One of my favorite video clips we have watched in class is Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe. This ingenious video illustrates the formula used to create reality tv shows. ‘Reality’ being subjective to whatever you make of it of course, since no reality show really is ‘real’, rather a simulation. As shown in the video, reality shows can create drama, suspense, mood, etc., out of any footage, just by editing it in a certain way. I highly recommend watching the video if you haven’t already, it can be found here.
Regardless of whether reality shows are ‘real’ or not, people love them. I dug this quote out of a past blog post, which gives insight as to why people like reality shows; “Reality TV allows Americans to fantasize about gaining status through automatic fame. Ordinary people can watch the shows, see people like themselves and imagine that they too could become celebrities by being on television,” Steven Reiss from phycologytoday.com. Seeing a person you can relate to is not coincidental however, as Chuck Klosterman explains in his book Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs, characters in shows like The Real World, are casted to fit a particular stereotype.
“[The Real World] succeeds because it edits malleable personalities into flat twenty-something archetypes. What interests me is the way those archetypes so quickly became the normal way for people of my generation to behave,” (Klosterman, 31).
A recent trend that I have seen in media is advertisers utilizing this cultural love of reality tv and applying it to commercials. Just like a reality show, these commercials are simulacra; just a simulation of what is real. In recent Microsoft commercials, ‘normal’ people are shown in big-box stores picking out a computer, eventually leaving with a Windows laptop. A similar example can be found in Pizza Hut commercials, where everyday restaurant goers are secretly eating Pizza Hut pasta. Both of these commercials use documentary-style camera work and editing that resembles reality tv. The audience can relate with the characters in these commercials, just like in reality shows. Just as Klosterman observes in The Real World, personality archetypes are used to make these commercials appealing to all different kinds of people. I am eager to know whether audience of these types of commercials react the same way to that of reality shows, and whether companies are seeing increased sales because of it.
References:
- Klosterman, Chuck. Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs.
- Reiss, Steven. Why America Love Reality TV. <http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200109/why-america-loves-reality-tv>
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