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>> 219 Notes Notes to Chapter 1 1. All interviewee names are pseudonyms. 2. Ang, Watching Dallas. 3. Biressi and Nunn, Reality TV, 4. 4. Ibid.; Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity; Rose, “Governing ‘Advanced’ Liberal Democracies.” 5. Weber, Makeover TV. 6. See, for example, ibid.; Andrejevic, Reality TV; Palmer, Exposing Lifestyle Television; Biressi and Nunn, Reality TV. 7. Hill, Reality TV; Hill, Restyling Factual TV; Skeggs, Thumim, and Wood, “Oh Goodness, I Am Watching Reality TV”; Skeggs and Wood, “Labour of Transformation and Circuits of Value ‘around’ Reality Television”; Wood and Skeggs, “Spectacular Morality.” 8. NBC’s prime time competitive weight loss series The Biggest Loser debuted in October 2004. The show recruits fourteen contestants, seven women and seven men, from among thousands of applicants. Contestants work to lose a lot of weight at the Southern California “ranch” where they live, eat, and work out for three months, before returning home to complete the process. Starting weights range from two hundred to more than four hundred pounds, and over the course of the show candidates have lost more than one hundred pounds. The first season debuted in fall 2004 with almost ten million viewers, and drew sixteen million to the season 2 finale. It has since been franchised to more than twenty countries. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy aired on Bravo from 2003 to 2007, with considerable press attention and ratings success, attracting 1.64 million viewers for the first episode—Bravo ’s largest audience ever. It makes over usually heterosexual men including their wardrobe, grooming, cooking skills, home environment, and taste. The 2006 season dropped “For the Straight Guy” and worked with a broader constituency of gay men, women, heterosexual couples, and a female-to-male transgendered person. Queer Eye won an Emmy in 2004. Starting Over was a three-season series developed by Bunim/Murray Productions, producers of MTV’s Real World and Road Rules. Debuting in September 2003 as part of NBC’s daytime schedule, the show brought the producers’ experience with residential, interpersonal reality series together with discourses of self-help associated with talk shows such as The Oprah Winfrey Show. Initially based in Chicago and moving to Los Angeles for the second and third seasons, Starting Over brought six women into a house to work with life coaches and a psychotherapist. As each woman was deemed ready to “start over” in the outside world, she underwent a one-day appearance makeover and graduated from the house, to be replaced by another woman in crisis. The first season of Starting Over drew 1.4 million viewers daily, half of them in the very desirable demographic of women aged eighteen to 220 > 221 38. Skeggs, “Moral Economy of Person Production,” 627. 39. Hill, Reality TV; Corner, “Performing the Real.” 40. See, for example, Van Maanen, Tales of the Field; and Hammersley and Atkinson, Ethnography for an overview. 41. Bourdieu and Wacquant, Towards a Reflexive Sociology, 36, 214. 42. Ibid., 40. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 215. 45. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks. 46. Adkins, “Reflexivity,” 22. 47. Radway, Reading the Romance; Berlant, “Cruel Optimism.” 48. Berlant, Female Complaint, x. 49. Skeggs, Thumim, and Wood, “Oh Goodness, I Am Watching Reality TV,” 6. 50. Weber, Makeover TV, 5. 51. Ang, Watching Dallas. Notes to Chapter 2 1. Sender, “Queens for a Day.” 2. Beauvoir, Second Sex. 3. Bourdieu, Distinction. 4. See, for example, McRobbie, “Notes on What Not to Wear and Post-feminist Symbolic Violence”; Weber, Makeover TV. 5. Berlant, Female Complaint. 6. Ibid., x. 7. Ibid., 5. 8. Ibid. 9. Heller, Great American Makeover. 10. Woodstock, “Cure without Communication,” 155. 11. Gurley Brown, Having It All; Norwood, Women Who Love Too Much. 12. Marketdata Enterprises, “Self-Improvement Market Shifts to Digital, Audio, and Online,” press release, November 23, 2010, retrieved March 2, 2011, from http://www.marketdataenterprises .com/. 13. Wood, Skeggs, and Thumim, “It’s Just Sad,” 137. 14. Livingstone, Making Sense of Television, 53. 15. White, Tele-advising, 16. 16. Grindstaff, Money Shot. 17. Ibid., 19. 18. Gamson, Freaks Talk Back. 19. Peiss, Hope in a Jar, 144. 20. Moseley, “Makeover Takeover on British Television,” 301. 21. See, for example, Weber, Makeover TV, 25. 22. Hochschild, Commercialization of Intimate Life. 23. White, Tele-advising, 55. 24. McRobbie, “Notes on What Not to Wear and Post-feminist Symbolic Violence”; Palmer, “The New You.” 25. Skeggs, “Moral Economy of Person Production,” 627. 26. Bourdieu, Distinction. 222 > 223 while the series was ongoing. I discuss the methodological implications of this in chapter...

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