Reality TV: Realism and Revelation

193 Pages·2005·2.12 MB·English

by  Anita Biressi

reality tv
realism and revelation

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reality tv
realism and revelation
Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn

WALLFLOWER PRESS
LONDON & NEW YORK

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A Wallflower Press Book
Published by
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York • Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © Anita Biressi & Heather Nunn 2005
All rights reserved.
Wallflower Press® is a registered trademark of Columbia University Press.
A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-1-904764-05-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-904764-04-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-231-85026-1 (e-book)
Book design by Elsa Mathern
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
Printed in the United States of America
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Contents

Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Reality debates 9
2 Real lives, documentary approaches 35
3 Just being themsleves: from docudrama to new observational
documentary 59
4 Personalising the documentary: from video diary to Errol Morris 70
5 Therapeutic culture: narcissism and self-revelation 95
6 Trauma as popular cultural script: from talk show to lifestyle 108
programming
7 Video justice: reality crime television 118
8 Man in a glass box 131
Conclusion: ‘Reach for the stars’: celebrity, social mobility and 144
the future of reality TV
Notes 156
Bibliography 167
Index 179

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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank staff at the BFI Library and at Roehampton University TV Services,
Eugene Doyen and Caroline Bainbridge for helping to locate videos and other materials.
Thanks too to Caroline for her supportive comments on some of the earlier drafts
of chapters and conference papers which eventually found their way into this book.
Heather Nunn would also like to thank the Department of Media, Communications and
Cultural Studies at Middlesex University for teaching remission during 2002/03 which
provided much needed time for research.
Parts of chapter 4 also appear in diff erent forms in two short articles for a dossier on
trauma for the journal Screen, vol. 45, issue 4 (2004). An early version of chapter 7 was
presented at the Media Studies Research Group at Sussex University and we are grateful
to them for receiving it with interest. An extended version of chapter 7 was also originally
published as ‘Video justice: crimes of violence in social/media space’ in Space and Culture,
vol.6, issue 3 (2003). A version of chapter 8 was published in the Journal for Cultural
Research, vol. 8, issue 3 (2004). Parts of the Conclusion were published in a diff erent form
as ‘The especially remarkable: celebrity and social mobility in reality TV’, in Mediactive,
issue 2 (2003). We wish to thank these journals for permission to reproduce some of the
material here.
We would also like to express our appreciation to Bert Nunn, Kathryn White, Berni
O’Dea and Miri Forster as their tireless support and enthusiasm sustained us through the
hard times. Thanks too to the anonymous reader commissioned by Wallfl ower Press who
read the entire manuscript with diligence and off ered constructive criticism.
vii

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Introduction
This book takes reality TV to be a signifi cant development within contemporary pro-
gramming and one worthy of close study. It presents a series of case studies that examine
each reality TV form closely in order to delineate its distinctiveness and to highlight key
issues around ethics, politics, truth-telling and realist representation. It will also seek to
make connections between diff erent forms: to track generic evolutions, to trace formal
relationships, collisions and disparities among and between diff erent kinds of non-fi ction
programming. Television in particular, its popular critics and its audiences, seem to have
a short memory and where lineage is pertinent to the discussion we will highlight the
impact of earlier forms of non-fi ction fi lm and television and fi lmmaking philosophies
on current forms. However, the variety of formal conventions employed by this range of
programming, the complexity of political or aesthetic agenda adopted by fi lmmakers and
the employment of hybrid fi lmic techniques all point to the diffi culty of establishing clear
genealogies and unassailable antecedents. But antecedents do exist; undermining the
claims so frequently made that recent reality formats are wholly ‘new’ or that they have
clearly defi nable and ‘unique’ characteristics.
Consequently, the book argues that within British television culture especially it
makes most sense to understand reality TV within the context of the diff erent but related
historical trajectories of documentary fi lm practice. This is not to say that reality TV is in
any simple way a commercialised or adulterated or mutant off shoot of documentary but
rather that many of its forms owe something to or operate in dialogue with varieties of
documentary in particular. And so too, that many of the debates within media and cultural
introduction 1

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