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This chapter examines the influence of reality-television formats in East Asia and looks at how they function as alternative models of program investment and production. While reality television is a product of European and North American television systems, it has a different provenance in East Asian society. Reality television provides a fresh alternative to documentary, an expository form that state-owned broadcasters actively exploited for the explicit purpose of state-building. In 2002, the first survival reality show in East Asia, Into Shangrila, was conceived in China. Within a short time, other programs emerged such as Perfect Holiday and Indiana Jones. Most of these shows were promoted as exercises in documentary anthropology rather than just escapist game shows.

This chapter examines patterns of crisis in the 1990s prose fictions of Goncourt prize winner Echenoz. Countering contradictory critiques of Echenoz as epitome or observer of postmodernity, it identifies in representations of cultural production (including novels, cinema, the art market, and reality television) implicit critical challenges to the symbolic violence of the mass media. Foregrounding the patterns of a parallel crisis‐generating postcolonial economy underlying the global market, it also identifies how Echenoz's avoidance of overt criticism risks perpetuating market‐driven stereotypes and misogyny. Analysis of language games and intertexts (including, via Žižek, Hitchcock's Vertigo) identifies how both deliberately and unintentionally Echenoz draws on and draws attention to the agency—critical and oppressive—of different fictional constructions, bringing into the tropes of his novels, the media, and the market alike, and thus leadng readers to consider their own responsibility in challenging or perpetuating symbolic violence.

In this chapter, Lynn Spiegel and Max Dawson show how American television remained the central medium not just for entertainment, but for discussion of gender roles, race relations, family life and other major moral and social issues of the day. They examine the new emphasis on taste and lifestyle in network programming, as well as the continuing under-representation of Latino and other ethnic groups on prime-time shows. They also examine the rise of reality television, the development of a new scheduling policy based on the ‘social arrhythmia’ of the 24-hour information economy, and the rising importance of time-shifting by the end of the period. Finally, they argue that viewers now form a part of television audiences that transcend the old boundaries of the nation-state – even though worldwide audiences continue to interpret programmes in the light of their own local contexts and national concerns.

This chapter examines recent commercial and formal developments in the popular and enduring genre of the wildlife documentary on television. It draws on three original qualitative audience studies to look at the responses of viewers to a range of wildlife programming, from high budget ‘blue-chip’ series to hybrids borrowing celebrity presenters and formats from ‘reality television’ and other popular genres. The range of programming and viewer responses analysed in this chapter suggests that assumptions about the audience embedded in some critiques of constructions of nature do not come close to telling the full story of wildlife documentaries on television and their audiences. The chapter also reveals the expectations and engagements, pleasures or irritations, understandings or confusions, derived by the audience from viewing wildlife documentaries.

This chapter considers how we can understand the term 'audience' and critically outlines some of the ways in which the audience has been approached, theorised and researched. It argues that the history of audience research is characterised by a division between powerful media and powerful viewers; that is, between understanding the media as capable of influencing and therefore affecting viewers and understanding viewers as capable of influencing and therefore affecting the media. This chapter also includes new developments in audience research.

Chapter Two turns to reality television, exploring three theories of emotion that explain the rise of this televisual genre in the wake of 9/11. A study of the 2000-2010 programming schedule reveals the cultural anxieties with which producers and viewers of these shows (dis)engage. Although often considered superficial, lowbrow entertainment products meant primarily for escapist purposes, this essay argues that reality television programs grapple with important societal concerns: surveillance culture and privacy rights; the pressure of identity performance in the social media era; and shifting social, domestic, and familial expectations for men and women.

Programmes broadcast during and after the eightieth anniversaries formed the most public interface where new televisual representations of the conflict collided with the war's history and memory. In the twenty-first century, however, a new television programme pushed the boundaries of what had been done by previous documentaries about 1914-18 and stimulated a controversy all of its own. The Trench (BBC, 2002) was the first documentary about the First World War to present its history in a reality-experiential format. Twenty-five male volunteers from Hull lived in a recreated trench to analyse elements of the British infantryman's experience of fighting in the autumn of 1916. Viewers witnessed a world that was never about dry facts, dates and academic squabbling, but about survival in extreme circumstances. The programme was widely reviled by the British press, testament to the fact that in Britain any televisual treatment of 1914-18 must not stray from the accepted three documentary cornerstones of archive film, veterans' testimony and historians.

This chapter considers how emotion functions within reality and lifestyle television. It argues that emotion is sometimes used as a social tool in a way that obscures differences of class, gender and race. Thus, while superficially operating as light entertainment, many reality or lifestyle television programmes such as Wife Swap seek legitimacy through a suggestion that they play a deeper pedagogic role: they invite us, the audience, to reflect on our intimate feelings and relationships through an empathetic engagement with the participants. Using devices such as the 'video diary' and the staging of final meetings between participants, programmes such as this use emotion as a tool to suggest that differences of class, race, sexuality and gender can easily be overcome through the emotional medium of a 'good cry'. Programmes such as Wife Swap play an ideological role in establishing notions of 'home' and in transmitting the emotions we should associate with 'home'. As viewers, we are drawn into an emotional engagement with the participants which on many levels reiterates our feelings of community, belonging and humanity; and yet, we are also complicit in perpetuating an individualised society that encourages us to make judgement on those around us.

This chapter looks at one well-known format in reality television– Big Brother (Bigg Boss in India) – in order to shed light on the complicated relationship between the forces of globalization, national and local cultural formations and the dictates of commercially driven entertainment. It analyses the essential features of format television to argue that the very mode of its constitution as an economic and aesthetic object inclines it towards the global. The chapter elucidates the reality behind global cultural formations by discussing the two main theoretical approaches to the question of global culture – cultural imperialism and cultural globalization. It also offers some speculations about how reality television embodies global form and thus functions as a sort of “Bigg Boss” that dictates contemporary modes of meaningful behaviour.

This chapter discusses the tensions that structure audiences' discussions of makeover television: tensions that involve learning, identification, gender, shame, authenticity, realism, and feeling. To hold these tensions in a productive relationship, the chapter draws on contemporary theorizations of reflexivity across a number of fields, exploring how audiences talk about the reflexive self as an accomplishment produced partly through their engagement with makeover television. Looking at two makeover television shows—Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Starting Over—the chapter considers analyses of modern, mediated selfhood and delves into the field of scholarly critiques of reality television that are based largely on textual analysis of television shows. It also draws on conversations with audiences about their engagements with makeover television.

This chapter explains that in an era of neoliberalism—the liberalization of market constraints and the reduction of government social services in favor of private enterprise—citizens are increasingly asked to invest in discourses of self-branding and self-management as means of attaining success. It views the emergence of reality television programs as part of the process of normalizing the ethos of self-governance by demonstrating how success and failure are matters of personal choice, creativity in the face of adversity, and the ability to “sell” one's brand to clients. By demonstrating how discourses of self-management are articulated across various subgenres focused on gendered, racialized, and classed subjects, the chapter reformulates how such discourses permeate almost every aspect of professional and private lives.

This chapter takes up the position of the infamous “angry black woman” by avoiding righteous, revisionist, or reactionary arguments about black women and anger and instead considering black women’s anger as critical posture. The argument neither begins nor ends with the stereotype, but with the supposition that representational discourse has been largely unable to account for anger as an aspect of black female subjectivity. The case is therefore made that anger is inherently bound up with the notion of claim for black women, and accounting for this interaction requires an interrogation into the most intimate of black female spaces. The chapter ultimately turns to a discussion of reality television, Claudia Rankine’s discussion of Serena Williams, and a brief analysis of Toni Morrison’s Sula.

This chapter examines the trope of the strong black woman by way of the “superwoman” of R&B musical parlance, particularly as expressed by R&B artist Karyn White in her 1988 hit song “Superwoman.” It extends this discussion to a consideration of the reality television series Keyshia Cole: The Way It Is in order to document the complex enactments of black female social intimacy and to say something about how black women collectively navigate trauma and pain by way of their music, as well as through their interactions with each other.

This chapter examines Hotel Impossible, a Travel Channel reality show in which hotel guru Anthony Melchiorri travels to hotels facing fiscal distress and crafts a management, labor, and decorative makeover to save them. Brody examines the show’s narrative arc and its perpetuation of the neoliberal dream of taking care of the self in a capitalist-driven marketplace. He focuses on the episodes of Hotel Impossible that deal with the subject of housekeeping, and describes how housekeepers generally remain silent regarding decisions about housekeeping practices. Through his analysis of Hotel Impossible, Brody explores how popular culture represents design’s impact on housekeepers.

What kinds of social comparisons are encouraged by an increasingly unequal America? This chapter explores how class segregation and media portrayals of wealth combine to push the American imagination away from contrast-focused upward social comparison with the wealthy elite. As inequality has grown over the last half century, so has economic residential segregation, insulating the majority of Americans from the sort of social experiences that make inequality feel real and meaningful. Exploring media portrayals of the elite, including celebrity culture and reality television, they show that increasingly, Americans’ opportunities for interaction with the rich are not social per se, but parasocial, conducted via imagined relationships and comparisons with celebrities through social and traditional media. Rather than offering opportunities for upward social contrast, these parasocial experiences are deliberately crafted to do the opposite: portraying the rich as morally or intellectually inferior, drawing attention to similarities between the elite and everyday Americans, or making distances seem small to spark economic aspiration and exploit the appeal of the American Dream. Finally, the authors demonstrate how race and class segregation distort white Americans’ perceptions of status, and how media use race and gender strategically to draw attention away from contrast-based thinking about the wealthy.