Core Post 2 – Week 9 – Reality TV Galore!

There’s something about reality TV that doesn’t seem very ‘real’ to me and this week’s readings only echoed my thought. While all 3 spoke at length about the genre, its history, and its avatar today, the one that resonated with me most was the one by Chad Raphael. His detailed description of the step-by-step dawn of the reality TV genre put into perspective a lot of what McCarthy and Ouelette theorized and analyzed. The crux of Raphael’s paper is about the financial and political economy aspect of reality TV or as he has renamed Reali-TV. I found his terminology interesting because when critics and audiences discuss reality TV, their inferences come very close to Raphael’s usage of this word. For him, ‘this term not only indicates how these programs make distinctive claims to represent the real but also their common impact on the realities of power and economic relations in the industry’ (p. 124). It is this particular definition that stuck when I was watching the finale episode of The Amazing Race this past weekend as part of our weekly screening requirement.

I am not a huge reality television fan, where in fact I dislike it vehemently. I have tried sitting through an episode of The Bachelor and the Indian version of Big Brother – Bigg Boss and each time I found myself switching channels within 15 minutes. The dramatic pauses, the over-emphasized music, and unnecessarily titillating edits of incidents, which were most likely minor but made to seem like major drama points, completely put me off from the genre. And, while watching the Amazing Race episode there were many points during the runtime that the production house used these tools. Raphael’s points about the economic motivations of this genre came to mind in particular, as The Amazing Race has been on-air since 2001 and just completed its 30^th season. Though initially a show that featured pairs of who can be termed as ‘regular people’ in the eyes of the audience, over the seasons they have introduced more celebrities in their participant pool, wherein the last few seasons they have included celebrities featured in other reality shows. Additionally, since it began airing and the inception of the Primetime Emmy Awards, the show has been nominated consistently and won 10 out of 14 times. As its success has continued, the show has also started employing tactics of the digital age, where they brought in YouTube influencers as participants in season 28 to appeal to the millennial and younger audience bases. This reiterates what Raphael has stated in his conclusion on the constant competition television networks face and the new tactics they have to employ, especially considering the dynamic nature and negative image associated with the reality genre (p. 138).