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The Reality Of Reality Television

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Reality television is one of the most popular genres featured on broadcast media. Although its name implies an honest and impartial story, reality television is one of the most-edited and manipulated forms of television, where producers decide what is seen by the audience through their careful selection of music, footage, camera angles, and lighting among many other important features. Through their design choices and careful edits, producers are able to create narratives and meanings that otherwise would not exist were a single uncut take been what was aired. One such example of a narrative being constructed is found in episode 19 of season 8 of the hit reality television show, Shark Tank. In this episode, a narrative about the allure …show more content…

In addition to the narration, the visuals that are shown also highlight the message that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and become a successful businessperson. The beginning of the clip features photographs of the sharks before they were well-known for their business endeavors. In these shots, the photographs of the sharks are intentionally blurred or left uncolored as to signify that they were at a less-fortunate time in their lives, or that they were inferior at that point in time. As the scene progresses, and the narrator begins to talk about how the sharks became rich, photographs and videos of a very different theme and quality are shown. In the pictures where the sharks have become rich, the outlines of their bodies are highlighted with a sort-of mixture between the soft-edge and glowing-edge effects found in the Photoshop image editing software. This simple edit gives the sharks an ethereal or heavenly appearance, insinuating that they have achieved greatness and are radiant sources of knowledge and business wisdom. What is especially interesting to note about this particular episode is that the producers actually chose to forgo the theme song. In order to keep the episode within its allotted amount of time, factoring in the amount of advertisements that would be played to fill the thirty minute time slot, the iconic Shark Tank theme was skipped in favor of the special intro. While this may not seem like a big deal on the

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