The Reality Reality Show
You’re never going to believe me when I tell you this. But it’s true. Every
single word.
I am lying on the ground, bleeding. I’ve been hit, and I’m not sure if anyone
will be coming for me—either to help me or to finish me off. There’s noise
everywhere. My eye sockets fill with blood causing me to panic further, thinking
I’ve been blinded. In the chaos I stay on the ground, bleeding, broken, sure that I
am dying. And all I can think about is why the television cameraman is just
watching instead of helping me.
Wait. Let me back up.
To ask “What is reality really?” is a bit of a redundancy or perhaps an
oxymoron, but it has been a question at the forefront of Western thought for at
least two and a half millennia. It seems an innocent question, a philosopher’s
question, perhaps even an important question. It is possible, however, to retrace
our history with an eye toward uncovering that it has been, all along, a question
founded on an irrational mistrust of appearance and a fear of reality. Just how
this is so is intriguing. And so, we work our way backwards, starting, of course,
with the moment that reality intruded in our collective contemporary lives: the
birth of reality television.
There are some scholars who found the history of reality TV on the rise of
the film documentary. It is generally accepted that the coining of the term
“documentary” took place in 1926 by John Grierson, a philosophy graduate
from Glasgow. Grierson had already grown disillusioned with Hollywood’s use
of cliche and glamour by the mid-1920s, arguing that true cinema should
instruct as well as delight. But no one seemed pleased with the term. Alberto
Cavalcanti, one of Grierson’s own employees, claimed that it “smelt of dust and
boredom,” while American filmmaker Pare Lorenz blamed the documentary for
his migraines. Much more troublesome, however, was Grierson’s own definition
for the word: “the creative treatment of actuality.”1Thus was bom an attempt to
found a genre that was different from journalism (because journalists are
thought to be objective and thus without creativity) but was also different from
fictional Hollywood movies (because the subject matter would be reality—
actuality—itself). All of this, of course, did little to clear up the matter.
At the start of 2008, the cable network formerly known as Court TV
changed its name to truTV and began offering what they are calling “actuality
programming.” “Reality has a connotation of not being real, of being phony,”
argues Marc Juris, the executive vice-president and general manager of truTV.
“We felt that because [our programming] was real, we couldn’t call it reality.”2