The Tube Has Spoken: Reality TV and History (review)

Many television viewers think that the 'reality TV genre' was born on June 6th, 2000—the day the long-running and popular television series Survivor was first broadcast. Surprisingly, perhaps, the newly released anthology The Tube Has Spoken: Reality TV and History demonstrates that reality TV is nearly as old as the medium itself. The Tube Has Spoken takes its readers back to the year 1948, when Allen Funt's Candid Camera seized the attention of millions of television viewers with its unrehearsed surveillance-based humor. As author Fred Nadis notes in "Citizen Funt: Surveillance as Cold War Entertainment," the 1950s were a period in American history when "loyalty oaths, fears of un-American activities, Communist infiltration, organized crime, and public panics over comic books" had become the primary obsessions of legions of Americans (13). Through the employment of surveillance-themed humor, Funt successfully played on the viewing public's concerns about personal privacy against a postwar ambiance of rampant paranoia.

A curious amalgam of cinema verité, broadcast news, and documentary styles, reality TV has also been successfully used as a tool with which to explore social issues. Cassandra L. Jones' "The Patriotic American is a Thin American" examines the phenomenally popular television series The Biggest Loser. Unlike Survivor, which "pit[s] the contestants against each other and place[s] the focus on a large cash reward, often by asking them to put themselves in dangerous situations...The Biggest Loser places the focus on transformation, both psychological and physical, as well as [on] teamwork" (68). Jones' essay addresses the 'frontier myth' and its role in American culture, specifically as it applies to contestants on The Biggest Loser, who must leave behind their homes, friends, and family in order to journey to the California ranch-style training facility and participate in the program. Of the influence of the frontier myth on both American culture and the scripting of The Biggest Loser, Jones writes that "this notion of escape to the West is clearly in the foreground...[A]t the completion of the filmed episodes, the bracketed space of the ranch functions as a way of reintroducing or reintegrating the reformed 'outsider' back into mainstream culture" (69). A particularly interesting segment is found in Jones' discussion of how the newly thin become ambassadors to their respective home states, returning from the "wilderness" with a victory over obesity and thereby providing enormous pleasure for the viewing audience.

In "Disillusionment, Divorce, and the Destruction of the American Dream: An American Family and the Rise of Reality TV," Laurie Rupert and Sayanti Ganguly Puckett offer a rather shocking reminder of just how dismal 1970s America was, with the return of disillusioned Vietnam veterans, a slumping economy, and political corruption, all of which colored the content of television programming, including reality TV offerings such as An American Family. The show's producer, Craig Gilbert, did everything in his power to use An American Family as confirmation that "family and marriage were dying institutions and that the American dream was in decay" (83). Departing from the rigid tenets of cinema verité, the producer manipulated the casting and editing to paint as negative a picture of Vietnam-era America as was possible. The show touched on other hot-button topics, such as homosexuality and women's liberation, but aired for only one season. Rupert and Puckett argue that contemporary reality TV offerings differ significantly from those in the early years of the genre: "Shock and provocativeness are now the keys to success[,] and a series like An American Family...needed to incorporate elements of the fictional in order to continue" (95).

Although the collection needs more careful copy editing, the strength of the individual essays produces an interdisciplinary synthesis that is palpable and satisfying. Sprinkled with blank-and-white photographs, The Tube Has Spoken can thus be approached 'cafeteria style' without losing the momentum obviously intended by its editors.