The Politics of Reality Television

Global Perspectives

Marwan M. Kraidy, Katherine Sender

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136913884
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

The Politics of Reality Television encompasses an international selection of expert contributions who consider the specific ways media migrations test our understanding of, and means of investigating, reality television across the globe. The book addresses a wide range of topics, including:

• the global circulation and local adaptation of reality television formats and franchises
• the production of fame and celebrity around hitherto "ordinary" people
• the transformation of self under the public eye
• the tensions between fierce loyalties to local representatives and imagined communities bonding across regional and ethnic divides
• the struggle over the meanings and values of reality television across a range of national, regional, gender, class and religious contexts.

This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students on a range of Media and Television Studies courses, particularly those on the globalisation of television and media, and reality television.

Chapter 1
Real worlds

Migrating genres, travelling participants, shifting theories

Katherine Sender

In March 2009 two reality television stories hit the British press: one described the successes and conflicts surrounding Afghan Star, a regional version of the UK’s Pop Idol; ¹ the other the death of Jade Goody. Goody was a young British woman who achieved fame (or notoriety) on the British Big Brother series and went on to convert her designated fifteen minutes into a sustained celebrity only enhanced by her death from cervical cancer. ² Together, these items exemplify many of the themes collected in this book: the global circulation and local adaptation of reality TV formats and franchises; the production of fame and celebrity around hitherto “ordinary” people; the fierce loyalties to local representatives; the imagined communities bonding across regional and ethnic divides; and the struggle over the meanings and values of reality TV across a range of national, regional, gendered, classed, and religious contexts. Both examples demand, if in different ways, that we think through the global migrations of reality TV from a variety of perspectives and in the context of highly mobile media, politics, and publics. The Politics of Reality Television: Global Perspectives presents new research that comes to grips with this protean genre.

The case of Afghan Star, a local adaptation – or rip-off – of the singing competition formula, highlights the increasing ease with which formats and participants travel across national boundaries. While sharing the Western focus on pop music of its precursors, Afghan Star competitors nonetheless inflect their performances with Afghan musical motifs and styles, dress more modestly than Pop Idol viewers are used to seeing, and decline to dance. For all its local adaptations, Afghan Star exemplifies the migration of a genre from its European beginnings, as well as the movement of personnel across borders: the show’s star presenter, Daoud Sidiqi, refused to return to Afghanistan after travelling to the US to promote a documentary about the show, ³ and has been replaced as host by a part-time Afghan flight attendant.

Coverage of Afghan Star and Sidiqi’s defection says as much about Western perspectives on the meeting of globalized media and Muslim cultures as it does about the details of the show itself – perspectives on reality television that The Politics of Reality Television is intended to complicate. Journalist Simon Broughton described Afghans as a music-loving people in recovery from the years of Taliban prohibitions on listening to music. Afghan Star, hugely popular among Afghan viewers (the final was watched by an estimated third of the population), carries the hope that it will “unite Afghanistan’s diverse ethnic groups and help bring an end to conflict.” ⁴ Sidiqi is quoted as saying that the show’s aim was “to take people’s hands from weapons to music.” ⁵ Even members of the Taliban apparently supported the female contestant from Pashtun in a show of regional pride. As in other countries, Afghans voted for the winner by mobile phone. The journalist described this as the “first taste of democracy” ⁶ for many Afghans. A television show can heal where civic processes have failed: as one fan argues, “Afghan Star is better than politics … Politics bring misery.” ⁷

Before we too quickly celebrate the mass mediated move from the silent days of the Taliban to cultural unity and democracy on a commercial music stage, Broughton’s article reminds us of the risks of participating in a show like Afghan Star, particularly for women: “Many Islamists disapprove of music and dance as incitements to licentious behavior.” ⁸ When a female contestant, Setara Hussainzada, moved to the music onstage, “it cause[d] a storm of protest, even among her fellow contestants. ‘Dancing may be liked overseas, but Afghans don’t approve,’” says one. Someone from her hometown rails, “She brought shame to the Herati people … She deserves to be killed.” ⁹ The article celebrates Western reality television formats that can be imported into and adapted by a non-Western country with a notoriously oppressed history. The shows not only reconnect Afghans to their musical traditions and passions but also heal ethnic rifts and induct fans into the processes of technologized democracy. The article reminds British readers how essentially repressive and sexually reactionary a society Afghanistan is, confirming a dominant Western view of Islam as inherently authoritarian and oppressive.

The second media story in March 2009 also exemplifies the transnational flow of formats and cast members, here in a volatile moment of post-colonial conflict. Jade Goody – young, working class, and poorly educated – joined the cast of the British Big Brother show in 2002, and skillfully maintained a media profile in the tabloid press and on shows such as The Weakest Link, taking her from a life of privation to that of a highly visible millionaire by 2004. She reentered the Big Brother house in 2007, in Celebrity Big Brother (ironic because she was a celebrity largely because of being on Big Brother in the first place), where she was held responsible for a racial bullying scandal during which the Indian Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty was called a “bloody Paki bitch.” ¹⁰ Tremors of this scandal were felt as far as the British House of Commons, where a Member of Parliament tabled a motion to reprimand the Big Brother housemates for their behavior and Channel 4 for its failure to prevent racism in the house. ¹¹ After a very public apology, met with due grace by Shetty, Goody then participated in the Indian version of Big Brother, Bigg Boss (2008). While on this show she was told she had cancer and withdrew for treatment. After she learnt that her illness was terminal in early 2009, Goody married her boyfriend, baptized her children, and died, all in the glare of media publicity: OK! magazine reportedly paid £750,000 for the photo rights to her wedding. ¹²

Goody’s celebrity depended in part on how she was seen as representative of far more of the British population than is usually visible on national television; according to Guardian journalist Aida Edemariam, “Many of the things for which Goody had been scorned – being out of her depth, overweight, lower-class, inarticulate – were things with which millions identified.” ¹³ Or, more positively, after her funeral came this headline from the British tabloid newspaper, the Sun: Goody was a “star [who was] one of ours just like Princess [Diana].” ¹⁴ But her celebrity had been enhanced – and not necessarily in a good way – by her participation in Celebrity Big Brother and, with other housemates, her racially-inflected bullying of Shetty. Implicit in both the Sun’s and the Guardian’s acknowledgment of Goody’s representativeness was that the Shetty contretemps revealed as much about the discrepancies between Goody’s working-class upbringing and Shetty’s privileged one as it did about their respective racial entitlements. In the process of Goody being summarily evicted from the house and the ensuing debate about racism in post-colonial Britain, her reputation as a lower-class, ignorant bully was consolidated, even if it was somewhat redeemed by her immediate contrition and later work towards cervical cancer awareness and screening. Jade Goody’s celebrity trajectory demonstrates how a reality TV show can become a touchstone to consider not only class and gender representation in the UK, but also how the movements of reality show genres and participants across borders raise questions of multiculturalism and national identity in a British post-colonial context.

Each of these news stories demands investigation into an increasingly complex interplay among the meanings of nation, gender, class, celebrity, politics, and globalism on the terrain marked out by reality television. This anthology gathers contributions to the burgeoning field of reality television studies from a number of perspectives. A central theme concerns how we must think differently about reality television when we move beyond narrowly text-based studies carried out on shows from the US, the UK, and Australia. Much of this defamiliarization means looking at shows and their reception outside the Anglo context, but it also includes looking at Anglo shows from new perspectives: within their institutional frame, in the context of labor studies, in the cultures of their production, and through alternative frames for audience engagement with the texts. “Global” here is not meant to inclusively represent work that focuses on each part of the world, as if that were possible, but offers a way of thinking more expansively about places and approaches that complicate narrowly text-focused studies.

The chapters gathered here engage with a number of recent routes of enquiry. One is a productive field of research that looks at the policy and political economic conditions of the global production and distribution of reality shows. ¹⁵ As Madger points out, challenges to state sovereignty by broadcast media are far from new, and “state control over media systems or cultural expression is rarely absolute.” ¹⁶ The pace and scale of international distribution of reality formats has accelerated, however, since the 1990s, boosted by the expansion of distribution networks and the consolidation of global media corporations. ¹⁷ Most significantly for reality TV, the 1990s saw the growth of media companies that specialize in the development of large numbers of reality TV formats that are easily adaptable to local variations. “These companies generate program ideas, sell concept rights, provide detailed production manuals, offer consultancy services, supply computer software, and create graphics and set designs to aid licensors in localizing formats,” McMurria explains. ¹⁸ Reality TV companies are highly concentrated in Western Europe, and are epitomized by Endemol (originally based in the Netherlands), a network that produces formats for Big Brother, Deal or No Deal, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Fear Factor, Star Academy, and thousands of other non-scripted programs, and by FremantleMedia, which began as the UK’s Pearson Television and owns the Pop Idol formula that has spawned at least 35 local variations (not to mention proliferating derivations such as Star Academy and Afghan Star). Reality television shows have proven to be highly profitable in many countries, drawing large audiences to cheap-to-produce shows with proven formulae that are flexible enough for local modification. ¹⁹

Rather than positioning the global spread of reality television formats as another example of US or even Anglo cultural imperialism, however, new work suggests that the relationships among global formats and their local implementations are specific, contingent, and unpredictable. Each nation that develops and adapts reality formats does so in a particular policy environment that navigates between (at least) commercial demands, expectations about public interest programming, and local tastes. Transnational television companies looking to enter new markets must often m...

Table of contents

• Shaping Inquiry in Culture, Communication and Media Studies
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Chapter 1 Real worlds
• Part 1 Producing identity
• Part 2 Laboring the self
• Part 3 Performing the nation
• Part 4 Migrating economies
• Index