True story, p.23
True Story, page 23
The standard stories on justice TV also unfold in ways that reinforce narratives about race, class, and gender that are familiar and cozy. When Patricia Hill Collins wrote about controlling images, she specifically connected these images to Black men’s perceived criminality and hypersexuality and to their overrepresentation in the prison population.34 While the justice system touches most of us in some way, poor communities and communities of color are considerably more policed,35 and involvement in the system is highly patterned by race. Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men, and Hispanic men are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated as non-Hispanic white men.36 In eleven US states, at least one in twenty Black men is behind bars.37 While one might argue that perhaps people of different races commit crimes at different rates, multiple studies have shown that even when rates of criminality are similar, white people are less likely to come under the auspices of the law.38 And when convictions occur, as discussed, sentencing can also differ by race.39
These types of programs not only display our ideas about race and deviance but also help to perpetuate them. It seems unlikely that most people who watched Cops were social science nerds like me, riveted and repulsed by what the show had to teach us about broad inequalities. Rather, they tuned in to watch a clash between two groups: the police (who were generally portrayed positively) and the suspected perps (who were generally not). On Live PD, the underlying “standard story” was even more nakedly visible. In each episode, footage from the patrols was interspersed with cuts to a studio, where we watched commentators—most of whom had worked in law enforcement themselves—respond to the action. In this way, the show often resembled a sporting event where the viewer was clearly meant to root for the cops. On one episode, for instance, while an officer is questioning and cuffing a suspect, the main commentator describes how that officer had previously been shot in the line of duty: “She is a real hero.”40
Tellingly, research suggests that viewing crime-related reality programming improves white people’s—and specifically white people’s—attitudes toward police.41 Not all of the perps on Cops are men of color; the drug-addled poor white person is also a regular character. But there’s a reason these standard stories about heroes and villains seem to resonate more with white audiences, who may more comfortably identify with the law enforcement figures than with the stereotypical criminals: dark skinned, male, and lower-class.
TOWNSPEOPLE WITH TORCHES
So, law-and-order programs may resonate with us strongly because they—like other reality TV shows—reinforce our comfortable national narratives about race, gender, class, respectability, and how bodies should be organized and contained. But what is it about deviance and deviants, in particular, that engages our interest? While Goffman suggests that we may try to fix deviants in order to allay our own discomfort with them, and while this is certainly true, we also benefit from their existence.
Recall that a fundamental puzzle, for Émile Durkheim, was social cohesion. What’s to prevent all of society’s self-interested, autonomous individuals from scurrying off into their own directions and refusing to cooperate with one another? For Durkheim, society was a giant, complex organism with different parts, each component serving a different societal function.42 Looking through the lens of this theory, we might be inclined to interpret deviance as something dysfunctional—an indicator that the organism is sick. But as Durkheim points out, crime isn’t just something that happens when a society needs a tune-up. On the contrary, it’s a feature of every society. This is curious, he ventures, since humans have been developing mechanisms to eliminate deviance throughout history. Theoretically, we should have gotten pretty good at it by now. And, again, he doesn’t think that deviance persists just because there will always be people naturally predisposed to it (though he doesn’t deny this). Rather, he argues that we need deviance in a way. The presence of deviance doesn’t mean that society is breaking down; it means it’s working correctly.43
For Durkheim, deviance shores up our notions of what’s normal and, in doing so, reinforces our social cohesiveness. Like townspeople in an old horror film chasing after a monster with their torches, we are bonded in our collective rejection of the ones who do not belong. This has always happened, Durkheim suggests, and will always happen. In fact, if we were a society of saints, we would simply redraw the boundaries of acceptability so that some of our members might still be cast as deviant.44
Why are we pulled toward reality programs with cushion eaters, Gypsies, bar brawlers, and killers? Because we’re drawn to the spectacle of deviance, and we always have been. That’s the premise behind the freak show—a form of entertainment that arose in the Colonial period, was popular in the nineteenth century, and continues even today.45 The freak show rested on clear-cut ideas about normalcy and deformity, displaying the latter as spectacle.46 We see shades of this today on unscripted TV, where deviant bodies are presented to us as curiosities: the conjoined twins on Abby & Brittany (TLC, 2012), the gushes of facial pus on Dr. Pimple Popper, and the array of programs starring little people. These include, but are not limited to, Little Chocolatiers (TLC, 2009–2010), The Little Couple (TLC, 2009–present), Little People, Big World (TLC, 2006–present), Little Women: Atlanta (Lifetime, 2016–present), Little Women: Dallas (Lifetime, 2016–2017), Little Women: LA (Lifetime, 2014–present), Little Women: NY (Lifetime, 2015–2016), and Our Little Family (TLC, 2015).
But reality programs also allow us to rubberneck at a wide range of human deviance beyond the physical body. As we know, many viewers tune in for the enjoyment of discussing the action with others.47 When we watch to make points of contact with other people, reality TV serves a communal function. Our water-cooler conversations about Hoarding: Buried Alive may seem like frivolous chitchat, and we might not want to lend them much social weight. But these moments of shared culture accumulate and contribute to our social cohesiveness. Our viewing, then, works on dual levels that are seemingly paradoxical: we gravitate toward reality stars because we identify with them, but they also reinforce our social solidarity when we collectively reject them.
Some viewers lean, and some programs lend themselves, more toward the former or toward the latter. One fan of Keeping Up with the Kardashians might identify with Kylie, while another enjoys gossiping about the ever-changing topography of her face. For many of us, it’s a mix. And many reality TV participants, like the Kardashian/Jenners, nestle in a space between deviant and acceptable. They are rarely just one or the other.
And neither are we.
These characters are versions of ourselves who go too far. Through our viewing, we are able to draw and redraw the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable and place ourselves on the correct side. But perhaps we’re so invested in curating that boundary precisely because we know it’s so messy and unstable. As sociologists have long observed, few of us can say we’ve never engaged in deviance. Edwin Lemert, for instance, distinguished between “primary” deviance, which is practiced by people who are basically conformists, and “secondary” deviance, wherein the deviance is persistent, with a negative label applied to the doer, who often internalizes it.48 In the case of primary deviance, we often explain away the behavior as being “situational” or “as functions of a socially acceptable role.”49 (Drinking to excess while in college is one classic example.) Indeed, most of us have engaged in deviance at some point or another, if only because some situations present a deviance catch-22. Driving at least a few miles above the speed limit on a major highway, for instance, is commonplace and expected but also illegal; we’re deviant if we perform this act and deviant if we don’t.
Many of us have messy homes. Many of us have technically violated the law. And while we don’t all binge on couch cushions, some of us have been known to polish off a whole sleeve of fudge-stripe cookies in one sitting (hypothetically). Although gorger girls may not drop out of school to cook, clean, and get married, we, like Priscilla, also live in a culture where women still are the primary caretakers of children and do a disproportionate amount of domestic work. As we’ve seen throughout this book, reality TV confronts us with an array of peculiarities that are simultaneously anathema and known to us in muted form. Just as these shows enable us to map out the terrain of normalcy, they also caution us against making such clear-cut distinctions.
CRAP HIERARCHY
Reality stars are not just deviant and neither are we, but they are deviant and so are we. They remind us that deviance exists on a spectrum and that our understanding of what is acceptable changes across social contexts. This concept applies to our viewing of reality shows as well.
Is watching reality TV a “deviant” act? Yes, and no. As we’ve seen, one of the contradictions of the genre is that it’s both highly popular and somewhat taboo. Recall the study that found that “people have a negative view of the impact of reality TV,” although 77 percent of respondents said they watched at least one reality show from the list included in the survey “sometimes or frequently.” The respondents’ viewing of these shows “belies [their] disdain for the genre,” the researchers concluded, as “the reputation of reality programming does not appear to have substantially interfered with viewing behavior.”50
But as far as guilty pleasures go, some reality programs seem a bit guiltier than others. At the apex of legitimacy are the cooking and home decor programs that pervade waiting rooms across America. When a new mom-friend, for instance, confessed her love for the Chip and Joanna Gaines home remodeling show, Fixer Upper (HGTV, 2013–2018), I couldn’t help wondering if she would have been as candid about an affinity for Snooki & Jwoww.
Recall that a major distinction between documentaries and reality television is that the former is educational in nature while the latter is intended mainly to entertain.51 But there is slippage between these categories, as documentaries also seek to entertain and some reality shows, at least nominally, attempt to educate. The term “edutainment,” applying to children’s shows that amuse and also teach, highlights this false dichotomy. And reality shows teach us all types of things: what a modeling “go see” is, how to prepare a home for sale, how to get a new product to market. They imbue us with new vocabularies, from the “tucks” and “fish” on RuPaul’s Drag Race to the “molecular gastronomy” of Top Chef. I learned the best way to crack an egg from Snooki & Jwoww, and it’s because of Vicki from The Real Housewives of Orange County that I roll my clothes when packing for trips. Indeed, before the network became known for its polygamists, sextuplets, and little people, TLC was an acronym for “the Learning Channel.”
It seems that the more closely reality TV resembles its documentary ancestors—that is, the more it overtly seems to teach us—the more it takes on the halo of legitimacy. One study of college students found that they distinguished between “good” and “bad” reality TV. The former label belonged to programs that “give the viewer useful ideas or advice; give people a second chance; are entertaining or funny; and can be applied to the viewer’s actual life.”52 One facet of a show like Bad Girls Club that catapults it into the “ratchet” zone is that it points to its participants’ ill behaviors but does not particularly focus on their improvement. Other research similarly suggests that viewers do not evaluate all reality TV equally but make assessments about the relative value of various subgenres. As one respondent told the British communications researcher Annette Hill, when it comes to reality TV, there is “crap I would never watch, crap I might watch, and then crap I would definitely watch.”53
Still, it’s “crap.” Even if the acceptability of these programs does vary, there’s a reason people refer to the genre, writ large, as “guilty pleasure” TV. We reserve that label for a particular range of cultural pursuits. We likely wouldn’t call attending a Shakespearean play or reading Proust a “guilty pleasure,” so why are we guilty about this?
There are a variety of possible answers to that question. Perhaps the most obvious is that it’s nonredeeming; aside from the occasional educational nugget, we don’t “get” anything from these programs. Yet professional sports don’t have intellectual value either, and we don’t regularly refer to them as “guilty pleasures.” There are other potential reasons for our disdain for reality TV: because it’s populated by real people behaving in “low-class” ways and it’s important to us to keep taste hierarchies intact; because, unlike sports, it’s a genre associated more with female viewership than male54 and we tend to devalue cultural products geared toward women (e.g., “chick flicks,” “chick lit”); or maybe because we just like to feel guilty about things—a propensity that perhaps illuminates our country’s charred but intact religious foundation. Not to mention, reality TV arguably does have value. In this very book, we’ve toured the genre like a museum, stopping to peer at its various artifacts, examining the things that they do for us and the various facets of our culture that they reveal.
But a large reason we feel this way about reality TV likely has to do with the types of people who populate these worlds. Even if we’re gathering our torches as we tune in to The Bachelor, we may still feel contaminated by the monster’s stigma. Athletes, conversely, are doing something socially laudable. When we watch sports, wearing our favorite players’ jerseys and bonding with others in our support for “our” teams, we don’t become implicated in unacceptable behavior. There’s a stink to reality TV that has never quite worn off, no matter how many people watch or how much the genre becomes a part of contemporary life. And maybe we’re reticent to admit we watch these shows because we think their participants’ behavior reflects on us—and maybe because we know that it does.
CRACKING THE LOCKS
Unscripted programming cracks the locks and thrusts open the places in ourselves that we keep hidden, both individually and as a society. One way it does this is by showing us the people who run amok of our norms, why they do that, and how we attempt to yank them back into the fold. It reveals the “polymorphous techniques” we use to curb deviance, via loved ones, individual experts, and behemoth institutions. It teaches us whom we view as legitimate but also how those views are fundamentally shaped by our culture. And it reveals that these views, while socially constructed, are still “real” in the sense that they are vital to our lives, impacting how we distribute societal power, treat others, and experience the world ourselves.
These programs offer us things and people ostensibly in need of fixing, from kitchen islands to inmates. But they also show us people who push back against society’s norms. The genre shows us how conservative we remain, illuminating the social repercussions for stepping out of line. But on the flip side of that, it highlights humanity’s heterogeneity. And, to be fair, reality TV doesn’t try to fix us all—nor does it try to. On Nailed It! (Netflix, 2018–present), for instance, which humorously features everyday people attempting to re-create bakers’ masterpieces, there’s an exuberance about failure, a sense that we’re all laughing together at our inability to measure up.
By presenting caricatures of our own oddities, these programs demonstrate how society sets parameters for normalcy and how we all move in and around those barriers, which are changeable and nuanced. Ultimately, the genre exposes the muddiness of distinctions that we may perceive as crisp and clean. The boundaries that we draw between the normal and the freaky aren’t “real” in any universal sense. And the monsters we reject are not as different from us as we’d like to believe. We’re all just a bunch of fudge-stripe cookies away from being in the wrong category.
Reality TV is both a guilty goody and a nutritional bite, nestling in the crook between normalcy and deviance—just like its participants and just like us. And while the “freaky” undercurrent of reality programming remains strong, reality stars are more than just sideshow. Some of them are also our main attractions. They’re flash points for our desires, behaviors, and peculiarities. And for a while, one was running our country.
Conclusion
And it’s true we are immune
When fact is fiction and TV reality
—U2, “Sunday Bloody Sunday”
President Donald Trump sits behind his desk in the Oval Office grinning toothily, hands clasped together, signature hair swooped across his scalp. To his side, between the president and the American flag, stands Kim Kardashian, her extensions cascading in thick curtains over her shoulders. “Great meeting with @KimKardashian today, talked about prison reform and sentencing,” reads the president’s accompanying tweet.1
This is not a scene from a reality show. In May 2018, many major news outlets covered this real-life meeting between the two reality show dynasts, one of whom was then helming the most powerful country in the world. As reality TV has seeped into the cultural ether, perhaps it was only a matter of time before it infiltrated politics, too.
The combination of these two worlds may appear jarring at first. Sometimes reality TV seems to be a space apart from politics. While we might expect the genre, with its fast production turnarounds and its focus on real people grappling with today’s problems,2 to be an ideal platform for the political, reality shows seldom cross into that realm.3 For instance, while the contestants on The Bachelor are ostensibly searching for their future spouses, we don’t ever hear them discuss their stances on abortion, immigration, or gun control. Perhaps these particular people are simply unconcerned with politics—something the “Virgin Hunk” Saturday Night Live skit implies when the narrator states that the star “has to choose between thirty women who didn’t vote.” It’s also likely that these shows don’t want to alienate viewers, whose ideologies may not coincide with those of their stars.
