Culture Watch: Reality TV

by Michelle Thomas

It has become something of a cliché to be concerned about our so-called fractured society. Modern Westerners are supposedly anti-relational, work-obsessed and detached from the communities that surround them.

Whether that is true or not is a matter for the sociologists, but if you were to look to our television screens for answers, you would think that we had nothing but relationships on our minds.

Substantial support for this view comes from reality TV shows, which have now had a few years to settle in and develop some common threads. And the thing that ties the most successful ones together is their concentration on how people relate, even when the pretext is the renovation of an apartment block (The Block, Channel 9) or the search for a male stripper (Strip Search, Channel 9).

Survivor and Big Brother were the pioneers of this genre, and as they both continue to churn out more and more programs, the machinations of the makers are becoming more and more obvious to the viewer.

Whole days of real time are edited down to a few minutes of footage, so producers have to select the moments that are most interesting. Surprisingly (or maybe not), this doesn’t mean viewers see much action. Instead, the focus tends to be on how the ‘characters’ relate – what they think of each other, what they say, how conflict develops and how it is resolved. The setting (whether it is the Amazon or the lounge room) is irrelevant. What matters is the interaction.

You could argue that the recent wave of reality television embodies a great social longing for community that is unsatisfied by real life. Or you could argue that it is representative of humanity’s God-given interest in relationships that is as much a part of our real lives as ever, and it’s just that the nature of our communities are changing. We might not know our neighbours anymore, but maybe the office is the new village.

Now if you could just find a way to vote your boss off the island…

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