Welcome to the Age of Reality TV

Over the past couple of years, reality television has been taking over the networks. Almost every channel out there has some reality show or another. We see ABC’s The Bachelor, CBS’s The Amazing Race, Fox’s American Idol, MTV’s The Hills and so on. People were expecting a lot of different things that might come from the start of the new millennia. What they didn’t know was that the new millennia would bring a huge blast of global popularity of reality television. Through the shows such as America’s Next Top Model, Project Runway, Fear Factor, The Simple Life, Laguna Beach, and Survivor among many others, we saw a large increase in our celebrities as well.

For a lot of these people, rather than possessing any talent to give them the celebrity status, most of these people gained their fame through manufactured means. We gradually started to see the cast members of these shows in the media and magazines. The public got interested in what was being said about them, and voila! They have become celebrities.
One thing to wonder about is why reality television became such a widespread popular notion. Ratings for these shows tend to increase more and more as the years go by, where it’s to the point that almost every person in the public watches at least one reality show. Why do the viewers find these shows so appealing? This brings to mind Sean Redmond’s reading and the idea of intimate fame. Perhaps the reason viewers enjoy watching these shows so much is because of parasocial intimacy, which refers to the feeling of intimacy that a viewer feels with a celebrity, almost as if they know them, even though they don’t.

Maybe it’s easier to feel this connection with the people of reality tv, because they are regular people, just like us. People have been known to talk about these shows with their friends, talking about how something someone did was wrong, or how they don’t like a certain person and like another person. Even after knowing that certain parts of these shows are scripted and that they are edited in ways to give off a certain image that may be misleading, the public talks about them like they’re people that they know. This parasocial intimacy is important because people are more attracted to things they feel a connection with.