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Murray And Ouellette: Article Analysis

Decent Essays
In Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette’s introduction to Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, they provide an informational tour of reality programming and offer some insight as to what perspectives the authors of the future essays may take. These editors suggest some viewpoints however they stick to informing the reader of the general background as a main objective and divide the introduction into three main topics: “Situating Reality TV”, “Is Reality TV Real?”, and “The Commercialization of the Real”. In order for readers to fully understand the arguments made in this book, Murray and Ouellette start by introducing the history behind this loved and hated genre in a section titled “Situating Reality TV”. First, they decide to define what is reality programing and describe it as “an unabashedly commercial genre united less by aesthetic rules or certainties than by the fusion of popular entertainment with a self-conscious claim to the discourse of the real.” (2). With an understanding of what this type of show is, they begin to dig into the history of the popular genre and how it fits into our…show more content…
Shows like Survivor make it “a point to use people from diverse age, racial, geographic, class, and sexual backgrounds.” (8). Many articles will bring up how many television shows and movies have few people of color. Many could also point out the lack of people in the LGBTQ+ community shown in film has lead to “queerbaiting,” which is were show creators will allude to a possible same sex relationship between two characters with no intention of making it happen in order to appeal to the queer fans of the show. However, reality programming relies on real people to draw viewers in and their tendency to have a wider range of people might be one reason for their
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