Overview
There’s an incredible love/hate relationship about Reality TV, didn’t you get the memo?
Half of us love them because they are so close to home and they move us in a provocative and emotional way.
Half of us hate them because they are contrived, melodramatic (at best), and delusional crap that mindless drones follow.
How do we find common ground between these incongruent viewpoints?
What’s the big fuss about anyway?
The Charm of Reality TV
Reality TV has stormed its way into the hearts of millions of viewers, but some of us keep asking the same question.
Why do we keep watching this trash?
Why do we keep the charade alive and well?
Before I delve deeper, let’s get a bigger perspective on Reality TV and I’ll use the initial paragraphs from Wikipedia to give us the proper meaning.
Reality television is a genre of television programming that presents purportedly unscripted dramatic or humorous situations, documents actual events, and usually features ordinary people instead of professional actors, sometimes in a contest or other situation where a prize is awarded.
The genre has existed in some form or another since the early years of television, begun in earnest as a television formula in the 1990s, and which exploded as a global phenomenon around 1999-2000, via series such as Big Brother and Survivor.
Programs in the reality television genre are commonly called reality shows and often are produced in series.
Documentaries and nonfictional programming such as news and sports shows are usually not classified as reality shows.
The genre covers a wide range of programming formats, from game or quiz shows which resemble the frantic, often demeaning shows produced in Japan in the 1980s and 1990s (such as Gaki no tsukai), to surveillance- or voyeurism-focused productions such as Big Brother.
Reality television frequently portrays a modified and highly influenced form of reality, utilizing sensationalism to attract viewers and so to generate advertising profits.
Participants are often placed in exotic locations or abnormal situations, and are sometimes coached to act in specific scripted ways by off-screen “story editors” or “segment producers,” with the portrayal of events and speech manipulated and contrived to create an illusion of reality through editing and other post-production techniques.
Allure of Magic Realism
The Reality Show Format delivers a powerful punch because it contains the allure of Magical Realism (Book Genre) by providing more than an escape from their ordinary lives, it allows viewers to not only “identify” with the characters, but provides an over-the-top platform where the viewers feel as if they are “above the law.” This connection engenders a positive feeling in the viewers, allowing them to bask in this feeling of personal power.
Wide Range of Spatial Connection
The Reality Show Format is a hybrid splice between Documentary and Drama, delivering a one-two punch of Situational Drama and In-Depth Reporting.
The dramatic structure glues together the storyline and maintains the dramatic arc of each episode, but the In-Depth reporting splashes deep into the characters of the how, providing more information than being behind-the-scenes.
It “interviews” each character and piggybacking off the immediacy of the Epistolary Format, refines the dramatic connection until viewers are literally “boxed in” (another way of being tuned in) to this story.
The often fanatical nature of viewers, dubbing each show as “My Show (emphasized),” is directly related to this two-throng approach of the Reality Show Format.
