The Reality TV Story
I can talk about all sorts of different aspects of nerd or geek culture another day. But I can only stay away from reality television for so long before my hands start to shake from the withdrawal. Today, I wanted to talk about one of the more interesting aspects of reality television: the story. I’ve talked before about the complicated nature of the “reality” part of reality television, and anyone that follows my work for even a short amount of time will know that I love a complicated view of reality. But stories are important — stories are important in scripted television and in reality television because stories are important to us as people. We tell stories every day when someone simply asks about how our day was. So of course reality television needs a good story.
I wanted to spend a quick time today talking about what it means to build a narrative in reality television and how these various narratives form. Before we get too into the weeds of it, we should pull back and first talk about types of reality television. In my personal understanding, there are two primary forms of reality tv: the competition show and the docu-soap.
The competition show is pretty straight-forward. These are shows like Top Chef, Survivor, the Amazing Race, or Project Runway. The show centres on the innate drama that arises when a group of people are all competing for the same one prize that only one person can win. Sometimes, these shows focus on the talent of their participants, such as Top Chef with talented chefs or Project Runway with talented fashion designers. Others focus on other forms of competition, like the Amazing Race which focuses on a team’s ability to navigate in unknown areas. Shows like the Bachelor or Love Island are competition shows for dating — where the winner is the one who falls in love the best. Though people would probably not word it quite like that, it’s basically what the show is.
Docu-soaps, on the other hand, tend to be more documentary style but with soap-opera like elements. These follow the same cast of characters and we, as an audience, get to live alongside their day-to-day behaviours. Shows like Keeping Up With the Kardashians or the Real Housewives franchise fit this style. The soap opera element is only in the inherent drama of the show and the drawing on personal and social turmoil.
Most often, reality shows are some mix of these two elements. While there are some pure forms — I think game shows are pretty pure competition shows — most borrow elements from one another and this helps to build their own production and narrative. Love Island and the Bachelor, for example, are both pretty solid competition shows but use and rely on a lot of docu-soap mechanics to follow the individual cast of characters.
Typically, competition shows have two forms of storytelling happening simultaneously: you have the individual narratives of each contestant, and the overarching storyline of the show’s season. The show needs to have the individual narratives of contestants in order to build interest and stake. Audience members also learn to connect to some contestants over others, and therefore root for one to win more than another.
Top Chef, for example, likes to demonstrate how a chef-testant has grown and developed through the course of the show as their storytelling trope, even if the participant leaves the show early. A contestant learning over the show “to cook my food” is an often-repeated storyline on Top Chef, where a contestant learns the importance of the food they grew up loving. Emotional connections to food, particularly food’s connection to family, is an important recurring theme in Top Chef.
This is where the infamous call-home started to become an important marker in storytelling. Shows like Top Chef and Project Runway began showing a character call their family typically on an episode where they went home. This wasn’t done massively on purpose, but that the call home was an easy way to tell the narrative of that contestant in as expediated a matter as possible because they were going to be leaving that episode. Though as audiences caught on to the call-home as a signal of imminent departure, editors have started spreading out these scenes far more evenly.
Alongside these individual contestant narratives is the over-arching narrative of the larger season. For Top Chef, these is pretty simply “who wins Top Chef?”. But sometimes, competition shows can have far more complicated over-arching narratives. This is something that the Bachelor leaves in the hands of their “lead” — the Bachelor or the Bachelorette that the contestants are all competing for. Perhaps the most salient in recent years has been the Bachelorette Michelle, whose story as a young black woman led her to carry the narrative of “being seen” throughout the entire season. This was not just a notion that Michelle looked for in her suitors, but also was repeated in the contestants themselves as they often commented on feeling “seen” by Michelle in their more intimate chats.
The episodic competition shows also have the storyline of the challenges set for each episode and how this impacts the wider narrative. For the Bachelor, each challenge is phrased as an important aspect of a relationship, such as learning to trust, or — a favourite for the Bachelor — learning to “let your walls down” and “be vulnerable”. The contestants who do well are those who embrace this narrative and let it become part of their own narrative, leading to them declaring an important personal secret or piece of their history to the lead, inspired by the events of the day. For more talent-based competition shows like Top Chef or Project Runway, the episodic overall narrative is how individual contestants approach the challenge and learn to grow from it. Maybe their story is that they are afraid of the challenge and worried they will do poorly, which they overcome and rise to the top. Or maybe the fear gets to them too much and it causes them to go home.
Docu-soaps differ from competition shows in their length of time with the cast. The Bachelor only has the same cast for one season, and then the whole cast resets for the next season. Other than the judges, the same is for Top Chef or Project Runway. The Real Housewives, in contrast, only have cast changes slowly, maybe only one or two will be replaced between seasons. Or sometimes there will be no replacements at all because the cast is working very well as-is. Keeping Up with the Kardashians only has new cast members when there are new members of the family, and often they do not take as much of centre-stage as the Kardashian-Jenners themselves.
These shows therefore have more time for the audience to develop a kinship with their cast, and their storylines do not only need to be developed over one season but can be developed over multiple seasons. But that being said, each episode and each season still needs to be able to stand on its own as a separate story itself. Think of an episode like a chapter in a larger book series — the chapter is still an important crafting of narrative but is only feeding a small part of a much larger narrative. So, episodically, storylines don’t necessarily have to be started and ended, but at least one storyline needs to have a significant development. Developments can either be taking a step forward toward “solving” the conflict, or it can be a step into further conflict and turmoil.
And this is where the role of editing becomes immensely important. Most cast members have their own producer who kind of follows them around and stokes the fires of conflict for scenes to be shot effectively. These producers are obviously important for the role of the reality show production to ensure that important scenes have these developments in storyline that we look for. However, these producers do not often, in the moment, have the same hindsight on the full season that editors do. One of my favourite elements of these was in the recent season (season two) of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. There was a full scene left in where cast member Jen Shah is joking around with her assistant Stuart about how he helps to make her so much money in the business. This short scene would probably have been left on the editing room floor if it wasn’t for the later arrest of Jen Shah for fraud, and her assistant Stuart pleading guilty to all crimes related to their joint business. Jen later claimed that Stuart did not really work for her in those businesses, leading to that innocuous clip being played over and over again in the show.
Anyway, this was a fun little overview of the way that stories can be crafted, understood, and experienced on reality television. It’s one of those interesting elements that can be uncovered the more you watch and delve into like-narratives. I’m sure there can be a lot more said on the subject — and maybe I will do so when the withdrawals from reality tv hit me again.
