Reality TV Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Reality TV is a catchall category that includes a wide range of popular factual programs located in border territories between information and entertainment, documentary and drama. Reality TV has become the success story of television in the 1990s and 2000s.

There are three main strands to the development of reality TV, and these relate to three distinct, yet overlapping, areas of media production: tabloid journalism, documentary television, and popular entertainment. There are a variety of styles and techniques associated with reality TV, such as non-professional actors, unscripted dialogue, surveillance footage. The main formats include infotainment (on-scene footage of emergency services, e.g., Rescue 911), docusoap (popular observational documentary, e.g., Airport), lifestyle (home and personal makeovers, e.g., What Not to Wear), and reality gameshow (experiments that place ordinary people in controlled environments, e.g., Big Brother). These formats draw on existing popular genres, such as game shows, to create hybrid programs, and focus on telling stories in an entertaining style. Reality TV has been the motor of primetime throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and formats such as Pop Idol are international bestsellers, with local versions appearing all over the world.

Critics have attacked the genre for being voyeuristic, cheap, sensational television. Such criticism is based on general concerns about quality standards within public service and commercial television, the influence of television on viewers, and the ethics of popular television. Academic work suggests reality TV is a rich site for analysis and debate on issues such as genre, audiences, gender, class, and identity, performance and authenticity, celebrities, and new media. Reality TV has repositioned factual and entertainment programming within popular culture. And this shift between information and entertainment is irreversible, blurring the boundaries of fact and fiction for a new generation of television viewers.

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