Week 12

How has the documentary genre influenced reality TV and how it presents the ‘real’?

Documentaries, in general, are basically a snapshot of an aspect of normal human life, or are an insider's look into "another world" we may never experience once in our lives. Compare that to reality TV, which is simply "real" entertainment involving "real" people in "real" situations, and we have a small problem. Sure, they both entertain viewers, but in wholly different ways. Documentaries aim to mostly educate and alter the perceptions of viewers, get them to think about what it is they're doing, while reality TV just simply entertains viewers without any kind of heavy thinking necessary.

Documentaries are very real, in that the people shown in them are real people and not necessarily actors. How does the average viewer know that though? They may simply be people hired on temporarily to help with filming, and are considered real people because they don't sound like they're reading a script. This is where reality TV comes in, as it takes this thought process and creates just that: real people reading off of a script. A good example of this is the popular MTV show "Date My Mom", which introduces a guy going out with the mothers of 5 potential girlfriends. Out of those 5 girlfriends, he has to choose one of them to go out with via elimination style. The show makes very good use of scripts, which is slightly annoying, as the scripts are EVERYWHERE: on the dates, at the elimination, pretty much everywhere. Not only that, but they are read, not spoken, which removes the viewer from the immersion completely.

Reality TV, compared to Documentaries, do not present a true reality, as the situations thrown at the people in reality TV are most often scripted and pre-planned. Also, there are likely scripts   involved in certain points (or everywhere, as shown above). Sometimes the real people aren't exactly real at all, and are instead renowned actors paid to appear on the show for easy money.

Overall, Documentaries and Reality TV present the 'real' in different ways: through real people being insiders into other lives or circumstances, or by showing real or "fake" people through a camera lens, giving them situations to get through in different ways. This can work as entertainment, or it can work for educational purposes. Either way, they both present the real as a completely different object: Documentaries present it as a factor in determining how we perceive what is shown in the documentary, and reality TV presents it as something to be trivialised and entertained through scripts and situations.