Once you get past the Kardashian tantrums, the scheming castaways on Survivor and the Real Housewives histrionics, there's much to learn about ourselves in reality TV, says sociologist and TV-lover Danielle J Lindemann.
Like or not, she says reality TV illuminates our everyday experiences and can help us to make sense of complex social forces.
She tells Jesse Mulligan no one should feel guilty about this particular guilty pleasure in her book, True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us.
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Lindemann says she was fascinated by the social dynamics of the shows in the mid-1990s when growing up in New York. But when she started studying sociology she came to understand how these shows can teach viewers much about social interactions in their everyday lives.
As primarily a form of entertainment, it also helps people relax. Many women say reality TV is a stress reducer, including Michelle Obama, who admitted it helped her get through husband Barack’s presidential campaign.
Many who say they don't watch the shows actually do, and the majority of viewers tend to be women, Lindemann says.
“We tend to think of it as this guilty pleasure that we shouldn’t admit that we’re watching. But more people are watching reality TV than not.
“It tends to be more often women, so it tends to be gendered in that way and it tends to be younger people. It also tends to be people who more often make use of social media, which kind of makes sense because you can kind of interact with the people who are on these shows via social media.
“You can interact with other fans and discuss the show as well.”
The fact that people talk about the shows, either online or at work, shows that it helps form different types of social connections, she says.
It is considered a guilty pleasure because of what’s being observed, including bad social behaviours, like fights, people getting drunk and saying inappropriate things. There's a fear of being "contaminated" by the toxicity of what's being viewed.
But she’s convinced that the stigma is associated with the fact women enjoy it.
“We tend to devalue cultural products that are associated with women and femininity. We tend to look down on them a little bit more.”
There are different types of reality TV, from Lego building shows, cooking and singing competitions, to getting married to strangers. But these are all part of the one genre, she says.
“There’s kind of a sense that if you’re watching shows that teach you something or more overtly vocational – you can learn something explicitly from them that that’s more okay and then those shows where there’s just housewives hitting each other with hand bags… But I would put all of those shows under the umbrella of reality TV.
“They’re all shows featuring real people those primary purpose is to entertain, not to educate, even if they do educate us along the way.”
Her book describes reality TV as “a funhouse mirror of social life, kind of an exaggerated version of us".
She argues reality TV takes us into places that scripted TV masks or just doesn’t show us, educating us on aspects of social reality, both good and bad. "It reflects the worst aspects of ourselves," she says.
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"Our sexism, our classism, our racism, our homophobia. It puts those things on full blast, but in doing that and kind of caricaturing those things to enables us to really take a good hard look at the worst aspects of ourselves and any qualities that cut our culture deeply.
“But reality TV also shows us some beautiful things about ourselves as well. It’s historically been more diverse than other forms of media and sometimes that diversity is stereotyped, but sometimes there’s something to be said for representation of different races, different sexual identities, and gender identities. Reality TV was on the vanguard of queer representation.”
However shows can also reference some old school values and narrow ideas of what is socially legitimate and healthy, especially for women, she says.
“In other ways it’s showing us the most retrograde aspects of ourselves, in terms for instance of how we think about race and gender. So, if you take a show like The Bachelor, where there’s these women vying for a man’s hand in marriage, the way that these women are performing gender on this show are very kind of conservative performances of femininity. They have faces full of make-up, eye lashes out to here, bedazzled ballgowns at 10am.
“The way they’re performing gender is a narrow conservative take and they don’t really stray too far and if they do they’re kind of punished for that and yanked back in.”
Social realities bleed into shows in other controversial ways. She argues the :mean judge" character on music talent shows tend to be rich white men for a reason.
“Who gets to be mean in our culture and gets away with it, not always, but… most often it’s kind of these wealthy white men who are allowed to be mean on these competition shows.”
Even shows that seem the furthest away from our social realities like Survivor, mirror our lives quite strongly.
“Survivor does seem like it’s divorced from our everyday life. Most of the time we’re not castaways on an island figuring out how to make fire and competing for immunity idols. But the little dynamics on Survivor are very similar to the dynamics of our own lives.
“Like the alliances that we form and even if you think about a work place the people you form alliances with have, how those alliances benefit you, your groups of two, triads, your groups of three, in groups and out groups, who’s popular and not popular, who’s on the outs. So, all of those little dynamics are magnified on Survivor, but they also exist in more muted form in our everyday lives.”
The power of reality TV can be measured by those who have seemingly benefited from it. Former US President Donald Trump and embattled Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy - both showmen - have weaponised the medium very successfully.
“I think Trump for sure has weaponised it. It’s interesting to think about whether he would have been so successful if he had not appeared on The Apprentice, in his position of power, behind the desk, his orders wearing a suit.
“We’ll never know, but he was certainly part of the cultural zeitgeist before then, but really amped up his popular personae, so I wouldn’t be shocked if that helped his ascent to the White House. Along the way he used the conventions of reality TV."
She says reality TV has had a huge cultural impact but it hasn’t been all bad.
“It does have the potential to serve this positive function… There is evidence that reality TV has changed our society for ways that a lot of us would consider to be better. So, the show Sixteen and Pregnant actually has reduced teenage pregnancy rates.
“That’s because people see the show and it offers educational nuggets, so that’s something you could point to and say well reality TV maybe did a good thing…
“So it does have the potential to serve this positive function even though it doesn’t always do that of course.”
