Reality TV
A tag for organizing content
Reality television is the most harmful genre in the history of moving pictures.
Patrick Radden Keefe’s “How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success” (New Yorker, 2019-01-07) is a fine essay on the subject. It follows the genre from its inception in Sweden, where state television aired the fascistic Expedition: Robinson (1997) after the first person “voted off the island” committed suicide in an unintentional tribute to Lord of the Flies (1954). Mark Burnett brought the concept to the US and then remade it for the “urban jungle” in The Apprentice (2004), a show that transformed the public image of its host.
The specific dishonesty of The Apprentice was masked by the greater lie that reality TV showed reality. This lie derives from less manipulative precursors going back to The Candid Microphone (1947–1950), a prank radio show.
Reviews
- Rough Science (2000)
- Mythbusters (2003)
- Historieätarna (2012)
- The Secret Life of 4, 5 and 6 Year Olds (2015)
- Världens sämsta indier (2018)
- Våra barns hemliga liv (2020)
Other
The following make direct references to the reality TV tag.
- “The Phantom Coach” (1864)
- “A Ghostly Manifestation” (1884)
- Dom kallar oss mods (1968)
- Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
- “Another Prince of Wales” (1970)
- The Running Man (1987)
- Old Enough (1990)
- Time Team (1994)
- Eternal Family (1997)
- A Mighty Wind (2003)
- A Hole in My Heart (2004)
- Rec (2007)
- “The Legend of Hallowdega” (2010)
- Fifteen Million Merits (2011)
- Tiger & Bunny (2011)
- The Hunger Games (2012)
- Coherence (2013)
- The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015)
- Bugs (2016)
- Morran & Tobias – Som en skänk från ovan (2016)
- Generation Wealth (2018)
- Planet plast (2018)
- Carole & Tuesday (2019)
- Tiger King (2020)