Week 11 - Reality TV

How does Hills define reality TV?

Hills (2005, p.41) starts his Reality genre chapter off by stating, "The category of reality TV is commonly used to describe a range of popular factual programming. There are a variety of styles and techniques associated with reality TV, such as non professional actors, unscripted dialogue, surveillance footage, hand held cameras, seeing events unfold as they are happening in front of camera"
After exploring the definitions of what other people believe reality TV is, Hills finishes by saying “there is no one definition of reality programming, but many, competing definitions of what has come to be called the reality genre. This is because the reality genre is made of a number of distinctive and historically based television genres, such as lifestyle, or documentary.” (2005, p. 54)

The definitions ranged from a 26 year old real estate agents perspective, to the BBC stating 6 categories that structured the new genre. People seemed to have their own opinion on the matter but it all came down to everything being real. Real people, real places, real situations. Our televisions are infused with reality TV programs whether it be Master chef on TV 1, Motorway patrol on TV 2 or following families around such as ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians’ and ‘Kendra’ on the E! Channel.

How has the documentary genre influenced reality TV and how it presents the ‘real’?

In 1960, free cinema documentaries took off and TV essentially became the home of documentary, much to the dislike of documentary makers. Common features of documentaries in the 20th century consisted of things such as edgy, shaking camera work, use of monochrome, focusing on regularity of every day life, lots of location filming, participant self – reflection (video diary) and inter weaving of different stories in soap opera style with cliff-hangers. These all influenced reality TV and all these features are present when watching reality TV giving the impression that it’s all real (Biressi & Nunn 2005).

Three of the earliest reality TV shows to be played on TV all portrayed a common documentary feature:

Docusoaps – Looked into Pet rescues and Children’s hospitals stories which all interweaved in a soap opera style.

Real World – A bunch of young people all living in the same house (like the more recent ‘Big Brother’) and often used a video diary to talk about their problems, experience so far etc.

Cops – Real world crime that is sometimes caught on a hand held camera which results in the footage being shaky and ‘edgy’.

Direct cinema film maker, D. A. Pennebaker (as cited in the Power Point) once described the documentary genre by saying, “It’s possible to go to a situation and simply film what you see there, what happens there, what goes on.. And what’s a film? It’s just a window that someone peeps through.” I believe this description is also relevant to how reality TV presents the ‘real’ to viewers. We almost instantly believe that this is how Reality TV is made, that a camera just turns up and films what they see, what happens and goes on, as if we really are sneakily looking through a window at a real life situation.

References
Biressi, A. & Nunn, N. (2005). Real Lives, documentary approaches. In Reality TV: realism and revelation. (pp. 35-58) London: Wallflower.

Hill, A. (2005) The reality genre. In A. Hill, Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television. (pp. 14 – 40). Oxon: Routledge.