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Reality Status

"We all know that reality shows are to real life what Pringles are to the potato"1

On any given day in the world of reality TV, people are plotting around a campfire, entering a talent contest, competitively racing through foreign lands, planning a wedding, designing clothes, getting drunk, punching roommates, inviting parenting/design/relationship experts into their home, swapping wives, consulting mediums, playing tricks on strangers, swimming in mud, and going on dates arranged by TV producers/offspring/professional matchmakers. Some of these things also typically happen to ordinary people in real life, but not all. So at once a basic distinction arises between ordinary events and TV shows. Most viewers recognize the difference, but it is not a straightforward one. Indeed, one attraction of reality television is that it muddies and plays with the distinction between event and program, between real life and representation: in fact RTV has put so much stress on the notion of reality that we may now be at the point of referring to "real reality." This chapter examines the kind of reality embedded in reality TV and asks: if it is indisputably TV, in what ways is it also "reality"? In making this determination we will learn a good deal about this programming's aims and conventions.

There is no doubt that reality TV's provocative name and status are what intrigue many viewers - just as producers hoped it would. Its self-conscious claim suggests there is some special and novel relation to "reality" that constitutes its brand identity. But in critiquing this marketing strategy people like to ask: Is "reality TV" a misnomer? An oxymoron? I will argue that there is no absolute yes or no answer to these or similar questions. The title's yoking of reality and television has some validity. The aim of this chapter is to consider both terms and judge what is staged and what is not. One might say that RTV turns reality into Reality, into almost a proper noun, a location, a tradable commodity - for this and other reasons we might more accurately refer to Reality TV (I and some others used this form a decade ago but the lower case version has now become the norm).2 As a concept, "real" can mean different things - actual, authentic, genuine, unexpected, raw, autonomous - and RTV programming can claim several of these distinct elements. Ask instead how realistic is this programming and this introduces a concept almost as slippery as real. Generally a measure of how convincing, probable, or verisimilar a representation is (i.e., how it is perceived), realism concedes a fictionality and lack of non-fictional veracity that may not fit either. Another modest but dizzying claim is to consider what kind of reality effect RTV creates (Black 2002; also Boorstin 1992 [1961]; Baudrillard 1983). My approach, however, is to put weight on referential meaning, on the actual status of the referents. Judgments about plausibility of behavior or verisimilitude remain more subjective and viewer-dependent.

Defining reality TV

As a TV category, reality TV has variously been described as non-scripted drama, non-fictional programming, dramality, and factual entertainment.3 Factual entertainment strikes me as appropriate when factual indicates something actually occurring at a particular place and time, not necessarily objectively represented or scientifically verifiable. Clearly RTV adopts some conventions of fiction - shaping (but not wholly composing) stories and characters, encouraging melodrama, employing emotive music, cliffhangers, dramatic irony, red herrings, and so on - but none of these place it in the category of the imaginary. We can identify a spectrum within fiction from wholly imagined and fantastic/impossible in real life to very plausible though made up; then in non-fiction, from highly contrived situations and a heavy shaping of material to an exact observation of actual events unaffected by their recording. Much RTV appears to occupy the middle of the non-fictional range where the distinction between happening in actuality and being imagined remains. Through advanced storyboarding and casting, TV producers can construct conditions and try to determine drama that editors then shape into narratives. But encouraging or shaping drama is not the same as wholly imagining it. Perhaps RTV can be thought of as synthetic, meaning an amalgam manufactured or created in an artificial process but not actually or materially unreal. It is fabricated only in the sense of made, not made up.

To say that reality TV merely records reality is obviously too simplistic, but so is saying it is all false. Clearly there are relatively unprocessed and raw elements in reality TV and many formats are genuinely aleatory and unplanned up to a point, though these real elements are generally "managed" (to pick a fairly neutral term) in order to be profitable, dramatic entertainment. It is the mix of the spontaneous and the planned that draws an audience, not the raw or real alone. Surveys suggest that what interests viewers is what Katherine Sender (2012) incisively encapsulates as RTV's "uneasy location between transparency and artifice" (p. 107). One way of understanding this location is as a social experiment in the sense of an environment with many controlled variables, though not with specific hypotheses or falsifiable results. Early on, some RTV, most notably Big Brother, was presented as just such an experiment, but this rationale soon faded away along with the hired psychologists. Still, this doesn't mean experiment is an invalid way of thinking about much RTV in a larger sense of setting up parameters, letting things happen, observing them, then communicating and interpreting results. Indeed, John de Mol's inspiration for Big Brother was the real scientific experiment of Biosphere 2.4 Also productive is Kevin Robins' early description of "karaoke television" (1996: 140), which underscores the combination of professional structure (soundtrack and lyrics) and amateur and not always predictable input. Along the same lines, RTV could be accurately described as a form of improvisation that encourages structured spontaneity. More specifically, many formats could be regarded as forms of play, a mode between pretend and real/natural that also combines structure and spontaneity.

However, for most purposes, I believe the most accurate and useful descriptor is what I have termed "staged actuality" (Deery 2012), drawing on both meanings of staged as planned and as performed (see also Piper 2004: 276). Actual is employed in the most basic sense of real-life and real-time empirical occurrence and is a useful bedrock term for making more modest claims than "real."5 Misha Kavka and Amy West (2004) underline that the etymology of "actual" is related to a temporal sense of now, rather than an ontological claim to truth. Hence the channel truTV, whose RTV formats sometimes use paid actors and scripts, can still claim they present "Not reality. Actuality." RTV events take place in a real time and place, but there will be different mixes of contrivance and spontaneity before, during, and after filming. The conjunction of empirical event and media staging is fundamental, but the degree and type of staging will vary - with only one constant, that most of it will remain hidden. Hence RTV viewers are often actively engaged in judging who or what is real or true. Going back and forth between suspicion and trust seems to be part of the viewing experience and, while frustrating for some, this spectator sport has proven to be a primary pleasure (e.g., Hill 2005). Extending this further, it could be that reality TV foregrounds the increased difficulty of knowing what is true or unbiased or disinterested in wider society - in large part due to media saturation and to the rhetorical masking of much commercial and political discourse (Deery 2012). For Mark Andrejevic (2004: 223), RTV demonstrates the inadequacy of the concept of reality and caters to the savvy awareness that reality is contrived and largely mediated.

Nevertheless, reality TV helps illustrate the difference between two kinds of unreal: the fake and the fictitious. With fiction, an author is admired for making things up. But not so in news or documentary and nor, it seems, on reality TV - in fact, RTV is not supposed to be authored at all. RTV gets close to fictional drama when we recognize that its participants perform roles to varying degrees, but the actor in fictional drama is known to be pretending to be someone else and the illusion is innocent, whereas RTV performances can be judged fake or deceptive. One way to consider the authenticity or fakeness of RTV is according to different relationship coordinates: we can judge how genuine or honest participants are being to viewers, to each other, or to producers; or how honest producers are in relation to viewers, participants, or other members of the production staff. The permutations are complex. For instance, when it comes to producers we can ask: How much is the situation and...