True Story: What Reality TV Says about Us

by Danielle J. Lindemann

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.

The experience of watching these shows, like looking in any mirror, is interactive. We see ourselves, and then we groom ourselves accordingly.

Research has suggested that people get several different “gratifications” from these programs. One of these is voyeuristic pleasure.28 We’re excited and curious to watch people in their unguarded moments, particularly when we suspect there might be a train wreck on the horizon.

The difference, however, is that with reality TV you’re reacting to someone who is ostensibly being herself.

Nothing shaped by humans into a cultural product is ever going to offer a pure reality.

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. When we gaze into the fun-house mirror, the reflection may not be pretty, but we gain a keener understanding of ourselves.

When diverse individuals socialized in different ways come into contact, sparks may fly, illuminating the fact that our understandings of the world are learned rather than innate.

Structure is how society is organized (in ways that may constrain or empower us as individuals), and agency is our individual free will to move within that system of organization and sometimes transcend it. In nearly all situations, to varying degrees, both elements are at play.

It shows us how in groups, through institutions, and as a society, we construct notions about legitimacy that are historically specific, that change with context, and that feed into and reinforce existing power structures. So, although we’re preoccupied with identifying and defining pure, uncut reality, it eludes our grasp. We, like reality stars, create our own “true stories” that, because they are connected to broader social dynamics, demand constant revision. Like Kevin and Julie, Cardi B, and the Countess, we’re all inexorably social creatures. In that sense, none of us can truly “keep it real.”

In between its eyelash flutters and bikini tractor races, The Bachelor is telling us something powerful about ourselves—not just who we were, but who we still are.

These shows aren’t just telling us how we’ve felt about sex, gender, and dating in the past. They’re showing us—in over-the-top ways that involve gesturing to body parts—how we feel about those things right now. Sure, post–sexual liberation, post–Sex and the City, post–Miley Cyrus straddling a wrecking ball, and post–J. Lo pole dancing at the Super Bowl, overt female sexuality is more culturally acceptable than it was in the mid-twentieth century—even if all of these examples have also stirred controversy. But we haven’t completely moved past rigid ideas about women, men, and sex. The 1950s notion of women as the “controllers of sex,” with the responsibility to “enforce sexual limits,” for instance, is still sharply reflected in the way that we respond to sexual assault.15 I’m far from the first to point out the proliferation of educational programs, with their groin kicks and their rape whistles, devoted to teaching women how to prevent assault and the relative sparsity of those that seek to curb potential male assailants.

Our expectations for gender roles in relationships, our expectation that both members of a couple be similar to each other, and our assumptions about the indispensability of love: all of these elements come to a heady boil on 90 Day Fiancé. Further, in understanding what types of relationships we deem “authentic,” the entire premise of the show is key: as a culture, we still cling to the institution of marriage. Marriage remains the government-stamped, church-approved consecration of “legitimate” coupledom.

And perhaps we enjoy watching dating and marriage play out in this way on TV because these shows are like pacifiers, soothing our anxieties about cultural change. Despite their often wacky premises, shows about coupledom reinforce many of our long-standing ideas about women, men, race, sex, and love. In doing so, they reflect and bolster our most entrenched and long-lasting social hierarchies—hierarchies that have repercussions far beyond who ends up with that final rose.

Why do the Kardashian/Jenners need one another? As Goode has explained, families shoulder a tremendous weight for all of us, doing things that it would be infeasible to pawn off on other social groups. While we might rely on the public school system to teach our kids calculus, for instance, family members are most likely to be the ones teaching their children how to talk, hold a spoon, and brush their hair. Families provide “physical maintenance” of their members—for example, feeding, bathing, grooming—as well as emotional support.

While the Kardashian/Jenners may or may not be a functional family in a psychological sense—an assessment that is beyond my expertise—in a sociological sense they function as a family and derive advantages from that grouping, even if the content of those benefits may be different from ours.

By failing to rise to the standards of intensive motherhood, the moms of reality TV both shed light on this model and hint at its lack of universal viability. There are contradictions and tensions inherent in this model, as Hays notes. One such tension is that mothers are expected to be intensive, but not so intensive that they border on helicoptering and smother their children.

The expectations that we hold for our family members are culturally specific and cannot possibly apply to everyone, yet we cling to them as though they are universal truths. Which families are legitimate? What roles within them are valid? In taking a thick highlighter to the inconsistencies and tensions in our expectations, unscripted television demonstrates how ways of looking at the world that may seem obvious to us are in fact built on the shifting sands of culture. Every family member needs to be personally fulfilled. Weddings are about the bride. It’s natural for women to remain in the home and care for children. The reality genre takes our collective assumptions about family and exposes how our society shapes our senses of what’s normal, what’s natural, and what’s real.

And that may be a reason we watch. But, taken as a whole, reality TV isn’t showing the American family in free fall. In many ways, it’s not even acknowledging the variety that exists within families. Nothing’s dissolving here. The genre gives us sensationalized families, to be sure, but it also demonstrates that family is still a cultural touchstone on which we can all rest.

But despite these historical changes, we tend to think about childhood as though it’s a universal constant. Specifically, we hold fast to the idea that it’s a whimsical and innocent period of life, completely separate from adulthood. The flip side of the expectation that mothers must intensively monitor their children is the assumption that children need intensive monitoring. And central to this notion is the idea that children are fundamentally different kinds of creatures from adults.

The children even give their siblings sideways hugs, avoiding full frontal contact. In these ways, the show exhibits a broader cultural tension: sexuality is not the realm of children, yet children are constantly at risk of being sexual.

While MTV clearly makes some attempts at diversifying its cast—featuring teens of different races, from different geographic locations, and with different family configurations—the patterns on the show tend to align with the contours of teen pregnancy in reality. Although there are exceptions, these girls generally do not have socioeconomic privilege. They regularly mention that money is an issue, and at least one teen father wasn’t at his child’s birth because he was unable to afford the trip.28 Research has found that adolescents who live with both biological parents, whose mothers have more education than high school, whose mothers didn’t give birth as teens, and who live in wealthier neighborhoods are less likely to give birth or father a baby as teens.29 Childbirth rates are also higher among Hispanic and Black teens than among their white peers.30 While there are teen moms across all demographic strata and family situations, overall those teens who wind up pregnant tend to have less social advantage—that is, less to lose. When we see this play out on 16 and Pregnant, it not only demonstrates the risk factors for teen pregnancy but also reveals the various types of childhoods that various slices of privilege have to offer.

While it may seem obvious that parents are able to pass on their social advantages to their kids, many of us may not understand the full extent of this process. It certainly runs afoul of the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and “land of opportunity” types of meritocratic narratives we like to tell about the United States. While there are exceptions, more privileged parents are generally able to transmit that privilege to their kids, not only in the form of money and the things that money can buy but also in the ways they teach their children to engage with the world.

Reality TV illuminates how we all use kids as extensions of ourselves. They become vectors not only for our personal goals and dreams (see: the starry-eyed parents on Toddlers & Tiaras) but, more broadly, for the reproduction of the social status quo. These tiny humans become agents through which we transmit our most deeply held cultural values and uphold the systems of power that govern all of our lives. Kids become ambassadors for the broader social norms and practices that buzz through our culture, lodging in our social institutions and leeching from their walls.

The real kids of TV are precocious, talented, spoiled, and heartbreaking. Their parents often appear on our screens as screeching caricatures. But these parent/child duos and our reactions to them paradoxically expose the tidy boxes we use to contain “legitimate” childhood. They expose the limited way we conceptualize our kids: as sentimentalized, asexual, incompetent creatures with assumed class and racial privilege. At the same time, reality TV’s kids also reveal the flawed nature of such assumptions, as they lift their feathered arms and emerge, bedazzled, from those neat boxes.

As this interview suggests, a common critique of reality stars is that they don’t do anything to warrant their stardom. Of course, there are exceptions, such as the contestants on skill-based competition shows or programs featuring stars who are already famous for having recognizable talents, such as singing, acting, or comedy. But for the most part, reality TV participants seem to rise in stature by simply … being.

In part because objective value, status, and compensation are misaligned, we have to tell ourselves stories justifying our class system. Job hierarchies become prestige hierarchies as we interpret certain types of work—and, consequently, certain types of people—as legitimate, valuable, and morally correct.

Yet we don’t simply rebuke the poor and love the rich. We aspire to be the rich, and we interpret their types of bodies and their types of things as morally correct, but we love them in a complicated way. While some reality programs about rich people are aspirational in tone, the genre’s relationship with the elite—and our relationship with the elite—is more complex than just that.

It portrayed a manageable distance between the rich and the poor, fitting neatly into the tantalizing American narrative of ingenuity, meritocracy, and individual achievement.

And this tells us something important about how we, as a society, think about sexuality. “Sexuality” is a blanket term used to describe “desire, sexual preference, sexual identity, and behavior,”3 and when we think about it, we tend to rely on categories, just as we do with skin tone, genital shape, and wallet thickness. We’ve seen how the concept of “opposite sexes” suggests that our existing gender roles are based in biology and are thereby correct. But the idea that men and women are complementary creatures is also used to reinforce the notion that they are, and should be, naturally attracted to each other.4 In this way, our biological ideas about gender are inextricably linked with our notions about sexuality.

Why don’t deviants just conform? Conformity is certainly easier in some ways. As Émile Durkheim points out, we can incur negative consequences for being deviant, so while it’s possible for us to free ourselves from social facts, we can’t do it without struggle. Yet he also observes that deviance exists in every society. (Again, note that Durkheim’s use of the word “deviance”—and my own use of it—does not imply judgment; it is simply a neutral, sociological term for non-normative behavior.) And while some people may just be naturally “pathological,” Durkheim concedes, there are social explanations for their nonconformity as well.5

Because it shows us unusual nooks of society, reality TV is particularly primed to reveal how deviants are socially created. Programs involving children, particularly, enforce this notion that some forms of deviance are taught.

These characters are versions of ourselves who go too far. Through our viewing, we are able to draw and redraw the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable and place ourselves on the correct side. But perhaps we’re so invested in curating that boundary precisely because we know it’s so messy and unstable.

Reality stars are not just deviant and neither are we, but they are deviant and so are we. They remind us that deviance exists on a spectrum and that our understanding of what is acceptable changes across social contexts. This concept applies to our viewing of reality shows as well.

Unscripted programming cracks the locks and thrusts open the places in ourselves that we keep hidden, both individually and as a society. One way it does this is by showing us the people who run amok of our norms, why they do that, and how we attempt to yank them back into the fold. It reveals the “polymorphous techniques” we use to curb deviance, via loved ones, individual experts, and behemoth institutions. It teaches us whom we view as legitimate but also how those views are fundamentally shaped by our culture. And it reveals that these views, while socially constructed, are still “real” in the sense that they are vital to our lives, impacting how we distribute societal power, treat others, and experience the world ourselves.

By presenting caricatures of our own oddities, these programs demonstrate how society sets parameters for normalcy and how we all move in and around those barriers, which are changeable and nuanced. Ultimately, the genre exposes the muddiness of distinctions that we may perceive as crisp and clean. The boundaries that we draw between the normal and the freaky aren’t “real” in any universal sense. And the monsters we reject are not as different from us as we’d like to believe. We’re all just a bunch of fudge-stripe cookies away from being in the wrong category. Reality TV is both a guilty goody and a nutritional bite, nestling in the crook between normalcy and deviance—just like its participants and just like us. And while the “freaky” undercurrent of reality programming remains strong, reality stars are more than just sideshow. Some of them are also our main attractions. They’re flash points for our desires, behaviors, and peculiarities. And for a while, one was running our country.

Though we may watch it for fun, reality TV exposes sobering truths. The insights that we can draw from the genre run the gamut from the micro to the macro; it teaches us about ourselves as individuals and as groups and institutions and about the broad structures of power that overlay our lives.

In demonstrating these narrow-minded views of the world, in some ways the reality genre mirrors the worst of ourselves. We sustain inequalities through the stories we tell, and we pass on these beliefs and practices to our kids. We manipulate others and allow ourselves to be manipulated by them. We buy lots of stuff, and we focus on those material possessions as the pathway to bliss. We overindulge. We sexualize children, laugh at poor and fat people, and render some segments of the population invisible. These programs demonstrate how centuries-old stereotypes still thrum within our culture like a meaty heart. They take the little oozing bundles of our racism, our sexism, and our heteronormativity and lay them at our feet. In the wild curvatures of the fun-house mirror, we are ourselves but uglier, more grotesque.

What we experience as reality, often, is not universal and static but a shifting amalgam like Countess LuAnn. Who and what get to be seen as legitimate? Who takes a seat within the core of society, and who is confined to the margins? What constitutes an authentic family or a real childhood? Who’s allowed to be mean? How do we think about women and sexuality and racial minorities and wealth and our own bodies and what’s tasteful and what’s not? Reality television teaches us how the categories and meanings we use to organize our worlds are built on unsteady ground. These designations are “real” in the sense that they have significant repercussions—how high we ascend in the educational system, how much we earn, where we live, how healthy we are, how much other people respect us, and when we die. They’re real in terms of how we think about our own identities. But they aren’t “real” in the sense of historically transcendent and immutable. Ultimately, the genre exposes how our “reality” is largely a social reality—something humans created.