verbose, this has lead to some rather amusing mutilations of the expression. It is not uncommon to hear an ousted contestant on a reality competition claim he was “left under the bus” or “pushed in front of the bus.” More tellingly, he may also claim to have been “sold under the bus,” an interesting agglomeration of the “bus” expression and the idiom of “selling someone down the river.” Obviously, cast members on reality competitions do not consider being eliminated akin to being sold to a harsher plantation, but the comparison is embedded in the very words they use. These erstwhile participants direct their sense of betrayal and injustice at those whom they perceive as having engineered their departure from the show. These individuals are undoubtedly “fake” and treacherous.
Yet how do these sinister architects perceive themselves? Curiously, contestants who orchestrate the elimination of fellow players tend to use one of two platitudes to comfort themselves: “it is what it is” or “I’m not here to make friends.” The former is an almost stoic, Machiavellian equivalent of “needs must.” It speaks of realpolitik and raison d’etat, and of the necessity of self-preservation which lies at the core of all reality competition. Most often used as a catch-all for any unpleasant situation, “it is what it is” also crops up in character-centric docudramas where manufactured conflict has created irreconcilable differences among individuals. Since these individuals usually cannot express the root cause of these differences without sounding like a fool (“Like, the producers told me to get mad at her when she and her new boyfriend totally started spending all their time together, and they told him to get mad at me for, like, interfering in their lives! So then the producers told her to leak a sex-tape rumour about me to the tabloids so we’d have something to talk about in season 3!”), they are forced to use vagaries like “it is what it is.”
The latter expression, “I’m not here to make friends,” is more nuanced, and frequently uttered by a manipulative or ruthless contestant when he is exposed as such to his peers. Contestants often appeal to the authority of whatever show they’re on when invoking this concept, leading to such classic lines as “This wall doesn’t say ‘America’s Next Top Best Friend!’” and “It’s ‘Flavor of Love’ not ‘Flavor of Friendship!’” Alternatively, contestants will claim that they are not here to make friends as they are here “to win” or “to be the best” or “to sleep with Tila Tequila.” In other words, there is the barest glimmer of understanding that their actions are not their own, and that for the duration of whatever reality show they are currently on, they will be subject to different standards and codes of conduct than society at large.
The last term I wish to address here, and my personal favourite, is the Big-Brother-spawned concept of a “nerd herd.” A “nerd herd” is a group of individuals on a reality show who conceive of themselves as extremely popular among viewers when in fact they are reviled and loathed by the audience. This concept does not see much use in docudramas, with some notable exceptions. This is mostly due to the fact that character-centric docudramas cannot prevent their subjects from reading the fan and critical reactions to the show (which is now used as a plotline-“Denise Richards reads tabloid blogs which mock her, causing her to lash out and then get depressed.”). However, in host-centric docudramas, many individuals are prone to thinking their antics and antagonism will resonate with audiences when in fact it causes severe viewer backlash (as in the case of an episode of Wife Swap, wherein a host husband verbally abused the visiting wife, belittling her for being poor and uneducated, no doubt thinking viewers would find his degrading comments hilarious; instead, many viewers wrote to the network, prompting the husband to publicly apologize for his behaviour). What is most intriguing about the “nerd herd” is the way in which reality television seems to create a bubble wherein contestants have an exaggerated sense of their own appeal. Self-righteousness is eclipsed by a blind faith that winning the game and/or the hearts of the audience will somehow justify all the terribly and morally egregious acts committed by the contestant.
So what does this all add up to? The job of a reality performer is a tightrope, between appearance and expectation. Performers create themselves in reality television, and since their overriding goal is always continued existence on their particular show, and since that continued existence is only secured through the approval of their peers, they must be sure to align their performance with the expectations of their peers. But! Discrepancies will always occur, and the performer must find some way of reconciling these imperfections. Their only tool for this endeavour is their speech-only what they say about themselves and others can hope to influence how their performance is viewed. This is one of the sad truths of reality television: that words carry more weight than action. Performers who initiate the discourse frequently have more control over it than those who do not.
Interestingly, given that discourse is the only arena in which the reality performer may truly attempt to control how their performance is received, this discourse is strangely closed and sectioned off. What we would casually term “natural language” or the vernacular is not necessarily admissible in the court of reality television. Reality TV has its own set of moral principles, detached from those in everyday life. Participants must appeal to these principles within the game rather than any external social, legal, or religious conventions. Survivor depicts this most clearly, where the rules of the game, “Outwit, outplay, outlast,” denote a closed system where certain types of behaviour typically considered impermissible by society become the norm. Duplicity, theft, aggression-these are the cardinal values within the world of reality competitions. Contestants must therefore express themselves in reference to these concepts, as this is the style of discourse which is accepted by whatever judging entity exists within their show. If a contestant has lied to a friend, he must rationalize that behaviour in the context of “getting ahead” in the game and “being here to win, not make friends.”
Pulling the curtain back, then, we can see that there is no one behind it. There is no malevolent demon instructing participants in this new discourse, since the participants instruct themselves. Or rather, they can see that to succeed in the context of reality television is a matter of speech, and that only certain types of speech are permitted.
Conclusion
I turn to a quote from Rene Magritte: “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.” Reality television presents a most perplexing conundrum-how does one conjure reality from unreality, when all attempts to seem realer are invariably interpreted as inauthentic? The proving ground of authenticity within reality television becomes the realm of discourse, as the participants use the only tool they can in an attempt to control and secure their identity and concordantly their continuance within the game.
Were this another forum of expression, I would be tempted to indicate that the performance in which reality contestants are engaged is in fact a form of labour and that value is being extracted through their speech-which is their only viable forum of self-expression. A contestant’s life within the realm of reality television is wholly reliant on whether his performance is accepted by his peers. In competitions, winning is frequently contingent on being approved by judges or jury members, and their evaluations are of whether a contestant’s performance is justified within the context of the game. Performers are therefore incited to discourse, exhorted to speak using this specialized language, because reality television is as much a process of socialization for those who participate in it as it is for those who watch it. They’re just two vastly different societies.
Although the focus of this entry is the language of reality television, the above questions bear investigating. Reality television is becoming an increasingly relevant component of the modern weltanschauung, and yet it is composed of a curious paradox: the more clearly these objects (i.e. reality shows) purport to authentically relate their “reality” to the audience, the more occluded this” reality” becomes. Initially, this occurred on the side of production, where producers and executives angled for more sensationalist situations and encounters regardless of their adherence to "reality."
This opacity is not a one-way street, either. As these shows obscure reality to a greater degree, the general population demands increasingly fantastic and incredulous iterations of this reality. In short, the “realer” these shows claim to be, the less they are; and this, strangely, is not troublesome to us. Far better writers than I have explored the concept of this new reality, which is realer than real. Here, I hope to demonstrate how this reality is instantiated by the parlance of its participants-how their very speech informs the entire notion of reality television.
Composition
To perform this analysis, I must establish a rough outline of this thing called “reality programming.” As indicated above, it is not a homogenous set of items. Throughout this entry, I will refer to televised reality programmes and shows as objects or texts, including long-running franchises and series. Those individuals appearing on these shows are contestants and participants, although in rare cases they may also be celebrities or terrible people.
Reality television as a genre can be divided in two ways. Firstly, we can sort the texts thematically, and here we see natural categories emerge: competition, docudrama and prank show. These three thematic groupings function somewhat ahistorically, in that many of the constitutive elements of these categories are present throughout reality television’s lineage. That is to say, reality television has not so much evolved as it has recombined many tropes which it had employed from the start. Secondly, we can divide reality television chronologically into early and modern periods, separated primarily by the sheer proliferation of reality programs in the late 1990s. These disparate eras are nevertheless populated by analogous forms and themes, making it more sensible to begin this discussion thematically, rather than chronologically.
The most common modern form of reality television is the competition, which sees contestants compete for romance, employment, prizes, or self-improvement. These competitions will typically all bear the following hallmarks: weekly eliminations, weekly challenges, minor rewards (such as phonecalls home, “alone time” or “one-on-one time,” luxury items, etc.), judges/juries, and a host/commentator/MC. The “employment” competitions frequently have a job offer, contract, or apprenticeship as their ultimate reward.
Competition shows are a peculiar breed as they take particular pains to isolate their contestants from the world at large. Big Brother presents the clearest example of this, with houseguests who are, for all intents and purposes, incarcerated. Even the airspace above the house is patrolled and protected, to prevent enterprising individuals from delivering airborne messages to the houseguests. Survivor is highly similar, with the contestants squirreled away in some inaccessible region of the world. What these examples point to is the lengths to which producers go to insert the contestants in a closed system where all the variables are tightly controlled. This stands in stark contrast to the other common reality genres, which thrive on interaction between subject and audience.
There is also the docudrama, which usually follows one or many personalities in their ostensibly “everyday” lives. The docudrama is marked by its claim to being an undiluted glimpse into the reality of a situation. It films one or several individuals over the course of “real” (but most likely heavily-scripted) events. Sometimes the subjects are celebrities, while other times they’re professionals. Many docudramas capitalize on the fame of their subjects, and promote outrageous behaviour to drum up interest in the show-fights will be exceptionally loud, minor injuries will be treated as life-threatening, ordinary events will be treated as extraordinary. Consequently, the documentary element of the show is sometimes subsumed to the need for “drama.” “Drama,” as used in the context of reality television, will be elaborated upon later. Other times “drama” will be substituted for hyper-sexualized situations, as is the case with shows centred on celebrities such as Paris Hilton, Brooke Hogan, Kim Kardashian, Ray J, and Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends.
Docudramas come in two varieties, character-centric and host-centric. Character-centric docudramas follow the same individuals from week to week (The Osbournes), while host-centric docudramas follow the same host interacting with different individuals each week (The Dog Whisperer). Note that some host-centric docudramas do not have a distinct host personality (in cases such as Wife Swap, there is an unseen narrator to provide structure to the wives’ experiences but no real host), but they nevertheless have a consistent format with new participants every week.
Some shows employ elements of both the above categories, with Trading Spouses as a notable example. The show follows two different families each episode in a host-centric docudrama fashion. However, for the duration of the spousal trade the family members (except the wives) are effectively competing for a portion of a potential $25000 reward. Each wife is allowed to allocate the money amongst the host family according to her wishes, so family members who “play nice” are usually suitably compensated. Other shows, such as Dancing with the Stars, retain the weekly eliminations of a reality competition, but also focus on the lives of the participating celebrities in the manner of a docudrama. While these kinds of crossovers are becoming more frequent, the categories of competition and docudrama are not weakened by these amalgamations. In fact, the above two formats have always been highly connected. Competition shows frequently rely on the “drama” amongst contestants to attract new viewers, while docudramas will occasionally employ hosts and narrators to give structure to the story.
Lastly there are prank shows, which typically present hidden-camera footage of “unsuspecting” victims of pranks. This category is possibly the earliest and most traditional form of reality programming, and relies primarily on the premise of embarrassing or scaring ordinary individuals. As it so often happens, the members of the general public are replaced by celebrities who are “in on” the prank. Consequently, these shows become increasingly personality-based, (such as devoting more time to Ashton Kutcher as he devises his next brilliant prank than to its actual execution) and tend to lay more and more in the realm of docudrama.
Modern prank shows increasingly rely on the supposition that what attracts viewers to such shows is the promise of someone else's pain or humiliation. In the early 90s, this gave rise to shows such as America's Funniest Home Videos, collecting user-submitted clips of everyday embarrassments. However, contemporary pranksters have learned that the public doesn't much care who the recipient of the prank is. What counts instead is the shock. Which is why we have shows like Jackass and Wild Boys, wherein the hosts play pranks on each other, and the allure stems from seeing how much these individuals are willing to debase themselves.
After completing some preliminary research for this entry, I decided to create the above set of thematic divisions on my own. This was mostly motivated by the concrete fact that the pre-existing divisions were riddled with redundancies and inaccuracies. Problematically, they proved unwieldy when considering many of the “hybrid” programmes which are common nowadays.
Reality competitions can also be distinguished from traditional game shows through the continuity of the contestants-since most game shows have unique contestants every week, while reality competitions follow a stable of competitors through numerous episodes-and the stability of the weekly challenges. Reality competitions employ different “challenges” with different goals each week, while game shows always play the same game. Here, you might be tempted to argue that a show like The Price Is Right uses different games or “challenges” with different goals every week, but this is to misunderstand the show. On TPIR, the games appear to be different, but this is a superficial difference. The mini-games played on the show are all of a singular type: games with two rewards, the immediate (whatever can be won in the space of that single competition) and the eventual (a chance at the best position during the showcase showdown); even the spinning of the wheel can be examined using this distinction. These can be contrasted with the mini-games played in reality competitions, which will almost always have but a single, immediate reward. More importantly, this single reward will sometimes be at odds with winning the entire competition. Consider the relatively stable Survivor trend: one of the final challenges almost invariably features a car as a prize, with the downside being that other contestants are much more likely to vote to evict the survivor who wins the car. This holds true of other competitions as well, where contestants who win minor cash prizes, trips or other luxuries are much more likely to be targeted by their peers for elimination due to the perception that the contestant has already won something. In other words, game shows form a distinct category in their own right, and one which shares only a few common elements with reality television.
Another debatable configuration is the membership of “talk shows” or “talk TV” to the club of reality television. In one sense, very little is “realer” than these supposedly mundane individuals who enact their private lives on a national stage-the revelation of paternity on Maury is an intimate, private affair that is writ large across daytime television. One could even make the case that talk shows are an example of a host-centric docudrama. However, talk shows bear more in common with staged plays and dramas than with the visual style of reality television. More importantly, the host plays a far more invasive role in a talk show than in reality television. The host typically directs the proceedings of a talk show to construct a new story for the audience, while the host of a reality programme attempts to maintain pace with the contestants by eliciting elaborations and reflections on incidents that the viewing audience has already seen. In any case, talk shows are no doubt inextricably related to reality television but they are distinct enough in format and presentation to retain their own category.
It should finally be noted that “fear-based competitions” is a useless description of reality programmes. Consider a show such as Fear Factor, which places contestants in situations where they must perform unpleasant or frightening tasks (such as eating spiders or being attacked by dogs). The general concept of these challenges-motivating contestants to perform demeaning or disgusting challenges-is present in many other forms of reality television. Tila Tequila once notably forced contestants to eat pig vagina to demonstrate their love for her. Survivor contestants are often compelled to eat bugs and other unsavoury items. Wives on Wife Swap and Trading Spouses are occasionally confronted by a host family with peculiar eating habits (such as the family that only ate rotten meat) or unsanitary living conditions, and must choose to brave the situation for a week or drop out of the show. Fear-based challenges are a staple of almost every form of reality television, making the idea of a “fear-based competition” a worthless distinction. Saying that a programme is a competition which uses exclusively fear-based competitions is far more precise.
A Brief History of Reality TV
We can also divide reality television chronologically. Although the distinction is a basic dichotomy (of early and modern periods), it is useful to mark the sea change that occurred in the 1990s in reality programming. The medium evolved drastically in the space of a decade and became one of the most thriving, profitable and ubiquitous genres on television. I suggest that the early period was hampered by the limitations of broadcast television and the trammelled nature of advertising and market reach. The modern period, which experiences no such obstacles, has fine-tuned the format to outperform most scripted shows while promoting the products of subsidiary corporations. Big Brother offers a classic example of this: the houseguests are offered the chance to watch an early copy of an upcoming summer movie release, and they all give lengthy, glowing, televised reviews. The movie, of course, is released by the same company that produces Big Brother (CBS and Paramount Films are both owned by Viacom), so both branches benefit from the tie-in. There are countless other examples of this, from the cars on Survivor to the make-up on America’s Next Top Model. This relationship, of producer and purveyor, is a complex one that warrants further investigation.
For now, I set the start date of “reality programming” at 1948, the year Candid Camera premiered in the United States. This early period lasted for the next four decades, and the shows ranged from prank shows to talent competitions and pageants. From these early pieces, we retain quite a bit in our modern iterations of reality programming. Pageantry is still televised, and if anything has expanded into a veritable industry. In fact, many of our reality competition shows follow the same basic model of a pageant, but expanded across several weeks. A stable of contestants are slowly eliminated as they compete in various minor challenges along the way to their ultimate goal, a process which is found in everything from American Idol to RuPaul’s Drag Race. Pageants and other such esoteric displays of skill and prowess-from lumberjack competitions to cat shows-are now infrequently seen on television unless actively sought. They are far eclipsed by their more sensationalized and marketable brethren, such as American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance.
Prank shows are also present on television in various forms, though almost entirely reliant on the fame of the host for success. And while we are still fascinated with watching individuals operating on faulty assumptions (such as assuming that they are not being filmed during revealing moments) we have now refined that format from harmless one-time pranks to long-cons which play out over the course of a dozen episodes (such as deceiving contestants in a competition about the true nature of the game or the prize for which they compete). Both these types of shows are now rare, mostly due to an increasingly savvy pool of reality contestants-after the first season of Joe Millionaire, wherein contestants were led to believe they were competing for the hand of a wealthy bachelor who turned out to be a poor construction worker, the show’s producers were forced to film the second season in Europe to increase their odds of finding women unfamiliar with that particular ruse.
Some of these early offerings aimed at being more than mere populist fare. In 1964, the BBC in Britain broadcast the first instalment in the groundbreaking Seven Up series, which documented the lives of 12 seven-year-old British children every seven years. Somewhat ironically, the fact that this series is so very authentic means that it cannot be accurately classified as reality television, and instead belongs in the realm of documentary. However, it can be seen as the precursor to many of the child-oriented reality shows which are currently in high-demand, and of docudramas in general. The success of child-rearing docudramas and social experiments such as CBS’s 2007 Kid Nation can no doubt be traced back to innovative televised documentaries like Seven Up which aimed to realistically portray the social lives of children.
Shortly thereafter, three shows premiered in North America during the 1960s and 70s which introduced some of the more classic elements of reality television. The first, The Dating Game, laid the foundation for what we would later recognize as the Bachelor/ette franchise-an eligible individual quizzes three potential suitors before selecting one for a date. The second, The Newlywed Game, was hardly a reality competition in any current sense of the word, but it paved the way for one of the primary tenets of modern reality programming: that the revelation of someone’s intimate feelings, experiences and thoughts on television will attract viewers. And the third, The Gong Show, can be seen as an early analog to the format of American Idol-on both shows contestants perform for a panel of judges with no credibility who then comically ridicule the contestants. The rationale behind these three shows informs much of our current experience of reality television, despite the fact that all three are more properly considered traditional game shows.
An Introduction to the Modern Era
Our contemporary era is knee-deep in the modern period of reality programming, which began in 1992 with the first episode of MTV’s The Real World (although in 1991 a show aired in the Netherlands with the exact same premise). Alongside Survivor (2000, although the Swedish version aired in 1997) and American Idol (2002, again predated by a British version in 2001), The Real World ushered in the era of reality program with which we are most familiar, and which many critics have affectionately termed “ShameTV.” The moniker is not entirely undeserved-long-running shows like Jerry Springer and more recent fare like Moment of Truth indicate a deep cultural fascination with seeing other people’s “dirty laundry” aired on television.
In contrast to the early period of reality programming, which focused on ordinary individuals, the modern period is primarily concerned with individuals with “issues.” “Issues” in this context can be political, religious, family, psychological, or sexual. Participants in the modern era or reality television are prized for their capacity for controversy. Reality texts of all type rely on this ideal-The Real World casts houseguests who are riddled with psychological disorders; you cannot watch an episode of America’s Next Top Model without watching one of the girls tearfully confess her dyslexia/eating disorder/suicide attempt/wheelchair-bound mother/trick baby; even rehab-oriented docudramas like Wife Swap profit more from a dysfunctional family than a mundane one.
No doubt part of this shift toward a hyper-dysfunctional reality contestant, as opposed to the more “everyman” persona of the early era, can be traced to our modern fascinations with sensationalism and voyeurism. After all, there’s no point to being a voyeur if there isn’t anything interesting to witness. More often than not, this tendency manifests itself as the audience’s desire to watch flawed characters make poor life-decisions.
The Fetishization of the Rehabilitated Individual
This viewer craving for schadenfreude invariably shifts to a different focus, that of rehabilitation. Currently a prominent feature of modern reality television, rehabilitation (or restoration or reconciliation or even reparation) is present in both docudramas and competitions. Cognizant of the audience’s love for ugly-duckling stories and happy endings, reality television has colonized the realm of self-improvement. Beginning in 1996 with the British broadcast of Changing Rooms, reality television has been reformulating itself as an educational experience. Whether it’s teaching you what not to wear or how to parent your child, reality TV is presenting itself as an idealized version of life-even in less-than-ideal circumstances like debt, divorce, obesity, unemployment or obscurity. Its intention is to function as a primer: for youth, beauty, success, romance, sobriety, etc.
At first, this urge for rehabilitation was confined to the more practical forms of reality television, such as the “how do I get out of debt?” and the “how do I look good naked?” and the “how do I stop mainlining heroin?” professional docudramas. The subjects of the show are taught how to exercise control over their lives, and as they learn, so does the audience. Many of these “rehab dramas” had a positive spin to them (except, of course, the one about mainlining heroin), and attempt to portray negative circumstances in a manageable light. Rehab dramas, particularly those about serious conditions, may even provide links to further resources about seeking help. In this sense, they can and must be distinguished from the “self-improvement” docudramas and competitions. Rehab dramas retain elements of both these categories, but are sufficiently focused on the sorry state of the subject and his potential rehabilitation to earn their own category.
Soon enough, however, this driving need to have contestants and participants on reality shows experience a moment of rehabilitation or reconciliation or perhaps even “genuine” regret became widespread and painfully apparent. Consider the first season of the US Big Brother, where the winner was selected through audience votes. This system was scrapped in favour of the more traditional “ousted contestants return as jury members” format. Contestants now prostrate themselves before former houseguests, and plead and grovel to atone for past sins. Acceptance by one’s peers has become an overriding principle in most reality competitions. In Survivor and Big Brother, contestants rely on votes to remain in the game, while in From G’s to Gents and The Girls of Hedsor Hall, the contestants must earn the respect of their fellow players lest they be seen to be unfit for civil society. These types of shows thrive on conflict, since that provides the host an opportunity to function as mediator and force two people to admit their faults on television. More than that, season-long “storylines” of redemption and growth can be tracked, and the audience can follow the changes made in each individual on their path to improvement. In more modern contexts, we see this urge to rehabilitation in the endless “reunions” of reality cast-members, and in the spin-offs earned by jilted contestants of dating programs and the C-list hangers-on in celebrity docudramas.
Terminology
If we are to speak meaningfully about reality television, then part of this conversation must be conducted using its own language. Problematically, this language is most often employed by the most inarticulate of individuals, making it somewhat difficult to map properly. However, there are several key concepts which appear in almost every show.
The first, and possibly most interesting, is the dichotomy of “fake” and “real.” These two terms see use primarily in reality competitions, but are not uncommon in celebrity and professional docudramas. When “fake” is used to describe contestants or participants on reality television, it typically denotes that they are present for ulterior, hidden motives. These can include fame, money, exposure, and exhibitionism. Being “fake” is always an accusatory claim, made by one individual about a fellow contestant/participant. “Real,” on the other hand, is always employed as a personal assertion of sincerity and loyalty (i.e., “I’m the realest person in this house!”). It is synonymous with authenticity, honesty and transparency of motive. Most importantly, “real” denotes playing the game the way it was meant to be played. This “intended ruleset” is often subject of great debate amongst participants (for instance, should one individual deceive another to win a reality competition?), but most agree that the quality of being “real” is commensurate with “playing the game properly.” “Reality,” within a reality show, becomes a matter of adherence and obeisance-a voluntary submission to certain conditions and stipulations in order to achieve a specific goal.
Fakeness takes on new meaning at this point as well. If being “real” is voluntary proper conduct meant to convey authenticity, then being fake is not merely misconduct but intentionally misleading conduct. A contestant who is fake is one who presents one face to her peers and another to her betters. In self-improvement competitions, contestants will often feign improvement in front of the judges while breaking rules indiscriminately when unsupervised. Morality, in the sense of reality television, suddenly becomes less contingent on the actions of individuals and more focused on the faces they present to each other. Being caught in a lie is far worse than lying, and successfully lying to the judge/jury/host is the worst sin of all for they are the arbiters of “realness.” Fakeness is a circumvention of one of the fundamental principles of reality television: that the cameras will capture everything. Participants exploit the inescapable fact that judges, hosts, juries and even colleagues are not privy to all the footage. Authenticity emerges as a sort of undeniable moral imperative.
Both these terms, fake and real, occupy opposing positions on the same spectrum, and most reality competition contestants appear to instinctively speak of themselves and others using these terms. This dichotomy is further reinforced by hosts who encourage this kind of thinking-on Paris Hilton’s My New BFF, the girls had to classify each fellow contestant as real or fake, and a continuum was established once the votes were tallied with Paris commenting on each contestant’s placement on the real/fake scale.
Before we progress to the next idiom I wish to dissect, there is a tension here that I want to explore further and it concerns the idea of “playing the game for the right reasons and in the right way.” We can look first at the idea of being in a competition “for the right reasons” in the context of the Bachelor/ette franchise. Although the turn of phrase is common enough in other shows, it is most relevant when considered in terms of dating competitions. In the 11th season of The Bachelor, Deanna Pappas makes the claim that she’s “not here to win, she’s here for Brad.” Later, once Pappas was given her own spinoff as the Bachelorette, she comments in episode 7 that Jason, one of the contestants, is definitely “here for the right reasons.” In the first instance, Pappas is attempting to convey her sincerity by first acknowledging that she is aware of the constraints of the game (namely, that winning is everything), then subverting that awareness by declaring a relationship with “Brad” as more important. Bignell notes that in “reality TV, key moments are when the performance façade of the contestant falls away. This seems to reveal the real person.” Pappas’s attempt is aimed at simulating this moment between performer and audience.
In the second instance, Pappas is evaluating the merit of one of the contestants competing for her affection. Here, the phrase is used to connote that Jason, the contestant in question, has demonstrated the appropriate level of deference to Pappas’s interests. It refers not at all to his actual motivations for entering the competition, nor to his stated goals, but rather to the manner in which he has treated Pappas thus far in the competition. A devoted competitor in this game is one who dotes on Pappas and acquiesces to her demands, and this kind of behavior is indicative of being in the competition for the right reasons. It is in this example that the notion of “right reasons” becomes clearer, and once again Goffman provides a useful frame through his examination of idealization.
Goffman argues that most performances involve an element of idealization, whether negative or positive. These performances “tend to incorporate and exemplify the officially accredited values of the society” even if those values are in direct conflict with the performer’s actual behavior. In the course of these performances, such discrepancies must be managed by the performer so as not to ruin the illusion. One of these discrepancies in particular, that of the “end product,” is relevant to this discussion. In the case of the Bachelor/ette franchise, it can be argued that every contestant is engaged in the creation of an “end product” which they continuously present to their eligible host. Much the same way that competitors on American Idol and Project Runway are forced to complete a “product” each week, competitors on reality dating shows must present themselves as an end product when they interact with the host on a weekly basis. Success or failure in such a game relies on the perceived authenticity of the product. The more “authentic” it is, the more likely that the individual is in the competition for “the right reasons.”
“Authenticity” in this sense varies based on which show is being discussed. Certain shows, like the Bachelor/ette, promote a more chaste depiction of courtship than something like Rock of Love, while a competition such as Survivor demands a more cerebral approach than The Real World/Road Rules Challenge. As a result, a competitor from Flavor of Love may be deemed authentic within the confines of that show, but considered to have unsatisfactory motives from the perspective of The Bachelor.
Accordingly, this discourse of motives is a conscious negotiation of the process of production. Whether it is a whispered debate about the hidden goals of another contestant, or a personal claim to authenticity and “realness,” this type of discourse is “strategic, both in terms of constructing social relationships between [contestants], and maintaining a positive self-image in the game.” Contestants see their performances gain or lose currency based on how often they’re instantiated by other contestants. If one contestant is frequently “called out” for duplicity, real or imagined, then his stock with the host (and ultimate prize) will fall proportionally. Thus, in the case of Jason from the Bachelorette, having Pappas claim that he was “here for the right reasons” is a further solidification and reinforcement of his performance of sincerity and devotion.
This is, quite rightly, a somewhat paradoxical idea. From a cynical perspective, it stands to reason that a competitor committed to sycophantic and idolatrous behavior has more to conceal than someone who is not. Goffman is sympathetic to this, commenting that “an honest, sincere, serious performance is less firmly connected with the solid world than one might first assume.” In other words, the actual correspondence of performance to reality is not what is at issue. Rather, what is crucial is delivering a performance which may be subsequently ratified and instantiated by peers and judges.
Another critical concept present in most (if not all) reality television is that of “drama.” Here, drama does not refer to a theatrical performance, or a set of events “involving interesting or intense conflict of forces.” Instead, it refers to the manufactured strife amongst participants on a reality show. These are the petty squabbles about talent, honesty, and granola bars. “Drama,” in this sense, is commonly instantiated in two ways. First, a contestant or participant on a reality show will confront another about a (real or imagined) grievance. The ensuing argument constitutes “drama.” Second, in the aftermath of such events, many participants will be heard to say that they do not condone causing “drama,” and this may even come in the form of an accusation against another participant (i.e., “All you do is start drama. I don’t play like that.”). Ironically, this accusation of “drama-causing” inevitably precipitates more “drama.”
Because it is so strangely removed from its vernacular counterpart, drama on reality television comes across as particularly contrived. As I will soon demonstrate, this impetus to cause drama, as well as the incentive to discuss it endlessly, are oddly endemic to the genre as a whole. What I mean is that not only do the producers of these shows appear to covertly promote the generation and sustainment of drama, but in situations where there is little producer-prompting the contestants seem naturally aware of the fact that causing drama is a surefire guarantee of longevity within the show. Thus drama will always be present with the system, regardless of whether it was prompted by producers or not.
There is also the set of clichés deployed by reality television participants when facing certain situations, namely those of betrayal and isolation. When an individual feels as though he has been slighted or used as a scapegoat, he will claim to have been “thrown under the bus.” Humorously, since most reality show participants are inarticulate yet verbose, this has lead to some rather amusing mutilations of the expression. It is not uncommon to hear an ousted contestant on a reality competition claim he was “left under the bus” or “pushed in front of the bus.” More tellingly, he may also claim to have been “sold under the bus,” an interesting agglomeration of the “bus” expression and the idiom of “selling someone down the river.” Obviously, cast members on reality competitions do not consider being eliminated akin to being sold to a harsher plantation, but the comparison is embedded in the very words they use. These erstwhile participants direct their sense of betrayal and injustice at those whom they perceive as having engineered their departure from the show. These individuals are undoubtedly “fake” and treacherous.
Yet how do these sinister architects perceive themselves? Curiously, contestants who orchestrate the elimination of fellow players tend to use one of two platitudes to comfort themselves: “it is what it is” or “I’m not here to make friends.” The former is an almost stoic, Machiavellian equivalent of “needs must.” It speaks of realpolitik and raison d’etat, and of the necessity of self-preservation which lies at the core of all reality competition. Most often used as a catch-all for any unpleasant situation, “it is what it is” also crops up in character-centric docudramas where manufactured conflict has created irreconcilable differences among individuals. Since these individuals usually cannot express the root cause of these differences without sounding like a fool (“Like, the producers told me to get mad at her when she and her new boyfriend totally started spending all their time together, and they told him to get mad at me for, like, interfering in their lives! So then the producers told her to leak a sex-tape rumour about me to the tabloids so we’d have something to talk about in season 3!”), they are forced to use vagaries like “it is what it is.”
The latter expression, “I’m not here to make friends,” is more nuanced, and frequently uttered by a manipulative or ruthless contestant when he is exposed as such to his peers. Contestants often appeal to the authority of whatever show they’re on when invoking this concept, leading to such classic lines as “This wall doesn’t say ‘America’s Next Top Best Friend!’” and “It’s ‘Flavor of Love’ not ‘Flavor of Friendship!’” Alternatively, contestants will claim that they are not here to make friends as they are here “to win” or “to be the best” or “to sleep with Tila Tequila.” In other words, there is the barest glimmer of understanding that their actions are not their own, and that for the duration of whatever reality show they are currently on, they will be subject to different standards and codes of conduct than society at large.
The last term I wish to address here, and my personal favourite, is the Big-Brother-spawned concept of a “nerd herd.” A “nerd herd” is a group of individuals on a reality show who conceive of themselves as extremely popular among viewers when in fact they are reviled and loathed by the audience. This concept does not see much use in docudramas, with some notable exceptions. This is mostly due to the fact that character-centric docudramas cannot prevent their subjects from reading the fan and critical reactions to the show (which is now used as a plotline-“Denise Richards reads tabloid blogs which mock her, causing her to lash out and then get depressed.”). However, in host-centric docudramas, many individuals are prone to thinking their antics and antagonism will resonate with audiences when in fact it causes severe viewer backlash (as in the case of an episode of Wife Swap, wherein a host husband verbally abused the visiting wife, belittling her for being poor and uneducated, no doubt thinking viewers would find his degrading comments hilarious; instead, many viewers wrote to the network, prompting the husband to publicly apologize for his behaviour). What is most intriguing about the “nerd herd” is the way in which reality television seems to create a bubble wherein contestants have an exaggerated sense of their own appeal. Self-righteousness is eclipsed by a blind faith that winning the game and/or the hearts of the audience will somehow justify all the terribly and morally egregious acts committed by the contestant.
So what does this all add up to? The job of a reality performer is a tightrope, between appearance and expectation. Performers create themselves in reality television, and since their overriding goal is always continued existence on their particular show, and since that continued existence is only secured through the approval of their peers, they must be sure to align their performance with the expectations of their peers. But! Discrepancies will always occur, and the performer must find some way of reconciling these imperfections. Their only tool for this endeavour is their speech-only what they say about themselves and others can hope to influence how their performance is viewed. This is one of the sad truths of reality television: that words carry more weight than action. Performers who initiate the discourse frequently have more control over it than those who do not.
Interestingly, given that discourse is the only arena in which the reality performer may truly attempt to control how their performance is received, this discourse is strangely closed and sectioned off. What we would casually term “natural language” or the vernacular is not necessarily admissible in the court of reality television. Reality TV has its own set of moral principles, detached from those in everyday life. Participants must appeal to these principles within the game rather than any external social, legal, or religious conventions. Survivor depicts this most clearly, where the rules of the game, “Outwit, outplay, outlast,” denote a closed system where certain types of behaviour typically considered impermissible by society become the norm. Duplicity, theft, aggression-these are the cardinal values within the world of reality competitions. Contestants must therefore express themselves in reference to these concepts, as this is the style of discourse which is accepted by whatever judging entity exists within their show. If a contestant has lied to a friend, he must rationalize that behaviour in the context of “getting ahead” in the game and “being here to win, not make friends.”
Pulling the curtain back, then, we can see that there is no one behind it. There is no malevolent demon instructing participants in this new discourse, since the participants instruct themselves. Or rather, they can see that to succeed in the context of reality television is a matter of speech, and that only certain types of speech are permitted.
Conclusion
I turn to a quote from Rene Magritte: “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.” Reality television presents a most perplexing conundrum-how does one conjure reality from unreality, when all attempts to seem realer are invariably interpreted as inauthentic? The proving ground of authenticity within reality television becomes the realm of discourse, as the participants use the only tool they can in an attempt to control and secure their identity and concordantly their continuance within the game.
Were this another forum of expression, I would be tempted to indicate that the performance in which reality contestants are engaged is in fact a form of labour and that value is being extracted through their speech-which is their only viable forum of self-expression. A contestant’s life within the realm of reality television is wholly reliant on whether his performance is accepted by his peers. In competitions, winning is frequently contingent on being approved by judges or jury members, and their evaluations are of whether a contestant’s performance is justified within the context of the game. Performers are therefore incited to discourse, exhorted to speak using this specialized language, because reality television is as much a process of socialization for those who participate in it as it is for those who watch it. They’re just two vastly different societies.