© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
Understanding Reality Television
Reality TV – Audiences and Popular Factual Television
Reality TV – Realism and Revelation
Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn (eds), Understanding Reality Television. Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2004, 302 pp.
Annette Hill, Reality TV – Audiences and Popular Factual Television. Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2005, 231 pp.
Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn, Reality TV – Realism and Revelation. London: Wallflower Press, 2005, 183 pp.
The ever-expanding range of programming we now speak of as ‘reality TV’ was commonly observed to enter a new phase around the turn of the millennium, putting us into what Annette Hill neatly dubs its ‘third wave’ (p. 24). Closely associated with transmission of the first series of Big Brother (Channel 4, 2000–), the shift was accompanied by a discernible intensification of the histrionic commentaries in magazines, tabloids and web-sites with which ‘reality’ forms are now inter-dependent. Some five years later, it should not be surprising that an erstwhile trickle of academic interest in the popularization of factual programming should begin to resemble a mini-glut of new publications. This review will consider three of these, although I should acknowledge that others are forthcoming, not least Jonathan Bignell's contribution (Big Brother – Reality TV in the Twenty-First Century), due for publication in December 2005.
Although all three of the studies under review pay close attention to Big Brother, it is the earliest of these, Understanding Reality Television, that it most dominates. The series is the central topic or an exemplary text for five of the fourteen chapters in this edited collection, and is cited in most others. This is evidently at the expense of the docusoap, which does not even make it to the index – echoing the manner in which it was rudely elbowed aside by turn-of-the-century commissioners scrabbling for the ‘game-docs’ that then came to epitomize the contemporary face of reality TV.
The problem here for television studies is that assumptions about Big Brother as the reality form par excellence are already looking rather dated, even if – and this is an important qualification – the theoretical modifications prompted by its innovations have a significantly longer shelf-life. In this particular regard I would emphasize Su Holmes's important reconfiguration of Dyer's ordinary/exceptional dialectic that lies at the heart of celebrity and stardom in ‘Approaching celebrity in Big Brother’ and her exposition of the series' paradigmatically ‘fervent’ pursuit of the ‘real self’ and the authentic identity. Similarly, by theorizing the intimate temporal dimensions of Big Brother and other formats, and re-appraising their (inter)active audiences, Misha Kavka/Amy West and Estella Tinknell/Parvati Raghuram (respectively) manage to productively develop long-standing textual and cultural concepts.
More so than any previous cycle of generic development, reality TV itself constantly reminds us how fallacious is the desire for an all-explanatory theory or a definitive analysis, and indeed, that there is as yet no consensus as to what ‘it’ actually is. In their introduction Holmes and Jermyn suggest that this absence of an agreed definition is precisely because it could not be extricated from questions of generic hybridity, specific issues of theory, criticism and methodology, and reality TV's ‘relationship with the history and status of the documentary form’ (p. 2). Indeed, if the three studies under consideration here have anything in common, it is a shared concern with the genealogy of the forms, genres, modes of address, subjects, aesthetic characteristics and thematic preoccupations of this field of programming. Although there is no consensual definition, there is apparently a consensual resistance to one particular idea assumed to be widespread: that reality TV represents a radical departure or innovation in the history of programming. For example, the first three chapters in Holmes and Jermyn's collection each deal with an influential antecedent: Bradley Clissold demonstrates the Cold War ideological resonance of Candid Camera (USA, 1948–), Jennifer Gillan exposes how The Osbournes (MTV, 2002–) resurrects a 1950s star-sitcom format, and Deborah Jermyn proposes that Crimewatch (BBC, 1984–) clearly foreshadowed many contemporary reality programmes (including those altogether unconcerned with crime), partly because of similarities in the ‘spectacle of actuality’ (p. 72), but also, rather interestingly, because of the manner in which more recent debates appear to mimic the concerns of the controversies that surrounded emerging crime-appeal formats in the 1980s.
A more extensive narrative of evolution is attempted by Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn, whose work, Reality TV: Realism and Revelation, places such programming firmly within the domain of the documentary, and purportedly ‘breaks new ground ... by linking together the realist enterprise of reality TV and its relationship to the production of knowledges (revelation) in mainstream television’ (p. 3). Although the authors take pains to insist that their subject is not an inferior form and should be ‘treated with respect’, they frequently generalize about factual entertainment and its abnegation of the political commitment shown by its forebears. This value distinction is most evident in the first half of the book, which is dedicated primarily to detailed analyses of canonical documentaries and drama-documentaries from the days of the Documentary Movement onwards. The denominator common to these texts appears to be a shared emphasis on the representation and/or self-expression of ‘ordinary people’, but the reality TV texts assumed to follow in this tradition are typically denounced as poor relations. Hence, for example:
The complexity of Woolcock's work reveals the unrealised potential of many of the reality TV docusoaps that were produced in the same period to provide a voice for ordinary people in an entertaining fashion. (p. 63)My objection here is to the typical deployment of ‘reality TV docusoaps’ (like the ‘so many talk shows’ of a later discussion) simply as an undifferentiated, negative standard – a point below the waterline. At no point is a popular or landmark series (such as the BBC's Driving School) subjected to the depth of analysis, the critical skill or the eloquent description that is reserved for the works of Lindsay Anderson, Ken Loach, Penny Woolcock, Jane Treays, John Edginton, Errol Morris and Andy Warhol. As a strategy this is clearly unjust, and arguably, the comparisons are inappropriate, particularly when so little consideration is given to the differing contexts of production and reception for popular television programmes, ‘authored’ films and visual art installations, none of which are adequately referenced.
To give credit where it is due, the textual analyses themselves are sensitive and insightful, and there is much here to satisfy an interest in the modes of documentary address, but it is counter-productive to regard popular television through a prism of that which it is not. The first chapter does little to mitigate this, offering only a random and largely extraneous sashay through ‘the debates around reality TV’. However, just as I was (rather uncharitably) concluding that none of the research had been conducted with popular television in mind, the book shifts gear and we are into altogether more salient territory. The remaining chapters address, in turn, therapeutic culture, self-revelation, the public expression of private trauma in talk shows and lifestyle programming, the questionable ethics of CCTV and reality crime programming, and lastly an exploration of David Blaine's public incarceration in ‘Above the Below’. Much of this (and earlier) material will be familiar from previous publication as articles in Screen and other journals, but it makes for a perceptive and incisive contribution and deserves a book format (if not this format exactly). I would have been more appreciative had the study engaged more directly with mainstream terrestrial programming. Moreover, although it is clearly a British study, and the titles of British programmes are constantly offered as (presumably self-evident) examples, the early emphasis on documentary auteurs gives way in later chapters to analyses that privilege American texts such as The John Walsh Show and Judge Judy, apparently to demonstrate particular extremes (of trends, sensibilities, ideologies). Thus we move from a narrative of what British reality TV could or should have been to a narrative of what it is in danger of becoming. What holds the book tenuously together is less an interest in reality television than a glimpse into its ‘cultural moment’, although for that at least it deserves some acknowledgement.
I would accept the premise that the aesthetic of contemporary reality TV owes much to the artistic experimentation of an earlier documentary avant garde, but then it also owes much to two centuries of fictive realism, forty-odd years of Coronation Street, even more of popular variety entertainment, and – as Annette Hill points out in Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television – decades of tabloid journalism (p. 15). Although, on the one hand, the investigation into the family tree of such complex generic and formal hybrids might therefore threaten to be a rather fatuous exercise, on the other, as Hill also observes, the process of programme categorization is fundamental to the everyday practices of television viewing (pp. 171–5). It seems that audiences are not yet in a position to accept the ontological claims of reality TV without reference to its generic status, but instead
watch popular factual television with a critical eye, judging the degree of factuality in each reality format based on their experience of other types of factual programming. In this sense, viewers are evaluators of the reality genre, and of factual programming as a whole. (p. 173)
Yet, although the complicated legacy of reality TV is a factor in its reception, one must still wonder at the collective gusto currently being expended in the anxiety to restore what Corner calls ‘the specific national history of factual television’ to the debate (‘Afterword’ to Holmes and Jermyn, p. 291). A perception of reality TV as ‘radical’ does not after all depend upon the purity of its generic innovations, and still less on its political accomplishments (for all the populist cant about ‘democratization’). Rather it arises from associated phenomena such as: the shift such an unprecedented volume of reality programming has brought about in what schedulers like to call ‘the mix’; the irreversible changes that these programmes have effected in the way in which we understand other, more conventional forms such as ‘straight’ documentary and drama; the expansion to the notion of what constitutes ‘a television text’ (to include simultaneous webcam streaming, text messaging, and so forth); the sheer faddish frenzy of everyday discourse that surrounds reality TV and its real/celebrity players; and even, as Daniel Biltereyst argues, the extension of programming marketing to include the whipping up of hostile ‘moral panics’, henceforth renamed ‘media panics’ (in Holmes and Jermyn, pp. 105–8). Clearly none of these would represent an aesthetic paradigm shift, but surely they amount to a cultural one?
Which of course is not to suggest that we should turn our attention away from the television screen, but we may, I think, need reminding that ‘radicalism’ is not inscribed in the text itself, but in the way it favours change more broadly. In this respect, publication of Annette Hill's qualitative audience research is both timely and necessary. The study sensibly begins with an introduction to the production contexts of reality TV and the discourses around its reception, as well as providing a refreshingly lucid account of its origins. One of her early arguments is that critical condemnation (metaphors of drug addiction and war are apparently much in evidence) ‘fails to take into account the variety of formats within the genre’ and hence she identifies at least ten common sub-genres such as ‘infotainment’, ‘reality talent’ and ‘reality life experiment’ formats (pp. 7–8). Later she attempts more actively to defend particular programmes and formats on the basis of their capacity to offer debating and learning opportunities.
These opportunities suggest the three main principles around which Hill organizes her findings. Chapters 4, 5 and 6, respectively, consider ‘performance and authenticity’ (how audiences judge ‘truth’ according to how real people act), ‘the idea of learning’ (including the acquisition of informal practical and social understandings) and the ‘ethics of care’. These chapters also throw up a number of paradoxes central to the process of watching hybrid popular entertainment. For example: ‘the more entertaining a factual programme is, the less real it appears to viewers’ (p. 57). Similarly, ‘In fictional programming, it is a sign of a good drama if television viewers find it entertaining. In factual programming the reverse is true’ (p. 86). However, the real beauty of this section lies in the way Hill extrapolates from viewers' responses an extremely complex, media-literate and ambiguous relationship between ‘real people’ in the audience, and ‘real people’ on the television. Arguably, it is this demanding process of ‘people watching’, and the commensurate need to interpret, weigh up and learn from it, that provides the principal source of audience fascination with these programmes rather than the debased, voyeuristic and even salacious impulses more commonly ascribed to them.
I am far less comfortable with Chapter 6, which jumps from a general discussion of moral philosophy (and its utility) to articulating a quite particular ‘ethics of care’ drawn from Buddhist and feminist ethical principles. Brave as Hill is to wade into this territory, I do think the sheer complexity of the issues introduced takes the matter beyond the reach of this particular study. Although she is circumspect, the highly selective criteria of moral judgement she proposes themselves work to close off the very questions a discussion of reality TV ethics should be asking. By this I mean questions posed by the fault lines of liberal oppositions between, say, moral boundaries and taste boundaries, or cultural absolutism and cultural relativism. At the very least, should we not first acknowledge that no ‘ethics’, however hotly debated, can exist in universalizing isolation from particular and competing religious, social and political traditions? Although in this chapter Hill also introduces issues relating to viewing ethics, she sidesteps them in favour of carving out a potential role for health-based reality programming to foster an ‘ethics of care’ (particularly in relation to self and family): a role we might once have more confidently described as ‘ideological’.
Just as textual approaches begin to wobble when they are obliged to confront broader social changes and to speculate about actual audiences, so too are there limits to the textual analysis and insight available from audience-centred approaches. I think Hill bumps against these limits most noticeably when she attempts to valorize texts by applying the principles she has introduced inductively, but with support from deductions drawn from audience research. So it is that a family focus-group discussion is supplied as evidence that Changing Rooms can promote debate about good or bad ways to re-decorate, or what Hill – apparently without irony – calls ‘an ethics of care for the home’ (p. 128). A rather less forgiving reading of ‘makeover’ television is available in Gareth Palmer's incisive chapter ‘"The new you": class and transformation in lifestyle television’ (Holmes and Jermyn, pp. 173–90).
The more challenging questions about ‘the ethics of watching people's private lives on television’ (p. 133) are reduced to an ethical comparison of the different treatment of pet deaths in Animal Hospital (BBC 1994–2004) and Animal ER (Channel 5, 1998–). It is an interesting discussion and I would not want to underestimate the intense emotions of animal lovers, but it can hardly be considered a rehearsal for the ethical questions that arise about the treatment (and watching) of human subjects. It is no accident that Hill hazards firm injunctions only in respect of children and animals, who are clearly unable to exercise informed consent. Biressi and Nunn tackle rather thornier issues regarding the privatization of public space, and the use/sale of CCTV footage (Chapter 7), but there will continue to be calls for ever greater toughness, not least because the endless reinvention of reality TV has involved the shattering of so many taboos. Mercifully, Hill was sensible enough to offer the previous chapter as an invitation for further debate about ethics, rather than as a definitive word on the matter, and I would have to echo this. Public, journalist-driven debate is already polarizing into a democratizing/debasing dichotomy, in which ‘willing participation’ or ‘right to know’ are the inevitable and only responses to claims of misrepresentation or ‘breach of privacy’. A vigorous exchange of academic views on the ‘radical’ moral implications of reality TV might yet enlarge this debate beyond its present boundaries.
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An Associate Lecturer in the Department of Drama at the University of Bristol, primarily teaching Film and Television Studies
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