BLOG: The unreality of reality television
By Lindsay Rice, Staff Writer
August 14, 2008 | noon
The term reality, according to dictionary.com, is “the state or quality of being real” and is consequently a misleading pre cursor to the term reality television because in most cases, the shows represent a slim, over-privileged facet of society.
The series “The Real World” is the oldest reality show created by MTV, beginning in 1992 and maintaining its popularity through today. However, over the years, the reality shows that spurred from these roots took on a very unrealistic nature. For example, the series “Laguna Beach” followed the lives of high school teenagers living in Orange County, Calif. The premise may seem capable of realistic potential, but the focus of the show ended up straying far from reality.
The show concentrated on one specific group of teens in a very rare home environment. None of the girls on the show held jobs, yet their days were filled with endless arrays of pricy hair and nail salons, expensive boutiques and high class lunches. As for the boys, it was escalades, surfboards and fine dining for their flavor of the week. The main characters of the show, Kristin Cavallari, Lauren Conrad and Stephen Colletti, were always with a sidekick who pressed them with the juicy questions about guys or the most recent girl fight. This prompting done by the supporting characters has been deemed an acceptable replacement for scripting although the encounters between supposed best friends come off as unnatural.
Ohio University student Alyssa Rembold recognizes the unrealistic nature of these shows as she deems them “staged” with behind the scenes preparation.
The popularity of "Laguna Beach" spurred the series “The Hills,” which follows one of the main girls of the Beach posse, LC, and her life after high school with newfound buddies and drama. Once again it serves as a misleading representation of the vast majority of high school graduates in the United States. Whether it is from the success of their past series, or simply because their parents are extremely wealthy, the characters are situated in high level internships that are usually out of reach for an average student out of high school. The friendships come and go, and the guys either remain unattainable or overbearing. It would appear that the transition from high school to college for the cast meant little more than a few hours drive from home and a bigger bank account. This idea of featuring so-called regular teens in their “natural” environments has caught on and will definitely continue because of its popularity.
A huge portion of the MTV's money goes to researching the audience and to responding to their desires, which conveys a huge discrepancy: viewers want reality television that isn’t their reality at all. In one study conducted by Betsy Frank, the executive vice president for research and planning at MTV networks, 50 people were forbidden to watch the network or to visit the site for one month. They kept journals and recordings of their daily activities, reporting feelings of disconnection from the world. Some participants went so far as to drop out of the study.
The dependency on MTV for hard news is alarming, and the study participants' views of reality is perhaps even scarier. When this question of warped morality was raised in an interview, Frank simply replied that she has “no qualms about MTV programming.”
At OU, it appears that most students are not duped by the label "reality television." The students on this campus had an overwhelmingly similar response when asked the question, “How realistic do you find reality television?"
The response was that students found the shows not in the least representative of the typical person’s reality. Erin Zaugg commented on the fact that behind every reality television show exists an extensive crew, eliminating a lot of the natural intentions of the show. Viewers at OU recognize the backstage element on the sets of these shows as well as semi-scripted nature.
Justin Storts responded that these shows “reflect no concept of reality as I know it” and concluded that the fact they are even associated with the term reality is appalling.
The inconsistency existing between true life and the life portrayed on any of these shows is blatant but does not, evidently, act as a deterrent from watching them. Dubbing these shows as reality is a potentially dangerous error that affects not only our cultural image to outsiders but also our own future generations.
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