Watching reality from a distance: class, genre and reality television

Abstract

The cultural significance of reality television is based on its claim to represent social reality. On the level of genre, we might argue that reality television constructs a modern day panorama of the social world and its inhabitants and that it thus makes populations appear. This article presents a class analysis of the population of reality television in which 1 year of television programming and over 1000 participants have been analysed. The purpose of this analysis is to deepen our understanding of the cultural and ideological dimensions of reality television as a genre, and to give a more detailed picture of the imaginaries of class in this form of television. The results bring new knowledge about the reality television genre and modify or revise assumptions from previous studies. Most importantly, we show that upper-class people and people belonging to the social elite are strongly over-represented in the genre and appear much more commonly in reality television than in other genres. This result opens up a re-evaluation of the cultural and ideological dimensions of the reality television genre.