The Reality (?) of Reality Television

The show which arguably established the contemporary reality genre, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, ended their latest season with a meta-conversation about the nature of their own show. The storyline centred on an argument between the sisters, and how Kloe and Kim felt Kourtney wasn’t doing her part of the sharing for the show. Some of this stress is emotional - an unbalance of personal life being open for the public to view - and some is practical. Kim points out how she and Kloe have to do more physical hours of filming to pick up the slack of a missing person. 

I personally found the final two or three episodes which captured this storyline fascinating. Not just from a narrative perspective but because the fourth wall was broken and remained broken. The show was no longer a pretence, but an open conversation about the nature of the show. There was even a scene in which the producers were present for the discussion. 

For those of you who are not connoisseurs of reality television, this may not seem as groundbreaking as it was. But reality television maintains a certain distance from its own nature, rarely commenting on the cameras following them or the clear production going into certain scenes. The Real Housewives, for instance, only reference the show as a show during their reunion episodes, in which the full show is discussed as a break down. Even Love Island, a show built on the premise that the audience is watching simultaneously with filming and allowing them to participate directly with the show, rarely mentions "the public" unless convenient for storyline. 

On some level, this echoes the nature of kayfabe in wrestling - a maintenance of realism despite everyone knowing it’s not. I'm always reminded of the many times my mother has tried to haughtily point out how reality shows are scripted. It was hard for me to explain that I knew this, and yet it wasn’t scripted simultaneously. Obviously, the producers of the Kardashians could not have foreseen Lamar Odom's near death overdose in a brothel. Nor could the Real Housewives have scripted Luann's arrest in the middle of filming Real Housewives of New York. But there are also clear scenes set up, or arguments arranged, situations manipulated to spur arguments. 

Lately, I've been writing and speaking a lot about the idea of playing with belief. Mostly I have stayed in the realm of online storytelling, where fictional narratives are told while playing as if true. Users engage with sincerity when in the parameters of the game, but leave it behind when the game is also left. It's an engagement of 'as if'. We can develop a strange new way of considering this when it comes to reality television.

Wrestling creates an interesting parallel with reality television. Both are creating storylines which are, at least to a certain extent, fabricated. However, the openness to accept and openly discuss the way audiences play with belief in the narrative is massively different. Wrestling's kayfabe is a temporary belief play while engaging with the narrative, but is discarded when confronted. Reality TV is more iffy. Audiences themselves are often unsure to what extent situations are manipulated and to what extent they are true to situation and reaction. And obviously this is rarely a strict dichotomy. A situation can be manipulated in order to elicit interesting, yet true, reactions. 

Love Island is the best demonstration of this. The whole premise of the show for Love Island is the manipulated environment: put attractive, immature singles in an isolated environment with supplies of alcohol, and promise them money if they couple up with the right person. But this does not mean every season of Love Island is equally good. The last summer season of Love Island was arguably the best the show has been, but that was all in the casting. The cast’s true reactions to each manipulated situation was unique and ultimately entertaining. Similarly, certain casts for Real Housewives encourage better responses than others.

Housewives provides a more complicated discussion of the manipulation vs truth argument. As previously noted, certain circumstances arise naturally in the lives of people generally, and D-level celebrities more specifically. Luann de Lesseps’s arrest in Palm Beach, which took centre stage of season 10 of Real Housewives of New York, could not have been a plot prearranged for the show. Nor could the death of Dennis, Bethannys on-again-off-again boyfriend from the same franchise. There is also a growth of ego, and the knowledge of an audience's enjoyment of an aspect of a personality trait, leading to stars acting less like people and more like characters, which can affect the life of the individual. Essentially, there are scenes clearly manipulated by producers, but there are also scenes manipulated by cast members, either inadvertently by mistakes like Luann's arrest, or by active manipulation of cast members concern for storyline. 

But if a storyline is manipulated primarily by the cast members, doesn't that make it still in some way organic? And if the situation is manipulated by producers but still elicits true reactions, is it still technically "scripted"? 

Reality television has the unique position of blurring the typical dichotomy between reality and fiction, in similar ways to how I saw online storytelling blurring this binary. They take real circumstances and real people who are not actors, and film them. But the process of this storytelling, and the need for entertainment, creates a scenario in which the knowledge of the television show is understood and taken on, without directly referencing. It's the lack of openly discussing the nature of the show that fully embodies the blurred boundary.

Which makes the open discussion of the nature of the show interesting. This kind of discussion takes the knowledge of the blurred boundary and suddenly steps away, bringing the scene fully into the realm of “real”. This is what makes the reunion specials for Real Housewives fascinating. It's not just the fourth wall that breaks, but, interestingly, the broken position of real vs fiction also gets broken and abandoned. Cast members sit and watch themselves in highlight reels during reunion episodes and comment on them. The pretense is dropped, and suddenly we see a discussion of “show”. 

Reality television is one of the only television genres which allow an open exploration of television show as a concept, and the impact this relationship has on cast and producer alike. It's interesting to discuss the questions of why reality television is typically demonized, but I think this is a discussion for another day. But the genre is more complicated than people typically think. There are many reality shows which are not as successful as the Kardashians, but I don’t think this has to do with the fame of the sisters - rather the extent of their fame has followed the show more than anything else. Similarly, some franchises of the Real Housewives have been less successful than others. Reality television is not simple, but a complicated negotiation of typically conceived binaries, broken but not obviously so. It presents us with a strange mirror to our social, political and economic world.