News Reporter: Act Four: How to enroll in a crash course on reality television literacy

Wednesday, 18 January 2017

Act Four: How to enroll in a crash course on reality television literacy

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

Host Arnold Schwarzenegger walks on stage to participate in a panel for “The New Celebrity Apprentice” in Universal City, Calif., on Dec. 9. (Danny Moloshok/REUTERS)

Every week I answer a question from the previous Monday’s Act Four Live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. The transcript of yesterday’s chat is here, and you can submit questions from the January 23 edition of the chat here. This week, a reader asks about how to learn more about the genre that our president-elect speaks fluently.

With a [celebrity] demagogue [about] to be inaugurated, I find myself re-reading Jennifer Pozner’s “Reality Bites Back.” But how else should we be boning up on the way messaging works in reality TV, so we can check our own tendency to buy into it?

I think the first step in dealing with reality television is to recognize that it is not, in fact, real. Instead, reality television is a set of story conventions that are governed by set dramatic beats in the same way you know how a police procedural will proceed, or the events in a romance novel will unfold. Competition shows have folks who aren’t nice, but are extremely talented. “The Bachelor” always casts at least one woman who is willing to flounce across boundaries and social conventions as if she’s not even aware they exist.

The next step is to learn those conventions so you’ll recognize them when you see them, and understand what the person setting them in motion is trying to pull off. You might use TV Tropes’ section on reality television as a reference guide. And to go deeper, my friend, the reality television critic and reporter Andy Dehnart runs the great site Reality Blurred. Reading him on how reality television is constructed, and how shows hew to or deviate from convention, is a great, granular way to learn about the business, and by extension, to learn about how those tropes have grown into our politics.

I don’t know that learning more about reality television will give us a clear path forward. After all, there’s a difference between entertainment and real-world politics and policymaking. We’re all contestants and judges now, whether we like it or not, making the game much more volatile and harder to produce. And the stakes are much, much higher.

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