Week 11/12: Reality TV

'Oh my goodness, The Hills was scripted? No way!' This actually appeared on my home page of some of the social networking sites I use by friends I honestly thought would know better.

The Hills, just like hundreds of other so called 'Reality TV' shows are spoon fed to viewers in a manipulative so that they believe what they are seeing is a genuine situation. If we're being honest, if these shows were truly 'Reality' all we would see would be a bunch of people not dissimilar to ourselves going about boring everyday activities and chances are, we wouldn't tune back in next week. 

However, this genre takes many previously unconventional things, mixes them together and produces something which over time has developed a cult following.

As Hill (2005) said first off you need a handful of random people or 'untrained actors', unscripted dialogue, surveillance footage, hand held cameras and usually some pressurized situations. All of this makes for good reality TV, dependant on your definition of good. It is also relatively low cost compared to the production of say, a sitcom, because it lacks the professionals that would be required in that situation.

From the reality TV genre has come many spinoffs including the DocuSoap eg. Airport, the Gameshow eg. Survivor and many others attracting fans who religiously tune in every week. The purpose of these shows is largely entertainment but occasionally are commissioned and used for education purposes.

As entertaining as Reality TV shows are, you'd be a bit silly to believe they are really 'reality'. The characters in these shows are put in situations which cause tension and lead to situations where fighting and other generally entertaining things occur to serve the audience.