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The TV recap has become one of the most ubiquitous forms of criticism in contemporary media culture, proliferating across multiple media spheres and domains. At its simplest, it provides an opportunity for people to catch up with what they have missed. However, it is also a space for engaging with reactions to a program: an inherently affective and social experience. This article seeks to theorize the TV recap, its uses, and its pleasures. It considers the recap as a form of paratext, and seeks to unpack its relationship to textuality. Specifically, it considers the practice of reality TV recapping, which often positions both recapper and reader/viewer as consuming the text ironically. This article uses a corpus of recaps of the 2020 season of The Bachelor Australia – including recaps by the author – to answer three questions: how does the recap energize, contextualize, and modify textuality?

Despite vast research on reality television (RTV) and The Bachelor (2002) franchise specifically, most scholarship focuses on its appeal or negative impact on viewers. The inclusion of social media...

History is littered with tales of the absurd, odd, and unusual. From Gorgons and mermaids to bearded ladies and elephant men, people have, for centuries, been fascinated by those who deviate from physical and mental social norms. Such fascinations seemed to peak during the 19th century when showmen, like PT Barnum, bought and exhibited those deemed too different and macabre for “normal” society. However, as science and medicine progressed, and the protection of human rights became more important, freak shows and travelling sideshows dwindled (Nicholas & Chambers, 2016). Society’s fascination with the unusual though, did not. Despite increased political correctness and calls to end “fat shaming,” bullying and the like, reality television appears to encourage “a dehumanising process that actually lessens our regard for other people” (Sardar, 2000). While some writers have considered how reality television exploits stereotypes and links social norms to hegemonic whiteness (Cooke-Jackson & Hansen, 2008; Rennels, 2015), few have commented on the similarities between such programming and the stylings of the 19th century freak show. Utilising Thomson’s (1996) concept of freak discourse, and Bogdan’s (1996) assessment of freak narrative, this article examines how reality television programming as a genre, despite its varied plots, uses a narrative formula that can be likened to 19th century freak shows to enhance its storylines and “produce a human spectacle” (Thomson, 1996, p. 7).

This essay turns to reality television to perform trans of color criticism. Taking as its analytic focus the embodied performance – and concomitant mediated production – of whiteness by Asian Ameri...

In Extraordinarily Ordinary, Erin A. Meyers excavates the preeminent place of the most popular celebrity gossip magazine of the 2000s, Us Weekly, in driving the construction of reality television c...

Advancing theorizations of communication in post-truth politics, where computational/big data or cognitive bias approaches often dominate the description of and proposed solutions to the problem, t...

Critics of weight loss reality shows often present the contestants as victims of commodification and exploitation without any form of agency. This paper seeks to contest this one-sided view of such shows. It draws on interviews with the producers and 19 contestants in the first season of a dance reality show in Ghana, the Di Asa show, as well as recorded video performances online. We argue that indeed the show was organised in a manner that commodified the contestants for purposes of improving the ratings of the private television station that hosted the show. However, to read these contestants purely as commodified objects misses half the story. We demonstrate that these contestants participated in the show with parallel motives to that for which the producers created the show, and were successful in their endeavours. They thus engaged in what we call subversive commodification, a situation where the object of commodification actively takes part in the commodification process to gain benefits that accrue solely to them and not the subject of commodification.

Despite popular interest in reality television, social media, and self-branding, much scholarship focuses on a single platform and places the burden of self-branding on the individual alone. Drawing on 6 years of research into the Real Housewives (RH) franchise and interviews with “Housewives,” I focus on the women’s performances of identity and self-branding across platforms. This article demonstrates that the women of RH become experts at working the system that exploits them via a form of labor I conceptualize as “emotional camping.” Successfully branded “Housewives” tend to be (1) dedicated to Bravo, (2) inclined to present as walking GIFs on Instagram, and (3) seemingly authentic. I argue this self-branding strategy affords these women a semblance of privacy in their highly public careers. These findings are a critique of and feminist mediation into the legitimate labor reality stars do for networks and themselves across platforms.

Ayesha Alexander is a Canadian–American chef, cookbook author, television personality, actress, and model. She has held several roles on multiple television shows and movies and began hosting her o...

This article argues that Comedy Central’s Nathan For You enacts a sophisticated critique of reality television and offers a different way of capturing ‘reality’ on the small screen. By exaggerating...

The popular preoccupation with celebrity in American culture in the past decade has been bolstered by a corresponding increase in the amount of reality programming across cable and broadcast networks that centers either on established celebrities or on celebrities in the making. This dissertation examines the questions: How is celebrity constructed, scheduled, and branded by networks, production companies, and individual participants, and how do the constructions and mechanisms of celebrity in reality programming change over time and because of time? I focus on the vocational and cultural work entailed in celebrity, the temporality of its production, and the notion of branding celebrity in reality television. Dissertation chapters will each focus on the kinds of work that characterize reality television production cultures at the network, production company, and individual level, with specific attention paid to programming focused on celebrity making and/or remaking. Celebrity is a cultural construct that tends to hide the complex labor processes that make it possible. This dissertation unpacks how celebrity status is the product of a great deal of seldom recognized work and calls attention to the hidden infrastructures that support the production, maintenance, and promotion of celebrity on reality television. Given particular forms of temporality involved in both television programming cycles and celebrity itself, this dissertation details how the management of time serves as a defining aspect of contemporary media branding.

It has been over 20 years since the reality television genre attracted the attention of fans, critics and scholars. Reality programmes produced high viewing figures, suggesting a strong appetite for the form; critics dismissed the programmes as mindless and the participants as desperate for fame; and scholars assessed the formats, audiences and meanings of reality television, offering a complex, if rarely celebratory, account. While some commentators and scholars made connections between vote-based formats and electoral systems, or between opportunities afforded audiences for the deliberation of social issues and the idealized public sphere, the civic dimension of participation itself has not been explored. In this article, we take a closer look at reality television participants, drawing on press interviews and coverage in order to highlight how participants enact representative performances that might supplement more formal modes of democratic representation.

This article examines the production and negotiation of ‘authenticity’ in reality television through a case study of a popular Chinese dating show If You Are the One. The study reconstructed the various stages of the show and collected perspectives from participating bachelors and production people. The ethnographic approach has enabled a relatively thick description of what happened on-screen and off-screen. Primarily, it details how four ordinary male participants entered the show and made sense of their experiences. It describes and discusses how they maintained a strong sense of authenticity while delivering anticipated performance on television. It uncovers the dynamics and interaction between the participants, producers and audiences and highlights the invisible scripts underlining the show. The recurring debates about authenticity, scripting and ordinariness in reality television are addressed with a renewed understanding of how the seemingly paradoxical ‘authentic performance’ and ‘extraordinary ordinariness’ work in the process.

In paranormal reality television, the medial evidence of senses adding to the visual and auditory may produce the most compelling intermedial experience. When little can be seen or heard, the lasti...

This essay is a feminist analysis of social media discourses about motherhood, religion, and the reality television show 19 Kids & Counting. Social media discourses about the Duggar family ...

The emergence of new narrative environments, such as social media, gaming and reality television, requires a renewed perspective on how stories are created and how people make sense of them. Accord...

The marked reluctance to incorporate African agency in African image-making in the West quite predictably brought about flat and simplistic caricatures of the continent and its peoples. Wit...

This study used cultivation theory to explore the relationship between exposure to reality television shows and college students’ beliefs about wealth and materialism. In addition, this stu...

Univision, historically the number one Spanish network, departed from its long tradition of safeguarding neutral Spanish to embrace not only English, but also Spanglish and Spanish-Caribbean accents in 2015. This article explores Univision’s new linguistic flexibility via two emblematic reality TV shows: Nuestra Belleza Latina (2007–) and La Banda (2015–). Through a textual analysis of these shows and industrial analysis of the strategies deployed by the network, the authors argue that Univision’s targeting of “billennials”—bicultural and bilingual millennials—prompted a linguistic flexibility that challenges the traditional lineup of neutral, Spanish-only, television, and is more inclusive of Latina/o audiences’ language use.

Scholars theorize that organizations influence individuals’ work identity management, yet scholars have studied individuals’ efforts more than organizations’ identity regulation processes. Recent a...

This article examines the presumed documentation of supernatural phenomena in ghost hunting reality television shows. It asks how we relate to these intangible images in the context of a so-called ‘post-truth era’ which challenges mainstream sources of information while offering wide access to the production of texts and images. \ud \ud One aspect of the discussion considers these reality programmes, which above all aim to entertain, as part of the horror genre, revisiting the place that reality occupies in horror scholarship. Supernatural narratives are traditionally discussed as symbolic representations of the real world—monsters stand for a feared ‘other,’ and stories metaphorically evoke personal or historical trauma. In horror criticism, supernatural tales are removed from reality, and can only address it indirectly. The reality shows in question, on the contrary, bring the occult and our life experiences closer together. Not only do they present ghosts and demons as real—in addition, these shows become a part of the individual lives of viewers, inviting participatory spectatorship. Fans interact with investigators of supernatural activity via text messages in live episodes and offer comments on internet discussion forums. \ud \ud The second element of the discussion challenges notions about the ontology of the photographic and audiovisual images. It turns to nineteenth-century spirit photography as a point for comparison with digital technologies to question the presumably direct, indexical relationship between the image and material reality in light of our relationship to the photographic and audiovisual records of immaterial entities whose reality cannot be proved.

Mass media systems play increasingly prevalent roles in our lives. However, the relationship between traditional mass media exposure and behavior on social media is unclear, particularly in the context of selfie-related behavior, which includes capturing, editing, and sharing images of oneself. In the tradition of social cognitive theory, we argue that reality television (RTV) models a value system focused on the self and competition with others, and hypothesize a model where self-worth based on competition mediates the relationship between RTV viewing and selfie-related behavior. Path analysis results from survey data ( N = 334) support the mediation model. Selfie-related behavior was explicated and measured via novel instruments. Audience variables including online network size and diversity also played roles in selfie editing and sharing, as did specific social media platforms. Results are discussed in the context of evolving media systems.

This textual analysis of Man Caves explores how former National Football League (NFL) star turned DIY Network host Tony “Goose” Siragusa uses Italian American stereotypes of the funny fatso, gangster, and unskilled worker, rooted in his life story, to “flex” hegemonic masculinity in ways that articulate what I call White diversity. This contradictory identity claims both victimhood and privilege for White ethnic masculinity. Analyzing Siragusa’s flexing of Italian American masculinity is especially timely in our present historical moment when White supremacists claim ethnic “diversity” to assert an aggrieved status without disavowing privilege. Siragusa’s flexing of Italian American masculinity reflects the wider historical moment in which White men, beyond White power movements, may claim an aggrieved but privileged status. The conclusion considers ways out of White diversity that feminist scholar-activists may pursue.

Befarmaeed Sham, an Iranian diasporic media production adapted from the original UK reality show “Come Dine with me” features Iranian diaspora of diverse backgrounds as contestants in a cooking reality show. The success of the show has been unprecedented among audiences back home in Iran, reaching millions of households. Using discourse analysis this article examines the potential of reality TV in widening the scope of public sphere and in providing a space for participation and representation. The key practices to illustrate this are ways diaspora position themselves as subjects through discursive practices to express agency in generating, participating and sharing opinions. Casual talk and the entertaining attribute of reality TV focused on the everyday life of ordinary people, constructs a space to normalize audience engagement with what is otherwise, restrictive taboo topics embedded in themes around belonging, homeland, gender, and identity. The article concludes that the broad system of discourse used by diaspora as participants in the reality show constructs a space for representation. It can be considered as a contribution to enhancing the public sphere to not only communicate and connect with their homeland but to express opinions on broader social issues as a practice of civic engagement. This unique adaptation of reality TV is an important aspect of globalization and in using new media to mobilize diaspora in connecting to homeland.

This case study examined the network TLC’s response to Josh Duggar’s (from their reality show 19 Kids and Counting) confirmation that he molested young girls, including two of his sisters, when he was a teenager. While TLC was not responsible for the molestation, their proximity to the family and their relationship with the Duggars led to criticism and thus, a plan to improve their image. Overall, TLC relied on four different tactics to assist their image repair efforts: (a) delayed and minimal responses, (b) reducing offensiveness, (c) minimizing the severity of the situation, and (d) ineffective social media use. We argue these four strategies were unsuccessful tactics. Specifically, their decision to wait two months to cancel 19 Kids and Counting, to air a documentary on sexual abuse featuring the two sisters victimized by Josh Duggar and their later decision to give these two sisters their own spin-off series calls into question the ethical and exploitative nature of their response.

Nyle DiMarco, a Deaf, sexually fluid celebrity, helps audiences reimagine ways of being through mediated representations of his cultural body. Within the framework of a critical intercultural commu...

Britain’s Missing Top Model (2008, BBC3) was a reality television programme which provided unprecedented opportunities to present disabled women in ways which deconstructed old stereotypes and offered new understandings of beauty, value and competency. Set within wider discussions of the possibilities afforded by reality television, this article analyses the programme’s portrayal of the contestants, exploring their presentation as potential models, their place in ‘expert’ discourses of value and competency, and the re-articulations of impairment-based stereotypes of disabled womanhood. Despite any aesthetic gains in the representation of disabled womanhood, the article concludes by suggesting the show was shaped around a moral hierarchy of impairment-based differences, which worked to de-sexualise disabled women, out-contextualise disabling forces, and re-inscribe non-disabled ‘normalities’.

This article aims to cast more light on how persuasive practices in business are enacted for an audience on television by comparing two versions of the television programme Dragons’ Den. The main objective is to examine different interactional features of the programme within a cross-cultural analysis. Drawing on data from the Spanish and UK versions of the programme, the present paper is placed at the intersection between routine and cross-cultural business practices on the one hand and reality based broadcast on the other. The results show that the analysis of the key structural patterns in exerting interpersonal influence makes it possible to measure the impact and effectiveness of specific social influence tactics in entrepreneurial discourse.

In the current recession, German television has developed a particular proclivity for ‘emigration shows’. In this article, I explore the most prominent of these, Goodbye Deutschland – Die Auswanderer ( Goodbye Germany – The Emigrants, since 2006). Through a figurative analysis, I investigate how Goodbye Germany produces its female protagonists as failed national subjects worthy of social derision and contempt. By highlighting how the programme equates the departure from Germany with a departure from coherent feminine respectability, I show how we can understand this programme as a cultural expression of ‘commercial nationalism’ that produces Germany as a ‘safe haven’ within an economically unstable Europe.

This article analyses a US reality TV series for the way it reflects two coinciding phenomena: the elevation of animals to a new domestic status in which their needs and interests demand significant time, care and money and the rise of male-fronted instructional lifestyle television. The commercial dimensions of what has been characterised as ‘America’s hyper-profitable obsession with its dogs and cats’ are apparent in dramatic sales rises of premium pet food, the dramatic growth of pet care and grooming industries and the expansion of care animals in the public sphere. Considering the ways in which we are now called upon to cultivate and monitor the emotional well-being of our pets and to take part in an animal-centred economy on their behalf, I turn to the example of Animal Planet’s My Cat From Hell. This series emphatically repositions cat care and empathy as congruent with masculinity while demonstrating, as I will argue, the relevance of hipster entrepreneurialism to the vastly expanded pet economy.

One’s dreams can never be affected by the lockdown. The COVID-19 pandemic brought the Indian entertainment industry to a halt on March 24, 2020 when the lockdown started and there were stay-at-home...

Cameo is part of a growing set of new media platforms trending toward direct routes for monetizing fame. Cameo allows fans to book personalized shout-out videos and provides celebrities—celetoids and reality stars in particular—access to new modes of income, which became increasingly important amid the pandemic. This research explores how the direct monetization of the fan-celebrity relationship is re-shaping the power dynamic of these parasocial relationships. Using digital ventriloquism as an analytical lens to study reality stars (e.g. Real Housewives) on Cameo, this study introduces the concept of paid puppeteering on digital platforms, defined as a form of digital ventriloquism in which a celebrity’s public persona is manipulated and incentivized through financial means on a paid digital platform for the illusion of close parasocial connections with fans. Paid puppeteering reinforces celebrities as gig workers as Cameo mitigates fan access to celebrities—for a fee.

This paper explores how social identity is constructed and manifests itself in interaction in reality television discourse, two national versions of the gameshow Big Brother – Australia 2012 and UK 2012. The analysis concentrates on two forms of group formation, spontaneous and imposed, and how different attitudes towards group formation are revealed in interactional practices. The findings show that in both types of group formation, the prevailing tendency among the Australian housemates is the avoidance of public group discourse, especially when it might suggest the superiority/inferiority dichotomy. In the British house, on the other hand, groups are frequently referred to in terms of them being popular/unpopular, with the unpopular group striving to reach popularity. Furthermore, unlike in the case of spontaneous groups, unwillingly becoming a group member does not trigger group identity construction and explicit membership claims. In both houses, a strong link to the original group identity seems to be preserved.

Scholarship on media events has rarely considered how interpersonal interactions between participants mobilize collective feelings of solidarity. Drawing on a study of Big Brother Israel, we demonstrate how several structural-interactional features of the show encourage viewers to shift from a position of bystanders to one of confidants and companions of the contestants. We analyze this shift through the lens of mediated “public intimacy”—the staging of exclusive interactions in front of a third party. The emergent sense of collective complicity affects everyday interactions between viewers and public discourse on social media. We conclude that beyond the public staging of self, it is the staging and concretization of social relations in media events that serves to reaffirm the collective's solidarity.

This article addresses a deficit in television scholarship through its focus on children’s engagements with contemporary factual entertainment television. The article seeks to indicate the contempo...

“Trapped inside of every white girl is a strong black woman ready to bust out.” This is the tag line for Lifetime's new reality makeover show, Girlfriend Intervention. In the show, four Black women transform White women (who they call a BW for “basic woman”) from “a red hot mess” to a “bootylicious babe.” Throughout each episode, the girlfriends provide near-constant prescriptions for how Black women should behave and perform their femininity. This project examines the ways in which the girlfriends on the show dictate the boundaries of Black female authenticity. Specifically, the authors explore the ways the stars of the show essentialize Black womanhood as they provide viewers a sort of “hand guide” for how to be a Black woman. A critical discourse analysis of how the girlfriends use the certainty adverbs always and never will help highlight the presence of gendered and racialized essentialism found in the show. Lastly, the authors will discuss the possible implications watching Girlfriend Interv...

This article looks at the renegotiation of Chinese masculinities by analyzing the gendered performances of participants of a popular TV dating show If You Are the One (Fei Cheng Wu Rao). As symptomatic media texts, the reality TV show points to the quandaries of evolving gender politics faced by singletons of China’s one-child generation within the country’s neoliberal restructuring. The textual evidence shows that male participants follow the rule of a market economic hierarchy and uphold the hegemonic ideal of versatile, successful, and upper-middle-class manhood, which hinges on the patriarchal, heteronormative model of love and marriage. Paradoxically, this disempowering ideal is reinforced by female participants in their relational reconstruction of masculinities. The article argues that the Chinese state media not only discipline masculinities but also naturalize a regressive gender mandate in alignment with neoliberal values and the state’s pursuit of capitalist economic development. Conseq...

In the twenty-first century, the visibility of transgender celebrities appears greater than ever. Whilst scholarly work has analysed, and continues to analyse, representations of trans celebrities, this research has largely approached these figures as significant because they make transgender visible, rather than the more specific fact that they are celebrities. This article interrogates the role of discourses and tropes of celebrity itself in enabling particular incarnations of trans subjectivity to become intelligible within popular culture. Focusing upon the examples of Caitlyn Jenner and Jazz Jennings, two of the most widely-circulated trans celebrities in the contemporary moment, I argue that the tropes of authenticity, self-reflexivity, self-revelation and manufacture central to celebrity culture, have functioned as core discursive frameworks through which Jenner and Jennings' transgender identities have been rationalised within the popular media. In becoming legible as transgender through celebrity, I argue that Jenner and Jennings' media narratives have worked to confer recognisability to a highly limited model of transgender life, fraught with exclusions around race and gender normativity.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore possible factors leading to a successful mediation in Chinese mediation shows. In China, media always play an indispensable role in information dissemination, morality advocacy and policy explanation. Design/methodology/approach This paper employed content analysis of 166 episodes of one representative mediation show, Gold Medal Mediation, and regression technique in data analysis. Findings Results of ordinal regression suggested that “secret talking”, rather than transparency, between disputants had significant influence on successful mediation. Function of mediators is limited in reaching full mediation. The effective factors leading to full mediation include compromise of rights, secret talking, attitude of the observer cohort. It suggests that the role of mediator is limited, rather than being over-exaggerated, in successful mediation. The successful mediation is largely dependent on disputants’ motivations. Additionally, “compromise of rights” by disputants is a key factor in solving disputes. Research limitations/implications Findings of this study revealed the role of Chinese mediation shows in propagating mediation in contemporary Chinese society and supporting upheld morality values. Due to the nature of the chosen mediation show, some disputes take more than one episode to solve. However, this study looks at each episode without considering the integrity of the dispute. That is, if the disputes take two episodes, the coder codes the two episodes as two separate disputes instead of looking at it as one dispute. Originality/value By exploring various aspects of mediations shows, including the role of mediators, disputants and a cohort of observers, this study can both explicitly show predicted factors to successful mediations on the shows, and can implicitly examine the power and perceived justification of mediation in contemporary China via media.

Related Research Data is available online at the end of the Discussion section at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2019.1690025#_i15 . Copyright © 2019 The Author(s). Factual and reality television shows that depict childbirth are both commercially successful and controversial. Social debate focuses on the potential implications for women’s experiences of birth and their health. This scoping review critically analyses published literature to assess the state of knowledge about the influence of factual and reality television on the expectations and experiences of childbearing women, and to make recommendations for future research. Recognising the complexity of researching the relationship between the media and lived health experiences, we critically engage with the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the published literature and its substantive findings. We argue that the field is limited by a disconnect between media studies and health studies. Feminist approaches have both criticised the medicalised view of childbirth seen to dominate mainstream media, and the valorisation of “natural childbirth” as a standard which also disciplines women. Very little research has engaged with pregnant women’s views and experiences. Future research should engage more rigorously with diverse women who are pregnant or have recently become mothers. Recommendations for future research also include transdisciplinary collaboration for methodological innovation, research about television production processes and research that takes social media and the changing nature of television into account. Wellcome Trust [grant number 110450/Z/15/Z].

Most Americans know little about the “Gypsies,” or Roma, other than what they learn in the media. Although research shows that media have perpetuated stereotypes, there is thin anthological attention to the representation of Gypsies in American media. This study examines portrayals of Gypsies in fictional and reality television programs 1953-2014, and reveals that American television has reinforced stereotypes, suggesting that Gypsies are consistently different, a closed ethnic community resistant to change. More recent representations convey that Gypsies may be misunderstood due to their cultural history, yet this considerably less visible depiction emerges as a mere nod toward tolerance.

This study investigates the ideological implications of Real Men, a Korean reality show that portrays the experiences of celebrities who join the military as new conscripts. We situate the popularity of Real Men in the context of the changing gender geography of Korea. Through an analysis of the official Real Men online bulletin board, we explore how the male audience’s discourses regarding the authentic military experience and ideal soldiers are related to their desire to restore hegemonic masculinity. Our findings suggest that Real Men became a vehicle that was used to demand women’s appreciation of the difficult work of men in the military. A desire to be symbolically remunerated for military service involved the positioning of women as primary caregivers who fulfill traditional female roles. By calling for the restoration of traditional gender roles, the male viewers attempted to recover the hegemonic masculinity that they perceived to be under threat from changing gender relations.