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Reality television

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This article is about the genre of TV shows. For the channel, see Zone Reality.

Reality television is a genre of television programming which presents supposedly unscripted dramatic or humorous situations, documents actual events, and features ordinary people instead of professional actors. Although the genre has existed in some form or another since the early years of television, the current explosion of popularity dates from around 2000. Documentaries, and nonfictional programming such as the news and sports shows are usually not classified as reality shows.

Many of the older secret-based shows, which derived much of their entertainment value from debate over how real they were or what the trick was, have been demystified. For instance, numerous magic tricks have been exposed. Professional Wrestling has left the kayfabe era, and the majority of Harlem Globetrotter games are known fakes . Reality television serves as a replacement in many ways to those types of entertainment.

Reality television covers a wide range of television programming formats, from game or quiz shows which resemble the frantic, often demeaning shows produced in Japan in the 1980s and 1990s (a modern example is Gaki no tsukai), to surveillance- or voyeurism-focused productions such as Big Brother.

Critics say that the term "reality television" is somewhat of a misnomer. Such shows frequently portray a modified and highly influenced form of reality, with participants put in exotic locations or abnormal situations, sometimes coached to act in certain ways by off-screen handlers, and with events on screen manipulated through editing and other post-production techniques.

Origins of reality television

the Colbert report is the only TV show to watch REALITY HAS BECOME A COMMODITY

Types of reality TV

There are a number of sub-categories of reality television.

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Self-improvement/makeover

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Dating shows

Some shows, such as Blind Date, show people going out on dates with no element of competition. Antecedents may be found in The Dating Game from the 1960s.

Talk shows

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Hidden cameras

Another type of reality programming features hidden cameras rolling when random passersby encounter a staged situation. Candid Camera, which first aired on television in 1948, pioneered the format. Modern variants of this type of production include Just Kidding!, Punk'd and Trigger Happy TV. The series Scare Tactics is another recent program in which the goal is to frighten contestants rather than just befuddle or amuse them.

Hoaxes

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Analysis and criticism

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Is "reality" a misnomer?

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Political impact

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Popularity and ratings

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Predictors in popular culture

A number of works beginning in the 1940s anticipated elements of reality television that would later appear. These harbingers tended to be set in a dystopian future, with subjects being recorded against their will, and they often involved violence.

  • Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a book by George Orwell, depicted a world in which two-way television screens are fitted in every room, so that people's actions are monitored at all times. (The all-seeing authority figure in the book, "Big Brother", inspired the name of the pioneering reality series Big Brother.)
  • Survivor (1965), a science fiction story by Walter F. Moudy, depicted the 2050 Olympic War Games between Russia and the United States. The games are fought to show the world the futility of war and thus deter further conflict. Each side has one hundred soldiers who fight with rifles, mortars and machine guns in a large natural arena. The goal is for one side to wipe out the other; the few who survive the battle become heroes and win 100 billion dollars in "reparations" for their country. The games are televised, complete with color commentary discussing the tactics, the soldiers' personal backgrounds, and slow-motion replays of their deaths.
  • "The Prize of Peril" (1958) was a short story by science-fiction author Robert Sheckley about a television show in which a contestant volunteers to be hunted for a week by trained killers, with a large cash prize if he survives. It was adapted in 1970 as the German TV movie Das Millionenspiel , and again in 1983 as the French movie Le Prix du Danger.
File:Empire TV.jpg
Spock and McCoy await their turn in the limelight in the Star Trek episode Bread and Circuses.
  • Bread and Circuses (1968) was an episode of the TV show Star Trek in which the crew visits a planet resembling the Roman Empire, but with 20th century technology. The planet's "Empire TV" features regular gladiatorial games, with the announcer urging viewers at home to vote for their favorites, stating, "This is your program. You pick the winner." The show included several jabs at real-world television, such as a praetorian threatening, "You bring this network's ratings down, Flavius, and we'll do a special on you!"
  • The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968) was a BBC television play in which a dissident in a dictatorship is forced onto a secluded island and taped for a reality show in order to keep the masses entertained.
  • The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1974), a novel by D.G. Compton (also published as The Unsleeping Eye), was about a woman dying of cancer whose last days are recorded without her knowledge for a television show. It was later adapted as the 1980 French movie "La Mort en Direct" (released in the USA as "Deathwatch").
  • Network (1976) was a film predictive of a number of trends in broadcast television, including reality programming. One subplot featured network executives negotiating with an urban terrorist group for the production of a weekly series, each episode of which was to feature an act of terrorism.
  • Shock Treatment (1981), the sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, places the action in a town that has been entirely transformed into a TV studio.
  • The Running Man (1982) was a book by Stephen King depicting a game show in which a contestant flees around the world from "hunters" trying to chase him down and kill him; it has been speculated that the book was inspired by Robert Sheckley's The Prize of Peril. The book was loosely adapted as a 1987 movie of the same name (see entry for both). The movie removed most of the reality-TV element of the book: its competition now took place entirely within a large TV studio, and more closely resembled an athletic competition (though a deadly one).
  • Vengeance on Varos (1985) was an episode of the TV show Doctor Who in which the population of a planet watches the torture and executions of those who oppose the government on live television. The planet's political system is based on the leaders themselves facing disintegration if the population votes 'no' to their propositions. This episode is often credited as the origins of "voting someone off".

Pop culture references

Some scripted works have used reality television as a plot device:

  • Real Life (1979) is a comedic film about the creation of a show similar to An American Family gone horribly wrong.
  • Louis the 19th, King of the Airwaves (1994) is a Quebecois film about a man who signs up to star in a 24-hour-a-day reality TV show. It was later remade as Edtv (1999).
  • The Truman Show (1998) is a film about a man who discovers that his entire life is being staged and filmed for a 24-hour-a-day reality TV show.
  • Series 7: The Contenders (2001) is a film about a reality show in which contestants have to kill each other to win.
  • Tomb of the Werewolf (2004) is a film about a man searching for treasure while being followed by a reality show film crew, but he encounters a werewolf and a vampire instead.
  • Bad Wolf (2005) is an episode of the TV show Doctor Who in which the characters find themselves trapped in various real-life reality television shows.
  • The Comeback (2005) satirizes the indignity of reality TV by presenting itself as "raw footage" of a new reality show documenting the attempted comeback of has-been star Valerie Cherish.
  • American Dreamz (2006) is a film set partially on an American Idol-like show.

In addition, a number of scripted television shows have taken the form of documentary-type reality TV shows, in "mockumentary" style. The first such show was the BBC series Operation Good Guys, which premiered in 1997. Other examples include People Like Us, Trailer Park Boys, The Office, Drawn Together and Reno 911!.

Hypodermic Syringe Theory

The Hypodermic Syringe Theory is influences on a particular audience (mainly young children) and then go out and use those influences in real life. The media uses this through reality TV in the sense that children will watch a programme such as "power rangers" and go out into the real world and perform such actions (attempting martial arts, in this instance). There have been many debates over the years on this theory yet little has been done about it.

Reality films

Several reality-TV-style films have been produced; these films differ from conventional documentaries in that they create new, sometimes artificial, situations instead of simply trying to document life as it is. Allen Funt, a pioneer in conventional reality television with Candid Camera, was also a pioneer in the "reality film" genre with the hidden camera movie What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? in 1970. The TV show Jackass spawned two films: Jackass: The Movie in 2001 and Jackass: Number Two in 2006. A similar Finnish show, Extreme Duudsonit, was adapted for the film The Dudesons Movie in 2006. The producers of The Real World created The Real Cancun in 2003. Games People Play: New York was released in 2004; it was possibly the first reality-TV-style film without a basis in a television series.

See also

Further reading

  • How To Create A Reality Show
  • Hill, Annette (2005). Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-26152-X.
  • Murray, Susan, and Laurie Ouellette, eds. (2004). Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture. New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-5688-3
  • Nichols, Bill (1994). Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-34064-0.
  • Godard, Ellis (2004). "Reel Life: The Social Geometry of Reality Shows". pages 73-96 in Survivor Lessons, edited by Matthew J. Smith and Andrew F. Wood. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc.
  • Lord of the fly-on-the-walls - Observer article: Paul Watson's UK & Australian docusoaps
  • Big Brother - Why Bother? - Graham Barnfield's Spiked commentary
  • Zeven werklozen samen op zoek naar een baan by Raymond van den Boogaard, NRC Handelsblad, September 28, 1996 (Dutch) - about Nummer 28 being the inspiration for The Real World

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