Reality television attempts to satisfy our insatiable appetite to be entertained through the dramatisation of other people’s lives and the false creation of events that aren’t as truthful as what they initially appear. While theoretically reality television is unscripted and told from truthful, real-life situations, the reality is that producers manipulate situations (and the editing via which they are represented) as well as provoke certain situations for dramatic effect. Whether it’s the back story of a Masterchef contestant’s battle with depression, a participant on Teen Mom’s turbulent upbringing or a Survivor castaway’s overcoming of alcoholism, audiences seem to love a good “sob story.”
Reality television can no longer make the same claim of an unbiased truth as it once could and, as a medium has shifted away from its initial contract with its audience to articulate an unmediated and absolute objective reality. Instead they are highly constructed negotiations of reality rather than bing ethnographic observations. By their very nature any representational medium constantly delineates the boundary between the subjective and objective. The reason for this is not complicated but the result of the producer seeing the footage through their eyes and editing it accordingly. According to Arneson (2012, para. 5):
“There is an art to (reality programming) that obliges the filmmaker to choose camera angles, to string words together into sentences that are not just informative but that tell a story: an art that draws not from objective methods of representing reality, but for the fictive world of cinematic production.”
Even when a producer’s intentions for absolute objectivity are at their height, decisions in terms of editing almost inevitably facilitate a small space in which true objectivity can be executed. Whether intentionally or inadvertently, the process of media-making means that presented to an audience that producer knows will hook in audiences. Is this subjectivity simply a natural bi-product of this process? Or, do reality programs fixate their focus on cultivating a particular constructive to gain as much dramatic currency as they can?
What is it about drama that we, as an audience, are drawn to so much? Well according to the French cultural theorist Baudrillard, audiences enjoy, to a certain extent, witnessing “the pain or distress of others.” He elaborated that “this idea is based on a kind of primal pleasure, of anthropological joy images, a kind of brute fascination unencumbered by aesthetic, moral, social or political judgements” (Cebas, 2011, para. 2). So the “drama” that is conveniently inserted into pockets of reality television programming aren’t there by mistake. Instead those moments of drama and tension (whether real or fabricated) serve an important entertainment value function that we as as an audience demand.
