-Opening line of Gogglebox

A TV show about watching TV, in theory, sounds more banal than most contemporary reality programming. But in the UK, Gogglebox became a hit since it premiered in March 2013. It’s the stuff of reception studies scholars’ dreams, officially called an “observational documentary.”

Gogglebox follows households from across Britain responding to relevant news stories, reality TV shows like Top Chef and Britain’s Got Talent, and popular films from Titanic to The Full Monty.

As a sleeper success that recently won a BAFTA for “Best Reality & Constructed Factual,” it may have just reached its peak. Certainly, watching the cast watch the BAFTAS is a top meta moment, but also a great scene of pure jubilation. Bill from Cambridge claimed it was the first thing he’s won since the 1975 British Chess Championship; best friends Sandra and Sandy embraced in the south London neighborhood of Brixton; and exes-turned-pals Christopher and Stephen in Brighton hurriedly opened a bottle of champagne.

The cast, who welcome viewers in their homes with uncensored and sometimes quite explicit commentary, is what really makes the show so enjoyable. The appointed “Posh Ones,” Dominic and Stephanie, are rumored to be on the next installation of Celebrity Big Brother.

Retired duo June and Leon, the quintessential “old married couple” provide cheeky banter on everything from finding the remote control to Leon’s interview for MI6 when he was in the army. I couldn’t help but tear up when they watched a recent widower speak of his late wife, or during the famous scene in Titanic when Rose lets go of Jack. Following both scenes, Leon says to June, “I couldn’t do without you.”

But the most telling parts of the series for a foreigner in the UK, such as myself, are the households’ responses to recent political events.

June and Leon are quite possibly the most liberal-minded of the Gogglebox bunch. The two cheered when the UK passed same sex marriage legislation. They empathized while watching a documentary on a group of men risking their lives to find a better life in England.

Leon is particularly supportive of immigrants, citing that his grandfather came to the country as one. He expresses his distaste for the head of the UK Independent Party (UKIP) Nigel Farage, whose party swept victories in the recent European election. Leon voted for Labour “with a heavy heart,” and the party is attempting to appease UKIP, as former Prime Minister Tony Blair has addressed.

During a news brief on David Cameron, Leon pointed out that working class citizens do not vote for “posh rich boys who look after the posh rich boys,” while Reverend Kate from Nottinghamshire stated it isn’t easy to vote for him “when you’ve seen the heart of your city ripped out by a Tory government.”

I first came to London in 2011, and most of my graduate cohort also hailed from other nations, from China to Portugal to Canada, and our British colleagues were welcoming and open-minded. Since returning in 2013, immigration issues have exacerbated. Farage spoke of “less civilized” Europeans from Romania and Bulgaria who could cause crime while taking jobs and abusing the benefits and healthcare system. The blatant xenophobia struck a chord with me as I am originally from Romania.

The reactions on Googlebox towards foreigners helped me understand attitudes towards outsiders in the UK, as foreign born residents in continue to be on the rise. Goggleboxer Andrew is a retired hotelier in Brighton, and furiously responded to an ad by the current head of the Labour Party Ed Miliband who said there is nothing wrong with employing from abroad, but that the rules should be regulated so “local people get a fair crack at the whip”:

“No, local people should be offered the jobs first, not just a ‘fair crack at the whip,’ whatever that means. They should be offered the job first because they’re born here, brought up here, their parents were born here, their grandparents were born here, so they should be offered the available jobs first. And then, if all that local labor is absorbed … bring them in and that’s fine.”

Gogglebox has essentially assembled a televised social experiment. It encapsulates pop culture nuggets from film and TV, and the most significant news events of each week, with unfiltered reactions to how it impacts individual citizens based on their beliefs, backgrounds and education. It’s only a shame the Season 3 finale ended before the results of this European election. I know Leon in Liverpool will be disappointed but not surprised. And I know I’ll be waiting patiently for Season 4.

As with any sketch comedy program, Kroll Show – a vehicle for comedian and The League star Nick Kroll – is heterogeneous. But it privileges certain sketches through multiple segments and narrative progression. One sketch in particular produced a spinoff in this week’s second episode (“Soaked in Success”), suggesting particular importance within the series’ overall text. Last week’s premiere episode (“San Diego Diet”) parodied the “overprivileged, incompetent young women go to work” reality genre (think Kourtney and Kim Take Miami) in a sketch that spins off to a “successful at serving the overprivileged” reality parody (think Dr. 90210) in the second. The first, PubLIZity, centers on a pair of women, both named Liz, who run a publicity company. In response to a client’s request for “something tasteful,” they organize a branded party, “Pirate Girl Rum Presents a Rockin’ Beach Bash to Benefit Cupcakes for Canine Cancer.” The client, a rare straight man for Kroll Show, summarizes, “The event cost $20,000 and it brought in $4,000 and I feel foolish.”

Conflict arises in this sketch as the industrious Liz butts heads with the more easygoing one. The work of organizing overwhelms hardworking Liz who is left to manage alone as the other’s superficiality distracts from the party. Deciding that her dog is too ugly, second Liz visits an animal plastic surgeon, Dr. Armand. Addressing the doctor, Liz explains, “I don’t want something in my house that’s, like, ugly… you wouldn’t talk to an ugly person.” Dr. Armand reassures her, “No, I don’t. I only hire very attractive people and my third wife is one of the most beautiful people I know.” The second episode elaborates on Dr. Armand in a sketch posing as a spinoff of PubLIZity. Armand of the House, as it is called, follows the doctor’s exploits dealing with his bratty son and distant wife. His dysfunctional family life is due in large part to his image obsession. As suggested in the first episode, Dr. Armand chose his spouse based on looks and in return she cannot even bother to hide that her interest in Dr. Armand is purely material. In demonstration, the doctor purchases his wife’s intimacy with jewelry. When the moment comes, she fakes an Ambien coma while he awkwardly dry humps her in the least erotic sex scene ever. The younger Armand and, in another sketch, “Gerry” Bruckheimer’s son represent the offspring of the image-obsessed. They are, for lack of space to elaborate, the worst.

In the 1991 Steve Martin film L.A. Story, a character praises the city because, “No one is looking to the outside for verification that what they’re doing is alright.” These sketches criticize L.A.’s insular culture, but are simultaneously a participant in its navel-gazing. As a parody of reality television’s focus on the parasitic industries that groom the images of the people and things that in turn run Hollywood’s mass media image production, these sketches play a game of infinite regression. The meta-meta-meta-discourse brings out the mutant traits of its too-small cultural gene pool.

Straight men often function as an audience surrogate, offering an orthodox logic against which the humorous twisted logic can contrast. The one significant straight man in these sketches, who should infuse some level of logic into the situation, has no effect on the goings-on. In another, similar sketch titled “Rich Dicks,” L.A.’s idle rich completely ignore the warnings of a put-upon maid, reminiscent of Zoila from Flipping Out. In this way, these voiceless “straight men” represent more particularly in this the viewer of these fictional shows. Ignoring the techno-democratic promise that a showrunner might read our tweets, on this side of the screen from a unidirectional mass media, reasonability seems to have very little voice in that world.

Kroll Show thus reflects an implicit viewing strategy with regards to much reality television: we laugh with a sense of superiority at that insular, overprivileged world. The only difference is that most of the shows on E! and Bravo pretend to not be in on the joke except that once a week, Joel McHale shows up to paratextually snark on our behalf. With programs like the ones Kroll Show critiques, distinctions between dominant and oppositional approaches break down to the point where the categories cease to mean anything. So while part of a critical discourse of class and image, Kroll Show is not critically outside of the programming it critiques. Instead it recreates, albeit more explicitly, a dominant reading position that masquerades as oppositional.

Reality Gendervision:
Sexuality and Gender on Reality TV Conference
April 26-27, 2013
Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana

Submission deadline:  January 7, 2013

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of programming and scholarship about reality television, yet very little of that scholarship actively deals with the politics of gender that are so insistent on Reality TV.  From Survivor to Jon and Kate Plus 8 to American Idol to Jersey Shore, Reality TV constitutes an enormous and ever-growing archive about our collective desires and anxieties, which often crystallize around gender. The gendered politics of Reality TV’s production and consumption further highlight the need for a discussion specifically on how gender is of critical concern to Reality TV.

This conference is third in a series of international events and is aligned with two previous symposia: Gender Politics & Reality TV (Dublin, Ireland) and Gender Cultures and Reality TV (Auckland, New Zealand).  The US conference marks the imminent publication of a new edited collection, Reality Gendervision: Decoding Sexuality and Gender on Transatlantic Reality TV, edited by Brenda R. Weber and forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Outstanding papers presented at the Reality Gendervision conference will be invited for publication in a leading peer-reviewed journal in 2014.

Confirmed keynote addresses:

Misha Kavka, Department of Film, TV, and Media Studies,
University of Auckland

Laurie Ouellette, Communication Studies, University of
Minnesota

With a pre-conference presentation on Thursday, April 25th by:

Herman Gray, Sociology, University of California at Santa Cruz

Deadline for submissions:  January 7, 2013 (announcement of acceptances will be made by February 1, 2013).  Submit 350-word abstracts and a brief bio to Brenda Weber: breweber@indiana.edu or to rgv@indiana.edu

For more information, consult the conference website.

I’m teaching Othering right now in my Media and National Identity class, and so once more Amazing Race is in my mind. Functionally, next to no other primetime shows spend as much time outside the United States, thereby making Amazing Race one of the most prominent, widely seen sites on American television for the depiction of foreign countries and peoples. And thus its representation of the world stands to “weigh” a lot more than, for instance, CSI: New York’s depiction of New York City, given the vast number of televisual depictions of the Big Apple.

What I find so frustrating about the show is not simply that it ends up Othering again and again, but that it’s a format that could allow for such interesting challenges to ideas of Othering, and that occasionally does so. It’s like a B student who writes occasionally brilliant sentences, and hence who you know could do better if s/he really applied him/herself, yet who isn’t trying hard enough.

A key problem with televisual representations of other countries and their peoples is precisely that other countries and their people are so actively represented, by which I mean the writers and directors have very certain ideas of who they want on camera. Think of Survivor here, as perhaps the only other show on primetime American television that films overseas. The locals have been evacuated from the filming site, and are only encountered as a “reward,” and as accompaniment to the nice meal that serves as centerpiece for the reward (screaming out for bell hooks’ “Eating the Other”!). They are usually chosen for their stunning primitiveness, grass-skirts, ability to dance with a smile for the cast, and/or perhaps to impart ancient tribal lore.

By contrast, Amazing Race holds great promise as a site for encountering the world. The format sees teams racing through towns, cities, and countryside and encountering random individuals who have not been selected by the directors (cabbie luck in particular playing a key role in who wins or loses). Especially when we’re in cities and places that the crew simply cannot stage manage, we therefore see an eclectic mix of foreigners. Their comments are of course heavily edited, and selectively translated, but they hold more power to speak for themselves, and to represent themselves. This may take place through quotidian acts like giving directions, refusing a team member’s requests to buy something in a challenge, or so forth, but it frees them from the need to appear solely as “reward,” and as dancing, cooking primitives.

Yet the Amazing Race still falls back into tired, old set pieces. Phil’s mat serves as an especially contentious site, somewhere for smiling, costumed locals to sit and wait for hours for the pleasure of welcoming Americans to their country. Phil’s allowed to look pissed off at having his time wasted, but they just sit there and smile. Oddly, we don’t even see Phil talk to them (I’m not looking for a Benetton ad, but are they that odious?). And once they’ve said “welcome,” it’s time to shut up and let Phil speak again, as their agency is so severely restricted.

Then there are the tasks, many of which spectacularly reduce a nation to two predominant activities (“Beg or Boogie”!), and that hire a cast of colorful locals to be their very best cover-of-the-tour-book stereotypes. When the race went to Kenya, we had Masai warriors leaping up and down, in Russia it was babushkas planting potatoes (more on them in a second, though), and so forth.

I’m also constantly both fascinated and depressed by the battle of looking, and of the imperial gaze, that goes on in many episodes. On one hand, the show often conforms to a “Heart of Darkness”-esque rendering of foreigners as painted onto a backdrop, mere props to draw the attention back to the American subjects, who constantly speak of and for the locals. See Chinua Achebe’s famous broadside attack on Conrad for more details on how insidious this kind of Othering is. On the other hand, the photographers often treat us to images of the foreigners staring at the American racers, and occasionally offer us delicious soundbytes of them criticizing them (as when, in a recent season, a group of babushkas engaged in wonderfully wry commentary on the racers’ plowing techniques and general physique). We’re also shown egregiously bad behavior from some racers, and the editing usually chastises the offending, offensive team. It might be easy to see this as a reminder that we’re looked at as much as the foreigners are, and at times it encourages us to look with the locals’ eyes, not the racers’. Yet there is no problematization of our own looking and gaze as viewers. The suggestion is a classically white liberal feel-good one that some travelers are bad, but that we’re not – our own motivations for watching, and investment in or at least culpability with the exoticization and spectacularization of difference, are never really questioned.

Despite all my criticism, though, I keep watching. The simple fact is that the show is doing more than most are to at least engage with the world at large. Us non-Americans don’t come out of this process looking all that good, and I’d love to reform the program in many ways (Sorry, Phil, but you’re not needed: let’s replace you with locals who can say more. How about international racing teams? And please, please, let’s do something about the challenges). But there’s potential, which is met at times. There are no tribal elimination scenes and fauxthentic team names. The soundtrack is rarely a lost recording session from Peter Gabriel. Nobody’s in jail at the hands of a brutal foreign government. The countries are more than just an amalgam of their lovely wildlife and pitiable slums. And none of them are being bombed or supposedly plotting the downfall of the USA en masse. In the radically culturally chauvinist landscape of American television, that alone puts Amazing Race in a rare position.

Those were good days, but I’m afraid they’re gone.  Long gone.  Even my grandmother now knows  that reality starlets often do retakes in order for the “real” action to be suitable for cameras to capture it, cameramen get scrubbed out of the “film”, and something like New York Reality TV School exists to teach reality wannabes how to earn their 15 minutes of “fame”.  Indeed, it’s impossible to write a paragraph about reality TV anymore without putting something in scare quotes–that’s how inauthentic the format has become.

And so it was with both skepticism and delight that I tuned in to WE’s newest series, Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best? The premise of the show is simple: Joan Rivers moves across the country to be closer to daughter Melissa and grandson Cooper.  Of course, bossy Joan can’t keep her mouth shut, and so family drama (and big jewelry and hilarity…it is Joan Rivers, after all) ensues.  Without a home of her own, Joan has to stay in Melissa’s house (overly full with wacky friends, of course), and the two bicker as Joan goes to a plastic surgeon, the family eats take-out every night, and mother & daughter plot new ways to develop the Rivers family brand.

When I pitched this post a few weeks ago, I envisioned a snark-filled analysis of the bizarre experience of watching a show that purports to represent “reality” that is produced by and stars two immensely successful media producers–and believe me when I say: it is a bizarre experience.  It’s absolutely impossible to take any aspect of the show seriously, for the most part.  The two women sit in their (joint) confessional and calmly explain to the cameras how important it is to stay in the public eye, to keep the brand growing and fresh…and then kooky Joan just happens to end up as a contestant on Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? or spreading a deceased friend’s ashes around Beverly Hills.  This is the precise opposite of “reality,” and its over-the-top, in-your-face artifice makes any suspension of disbelief impossible.  The show itself draws attention to its function as a publicity tool, and each segment seems more contrived than the last–not least because the stars are constantly reminding you of their function as producers.

But just when I was at the height of eye-rolling smugness, something strange caused me to rethink my stance.  The fourth episode of the series, “Family Feud”, moves along its manufactured path as Melissa’s boyfriend Jason suggests that perhaps the family should go through some team-building exercises to help them cope with the stresses of living together.  The plot, obviously another cleverly contrived scheme suitable for functioning as the narrative thread of an episode, carries along as one might expect.  Melissa & Jason interview a string of goofy life coaches, psychiatrists and team-builders, and settle on a New Agey woman whose motto is “Funky to Fabulous.”  They set up Joan, who (purportedly) doesn’t know what’s about to happen, and the life coach makes them don silly hats to “represent their roles in the house” and leads them through some inane exercises.  And, believe it or not, that’s when things get weird, as Melissa, and then Joan, really begin to open up about what’s bugging them, and the whole mess gets very personal, ugly and uncomfortable, as you can see in the clip below.

What’s noteworthy about this episode is its apparent break with the overly manufactured nature of the series.  Viewers get the sense that something went slightly awry, here, and we’re no longer watching a cutesy segment intended to follow the episode’s theme–we’re seeing something “real.”  Despite Joan & Melissa’s position as producers and media moguls, their tears and anguish seem real, and the pain is palpable.  This seems like the kind of arguments we’ve all had–or considered having–with our own mothers or daughters.  In the following episode, “Can We Not Talk?”, the two aren’t speaking when Joan leaves LA for New York in order to put some space between them.  Unlike the episodes that came before, these are awkward, uncomfortable, and filled with tears and tension until the two finally speak at the end of “Can We Not Talk?”, apologizing and promising a reunion in LA.

It’s instances like this one on Joan & Melissa that keep me watching reality TV, that remind me of the Real World promise that reality TV allows us to “See what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.”  In this case, of course, it’s that the producers forgot, in the heat of the moment, that they were producing–and they got real, to some degree.  After the initial crisis has blown over, I’ve no doubt the series will attempt to structure itself around recouping some useful themes and jokes out of it, but there were certainly moments of “reality” in there, despite any production intended to smooth it over.  “Reality TV” is a bizarre concept, and Joan & Melissa provides a bizarre incarnation of the format, given the stars’ own institutional histories.  But despite the fact that we’ll never be able to fully believe in the “truth” of reality TV, every once in awhile there’s still something “real” that’s worth watching , if you’re willing to put up with the production that surrounds it.

This is especially true of a show like Project Runway, which in recent years has seemingly been on every time you turn around. Thanks to the series’ forced hiatus as a result of lawsuits regarding its move to Lifetime, Runway aired three seasons – 49 episodes in total – in just 14 months between August 2009 and October 2010. This was exaggerated by the sixth season being “on the shelf” for a lengthy period, and the seventh season being rushed to counteract poor viewer response to the franchise’s Lifetime debut, but the series’ omnipresence is demonstrative of general trends within the genre (if in an exaggerated form).

However, the same period has been marked by the absence of two of the series’ most prominent international spinoffs: both Project Runway Australia (2008-Present) and Project Runway Canada (2007-2009) debuted in their respective countries to relative success, earning second seasons and, in the case of the Canadian version, even moving from a niche cable outlet to a national network. Each show largely followed the formula of the American series, with a famous fashion model host (Kristy Hinze in Australia, Iman in Canada), a fashion industry mentor, and a collection of celebrity guests and judgmental observers to complete the package.

The basic format of the series may have remained intact when the show made its way to other countries, but the scheduling model has been lost in translation. Both the Australian and Canadian series aired only one season per year, and both dealt with substantial hiatuses: this is particularly true for the Australian series, which has been off the air for nearly two years. While America’s love affair with reality television has had international ramifications when formats like Project Runway which originated in the U.S. are spread to countries around the world, the way in which the series are scheduled seems to have been considerably less influential internationally.

Some of this certainly has to do with simple industrial realities. American cable networks have the luxury of appealing to niche audiences, with networks like Bravo and Lifetime able to position shows like Project Runway as signature series designed to deliver female viewers to their advertisers. International producers, meanwhile, are working with less industrial infrastructure in general, and most likely less in the way of targeted cable networks that seem a fit for narrowcast reality programming as well. They simply don’t have the resources to schedule two seasons in a single year, which makes emulating the American schedule more challenging.

However, I find myself curious if there are more cultural reasons for the vast proliferation gap between Project Runway and its international adaptations. If we look at the vast array of versions, the longest-running has been the United Kingdom’s Project Catwalk, which lasted three seasons from 2006-2008. While I haven’t seen the series, I do wonder whether its relative longevity stems from the prominence of London as one of the world’s fashion capitals, at least relative to Melbourne or Toronto. Even within the American series, location and setting seem to play a prominent role: viewers and critics alike panned the series’ move to Los Angeles in Season Six, prompting Lifetime to promote the return to New York as the defining feature of the seventh season. Perhaps the same principle applies internationally, and certain locations can only sustain a couple of seasons before fading away into local pop culture history.

And yet, some part of me wants to believe that this may be a purposeful choice on the part of international producers. While these changes are perhaps facilitated by concerns over financial commitments and cultural limitations, there seem to be creative benefits to this scheduling model. Personally, despite having seen countless seasons of the American series beforehand, both the Canadian and Australian versions felt remarkably novel. The format was more or less the same, but the wait between seasons made their introductions more eventful, and their conclusions more effectively bittersweet. The return of the American series feels like routine, but is reality television not (like television in general) more effective – and affecting – when we anticipate its return with baited breath?

With a new host secured, Project Runway Australia will return for its overdue third season later this year (although on a new network). In an era where the American version has shifted to overstuffed 90-minute episodes and barely takes a breath before plunging into a new season of “making it work,” there is something wonderfully refreshing about the notion of Project Runway being a scarce commodity; it’s too bad, then, that most American viewers rarely get to experience such a feeling.

One night as I flipped through the channels, I came face to face with Brad Womack, this year’s bachelor. His vacant look, mannequin smile, and pumped-up physique reminded me of everything I loved about The Bachelor: An Officer and a Gentleman, the last season I watched, where a beefcake guy walked around with his shirt off, said cheesy lines such as “I’m in Heaven when I’m with Bevin” (the name of a female contestant), and spouted every romantic cliché possible. I figured the new season with Brad Womack would show how hollow an unquestioned embrace of traditional patriarchal romance and romantic coupling can be. Mainly, I thought I would be experiencing the carnivalesque pleasures of reality dating shows that Jonathan Gray has astutely noted, ones that can subvert gender roles and patriarchy. I hadn’t seen Brad’s previous season when he left two women at the altar and incurred the scorn of viewers who believed in fairytale romance.

Normally I find the carnivalesque pleasures of certain reality series or subgenres painful. They lead to such corny moments that are both hard and delightful to watch, and usually the painful moments question normative assumptions about our identities. I’m all for this type of pain. It’s masochistic, but fun.

I think I’ve found a different type of pain on this season of The Bachelor. While this season has carnivalesque moments filled with over-the-top romantic clichés, love-crazed women, and a zombiefied prince, I’m amazed by the way the season has the patriarchal past impinging on the happiness of the present and the hopes of the future. So far episodes have spent an inordinate amount of time explaining how Brad went into three years of intensive therapy after ditching his two love interests in his last season, and Brad goes on about how he had commitment issues because he felt abandoned by his father at a young age. Brad recounts numerous stories of his father coming back into his life, only to leave quickly and devastate our beau. I was particularly surprised when Brad talked about how he turned to body building in an effort to overcome his emotional weaknesses that he developed from being abandoned. Even he concedes that his inflated body is meaningless. Brad claims he came back on The Bachelor in hopes of freeing himself from the past and finding happiness in the present and future.

A few contestants add to the theme of patriarchal ruins destroying the happiness of the present and future. Emily seems trapped in unhappiness because her husband died in a plane crash on a business trip, yet she has come on The Bachelor in hopes of discovering happiness in life. And Ashley S. talks to Brad about the devastating sudden death of her father and how she is trying to find peace in the present. Brad has developed what I call the “patriarchal crisis” look. Every time a woman tells Brad of a devastating loss of a man in her life, he clenches his lips and looks down to the right. It seems to be the image of the season.

Sometimes I feel this season of The Bachelor shares more in common with Vertigo than it does with other seasons; however, maybe I haven’t seen enough previous seasons to make such a grand claim. But I feel like I’m watching a traumatized man re-enter the same love story when history might not allow him to find happiness this time around either.

This season is painful to watch, but not in a fun, carnivalesque way. Rather, the pain seems to be much more serious and reveals the emotional trauma that we can experience when we blindly submit ourselves to normative ideas of patriarchy and the nuclear family. Common sense tells me that the producers aren’t consciously promoting this, but it appears prominently in this season because of casting.

Where is this theme going, and what are we to make of it? Perhaps this theme about the past and patriarchy will simply die out and be replaced by the carnivalesque that dominates reality dating shows. I’d be fine with that, since I initially started to re-watch The Bachelor to experience some subversive fun. But I hope that if the season continues with issues of the past and happiness, it envisions a coupling that doesn’t fall back on assumptions of a good man simply being there for his family—as if that in and of itself is good enough—or a good woman simply standing by her man just because he is there and alive. If issues of the past continue to concern the series, can The Bachelor work through a vision of love that truly frees these people from the ruins of patriarchy instead of redeeming patriarchal roles for them?  Promos for the season hint that Brad might be abandoned by the woman he proposes to because she can’t free herself from the past. If this season continues with its Vertigo trajectory, I hope the final rose ceremony isn’t on an exotic ocean-side cliff with nuns lurking around. If it is, I hope the producers attach Brad’s love interests to bungee cords and harnesses.

For as long as I’ve been watching Maury, I could never pinpoint what was so appealing about revealing the identity of a promiscuous woman’s “baby daddy,” or the truth as to whether or not some creepy-looking truck driver was lying about an affair with a male co-worker.  Something about the show’s dynamics brought me back to the couch time and time again.  So one day, like any intellectually curious researcher with too much time on his hands, I went looking for answers directly from the source.

On March 5^th, 2010, the missus and I drove up to Stamford, Connecticut, in order to participate as audience members of the Maury show.  Our episode, “Sexy Secret Fantasies Revealed and Fulfilled,” first aired on March 25^th, 2010, and featured copious “hot bods” and lame stories from scantily-clad guests.  In retrospect, the most memorable part of being an audience member was learning how the show achieves such a consistently united, cacophonous reaction from its audience: through coaching from the production crew.

Before filming began, Maury’s energetic producer got the crowd roaring with a brief lecture on how to get on TV: “If [a guest makes] a corny joke, laugh TEN TIMES HARDER than usual,” he boomed.  “Exaggerate your reactions; make them bigger than real life—ham it up, people!”  After explaining how to “properly respond” to typical situations encountered on the show, he got the audience to practice cheering vivaciously by promising free T-Shirts to the most vocal participants. When someone didn’t participate enthusiastically enough, he would playfully single them out; fellow audience members were instructed to boo such deviants, and they kindly obliged.  It was clear to me that the Maury crew was tacitly facilitating and crafting a very specific behavioral response from the audience—seemingly outside of the participants’ own realm of awareness.

The producer, adopting the role of the authority within the audience’s hierarchy, establishes a play frame with the audience in which they become pre-conditioned to adhere to the show’s directions and prerogatives. Appeals are made to the audience through intrinsic rewards, and nonconformity is punished via directed crowd jeering—this is tolerated because of the play frame that serves to suspend the full force of reality.  By allowing the show’s producer to guide their actions, the audience members partake in an interactive scene that may actually contest or override their own constructed boundaries of political correctness with regards to race, the social organization of class, conception and fidelity, or ethnic and cultural stereotypes.  At the producer and editors’ instruction, the audience’s outward expression of emotion is meant to be received as the “right” viewpoint, while the guests are either sympathetic figures or antagonists, depending on the contextual storyline.

In essence, the audience underscores and champions the desired editorial angle of the show’s episode.  The viewers at home are meant to psychologically connect with this ethos by rhetorically strategizing an imagined position of moral or cultural superiority over the episode’s villains.  Thus, the Maury show’s real power comes from rhetorically granting permission for fans to explore contentious or taboo subject matters in an open forum.  On the set of Maury (or at home watching along), it is acceptable to poke fun at “white trash rednecks” or mock black men that fathered numerous children with six different women—on this show, guests’ actions can be critiqued by tapping into the unspoken prejudices of its audience members. The viewers’ internal anxiety over political correctness becomes neutralized as the audience subjugates the guests’ behaviors or actions while reinforcing their superior position.

With these observations and analyses in mind, should I be ashamed to admit that I enjoy watching the Maury show?  Should you?  I don’t think so.

I am a folklorist, and one that is particularly interested in how people express themselves through subversive material in an effort to circumvent societal restrictions on decorum.  As much as I would like to say otherwise, I subscribe to the adage that everyone has their own prejudices within them and that these perspectives have been shaped and acquired throughout their lives.  The “Trash TV” genre allows its viewers—some of whom may be underprivileged given the aforementioned commercials’ targeted demographic—to come away with a greater sense of normalcy and superiority through the misfortunes and buffoonery of guests whose personas fall below their threshold of respectability.  While feeling “better than” someone else isn’t typically a socially-sanctioned practice, it is clear that the Maury show’s antagonists are portrayed as lowlifes that deserve to be seen as beneath us.  Viewers are led to walk away from an episode entertained, but also with a greater sense that their own lives are not as bad as “those people” on the screen; the feeling is subconsciously reinforced every time that the show is watched.  As that point of internal satisfaction is reached, the mission of the show’s producer is fully accomplished.

How’s that for a final thought?

Rarely has there been a reality contestant as polarizing as Palin, whose lineage has created both fervent fandom and intense ridicule during her surprisingly long tenure on Dancing with the Stars. On tonight’s finale she was labeled as “the shy girl next door who has transformed into a dancer and become a surprise contender,” but in truth she’s a weak dancer who beat out stronger competitors thanks to substantial voter support. That support have been broadly labeled a right-wing conspiracy (without much “real” data available to justify this), while her detractors have taken to shooting their televisions in protest.

However, this sort of controversy is a regular occurrence on shows like Dancing with the Stars or American Idol. In fact, the very first season of Dancing with the Stars in 2005 created a similar controversy when Kelly Monaco, an ABC soap star, defeated John O’Hurley despite many viewers feeling he was the superior dancer (as would be natural in any close vote). ABC, of course, capitalized on this fairly innocuous controversy by airing a special “Dance-Off” for charity, which O’Hurley won. American Idol, meanwhile, has had numerous contestants who “went home too early,” including eventual Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson and eventual multi-platinum recording artist Chris Daughtry.

These controversies are natural, I would argue, considering reality television’s tenuous relationship with the basic principles of democracy. Ryan Seacrest refers to the winner of American Idol as “Your American Idol” to suggest a sense of ownership, while So You Think You Can Dance? crowns “America’s Favorite Dancer,” as opposed to its best dancer, in each of its seasons. Both shows suggest that they are turning over a life-altering decision to the American public, as agency over the future of a young singer or dancer is transferred to the voters’ telephones (and their parent’s texting plan).

And yet this agency is seen as problematic when mixed with larger questions of credibility. If the process of voting has viewers exercising their democratic rights, then the existence of judges is meant to introduce some level of meritocratic consideration of talent. While shows like American Idol wholly turn the vote over to the people, shows like So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing with the Stars give judges considerable power over the outcomes – in the case of Dancing with the Stars, 50% of the power – because dancing is considered to be technical enough to require an expert’s opinion (whereas singing is something we all think we can judge, even when we are actually tone deaf).

This all seems particularly silly for Dancing with the Stars, as we’re talking about democratic engagement and legitimacy in a series about C-List (at best) celebrities competing to win the mirrorball trophy (which is exactly what it sounds like). However, we can’t deny that this particular season became a legitimate national media event, with Palin’s supporters emphasizing their democratic right to support their candidate while her detractors argued that her inability to actually dance makes her continued presence a detriment to the series’ “integrity.”

Of course, this is no different from the original concerns over Monaco’s victory on some level, but the political overtones are exaggerating this controversy. It is the overlaying of real democracy over fake democracy, a microcosm of national political tensions within a dancing competition featuring a daughter of a politician (Palin), an actress (Jennifer Grey) best known for a movie released over twenty years ago (however timeless it may be), and an actor (Kyle Massey) best known for his stint on That’s So Raven who the media has completely forgotten about (or, more likely, didn’t notice in the first place).

The stakes for tonight’s results show were non-existent, in reality: the series has too little legitimacy for an “undeserved” Bristol Palin victory to substantially alter its future prospects, and a Bristol Palin victory is not going to be a sudden turn in the tide of popular opinion surrounding her mother (or have any real democratic meaning, as James Poniewozik argues).

But the show, already a bizarre mix of hyper-seriousness and campy excess, was forced to address allegations of voter fraud and attacks on its legitimacy; the show even opened with an explanation of how the voting process worked, explaining the 50/50 model as if they were 24-hour newscasters discussing why Florida meant everything in 2000. For two long hours filled with novelty dance routines and advertising disguised as musical performance, the audience’s faith in democracy depended on the envelope in the hands of Tom Bergeron.

And then, in a single moment, it all fell away. Bristol was revealed to be the competition’s Ralph Nader, a spoiler rather than a contender, finishing in third place and denying ABC the final moments of tension which would have divided the nation along partisan lines. Instead, Jennifer Grey steps out of the corner to take the mirrorball trophy, a victory for dancing and for the series’ own twisted meritocratic democracy.

Bristol, meanwhile, steps back from the political edge: while she told the camera early in the episode that her victory would be a middle finger to those who hate her mother, her loss becomes a personal tale of the shy girl next door coming out of her shell. Like many politicians, she weathered apparent death threats and substantial critics to prove to the world that anyone can run for office or, in this case, put on colorful costumes and compete for a shiny disco ball on a stick.

And isn’t that what democracy is all about?