Reality TV : The Positive Aspects Of Reality Television

In Cassie Heidecker’s paper, The Real, the Bad, and the Ugly, she exposes that reality television’s charm is the characters have real, normal lives like the audience’s lives. While the producers’ editing causes regular episodes of reality TV shows to differ from a viewer's normal life, it also generates larger audiences with every episode and the ratings continue to rise. Moreover, the shows follow a predictable formula so that even Heidecker, who regularly watches reality TV, realizes the shows are predictable; yet Heidecker continues to laugh, cry, and enjoy the predictable moves the shows make. Since the ratings of reality TV continue to rise, more people than just Heidecker still enjoy the shows, even though they are predictable. Though the shows are

Though the scope of this particular research paper limits itself to media psychology and reality-based programming, the scope of the field of research in general is vast. Media psychology becomes increasingly practical and necessary to effectively and precisely navigate the 21st century information age. Whether an avid academic or a blissful consumer, referencing media psychology as part of one's media consumptive experiences proves invaluable time after time. The world experiences a sharp and distinct increase in mediated experiences as part of daily life. Such a massive shift in how humans perceive reality and experience life because of media technology and media forms must have results and consequences that can be studied, tracked, and analyzed. This study forges in that direction. The paper studies and further hypothesizes the affects of reality-based programming on consumers with regard to their perceptions of actual reality as well as any behavioral and attitudinal changes they experience or enact as a direct result of reality-based programming consumption.

Reality TV allows audiences to laugh, cry and to live vicariously through so called everyday ordinary people who have opportunities to experience things that, until the moment they are broadcast, most individuals only dream about. (Frisby,

Do you know the guiltiest pleasure of the American public? Two simple words reveal all—reality TV. This new segment of the TV industry began with pioneering shows like MTV’s The Real World and CBS’s Survivor. Switch on primetime television nowadays, and you will become bombarded by and addicted to numerous shows all based on “real” life. There are the heartwarming tales of childbirth on TLC, melodramas of second-rate celebrities on Celebrity Mole, and a look into a completely dysfunctional family on The Osbornes. Yet, out of all these entertaining reality shows arises the newest low for popular culture, a program based on the idea of a rich man or woman in search of

Reality TV burst onto the television scene in the early 2000s’s. Shows such as, The Bachelor, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and American Idol are just a few of the hundreds of reality TV shows that are capturing the hearts of Americans on a weekly basis. The effects go unnoticed by the viewers, but as these shows are watched, they begin to take over the personality of the audience and are changing the way people perceive the world today.

At the end of a long day, relaxing in front of a television, watching a favorite show will hit the spot just right. Comparisons between the audience and the reality stars will take place whether it is noticeable or not. And finally, reality TV will continue to attract an abundant audience do to the constant changing of topics and

Reality TV is known as exciting entertainment because the audience never knew what will happen next as it is with no strings attached and even have the freedom of speech. Despite the entertainment it can bring, the content of reality shows are actually degrading the society. Our pop culture and civilization have been affected by the reality programs in a bad way. Indeed, reality TV is promoting bad social value to the

This essay will assess the debate on whether or not reality television is becoming more like a form of tabloidization; whether, reality TV has shifted from to entertaining the audience rather than educating the audience. John Corner believes that television has greatly expanded its range of images, depicting more of the ‘real’. He added that the shift in reality TV has employed factual programming, such as an increase in documentaries. On the other hand, Richard Kilborn believes that reality TV is a simulation of real life events through various forms of dramatic reconstruction… ’Documentaries can never be any more than a representation or an interpretation of events and issues in the real world’ (Kilborn, 5). Therefore, programs can be

“Reality shows are everywhere, from cable and broadcast television to the Internet. Reality TV programming has generated millions of viewers,

Since then, television has become a reflection of society’s cultural values and interests. Therefore, it is no surprise that our values have continued to be the driving force in shaping the popular reality television programs throughout the decades. All through the 1990s and 2000s, broadcasters began to narrow their focus to further trigger the interests of their target audiences. Cable networks developed reality television series devoted to cooking (Food Network), conflict drama (VH1, MTV), courtroom drama (Judge Judy), family-oriented programs (FOX), and even subculture specific interests such as BET. This gave viewers a choice of what type of program they want to watch within the scope of reality television. Many reality shows target a narrow audience, yet one that is incredibly valuable to television ratings. For instance, Bravo produces a variety of reality shows that cater to a narrow demographic of 20-50-year old women, such as The Real Housewives series. The series documents a group of wealthy housewives from a particular area in the United States. The show is cheap to make as it’s merely the day to day lives of melodramatic stay at home divas. The majority of episodes consist of these wealthy housewives’ social drama and extravagant lifestyles. Due to the narrow viewership of reality shows like this,

Celebrities play just as large a role in the success of reality television. There is a popular reality game show format called I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! The first series of I’m a Celebrity attracted just over seven and half million viewers. The second series increased to nearly nine and a half million viewers, and the third series, which performed the best, attracted twelve million viewers in 2003. The format involved a group of celebrities, who lived together for several weeks in a purpose-built camp in the Australian rain forest (Hill, 2005). The celebrities needed to overcome various trials, such as crawling through confined spaces with hundreds of rats, in order to win food for the camp (Hill, 2005). The highest-rated episode

Everyday we are bombarded with images of perfect hair, luxury cars, and a life of extravagance we all desire. American society glorifies the rich and broadcasts their life of ease. We watch movies like “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “American Hustle” in order to make our lives more exciting. Escapism has become part of our society; we fantasize living like the Kardashians or the Real Houswives of any city. Because of reality TV, we have become infatuated with the extravagant lives of others rather than our own.

Reality television is popular all over the world. The influence reality television has on society is significant, especially its influence on the youth generation since television is a widely accessible form of mass culture. Psychologist Randall Flanery, PhD, director of the Eating Disorders Program at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine tells Webmd.com (2003) that he is especially concerned about its teenage viewers, who are more than likely to develop eating disorders. Holly Hoff, program director of the National Eating Disorders Association, also shared with Webmd.com (2003) her concerns about reality television’s impact on youth, saying that reality television

For close to a decade, the ethics behind the existence of reality TV have been questioned. While there are ardent viewers of reality TV, researchers and other scholars disapprove them, and claim that the world would have been in a better place. Reality TV shows, especially in America, are extremely profitable to media owners, and this has increased their popularity in the recent years. The main target audience for these shows are teenagers and women, who spend a lot of time discussing about them, even hours after the shows. Most of the reality shows in America and other parts of the world have common ideas. The most fundamental aspect of most reality TV shows is that they display people who go through embarrassing, painful and humiliating ordeals. This is what the reality shows expect their audiences to be entertained, and presumably laugh at the situations the people go through. For this reason and many more, it has been found that they are more detrimental than entertaining to the society, and therefore, the world would be in a better place without them (Pozner 89-91).

There has been a huge increase in “reality” based television over the last few years. From Survivor to Big Brother it seems that we are constantly being bombarded with a new type of reality television program. But why do people watch these shows? What makes these shows so interesting? One theory brought up in an article in Psychology Today by Steven Reiss Ph.D. and James Wiltz, a Ph.D. candidate at Ohio State University, is that, “reality television allows Americans to fantasize about gaining status through automatic fame” (Reiss and Wiltz, 2001). This is the American dream, acquiring fame with little to no work at all. And what better way to do it than on television?