The Reality Of Reality Tv

In Cassie Heidecker’s paper, The Real, the Bad, and the Ugly, she exposes that reality television’s charm is the characters have real, normal lives like the audience’s lives. While the producers’ editing causes regular episodes of reality TV shows to differ from a viewer's normal life, it also generates larger audiences with every episode and the ratings continue to rise. Moreover, the shows follow a predictable formula so that even Heidecker, who regularly watches reality TV, realizes the shows are predictable; yet Heidecker continues to laugh, cry, and enjoy the predictable moves the shows make. Since the ratings of reality TV continue to rise, more people than just Heidecker still enjoy the shows, even though they are predictable. Though the shows are

It seems that you can’t turn on a television set anymore without a reality show being on. All networks have recently started to pump out reality shows left and right. And why wouldn’t they? Reality shows are highly rated, with three of them being in the top ten on the Nielsen ratings chart. In fact, these shows are becoming more popular than the sitcoms and dramas aired. New sitcoms and dramas struggle to get attention of the public when going against a reality show. Programs such as The Beast and Go Fish, which critics loved and raved about, are victims of the wrath of reality shows. These shows are now cancelled.

American actress, Lisa Bonet, once said, “What saddens me is the corruption of youth and beauty, and the loss of soul, which is only replaced by money.” Today’s television shows are decaying into more polluted and inappropriate ideas, which are then presented worldwide. This is a negative influence on not only young people, but also society as a whole. How can it be expected of youth today to be appropriate role models to future generations with such corrupt influences? With the filth, dishonesty, and abuse of freedom of speech, reality television ultimately does more harm on today’s society than good.

Reality television’s portrayal of ordinary people is anything but real. However, audiences across many cultures are still drawn to them. Audiences aren’t just passively consuming reality television; they are actively engaging with it, and its significance conveys the viewers with the ethical obligation of media literacy. “This tension between the ordinary

At the end of a long day, relaxing in front of a television, watching a favorite show will hit the spot just right. Comparisons between the audience and the reality stars will take place whether it is noticeable or not. And finally, reality TV will continue to attract an abundant audience do to the constant changing of topics and

Although I agree, I would add that beyond the perceived realism – and therefore relatability – of reality television stars, reality television is gripping because it puts the relatable characters in situations that bring out their amoral qualities. In doing so, the viewer feels morally elevated by getting the sense that, “at least I’m not as bad as these people.” Becoming aware of this “holier than thou” complex that reality television sets up between viewer and character is a form of media awareness. Being aware of this complex, beyond ruining reality television for the viewer, helps to overcome the influence on your morals that television producers are trying to

In this research paper, I will be talking about the negative effects of reality television on its viewers and how it affects the American culture of today’s society. People may disagree and say there are positive effects, I realize that. On the contrary, the negative effects seem to outnumber the positive effects. Reality TV stars are becoming huge role models with teenagers, rather parents

That’s 88 hours of footage a day, seven days a week. So [we]they end up with 616 hours of video for just one week’s episode.”(Crouch)This shows the untruthfulness of reality television because they can create the story line they want. Also,they now have 615 extra hours of footage they can mash together for a different episode.Something common in reality television is frankenbiting,this is when they “take different clips and edit them together to sound like one conversation, sometimes drastically changing the meaning.” (Crouch)So for example in a shows like “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” They can take footage from a phone call over the summer,and not have it on the show until winter,or put someone entirely different on the other line.Shows can get away with this because people are so oblivious to the fact that this actually happens and because of how real they can make the conversation look. Someone who knows the reality television scene first hand is Ann Kalsen who “had been approached by someone [a week earlier] about the possibility of starring in a pilot for a reality TV show”(Klassen).

Shows like Keeping Up With the Kardashians, The Bachelor and The Real Housewives have been taking the country by storm with the unscripted, outrageously unpredictable stories of ordinary people from around the country. Americans spend thirty three percent of their free time watching television and sixty seven percent of the shows are reality television (Reality Television:a Shocking Statistic). The average American watches five hours of television a day, that means they spend three and a half hours a day watching reality television. This shows that reality television is affecting everyone's everyday lives. Reality television is harmful to our society because it promotes stereotypes, it leaves a lasting impression on young susceptible minds,

“Reality shows are everywhere, from cable and broadcast television to the Internet. Reality TV programming has generated millions of viewers,

The cultural phenomenon ‘Reality Television (TV)’ has become an increasingly popular genre of television since its paroxysm onto the airwaves in 1945. The term ‘Reality Television’ can be defined as the genre of entertainment that documents the lives of ‘ordinary’ individuals through the exhibition of allegedly unscripted real-life scenarios, despite inquisitive inquiries disclosing Reality TV to entail facets of script. The primary objective of Reality TV is purely to entertain the audience. This genre of television is appealing to viewers due to its entertainment principle/value, the audience’s competency to correlate to the characters and their situations, and the contingency it presents for escapism and voyeurism. We can capitalise the Australian appropriation of the American popular dating Reality TV show ‘The Bachelor’ as a tool to further comprehend the purpose and appeal of Reality television. The postulations of media’s obligations to society in contrast to their current actions and media as a mirror to society - the normative theory, can also be utilised as an implement to apprehend Reality TV. Through the strict analysis of ‘ The Bachelor’ and the employment of the normative theory, the purpose and appealing factor of Reality TV can be deeply examined.

For close to a decade, the ethics behind the existence of reality TV have been questioned. While there are ardent viewers of reality TV, researchers and other scholars disapprove them, and claim that the world would have been in a better place. Reality TV shows, especially in America, are extremely profitable to media owners, and this has increased their popularity in the recent years. The main target audience for these shows are teenagers and women, who spend a lot of time discussing about them, even hours after the shows. Most of the reality shows in America and other parts of the world have common ideas. The most fundamental aspect of most reality TV shows is that they display people who go through embarrassing, painful and humiliating ordeals. This is what the reality shows expect their audiences to be entertained, and presumably laugh at the situations the people go through. For this reason and many more, it has been found that they are more detrimental than entertaining to the society, and therefore, the world would be in a better place without them (Pozner 89-91).

What is it about these reality shows such as: Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Bad Girls Club, and The Real Housewives that we cannot stop watching? After watching reality shows like this, it leaves people craving the next episode of the next week. Reality television producers are exploiting people by giving the public a “sense” of reality but not the real version of it, but rather exploit people and use stereotypes to make money for entertainment. The specific points of this argument is: the excessive amount of reality TV that can result in an extreme amount of trash, the producers that present these shows with specific good and bad characters, the social world around us gives us an idea of “real” with different relations in the media, how race is used a positional place in some reality shows, and the expectations and image that you would usually see out of a black male in college.

There has been a huge increase in “reality” based television over the last few years. From Survivor to Big Brother it seems that we are constantly being bombarded with a new type of reality television program. But why do people watch these shows? What makes these shows so interesting? One theory brought up in an article in Psychology Today by Steven Reiss Ph.D. and James Wiltz, a Ph.D. candidate at Ohio State University, is that, “reality television allows Americans to fantasize about gaining status through automatic fame” (Reiss and Wiltz, 2001). This is the American dream, acquiring fame with little to no work at all. And what better way to do it than on television?

Also, in many cases, the characters used in these shows are not ordinary individuals, but highly paid actors that simply recite scripts. Clearly, these shows are inaccurately labeled as “reality television,” and many individual’s time is wasted as a result. Time for many is very valuable. Wasting a person’s time because of an inaccurate description could be just as detrimental as wasting a person’s money because of an inaccurate description. Many people watch these shows to view real life situations, but what they are really viewing is the complete opposite. This cultivates confusion about what is real and what is fake.