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
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