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Reviewed by:
  • Reality TV by Misha Kavka
  • Mike Van Elser
Misha Kavka . Reality TV. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 198 pp.

Reality (or unscripted) TV is often portrayed as the bane of modern television culture. At best, it is considered mindless entertainment by critics. At worst, it is said to represent the most awful aspects of contemporary consumer society. Misha Kavka, however, continues the work of recent scholars such as Laurie Ouellette, Mark Andrejevic, and Brenda Weber, among others, in seeking to go beyond the polemics of critics, politicians, and aesthetes to unpack the cultural, political, and economic attributes of reality television.

Reality TV is part of the Edinburgh University Press TV Genres series. Hence, citing a number of textual and paratextual conventions to which reality television adheres, Kavka approaches reality television as a genre. This is actually quite a bold stance to take, considering the aforementioned invective surrounding unscripted television. However, Kavka effectively argues her point. Kavka [End Page 97] acknowledges that genre itself has been much debated regarding its applicability to television as a medium, but firmly outlines her understanding of reality television as "exemplary of television genre owing to the ease with which it mixes fictional and documentary forms, soap operas and game shows, talk shows and advertising platforms—all without losing its legibility as 'reality TV'" (7). Kavka, then, argues that reality television is the best way to understand genre in a televisual context.

Reality TV is divided into distinct chronological eras—historical precursors; first generation, or 'camcorder generation' (1989-99); second generation, or 'competition generation' (1999-2005); and the third generation, or 'celebrity generation' (2002-)—and examines the content and practices that demarcate each era. Kavka organizes her book this way because she takes a genealogical approach to understanding genre and its evolution. She is explicit about taking no single approach to unpacking reality television as genre, preferring instead to exercise a range of critical approaches as part of the larger discursive context of the field. By employing a genealogical method, then, Kavka is able to roughly sketch out the cultural, industrial, and historical contexts that led to what we now understand as reality television.

Rather than clearly and definitively marking out programs that initiated the practices and conventions of reality television, Kavka chooses to understand the formation of the genre as something that occurs in waves. For example, Kavka notes that Candid Camera and PBS's An American Family established a dual legacy, one that was both technological insofar as it incorporated innovations in portable sound technology and conceptual insofar as it included "ordinary" people in a television program in an unscripted manner. These are not reality television programs as we understand them today, but they nonetheless established practices that would be adopted by later programs. Put another way, Kavka's genealogical approach to sketching out the evolution of the genre is effective because it avoids making sweeping statements about the primacy of one program in the reality television ecology, and instead looks at how each text builds upon its predecessors, incorporating and modifying relevant concepts.

Kavka's text fills a notable hole in the field of television studies because scholars have yet to develop an in-depth genealogy of reality television or establish its generic conventions. By delineating the eras of reality television chronologically and identifying discursive similarities between programs, Reality TV broadens our understanding of television. Kavka also avoids lionizing reality television or trying to rescue it from cultural criticism. Rather, she approaches the genre on its own terms, which makes the text more credible inasmuch as the reader is allowed to examine reality television programs as conceptual, social, and cultural texts instead of being fed value judgments or reviews.

The audience for Reality TV is arguably quite broad. Television studies scholars will appreciate the close attention Kavka has paid to structuring the book around chronological and discursive similarities between the programs, as well as the wide range of theories and approaches included in the text. Hardcore fans of reality television should also find the historical aspects of the book intriguing. The text does get dense at times, however, and general audiences will probably not follow the numerous invocations of Foucault, Barthes...

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