Your point about “conflict-authenticity” points is also apt, particularly since, while we can convince ourselves that, even if living in a house with strangers, we would not resort to hair-pulling and catfighting, we have likely had (or can at least envision having) the sorts of familial conflicts you find on the shows you list. Part of the reason the Joan & Melissa fight was so powerful, to me at least, is that these are precisely the sort of tensions I think all mothers & daughters have, at some point or another.

Perhaps Joan & Melissa are both savvy and spiraling? They figured the conflict would be sitcommy, but it ended up being more “real” than that?

Thanks for the food for thought!

What I’m curious about, and please chime in, is how the conflicts in reality dramas are more and more between actual family members rather than strangers-sharing-a-house. In Bad Girls Club, ANTM, Real World, etc., housemates lose it at each other all the time, but there’s little at stake because the relationships exist only within the parameters of the show. Audiences could begin to wonder if the conflict/drama isn’t all drummed up by producers (and be inauthentic, and thus less interesting).

So are producers, aware of audience cynicism, trying to ramp up the drama by using more characters who are *actual family members,* thus raising the stakes, and thus gaining conflict-authenticity points with viewers? (I’m thinking Real Housewives, Biggest Loser, Tori and Dean, etc.) The characters have a past of resentments and grievances (a deep well to draw from) and are supposed to have a future too. And then we get these extra-textual bits about whose not talking to whom after the taping or airing–allowing us to invest in the conflict’s authenticity even more. What happens to real families post-taping?

So, if Joan and Melissa are producers, are they savvy ones? Or are they spiraling into a hall of mirrors without end?