Reality TV Gives Back: On the Civic Functions ofReality Entertainment

By Laurie Ouellette

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Figure 1. Contestants on VH1’s Charm School perform civic service by cleaning up a polluted river (2009).

Copyright © 2010 Taylor & Francis Group, LLCDOI: 10.1080/01956051.2010.483347

Abstract: Reality TV is more than a trivial diversion. Civic aims historically associated with docu-mentaries (particularly citizen-ship training) have been radically reinterpreted and integrated into current popular reality formats.

Keywords: citizenship, civic ex-periment, documentary, public service, reality TV

In his influential 2002 essay “Per-forming the Real: Documentary Di-versions,” John Corner identified a lack of civic purpose as reality TV’s defining attribute. His point of ref-

erence was the documentary tradition, from which the surge of “unscripted” entertainment since the late-1990s has selectively borrowed. Reflecting on the early stages of this development, Cor-ner worried that if television programs like Big Brother drew from the look and style of serious documentary, they eclipsed its historical “civic functions,” defined as official citizenship training, journalistic inquiry and exposition, and (from the margins) radical interrogation (48–50). Designed “entirely in relation to its capacity to deliver entertainment” and achieve “competitive strength” in a changing marketplace, reality TV repur-posed “documentary as diversion,” Cor-ner argued (52). Serious techniques of observation, documentation, investiga-tion, and analytic assessment were fused to the pleasure principles of soap opera and gaming—and focused inward. Cam-eras and microphones captured the per-formance of selfhood and everyday life within artificial settings and contrived formulas. For Corner, this interior play with the discourse of the real was symp-tomatic of a larger trend with troubling implications. Changing the whole point of documentary since the late-1800s, the new reality programming addressed TV viewers as consumers of entertainment instead of citizens. Would purposeful

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factual forms of television—and de-mocracy itself—survive?

The broader institutional context for such concerns was—and is—the waning public service tradition. Pub-lic broadcasters such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in the United Kingdom and to a lesser extent the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States have played a major role in defining and developing televi-sion’s civic potentialities (Scannell; Ouellette). Envisioning the medium as an instrument of education, not a mover of merchandise, public broadcasters embraced documentary and other non-fiction formats as a dimension of their broader mission to serve and reform citizens so they might better fulfill their national “duties and obligations” (Ang 29). Factual programming high in civic legitimacy but low in “exchange value” (Corner 52) was faithfully circulated as a “cultural resource for citizenship” as well as an instrument for enlightening and guiding national populations (Mur-dock 186). Since the 1990s, however, this commitment has been subject to re-interpretation and flux. As BBC scholar Georgina Born points out, the “concept and practice” of public broadcasting has been “radically transformed” across Western capitalist democracies by mar-ket liberalization, deregulation, digital technologies, and the postwelfare impe-tus to reform and downsize the public sector in general (Born, “Digitalising” 102; see also Uncertain Vision). Faced with budget cuts, entrepreneurial man-dates, and heightened competition from commercial channels and new media platforms, many public broadcasters have backed away from traditional pub-

lic service–inflected programming with limited audience appeal. At a juncture when citizens are increasingly hailed as enterprising subjects and consumers of do-it-yourself lifestyle resources, ma-jor European public broadcasters have embraced many of the popular reality conventions critiqued by Corner. The BBC, for example, helped pioneer the hybridization of documentary and en-tertainment, and is how a major player in the global circulation of unscripted formats. With fewer resources, PBS has also experimented with the popular real-ity show in an attempt to bolster ratings. With the market logic responsible for “documentary as diversion” operating across public and private channels, the conditions for fostering documentary as a civic project would appear to be clos-ing down.

Although the further decline of jour-nalistic and investigative documentary material on television is difficult to dispute, I want to suggest that the me-dium has not entirely withdrawn from civic engagement since Corner’s essay was published—far from it. Many of the functions ascribed to the documentary and the public service tradition in gen-eral—particularly citizenship training—have been radically reinterpreted and integrated into popular reality formats. While the specific aims and techniques have changed, reality TV continues to be mobilized as a resource for educat-ing and guiding individuals and popu-lations. If the civic functions of reality entertainment are more difficult to rec-ognize, it is partly because they now operate within market imperatives and entertainment formats, but also because prescriptions for what counts as “good

citizenship” have changed. Unlike the cultural resources for citizenship pro-vided by the (partly) tax-funded public service tradition, reality TV’s civic aims are also diffuse, dispersed, commercial (especially in the United States), and far removed from any direct associa-tion with official government policies or agendas.

In Better Living through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship, James Hay and I argue that, particularly in the United States, reality TV does not “divert” passive audiences from the se-rious operations of democracy and pub-lic life, as much as it translates broader sociopolitical currents and circulates in-structions, resources, and scripts for the navigating the changing expectations and demands of citizenship. Many real-ity programs explicitly address TV view-ers as subjects of capacity who exercise freedom and civic agency within (not against) entertainment and consumer culture. This is not particularly surpris-ing, to the extent that reality TV took shape alongside the neoliberal policies and reforms of the 1990s, including the downsizing of the public sector, welfare reform, the outsourcing of state powers and services, the emphasis on consumer choice, and heightened expectations of personal responsibility. Within this context, we suggest, the application of documentary techniques to the dem-onstration, performance, and testing of self and everyday life makes reality entertainment potentially useful to new strategies of “governing at a distance” that deemphasize public oversight and require enterprising individuals to man-age their own health, prosperity, and well being (Rose). From The Appren-tice to The Biggest Loser, reality games command an indirect and unofficial role in constituting, normalizing, educating, and training the self-empowering the citizens beckoned by political authori-ties. However artificial and staged these programs appear on the surface, they help to constitute powerful truths con-cerning appropriate forms of civic con-duct and problem-solving. To the extent that reality TV’s civic functions are also marketable, affective, entertaining, and executed through dispersed partnerships

Many of the functions ascribed to the docuMentary and the public service tradition in general—particularly citizenship training—have been radically reinterpreted and integrated into popular reality forMats.

The Civic Function of Reality Entertainment 69

among the television industry, sponsors, nonprofit agencies, celebrities, and TV viewers, they parallel with (and have helped to constitute) the “reinvention of government” in the United States (under Clinton and Bush) as a series of decentralized public-private partner-ships on one hand, and self-enterpris-ing citizens on the other (Ouellette and Hay 18–24).

Cultural studies scholar Toby Miller once theorized citizenship as an ongo-ing pull between the “selfish demands” of the consumer economy and the “self-less requirements” of the political order (136). This tension takes on an even greater degree of intensity as the line be-tween consumerism and public politics further collapses, and the requirements of citizenship come to include the actu-alization of the self through consumer culture and the execution of compassion and ethical responsibility to others. We are expected to actualize and maximize ourselves in a world of goods and per-form as virtuous subjects whose volun-tary activities in the public world are, as George W. Bush explained during his inaugural address, “just as important as anything government does.” In addition to calling on nonprofits, charities, and faith-based organizations to temper gaps left by the downsized welfare state, both the Bush and Clinton administrations promoted volunteerism as a preferred mode of privatized civic empowerment. Reality TV’s contributions to what might be called postwelfare civic responsibil-ity manifested within this milieu and are particularly evident in the “do-good” ex-periments that have flooded the airwaves since the millennium.

From American Idol Gives Back to Oprah’s Big Give, a stream of high-profile helping ventures has appeared to redeem reality TV’s scandalous as-sociations with bug eating, navel gaz-ing, and bed swapping. These programs (and the marketing discourses that sur-round them) make explicit claims about reality TV’s civic importance. Do-good programs can take on a variety of for-mats—from the audience participation show to the competition to the make-over—but all reject the earlier notion of public service as education and prepara-

tion for participation in the official po-litical processes. Reality entertainment instead intervenes directly in social life, enacting “can do” solutions to largely personalized problems within emotional and often suspenseful formats. The tem-plate was established by Extreme Make-over Home Edition (2002–present), a successful ABC program that mobilizes private resources (sponsors, experts, nonprofits, volunteers) in a “race against time” to revamp the run-down houses of needy families (see Ouellette and Hay 42–56). The participants are selected by casting agents who find the most “deserving” and marketable stories of hardship from tens of thousands of ap-plications weekly. Products and brand names are woven into the melodramatic interventions, and as many critics have noted, complex issues and socioeco-nomic inequalities are simplified and downplayed. Still, to dismiss these ven-tures as trivial or somehow less than “real” would be to overlook their con-stitutive role as technologies of citizen-ship, private aid, and volunteerism.

On Home Edition, for example, TV viewers are “activated” to practice com-passionate citizenship by volunteering for nonprofit partners such as Habitat for Humanity and Home Aid. The ABC Web site provides direct links, public-ity on sponsors and partners, advice on getting involved, and tips from volun-teer agencies, thus further stitching the production and active consumption of reality TV into privatized networks of assistance and self-care. While often endorsed by public officials, do-good programs circulate as alternatives to the various ills (inefficiency bureaucracy, dependency, centralized control) as-cribed to the welfare state. Needy sub-jects and their problems provide the raw material for the manufacture of enter-tainment commodities and circulation of advertising that cannot be zapped. The best and only solution to unmet needs and human hardships (private charity) is offloaded onto the private sector and TV viewers. More explicitly than other reality subgenres, the helping trend ac-knowledges the limitations of self-max-imization and pure market logic—and capitalizes on the result.1

Do-good television is especially common on commercial channels in the United States. Although European pub-lic broadcasters offer reality-based les-sons on living, most lack the resources to intervene directly in reality on a phil-anthropic scale. Why would the tele-vision industry take on such projects, given its historical avoidance of public service obligations? For one thing, do-good experiments are fully expected to be profitable. More importantly, they also allow media outlets to cash in on marketing trends such as “citizen brand-ing” and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Because networks are offered as branded interfaces to suggested civic practices, good citizenship—and the ethical surplus it is assumed to gener-ate—can be harnessed to build con-sumer loyalty. This makes it possible to differentiate brands of television in a cluttered environment and exploit what business historian David Vogel calls the burgeoning “market for virtue.” For example, ABC (home to many do-good ventures) brands itself as a Bet-ter Community, while the reality-based cable channel Planet Green provides a branded interface to green citizenship and environmental problem-solving. Recently, MTV (owned by Viacom) an-nounced its intention to replace trivial reality entertainment with issue-ori-ented and civic-minded material. Last year, the wealthy debutantes of My Sweet Sixteen were sent to impoverished global locations to improve their char-acter and ethics in a program called Ex-iled. The contestants on the third season of sister channel VH1’s Charm School are currently being instructed on the im-portance and procedures of volunteer-ing and performing community service (figure 1). The change is part of MTV and VH1’s efforts to re-brand their pro-gramming—and their images—in the wake of young people’s overwhelming support of Barack Obama. Tellingly, Charm School’s off-screen male narra-tor not only sounds a lot like Obama, he also punctuates the ongoing question of whether the show can transform party girls into “model citizens” with the slo-gan, “Yes, we can.” As this example attests, the spirit of accountability and

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public sector renewal ushered in by the election can easily be evoked as a new justification for the enactment of philan-thropy and self-help—in part because of television’s commercial investments in these solutions as branding devices and marketing strategies.

If CSR is becoming the new public service, we need critical frameworks for assessing its cultural output. My aim here is not to fault Corner’s early evalu-ation of mainly British reality TV but to begin to unravel the complexities of re-ality entertainment in its current forms. I have been arguing that any attempt to theorize the civic functions and conse-quences of popular reality will need to also address its constitutive relationship to changing and colluding dynamics of commerce and governance. It also seems crucial to recognize the residual, emergent, and sometimes contradictory logics operating within the genre. For example, however market-driven and stitched into the circuitry of privatiza-tion, do-good reality programming does provide all-too-rare visibility on U.S. television for the poor, the sick, the un-employed, the homeless, and the unin-sured. As Anna McCarthy convincingly argues, it bears witness to the “trauma” of everyday life under neoliberal condi-tions, even as it deflects the causes and commodifies the consequences. Reality TV’s helping interventions disrupt the calculated rationality of today’s enter-prise culture, encouraging visceral and affective reactions to poverty not unlike the industrial slum photographs of Jacob Riis or the gas company–funded social problem documentaries of John Grier-son (see Winston). In the wake of the current financial crisis and recession, these dimensions of reality TV may be intensifying—as suggested by the re-cent Fox program Secret Millionaire (2008–09).

Developed by the U.K. company RDF Media, Secret Millionaire origi-nated in 2006 on Channel 4, a publicly owned but commercially funded British channel. RDF developed the format for Fox Television last year, using U.S. par-ticipants and locations but keeping the generic template and the series name intact. Conceived and marketed as re-

ality entertainment, Secret Millionaire combines the techniques of the docu-mentary, the social experiment, and the melodrama. Each week, a designated millionaire goes “undercover” into im-poverished communities to observe hardship firsthand and give away one hundred thousand dollars of his money (tellingly, the millionaire is almost al-ways white and male) while the cameras roll. The benefactors are required to give up their mansions, fancy cars, expen-sive restaurants, electronic gadgets, and other taken-for-granted consumer privi-leges and subsist on “welfare wages” like the struggling individuals and families they encounter. They perform hard labor, eat cheap food, live in sub-standard housing, and interact socially with have-nots, often for the first time in their lives. Along the way, they scout around for people and projects to donate a chunk of their fortune to. Eventually, the expected “reveal” occurs: The mil-lionaire unmasks his true identity and surprises the deserving recipients with a spectacular cash donation.

In the debut episode of the U.S. ver-sion, a wealthy California lawyer who is also a successful business owner goes to live among the poor with his teenaged son. They perform temporary construc-tion work, reside in a cheap motel, and quickly discover how much they have to learn about the “real world.” What is innovative and potentially disruptive about the program is not its authentic-ity per se (the artificial conditions and staged aspects of other reality shows

are readily apparent) but the alternative manner through which the intervention unfolds. In many respects, the formula draws from and exploits dominant rep-resentations of socioeconomic inequal-ity: wealth is individualized, and only those “others” who are judged deserv-ing on the basis of uncontrollable cir-cumstances and/or exemplary character are candidates for assistance. Yet, un-like other do-good television programs, the Secret Millionaire’s purpose is ul-timately not to evaluate or make over the poor. Nor is it to shower them with branded consumer goods (courtesy of sponsors) or to enact enterprising solu-tions to their complex social problems. Its point is to evaluate, educate, guide, enlighten, and transform the richest people in North America. Throughout the debut episode, father and son learn about routine dimensions of socioeco-nomic difficulties not from experts, but from the experiences and commisera-tions of people who mistakenly believe they share something in common with the main characters. A middle-aged, un-insured woman who became homeless for a time when she suffered a major back injury provides them breakfast and encouragement. She had subsequently found work at the same construction site and—unaware of their true identity (the cameras are ascribed to a documentary filming)—tries to help the best she can. Another family with a chronically ill child and no health coverage explains the everyday stresses and difficulties of making ends meet and their eventual

[h]owever Market-driven and stitched into the circuitry of privatization, do-good reality prograMMing does provide all-too-rare visibility on u.s. television for the poor, the sick, the uneMployed, the hoMeless, and the uninsured.

The Civic Function of Reality Entertainment 71

slide into bankruptcy. While this consti-tution of the worthy poor is characteris-tic of other do-good reality experiments, Secret Millionaire also identifies the undernourished and collapsing public sector as a structural factor in their situ-ations. TV viewers are allowed to iden-tify with shared problems and difficul-ties that no television program can fix.

The millionaires perform extreme empathy and shock on hearing the hard-ship stories. As with all reality enter-tainment, their reactions are shaped and accentuated by casting, editing, camera work, and music. Yet, this artifice does not prevent the series from contributing in potentially useful ways to the “truth” about class and wealth in the current era. In the premiere, father and son undergo a process of self-recognition in which they become increasingly aware of their privilege. They come to see themselves as thoughtless and selfish and are un-able to rationalize their “luxury spend-ing” in the midst of unmet human needs and chronic suffering. While this recur-ring lesson can be easily dismissed as a cultural tempering of growing resent-ment against the business elites respon-sible for the current economic crisis, it also reworks the civic logic orienting of much of reality TV by reversing the process and subjects of transformation. Within this context, the millionaire’s cash donation can be interpreted as a technology of private aid, but it can also be seen as enacting a reevaluation (if not quite a redistribution) of the allotment of resources and wealth in the United States. The lack of product placements

in Secret Millionaire reinforces this pos-sibility—not only because a consumer address is contained in the commercial breaks, but because the problem of un-even wealth cannot be resolved by a trip to Disney World or the installation of a free washing machine. Alas, this lack of marketability will undoubtedly keep the civic possibilities opened up by programs such as Secret Millionaire in check. Such are the limits of reality TV in its current form.

NOTE1. For a more detailed analysis of the gov-

ernmental dimensions of do-good TV (from which this article draws), see Ouellette and Hay ch. 1, “Charity TV: Privatizing Care, Mobilizing Compassion.”

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Laurie Ouellette is associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is coauthor, with James Hay, of Better Living through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship (Blackwell, 2008), coeditor, with Susan Murray, of Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (NYU Press, 2004 and 2009, 2nd ed.) and author of View-ers Like You? How Public TV Failed the People (Columbia U Press, 2002).

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