True Story: What Reality TV Says about Us

by Danielle J. Lindemann

An often ridiculed form of entertainment, seemingly marginal to the serious business of life, reality TV is in fact a pop-cultural touchstone that illuminates our everyday experiences and can help us to make sense of complex social forces. The genre is a fun-house mirror, to be sure, but one that powerfully reflects the contours of our social world. It takes the elements that are central to our culture—our collective preferences, our norms and taboos, and the jagged edges of our social inequalities—and beams them out to us in frenetic detail.

one experiment, for instance, participants who were exposed to an episode of the weight-loss show The Biggest Loser, versus an episode of a nature show, walked away with a significantly greater dislike of overweight individuals.14 But these shows have arguably more constructive outcomes as well. Another study, published in The American Economic Review, found strong evidence that the show 16 and Pregnant had reduced births by teens.15 Reality TV is important to understand, not only because of what it can tell us about our lives but because of what it does to us. The experience of watching these shows, like looking in any mirror, is interactive. We see ourselves, and then we groom ourselves accordingly.

These programs show us the ugly places we’ve been and the ugly places where we still are; they illuminate the inequalities that cut our culture deeply, leaving ruts we may never repair. They showcase elements of our culture in drag form, bold and garish. At the same time, the genre holds the potential to explore new possibilities, diversities, and creativities. By looking at reality TV, we gain insight not only into this genre but also into interpersonal dynamics, large and small—ultimately, better comprehending our own lives within the context of broader forces.

Often when we have troubles in our lives, Mills wrote, we lack a sociological imagination. We tend to see things as the result of individual failures rather than as the products of large-scale sociohistorical forces.

instance, developed the concept of a “looking glass self.” Just as we might examine ourselves in a mirror and be happy or unhappy based on how we look, he argued, we see ourselves reflected in other people’s reactions to us, and that helps to shape not only how we act but who we think we are.12 Erving

For Marx and Engels, ideology is not something that stems organically from each of our individual brains; rather, it’s born from our social relationships and functions as an instrument of power.8 We sustain the current arrangement of power when we interpret work that involves manual labor as less important. The classical sociologist Max Weber makes the related point that engagement in physical labor tends to disqualify one from status. He gives the example of artistic work that’s more labor-like (such as masonry) being lower-status work than artistic practice that’s less labor-like (such as oil painting).9 While we can likely all think of exceptions to this rule—for example, professional athletes—it’s still generally true that our most esteemed work is more intellectual than physical, and vice versa.

They’re showing us something old. In 1867, Marx drew a distinction between “use value” and “exchange value”—a distinction that may be used, for instance, to demonstrate why gold is more expensive than water. Water has higher use value than gold, because we need it to survive. Yet gold has higher exchange value than water because even though it’s a hunk of metal that serves virtually no inherent function, it’s a universal currency. Weber, writing in the early 1900s, made a related argument, observing that most highly esteemed occupations were not necessarily the ones that garnered the highest wages, and vice versa. If we aligned prestige and compensation, Weber argued, society would look very different.12 Indeed, research suggests that even today, the job categories that people view as most prestigious—for instance, firefighters and clergy—are not necessarily the highest paying, and the other way around as well.13 So while it may chafe us that Kylie Jenner earns a million dollars per Instagram post,14 there’s precedent for this. (Even the concepts of “skill” and “talent,” though, are social constructions, presuming excellence at tasks that are socially valued. I can wiggle each ear independently, which I think is pretty special, but I’ve never earned a cent for it.) Of course, this all presumes that the Kardashian/Jenners don’t have any type of marketable skill or talent—which, to be clear, is not a foregone conclusion. These women (and maybe Rob) have managed to parlay a s...

Reality TV, with its emphasis on archetypes and difference, amplifies these typologies. The sociologist Patricia Hill Collins uses the term “controlling images” to refer to media’s stereotypical portrayals of marginalized groups—which, she argues, serve to normalize the power structure and allow us to view facets of culture such as racism and sexism as natural and inevitable.15

The entire subgenre of makeover TV reminds us which bodies we perceive as acceptable and good. On these shows, as in our lives, our bodies are understood not simply as collections of cells that exist neutrally in the world; they can be evaluated and altered accordingly.32 On Dr. Pimple Popper (TLC, 2018–present), for instance, the dermatologist and YouTube sensation Dr. Sandra Lee remedies extreme skin conditions, while over on Botched (E!, 2014–present), Drs. Terry Dubrow and Paul Nassif (both formerly of Housewives shows) remedy the mistakes of prior plastic surgeons via additional plastic surgery. These shows “fix” their participants in ways that sustain existing class hierarchies. Transformational television is like other types of reality TV in that it promotes middle-class norms of fitness, thinness, and goodness.

Why do we perceive wealth as good? One might argue that it’s only natural to crave nice things, to want to live in the greatest comfort possible, and to feel the urge to telegraph our success to our neighbors like a peacock fanning its tail. Yet to some extent, these impulses are a particular product of Western capitalism. Tracing the origins of our capitalist system, Max Weber has argued that we can locate its roots in late-1800s Protestantism. At that time, financial success in the present life became seen as a marker that one was destined for greatness in the afterlife as well. Thus germinated the “Protestant ethic,” in which people are inspired to work hard and accumulate money, to demonstrate that they are among the Chosen. This ethic wasn’t the sole catalyst for capitalism, but it did contribute to the “spirit” of capitalism.38 In some Christian megachurches we still see this ideology of wealth both as a goal and as a sign of God’s blessing. And even though most of us today are not working hard to demonstrate our fitness for the afterlife, we’re still fanning out those peacock plumes of money to demonstrate our legitimacy. Under capitalism, to have things becomes a goal in and of itself. The concept of modern-day consumerism, as the sociologist Dalton Conley explains, “refers to more than just buying merchandise; it refers to the belief that happiness and fulfillment can be achieved through the acquisition of material possessions.

The Housewives are an imperfect example of this mismatch between socioeconomic status and upper-class habitus because, frankly, some of them are not all that rich. Some of them do appear to have legitimate wealth and/or fame—for example, Beverly Hills’ restaurateur Lisa Vanderpump, New York City’s heiress Tinsley Mortimer, Miami’s cosmetics queen Lea Black, and Atlanta’s Grammy winner Kandi Burruss. But Orange County’s Gina Kirschenheiter’s small, sparsely furnished house littered with inspirational signage (“GATHER”) is a far cry from Lisa Vanderpump’s sprawling mansion with miniature horses and a swan moat. Other Houseswives are shown living in rented houses, filing for bankruptcy, and tucking the tags into their designer dresses so that they can return them later (I’m looking at you, Sonja!). These women have a lot in common with Karl Marx’s category of “petite bourgeoisie,” the middle managers who are not of the bourgeoisie but affect their airs. But even among the Housewives who have amassed considerable fortunes, their constant emphasis on that wealth is not always consistent with an upper-class habitus. The juxtaposition between these women’s current (purported) economic level and their internalized class condition is mined for entertainment. Indeed, these shows present the women’s ignorance of their own crass materialism as a kind of dramatic irony.

Elites don’t listen only to opera. Indeed, as the sociologist Paul DiMaggio has observed, they actually have a wider range of tastes than just the highbrow. One of the reasons for this, DiMaggio proposes, is that upper-class people have larger and more diverse social networks, necessitating “broad repertoires of taste.”50 They are exposed to more things and need to connect with all different kinds of people. Other researchers have found similarly, observing not only that high-status people are “omnivorous” when it comes to cultural consumption51 but also that this group has become more omnivorous over time.52

We are a country starkly divided by social class. Further, this divide is increasing, not diminishing. The gap between middle-income and higher-income households, for instance, has been widening for decades.66 And class is sticky. By one estimate, it can take ten to fifteen generations for a family to either lose its wealth or move out of poverty.67 Another study found that class is vastly more important than intelligence in determining a child’s future; in fact, a low-income child with high test scores in kindergarten is significantly less likely to attend college and get a good entry-level job than a high-income child with low test scores.68 The fact that a reality star could ascend to the presidency, and that we could tweet at him directly, has not rattled the fundamental structure of the class system. While there are some nuances to this structure (laughable heiresses! redneck TV stars!), and while it may sway slightly, it remains heartily intact. Myths about meritocracy are central to our national discourse. We tell ourselves that Americans, with the right amount of skill and effort, should be able to improve upon the circumstances of their births, and indeed some people do. Yet we don’t have completely meritocratic systems in place. With controlling images as our lodestars, we navigate the gap between our meritocratic national narrative and the reality of life in the United States. We watch these shows, perhaps, because they reinforce the long-standing narratives abo...

But while there is some movement across categories, both in life and on our screens, the spatiality of race endures. For instance, our job categories are patterned by skin color. In 2018, Black people represented 37.7 percent of all baggage porters, bellhops, and concierges but only 7.6 percent of all physicians and surgeons.4 African Americans are overrepresented in prisons—constituting 40 percent of the US incarcerated population but only 13 percent of the total US population.5 De jure racial segregation in schooling may be an artifact of the past, but de facto school segregation is a current reality.6 Meanwhile, the legacies of slavery, legal segregation, and discriminatory real estate practices have seared themselves onto housing grids, creating and sustaining “Black” and “white” neighborhoods that aren’t only the products of socioeconomic differences between the groups.7 When Black families begin moving into a neighborhood, the white residents start to trickle out, and seldom are white people choosing to move to all-Black areas.8 As the journalist Isabel Wilkerson has observed, America has a racial “caste system,” which “is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings that we call home.”9

Then there are the white spaces. As we’ve seen, although there are people of color on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, these remain essentially “white shows.” As Amy Kaufman has pointed out, it took fifteen years for the producers to cast an African American lead. Between 2009 and 2012 there were no Black women on the show, and there were no Black male contestants on The Bachelorette between 2009 and 2011. In other years, there were only a few Black contestants. “We always had to cast a black girl or two,” a former producer of the show told Kaufman. “It was very obvious to me that it was token.”11 This reflects racial homophily in dating practices, as I’ve argued, but it also reflects how both our population and the reality TV world remain broadly stratified. During the first Black Bachelorette’s season, former Bachelor contestant Leah Block tweeted, “I’m sitting here watching @BacheloretteABC and my roommate just sat down on the couch and said, ‘What is this? @LoveAndHipHop?’ DEAD.”12 Leah’s post reflects the reality that Black people are often confined to these “ratchet” arenas. Further, the tweet captures more broadly the dissonance created when Black bodies move into predominantly white spaces—physical, mental, and social. Historically, we’ve seen this in the furor over school desegregation and “white flight” from racially mixed urban areas into the suburbs. The implicit question: What is this person doing here, in this space generally reserved for white people?

Unscripted programming illuminates and perpetuates the controlling image of the wealthy Black woman, specifically, as someone whose “ghetto” core lurks just under a veneer of civility. Shows such as The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Married to Medicine, and many others featuring relatively well-off Black women have a “ratchet” undercurrent despite their opulent scenery. Married to Medicine (Bravo, 2013–present), for instance, follows a group of mainly African American women—some wives of doctors, some doctors themselves—in Atlanta. At first glance, the show is about Black people who have made it; it references their education and showcases their luxury goods. “One of the great things about the medical community in Atlanta is that it’s a huge population of young, Black Americans, and they’re doin’ it. You know, they’re makin’ six figures,” one of the doctor’s wives, Toya, tells us in the first episode.

Author bell hooks has described how, during Reconstruction, African Americans who attempted to improve their social standing were met with derision. Specifically, “A black woman dressed tidy and clean, carrying herself in a dignified manner, was usually the object of mud-slinging by white men who ridiculed and mocked her self-improvement efforts. They reminded her that in the eyes of the white public she would never be seen as worthy of consideration and respect.”49 Today, while white women on shows like the Housewives are not immune from this type of mockery, the reality genre gets particular traction out of taking putatively elegant Black ladies and cutting them down to size. The image of a well-to-do Black woman behaving in a “low-class” way is not a random one. It has a history and a function, and there’s a reason that Americans gravitate toward it.

the reality genre highlights the particular narratives that we tell about brown bodies, how they dovetail with those about Black bodies, and how they stand on their own. We can then see how these controlling images of Latinx people—as refusing to play nicely or to assimilate and as purveyors of violence and crime—help to enforce the physical separation of particular categories of people. For example, these very narratives converge in political rhetoric about immigration. In its paucity of Latinx characters, and its representations of the ones that do appear, reality TV illuminates whose perspectives we see as central and whose we see as marginal—and the narratives we construct to sustain that marginality.

Another group whose stories seldom get told on reality TV are Asian Americans. Asian American women occasionally appear, sometimes as submissive or unmemorable background players (The Bachelor), sometimes as hypersexualized personas (Tila Tequila), sometimes as exoticized creatures (the Asian American contestants on America’s Next Top Model), and occasionally in the role of abrasive and demanding “Dragon Lady” (Ryan’s mom on Child Genius). Other than in a few notable cases (e.g., Dr. Pimple Popper’s dermatologist Sandra Lee), they’re generally marginal to the main action of the show. Asian American men, though, are even less visible. For example, while some Asian American females have appeared on The Real World, during its entire run there has never been an Asian male on the show. Similarly, between 2013 and 2018 The Bachelorette included only five Asian men, four of whom did not make it past the first round.

Reality TV sweeps us along on a tour of American inequality. These shows participate in our broader national narrative about pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps—a narrative that helps to keep us comfortable with our unequal allocation of money and resources and power. But despite its controlling images, the genre shows us glimmers of something broader happening behind the curtain—clues that our social positioning is not just about our personal choices or morality. America’s interwoven classism and our racism, which the genre splays out for us in gargantuan caricature, are part of our culture, but they’re also structural—baked into our institutions, in the way we house, educate, police, and care for our citizens.

If anyone shows us that gender can be performed, it’s the contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race. They (for the most part) give their testimonials in men’s clothing and then we watch them metamorphose, swiping blush across their faces, donning evening gowns, and strutting confidently in stilettos. Their femininity is more amped up than the typical Bachelor contestant’s, their lashes stretching out longer than Ashley I.’s. But while their performances are extreme, they’re doing what most of us do every day. As the sociologists Candace West and Don Zimmerman have pointed out, we’re all socialized to “do gender” from a young age.2 We may not be on a literal stage getting judged by comedians and reality stars, but we display our maleness or femaleness for an audience of others who have the same understandings of what it means to be a boy or a girl. As RuPaul has exclaimed on the show, “May the best woman win!” From flouncy little girls to aggressive men, reality TV’s larger-than-life characters show us how we’ve all been groomed to meet certain gender expectations. They expose gender as a social construction that is buffered by questionable assumptions about who is naturally suited for what behaviors and what roles. And they teach us that gender works on two levels: it’s something we perform every day, but it’s also a broader system that stretches over all of our lives and fundamentally impacts the way society operates.

Gender is one of our most basic, important, and enduring social categories—and, like race, it’s largely something we’ve created ourselves.

On the other hand, even Drag Race is not immune from our persistent cultural idea that gender is rooted in biology. The queens typically take all sorts of measures to approximate female-sexed bodies. They shave their facial stubble; they “contour” their makeup to create the illusion of feminine cheekbones; they “tuck” (taping back the penis and scrotum, to eliminate the bulge); they put on fake breasts; and they cinch their waists and add padding to create hourglass silhouettes. The judges critique them when they do these things ineffectively. Contestants are praised for being “fish”—that is, looking convincingly like cisgender women. And while RuPaul may repeatedly state that drag is what we put on our naked bodies, the celebrity drag queen has also suggested that trans women who undergo transitional surgeries are not welcome to apply for the show, likening such procedures to “performance-enhancing drugs.”10 (As of this writing, there have also never been any cisgender women on the show.) While RuPaul has since apologized for the comment, it reflects how our cultural ideas about the link between anatomy and gender continue to endure, even in places where the boundaries of gender are being pushed. If gender is simply a performance, unlinked to anatomy, then why is “tucking” necessary?

When schools and day cares closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, women were more likely than men to scale back or terminate their employment in order to attend to their children. “Women do an average of 75% of the world’s total unpaid-care work, including child care, caring for the elderly, cooking, and cleaning,” one analysis by the Harvard Business Review found in September 2020. “As Covid-19 has disproportionately increased the time women spend on family responsibilities, women have dropped out of the workforce at a higher rate than explained by labor-market dynamics alone.

Reality programs have also played with traditional gender expectations in ways that go beyond trans representation—giving us drag queens, female bodybuilders,34 and boys who love sewing dresses (Project Runway: Junior, Lifetime, 2015–2016). And while many reality programs perpetuate the cultural narrative of men as financial providers and women as domestically oriented, there are also moments when the genre drops the veil and reveals that the heterosexual breadwinner/homemaker model is not a universal, historical truth. I’m not the first to point out that The Real Housewives is a misnomer, as a lot of these women are single and/or have paying jobs—and, technically, they’re all running afoul of the definition by getting paid to appear on the show. And despite the Kardashian/Jenner women’s professed devotion to their men and to traditional gender roles in some ways, they are actively reaping the rewards of capitalism—not sitting on the sidelines, as they would within Hartmann’s model.

I’ve often heard it said that when it comes to representation, reality TV is an equal opportunity offender. That is, no social group comes away smelling like roses. My response to this is twofold: First, it’s important to look not only at whether certain groups are portrayed negatively but also how they’re portrayed, in order to better understand our cultural rifts. And second, straight white men often come away smelling pretty good.

Mean judges like Gordon and Simon are able to fit cozily into the mean role, and to profit from it, in part because of who they are. If you look at articles and listicles dedicated to the “meanest” or “harshest” or “worst” competition judges, a pattern emerges: they’re predominantly white men. Yes, sometimes a person of color and/or a woman sneaks on there. For instance, Janice Dickinson from vintage America’s Next Top Model makes the cut sometimes, but she also lasted only four seasons of the show, which persisted into its mid-twenties. The harsh judges who have really had legs, though? Gordon Ramsay, Len Goodman, Michael Kors, Nigel Lythgoe, Piers Morgan, Simon Cowell, and Donald Trump. All white men.

Gordon and Simon are able to profit from the mean role, not only through their own efforts but because of their broader social positioning. This is not to say that only men can be terrible (Leona Helmsley) or that the criminal behavior of a nonwhite person has never gone unchecked (R. Kelly). But Gordon and Simon are part of a more general pattern in the types of behavior we are willing to let slide and from which types of people.

We’ve seen how reality stars can capitalize on existing archetypes; however, as the mean judges show us, they can’t just inhabit these roles at random. It’s easier to slip into the “mean” space if you’re already in the “white male creative genius” space. When

Foucault points out that by controlling the ways we understand sex, powerful institutions are able to exert control over us.

The combination of these two worlds may appear jarring at first. Sometimes reality TV seems to be a space apart from politics. While we might expect the genre, with its fast production turnarounds and its focus on real people grappling with today’s problems,2 to be an ideal platform for the political, reality shows seldom cross into that realm.

From the early days of his campaign and throughout his presidency, Trump also drew upon the key conventions of reality TV to his benefit. He used broad characterizations (the Fraudulent Media), mobilized controlling imagery that perpetuated demographic stereotypes (the Bad Hombre, the Nasty Woman), and relied on standard stories with simplistic plots and clear villains (China is to blame for the novel coronavirus). He successfully used a multiplatform approach; his tweets will live in infamy. Unable or unwilling to remain silent, he chattered over his debate opponents in the manner of a Real Housewife on a reunion special. He also employed cliff-hangers and big reveals—as when, after an earlier teaser via Twitter, he unveiled his first Supreme Court pick. Later, his announcement of his second pick, Brett Kavanaugh, aired on ABC between The Bachelorette and the reality dating series The Proposal: a lineup primed to evoke parallels between these two types of spectacles. (One Huffington Post writer characterized the evening as “a nauseating turducken of reality pageantry.”)11 Also like the reality genre, Trump mobilized stereotypes about women and people of color in order to provide entertainment and to provoke emotion from his audience. Throughout his tenure in the White House, he was a shit-stirring divide et impera personality, fomenting conflict between two halves of a divided nation. His penchant for drama endured right up until the twilight of his presidency, when he in...

Americans have long been concerned with the erosion of “traditional” values, and one might expect reality TV’s outrageous misfits to be at the leading edge of that erosion. But while conservative groups would be unlikely to endorse most of these shows, they’re havens for some of the most old-fashioned values that pulse through contemporary American society. They show us how steadfastly we cling to conventional ideas about, for instance, families, marriages, sex, women’s roles, Black bodies, and queer people.

And here, too, reality TV and Donald Trump align. Both have relied on conservatism repackaged as outlandishness. Trump came onto the political scene as the man who wasn’t a career politician—the flashy showman who would do things differently, who would “drain the swamp.” But far from being a renegade, he capitalized on and crystallized the ideologies that have long loomed large in American culture.

Still, the question of whether reality shows are “really real” misses the mark and does a disservice to what these shows can actually teach us. In the end, unscripted programming teaches us that all reality is socially constructed. The genre exposes how we make designations about what is “real”—designations that we then turn around and perceive as universal and innate. In its raw and heightened portrayals of the norms we create and pass down to our children, it peels back our collective skin and shows us, bloody and messy, the things that we value, who gets to be seen as real, and who doesn’t stand a chance. But then it rears back and shows us that what it means to be “real” is, in fact, ambiguous. Once we peer into the face of that ambiguity, we’re better able to see the unstable social fictions that more broadly dominate our lives.

Furthermore, if we learned anything from Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House, it’s this: one thing that’s “really real” about unscripted programming is its impact. Not only did starring on The Apprentice perhaps help propel Trump to the White House, and not only did the president employ techniques from the genre to buffer his popularity, but his presidency arguably became a reality show.

Today, we live our lives publicly in unprecedented ways, not only primed for our own surveillance but also actively participating in it in a plurality of ways. As Kim Kardashian has pointed out, when asked about the media’s objectification of women, “Even if I’m objectifying myself, I feel good about it.”

Though we’re not all storming the Capitol with zip ties in hand, there are other connections between the material on these shows and how we engage with the world. One study of nearly five hundred adolescents over three years found that girls who watched Temptation Island, The Bachelor, or Joe Millionaire were more likely to communicate with one another about sexuality and that boys who watched were more likely to be sexually active.23 Other research has found that watching programs such as Real Housewives, 16 and Pregnant, and Keeping Up with the Kardashians was connected to young adults’ ideas about gender and relationships. For instance, “heavy viewers” of these shows “were more likely to think females in the real world engage in inappropriate behaviors (e.g., arguing, gossip) more than males.”24 These viewers were also more likely to overestimate the extent to which real-life romantic relationships involve conflict.25 Another study found that people who heavily consumed TV shows, like Keeping Up with the Kardashians, “that valorize and regularly portray wealth, fame, and luxury” are “significantly more materialistic and anti-welfare than lighter consumers.”26 Viewers of reality TV are more likely than nonviewers to have one-night stands;27 to use tanning lamps and to tan outdoors;28 to drink alcohol;29 to go hot-tubbing on dates;30 and to engage in online activity such as blogging, video sharing, and social media use.

And to understand that sometimes the better question is not what’s “really real” but how our existing notions of what’s real and true are generated. Because while this guilty pleasure is demonstrably unhealthy for us in some ways, it’s also a site for deep reflection about who we are as a culture, the places we’ve been, and where we want to go next.