Week 12 - Che Crawford - Reality TV

How do I differentiate between documentary and reality television?

To me, the purpose of a documentary is to educate, and the purpose of reality TV is to entertain. Both do both. And education could arguably be entertainment. But the entertainment of reality TV, to me, is that of generic enjoyment, heedless of how much attention you have to pay.

The other way is that the participants of reality tv more often than not win a prize, or one of them does. Participants of documentaries don’t.

How does Hill define reality TV?

Hill talks about how different audiences define reality tv differently. And within the genre of reality tv, that there are so many subgenres. This means the lines grow fuzzy and it begins to get more complicated defining what is a broad range of reality television programming.

Much of television today is a result of hybridizing different genres together. It was the same last week with Buffy, and is the same for reality television.

Hill concludes that there is no one definition of reality programming, rather many competing definitions of what has become the reality genre.

Hill says that if there is one defining characteristic that unites all the programmes that make up reality television, it is the capacity to let viewers see for themselves.

How has the documentary genre influenced reality TV and how it presents the ‘real’?

Everyone has a bias. It is impossible to present something in an unbiased way, even if you think you are. So even in documentaries, where the creators might be trying to show the truth of a subject, their point of view, the shots they use, all create their bias.

It seems to me that the documentary genre influenced reality TV by conceiving the idea of taking this bias further, and for a more simple form of entertainment.

The power of how scenes come across is in the hands of the editor. And the job of the editor is to create a show that will sell. So while on the one hand, a room filled with people talking nicely to each other could be real, he could manipulate it so that the real looks a lot more awkward, thus creating drama. His bias is to get numbers.

Documentaries started this off, and influenced what could be the start of reality TV, just like in the “Cathy Come Home.” Cathy Come Home was presented in a realistic drama documentary style. It followed a couple who had a child, then due to the husbands injuries, are evicted and become squatters. Eventually they lost their children to social services.

The ‘reality’ way it is filmed makes it believable, but in fact it is a written play. Cathy Come Home seems to be a middle ground between documentary and reality tv. Everything is scripted. It is just presented like reality.

Genres are a never ending train of influencing to each other. That’s why, every week of popular genres, it has been difficult to completely define what is each separate genre.