Week 11/12: The Real Reality TV?

An attempt to define something, anything, implies that the meaning is permanent, however in the case of Reality TV and other forms of modern entertainment (music) genres and definitions are continually redefined, being influenced by an ever changing society and their demands.  Hills (2005) notes that there is a range of popular factual programming and ways of creating a ‘reality’ – through non-professional actors, unscripted dialogue, surveillance footage, hand held cameras and others – however, over time the treatment and adaption of reality on TV has changed. One just has to look at the context and social commentary of Cathy Come Home compared to the likes of The Kardashians, The Hills or most recently, The Rydges. Which although both are of a ‘documentary’ reality genre, are not really comparable.

Drawing in the research that Hills has done, it seems that each TV network categorises reality TV/popular factual entertainment according to what suits their needs in terms of ratings. He defines popular factual as anything with facts and learning and therefore can include but is not limited to history, crimes, arts and culture, current affairs, sports and people profiles – which E! Television capitilises on, amongst other things.

As Grierson defined the documentary as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ and created such in reaction to the industry obsession with dramatic cliché and glamour at the time, it seems that Reality TV (coined in the 1980s) came about as an appeal of the ‘raw’, unedited aspects of life as opposed to the ‘staged’ and set nature of TV and filming prior to this.  And, as the ratings increase for reality shows, so did the number of reality shows on air. Hill notes that TV cannabalises on successful genres – for another modern example, talent shows started with Idols, then there was America’s Got Talent, then The Voice, The XFactor, the XFactor Australia, New Zealand’s Got Talent and so the growth of the genre will continue to redefine and attempt to reinvent itself as long as society buys into the formatted reality. As Bazalgette (quoted in Hill) said, some shows are more factual and some are more formatted but the question that remains is how real is the reality presented.

Roscoe and Hight (2001) states that the documentary does not provide an ‘unmediated view of the world, nor can it claim to be a mirror on society. Rather, like any fictional text, it is constructed with a view to producing certain versions of the social world’. Audiences also judge the ‘reality’ of reality TV using a fact/fiction continuum but the truth remains that at some point, what is aired is formatted, edited, cut out, rehearsed and staged and therefore the show has been tailored to increase the show’s ratings as opposed to represent some form of human reality.  

Concluding the chapter, Hills says that there is no definition of reality programming – and I doubt there ever will be as it is bent and adapted as networks see fit. The fact that reality TV has dedicated channels evidences the fact that networks capitalise on the broad definitions of popular factual/factual entertainment.  

Personally, I don’t find any of it realistic at all and the mention of The Voice, or New Zealand’s Got Talent, The Kardashians or any other popular factual show annoys me. It is all, simply entertainment and the level of society’s involvement of such shows also leads me to question society itself (it also makes me wonder what Philip K. Dick’s view of reality shows would be).