Reality TV Shows

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Big Brother, Survivor, The Apprentice, and The Bachelor: all these programs have one thing in common. They are classified as reality TV shows. This list is just a representative of the literally hundreds of reality TV programs that have eclipsed the TV scene. Reality TV programs have become a popular genre today due to two major reasons. First, they are much cheaper to produce because they do not require expensive actors like fictive drama series. The second and the major reason is that they are believed to depict purported or actual reality thereby assuring their audience that they are seeing life as it really is, without artifice and storytelling expertise. But, how real are Reality TV programs? How real is the reality that they depict? This paper argues that the authenticity of the reality in Reality TV shows is questionable. Although examples of Reality TV can be found throughout the history of television, reality programs arrived en masse in peak time television schedules during the 1990s. The first wave of reality programming was based upon the success of crime and emergency services reality TV, better known as infotainment and travelled from America to Europe and beyond in the late 1980s to early 1990s (Hill 16). The second wave of reality TV shows was grounded upon the success of popular observational documentaries known as docu-soaps, and lifestyle programming involving house and garden makeovers, and traveled from Britain to Europe and beyond in the ,id to late 1990s (Hill 16). The third wave was grounded upon the popularity of social experiments that paced ordinary people in controlled environments over an extended period of time, or reality game shows, and moved from Northern Europe to Britain America and other parts... ... middle of paper ... ... Works Cited Falzone, Diana. Real Housewives Reportedly Faked Scenes: Is Anything on Reality TV Real? 30 August 2013. FoxNews.com.Web. 4 December 2013. Hill, Annette. Reality TV: Factual Entertainment and Television Studies. Oxon: Routeldge, 2005. Print. Isenberg, Robert. How Real Is Reality TV? The Laughably Far-Fetched, the Totally Sincere and Everything In Between. MSN.com. 2013. Web. 4 December 2013. Jacobs, Tom. Reality TV May Warp Viewers’ Perception of Actual Reality. Pacific Standard. 13 September 2013. Web. 4 December 2013. Ouellette, Laurie. Reality TV Gives Back: On the Civic Functions of Reality Entertainment. Journal of Popular Film and Television 2010: 67-73. Taylor, Jim. Reality TV Is Not Reality. Huffington Post.com. 2011. Web. 4 December 2013. Torre, Nestor. How Real Is Reality Television? 6 August 2013. Web. 4 December 2013

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