The Rhetoric of Reality Television - A Narrative Analysis of the Structure of Illusion

Reality programs have transformed televison pushing many traditional narrativessuch as miniseries sitcoms and movies of the week off the dial. Becauseof the genre's roots in documentary many scholars and critics havecondemned reality televison for its perceived lack of formal appropriatenessand for how it uses documentary conventions for sensational purposes. Examiningfour representative programs this book takes a different positionarguing that reality television has more in common with traditional narrativeprograms than with documentary: its rhetoric is a narrative rhetoric. Whereasdocumentaries tend to use argument as a primary mode within which narrationmay figure reality programs operate within a primarily narrative modetelling dramatic stories about real people. And the success of the realitytelevision phenomenon may be due to those very narrative structures it employsto order and construct its reality. This book will interest those in thefields of Communications Rhetoric Film Studies Television Studies MediaStudies and Popular Culture Studies.