The Importance Of Reality Television

For the past several years Reality television has dominated mainstream television programming, providing relatively inexpensive entertainment (Gardyn, 2001). Media commentators have frequently argued that the popularity of Reality programs is rising and it stems from the show’s ability to cater to television viewers’ voyeuristic needs and this has led to their penetration into the prime time schedules of television networks (Peters, 2007).

The premise of Reality Television requires that individuals place themselves on public display, thus forfeiting all claims to personal privacy for the sake of transient fame and the possibility of monetary compensation. Some critics argue that Reality Television poses a new low denominator for television

Research on audiences’ opinions about Reality programming suggests that television viewers themselves perceive Reality programming to be voyeuristic (Hill, 2002) and concede that it is, at least partially, the voyeuristic appeal of Reality programs that they are drawn to (Johnson-Woods, 2002).

Gardyn (2001) also found that the thrill of “guessing who will win or be eliminated from the show” is the main reason why people watch Reality shows. The second and third reasons audience had for watching the same was “to see people face challenging situations” and “imagine how I would perform in similar situations”.

After that a new additions came into the Reality programming research which reported need for viewer participation and interactivity by involving some form of audience voting or live interaction such as a Q&A session. In this sense, it is possible that vicarious participation in the lives of “real people” who and instant celebrity, romance, and perhaps riches explains some of the appeal (Kilborn,

For example, in one of the first empirical investigations of the psychological appeal of Reality programs, Nabi, Biely, Morgan, and Stitt (2003) found voyeurism to be a significant predictor of Reality television consumption. 15 However, findings from a later study suggested that although voyeuristic appeal might be a factor that distinguishes between fictional and Reality programming, voyeurism was not a consistent predictor of the enjoyment of Reality programs (Nabi & Stitt, 2006) Papacharissi & Mendelson (2007) found out that only a small subset of television viewers watch Reality programming to fulfil their voyeuristic needs.

Such inconsistencies in the findings with respect to the voyeuristic appeal of Reality programs may, at least partly, be due to a lack of an agreed upon conceptualisation and, hence, operationalisation of voyeurism as a common psychological orientation.

A related component of the conceptual disagreement regarding the voyeuristic appeal of Reality programs pertains to the difficulty of separating common voyeurism as a scopophiliac interest from social curiosity (i.e., the drive to learn about