Reality Television throughout the Years

Reality shows – the present of mass media on entertainment which make the big influence to American society. Everybody watched the same stuff, the same old movies, or the same reruns before the cable TV or Internet appeared. For example, the Simpson was a successful sitcom became an institution as important as the cult classic. They poured their shared pop culture experienced into the show. However, the character

The selection called “Reality TV: Surprising throwback into the past?” written by Patricia Cohen suggests love and marriage through TV is shallow. Reality TV is mixing relationships with money and that is immoral. Women, like in this article, expect and trust the viewers to choose her true match through a series of bachelors. Ladies feel that if they don’t get married by late 20s, they are to be single for the rest of their lives. They consider going on a TV show because they feel like they have nothing to lose. In the process they might gain lots of money and a true love. When they take this crude way, they don’t realize the risks of divorce. The girls don’t see that this does not guarantee a real marriage.

So where did this idea of reality TV come from? How many kinds of different reality TV are out there and why is this is

Some of the most popular television shows in today’s society are The Biggest Looser, Jersey Shore, and Big Brother. These programs and many others are classified as reality television. Reality television’s main purpose is to attempt to portray ordinary people in unscripted situations. Recently, however, many of these shows have achieved in creating the complete opposite, and have earned an immense amount of criticism as a result. Reality television programs are detrimental to society because they influence bad behavior among teenagers, do not produce authentic real life situations, and they humiliate many of the characters.

Reality shows can be defined as a catch-all category that includes a wide range of entertainment programs about real people. The MTV network executives quickly realized how fast the world around them was changing; so on May 21, 1992, seven random strangers were picked to star on the show The Real World. This show modernized MTV by connecting viewers to the world and current culture around them. It also demonstrated that the network was not just about airing the hottest music videos of the year. Even today, The Real World is stil the forerunner of the American reality show genre. The reality genre has mass appeal. Because of this, MTV started to create more reality-based shows. As more reality shows were created, the MTV network made the executive decision to create another network channel to further the demands of viewers. So, they created M2, formally known today as MTV2.

This research will focus on the negative impact of reality TV and analyse facts and examples of influence from reality TV shows. The information provided and studies are referred from year 2000 till present hence it will be based on most recent popular reality TV shows.

I truly believe that reality TV needs a different name. At first reality TV was created with the aim to depict reality, but over time different interests and actions have resulted in doing the opposite of this. I would even go so far to say that reality TV has become just as fictional as fiction based television. “Reality” is defined as “the world or the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them”. However, Reality TV in no way represents this definition, but rather represents the idealistic and notional ideas as to what reality should be.

Television is a main media in today's society, the majority of people in America watch television. There are so many different genres of television, you can watch so many different things. The focus will be on reality television. Reality TV has become pretty big to watch, there's different genres of reality TV under the television genre reality TV. You can make many different subcategories under reality television, their are many, but they all can be mainly put into seven subcategories: documentary/ docu-series, makeover/ renovation, competition/ elimination, dating, hidden camera, supernatural, travel/ aspirational. Each one is different with the same concept. Reality television in the 20th century is very popular. People are so drawn to these shows because they show people a version of their own reality.

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”.

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).

To quote Matt Philbin, managing editor of the MRC Culture & Media Institute, “the problem with much of reality TV is that it isn’t about real people or reality at all. These are highly scripted, performed shows, ‘written’ like a piece of fiction and as such they need the classic conflict-driven characters and soap opera melodrama.”

Reality shows have become very popular in the last few years. Reality television shows document unscripted, spontaneous situations and actual occurrences, and usually feature publicly unknown cast. The cast members are from different backgrounds and cultures and have different mentalities. However, reality television is facing significant criticism in the last few years, the criticism has mostly centered on the use of the word "reality". Many people claim that these reality television shows are fake and do not present reality. Other criticisms include that they make stars out of untalented and infamous personalities and that they glamorize materialism and vulgarity.

It seems that you can’t turn on a television set anymore without a reality show being on. All networks have recently started to pump out reality shows left and right. And why wouldn’t they? Reality shows are highly rated, with three of them being in the top ten on the Nielsen ratings chart. In fact, these shows are becoming more popular than the sitcoms and dramas aired. New sitcoms and dramas struggle to get attention of the public when going against a reality show. Programs such as The Beast and Go Fish, which critics loved and raved about, are victims of the wrath of reality shows. These shows are now cancelled.

Modern day Reality TV has spawned from decades of transformation, and a change in the public interest, however has this change been for the better? Americans spend countless hours watching television; some may not even realize the show they are watching is in fact Reality TV. This new hybrid of television is capturing the interest of many, comprising of children and adults, which is creating a family norm to watch Reality TV. This form of television is beneficial to help recognize social issues, through various life-learning shows, while building a stronger family dynamic.

Can you believe that reality television has actually been around since 1948? Most of us may have thought that this idea of real television just came about in the last decade but actually it’s been around for quite some time. In 1948 Candid Camera was the first reality show to be broadcasted on television. Many considered this to be the “granddaddy” of the reality TV genre (History of reality TV). This show actually began in radio broadcasting. Allen Funt was the man in charge of this whole new production. He started by simply taping complaints of men in service and broadcasting them over the Armed Forces Radio. This is what later became known as the television show, Candid Camera. Candid Camera was known for