Reality TV is an ever expanding genre but for my blog post I want to focus on reality competition shows and the recent rise of meta-editing from them. Competitive reality TV shows have historically been believed to be unscripted, have minimal production interference, and take shots which make the setting look normal.
In Survivor, shots of the contestants and landscape without showing the production team allows the viewer to buy into the fantasy that players are actually surviving in the wild on their own.
In a show like Big Brother, where there are 24/7 live feeds that allow viewers to see contestants interact with one another, producers use confessionals as ways to let the audience in on what players are actually thinking about the game and those around them.
However, these generic tools within reality have become subverted within recent years, with both producers and players leaning into them and reconfiguring what reality TV looks like and is. For instance, in the most recent season of Survivor, in the very first episode the show gives the viewers a look into its actual production.
This breaks the generic fixation that exists within reality TV to make the viewer believe that everything we see is true by letting us into what actually happens. It subverts one of the goals of reality television by attempting to present the entire picture of the show and the work put into producing it.
Additionally, shows like Big Brother and Drag Race have been heavily criticized by fans because of the way editors deliberately push contestants that are entertaining in their confessionals. Oftentimes, these players will play up answers to questions from the production team and say what they are told to in order to garner favor with those running the game. This form of producing stories in reality television shows creates a dynamic where the game and players are no longer at the forefront of the viewer experience, instead the show becomes like any other program where things are not explicitly scripted but they are at the very least prompted for the players/actors.
The act of producing reality television games itself is meta because of the tension that exists between producing a show and playing a game. Where producers are expected to create an interesting viewing experience for the audience, yet remain unbiased while they watch the game itself unfold. Breaking the fourth wall to allow the audience into the reality of the game as a show and allowing the relationships players have with production to influence the game are ways in which reality television games are meta. They free themselves from criticism of being too much of a show or a game by combining both into the viewing experience. Their form is constantly evolving to address and subvert its original goals.
I found it really interesting how you were able to approach the boundary of what constitutes reality television, especially if most of the shows that are airing nowadays have the component of the crew and team always being in close range. The question of what the definition of reality tv constitutes is an interesting one that you raise, because now that most, if not all, of the reality shows being aired have a component of inauthenticity and the component of pandering to the audience, does there exist now a new genre of reality tv? Does this also speak on what we consider reality nowadays? The online, social media reality versus what we consider as actual reality off-grid: is it ever possibly to portray that sort of reality as entertainment?
Something that your post makes me think about is the relationship between diegesis and meta (in the case of reality TV as well as video games). To anyone on the Survivor set, their fundamental experience is participating in a social experiment. But because it is being filmed (and its being filmed is being filmed) it then becomes meta to the viewer; there needs to be some middle step of subjectivity that makes this a thing that is watched or seen. Similarly, in a video game, there is a need for a diegesis or boundary between a player and a game for it to have the opportunity to create meta commentary.
This is a super interesting trans-media connection! I think in a sense reality-TV is a false sort of meta in that it does not really challenge anything or make the audience feel uncomfortable as in DDLC or TING. It simply acknowledges its ‘unreality’ as a sort of ironic gesture with no content. This is in some ways connected to both Zizek’s analysis of irony: audiences know full well that reality TV isn’t strictly ‘real’, but it is precisely this disavowed knowledge that allows them to enjoy it, as a sort of ‘real-fiction’. It is also connected to Baudrillard’s idea of a simulacra. For Baudrillard, however, there is no longer a Real in the world, a claim which metagames like DDLC with all its traumatic rupture break a part. So it would be interesting to discuss how the meta-ness of games can challenge or sustain a false sense of reality.