National hysteria: the first year of reality TV in Slovakia.

In 2005, the Slovak print and broadcast media discussed reality TV 'events' as avidly as anything from the fields of politics, economics or culture. While the majority of entertainment programming on Slovak television is of foreign origin, the arrival of reality TV programmes that involved the use of local and foreign 'ordinary' contestants in unscripted settings before the gaze of a directly participating national audience appeared to redefine Slovak media culture for that year. Following an examination of the central properties of reality TV that have determined its worldwide success with national audiences, the ways in which reality TV reflected Slovak society will be discussed. In the absence of any ethnographic research, this article refers to a range of contemporary mass media sources collected in Slovakia and accessed electronically to assess the characteristic properties and developments of reality TV programming in Slovakia, its national impact on Slovak media culture and its possible implications for national self-perception through an examination of the discourses that defined Slovak reality TV in its first year of broadcast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]