a synopsis of reality television
...vial. It is my contention that reality television possesses merit in its exploration of contemporary culture, its examination of socio-politics and its presentation of human interaction as a reflection of segments of society. Reality / factual television justifies itself as a genre of television programs on the grounds of its ability to replicate reality, primarily for the purposes of entertainment. This view is shared by Philip Bell (2000), who further postulates that reality television is a combination of various characteristics of television genres. This fusion of several elements of television genres, points towards my discussion of hybridity (Stafford, 2000; Holmes, 2004; Livingstone and Lunt, 1994). A paper of this length cannot address hybridity adequately. Except insofar as to crudely suggest that the notion of hybridity is an extremely pertinent one, given that my larger theoretical question lies in the relevance of reality television’s very reason of being. When discussing hybridity, that includes an analysis of several TV genres and its pertinence to reality TV. I hope to persuade the reader that although reality TV aims to entertain, there exists beyond entertainment other qualities worthy of consideration in reality TV. To delineate my central argument that reality television is valuable watching, I shall employ the TV program ‘Big Brother’ as a case study. This is because Big Brother best supports my assertions of reality TV’s significance in our lives through its visuals (film stylistics), meanings (semiotics) and content (analytic and linguistic philosophy). Within the discourse of reality television, I will attempt to provide an exposition of two theoretical questions. They are: What is reality television? Why watch reality TV? The former will be answered descriptively and defined a priori, utilizing the notion of hybridity as a means to establish its existence. The fundamental reason to approach this question a priori is because reality television is problematic to categorize as an original genre of...