Abstract
This book is an exceptionally informative review of a copious amount of academic publications on the subject of reality TV and a ‘textual analysis’ (p. 8) of a diverse range of reality TV programmes themselves. This book is pivotally beneficial for students who are interested and scouting the field of reality TV studies, or scholars who are looking for stimulating research questions and prior literature to build on. In other words, it is a didactically good starting point. The book encompasses crucial sub-fields/topics: the convoluted questions on reality status; Internet’s role in facilitating the interactivity of viewership; commercialization models; the representations of gender, race and class; and finally political questions such as democratisation.
The definitional argument of the book is that reality TV should be ‘defined more ontologically than stylistically’ and ‘a way of making television’ (p. 6). While Deery correctly asserts reality TV should not be considered as a genre in itself, evoking ontology in television studies seems to signal a return to the definitional crisis of debates around liveness (e.g. Jane Feuer’s essay on Ontology as Ideology). When defining reality TV in relation to the concept of realistic-ness, which is both the most central to the medium and ‘slippery’ (p. 27), the author is very proficient and incisive. The author argues that reality TV is ‘fabricated only in the sense of made, not made up’ (p. 28), ‘structured spontaneity’ (p. 28), or ‘staged actuality’ (p. 28) to highlight the ‘synthetic’ nature of both real elements and staged elements.
In terms of how reality TV perpetuates hyperbolic stereotypes of gender, race and class, Deery argues that reality TV is very self-conscious in constructing these ‘culpable simplifications’ (p. 121), although it tends to exploit differences for dramaturgical and commercial reasons rather than with moral or ideological intent. To a degree, reality TV even encourages audiences to be ‘media-reflexive’ (p. 43) and enjoy ‘critiquing its artifice’ (p. 43) but at the same time, audiences can also enjoy the ‘affective reality’ by investing and immersing in the emotions of participants. Reality TV digs out the extra-ordinary character or behaviour out of the ordinariness of an ‘everyday’ person, by carefully selecting their participants in pre-production, setting up the event, camera, editing, setting and other technical work.
Woven through this book are also some very interesting insights on mediation encapsulated in this statement: ‘the ultimate theme of reality TV: what it means to be mediated on television’ (p. 71). Reality TV, in its developed phase, is not necessarily about hiding or revealing but ‘appreciating and admiring the mediation of the real’ (p. 51) – especially as a prolonged period of witnessing and vicariously participating the growth of an ‘ordinary celebrity’ (p. 53). In summary, the book does a great job in explicating the key themes, theoretical perspectives, texts and methods in reality TV studies and should be of strong interest to researchers and students alike.