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>> 105 5 Feeling Real Empirical Truth and Emotional Authenticity [When I’m watching Starting Over] I’m usually crying or whatever when they’re crying. And I think it’s wonderful! I think it’s real TV and you don’t see that often. There’s no real TV in many places. One of the reasons I really, really like the show, it’s because you can see those real intimate moments and there’s so many people that I come in contact with who are just so afraid to be real, to be heard, to be vulnerable. And so sometimes seeing that is a breath of fresh air. —Julie, Starting Over viewer Julie’s discussion of her emotional engagement with the housemates on Starting Over frames the intertwined themes in this chapter. For Julie, the housemates’ expression of emotion, particularly crying, signals the authenticity of the show, a rare value in most television. This authenticity is underpinned by her sense of the housemates’ vulnerability, where Julie presumes they are showing their real selves to the audience. And through this perception of the housemates’ emotional authenticity , Julie also experiences her own emotional release: “I’m usually crying . . . when they’re crying.” Julie’s appeals to “real TV” and “be[ing] real” emphasize a taken-for-granted association between emotional expression and authenticity that underpins the realness of reality TV. This chapter investigates the conditions in which audiences perceive the genre of makeover television, its candidates, and their feelings to 106 > 107 She found that audiences could perceive a text to be realistic if it was found plausible (I can imagine the story taking place in the real world); typical (it might happen to me or someone I know); factual (it is faithful to what “really happened”); and had “perceptual persuasiveness” (I can’t see how the fictional violence is faked). Hall found that people could perceive texts as realistic even when they were implausible (as in science fiction shows) as long as the story was internally coherent. She also found that audiences discussed texts as realistic when the emotions expressed by the actors were seen as authentic, what Ien Ang calls “emotional realism.”5 Reality television plays with two kinds of latitude: the flexibility of reality as a code, and the breadth of audiences’ willingness to read texts as realistic. Further, the metagenre complicates the distinction between documentary approaches and entertainment genres. It combines both observational, “fly-on-the-wall” types of unobtrusive recording, as well as more participatory and reflexive techniques that emphasize the subjects ’ awareness that they are participating in a mediated event. As John Corner writes, “Much reality television . . . mix[es] moments of selfconscious and playful artifice with moments of intensive commitment to the truthfulness of their images, the ‘reality claims’ of which at least equal the much-discussed ‘ideology of transparency’ of classic observational work.”6 For Corner, the friction between the fantasy of the window on the world and the revelation of the window frame itself opens up the potential of reflexivity in audiences. However, Corner remains doubtful that this new attention to performance “involves a new reflectiveness on the part of program makers” or “a new refusal on the part of audiences to accord reality status to what they see on television.”7 Drawing from her audience research project, Annette Hill also argues that contradictions within the aesthetics of reality television open the possibility for a consideration of the realism of the metagenre. She suggests that reality television’s uneasy location between transparency and artifice demands that viewers reflect on its truth claims: “The intermediate space of [reality television] can be transformative, and at times we will personally connect with something in a program, reflecting on what that person or real event means to us, creating a powerful self-reflexive space.”8 For Hill, reflecting on the realism of reality television is an outcome of the metagenre’s precarious position at the interstices of fact and fiction. She 108 > 109 way the lines come out, it’s definitely scripted. I think what happens is, they sit down, they look at everything, and Stacy and Clinton will make comments—I think the comments Stacy and Clinton originally make as they’re watching it are genuine. And then the scriptwriters get it and they tweak it a little bit. Drawing on his own background as a freelance writer, Robert assessed the extent to which the writers shape the content of the shows: In The Biggest Loser...

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