Women's Studies 2161A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 12: Scripted Reality, Young Royals, Reality Television
30 Apr 2018
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Classed Femininity, Performativity and Camp in British Structured Reality Programming:
• Growth British free-to-air TV at turn millennium resulted dev niche-focused digital
channels target youth market
• British tv prod dif mode structured reality fits within national and cultural identities and
engages w tonal address British youth tv- characterized combo cheeky detachment and
engaged emotional realism
• Structured reality appropriates The Hills melding docusoap’s observational style w high
production values, continuity editing and carefully composed mise-en-scene of drama
• Reworks form British audience raised on celeb gossip mags and Big Brother’s
celebration performativity and intervention- end signified shift British reality tv form
leans heavily on soap opera and youth drama, yet simultaneously recognizes its own
artificiality
• Structured reality= blending trad fictional storytelling w reality tv
• Employ knowing tone and engagement w camp seeks smooth tensions structured reality
creates b/w intervention and authenticity, drama and reality tv
• Offers skeptical viewing position and knowing address allows viewers to be detached yet
simultaneously invested in unfolding narratives-highlight role excess in classed fems and
performativity cont progs varying displays nonnaturalism
Regional representations in structured reality:
• TOWIE follows friendship and relationship dramas group 20-something champagne-
drinking, club-going glamour models, beauticians and entrepreneurs living in Brentwood,
upscale town southeastern country Essex, England
• Diverse citizenship, wealthy enclaves and struggling working-class towns- cult reps
informed postwar dev region and more recent shifts in population
• Rep Essex dom regional working-class stereotypes, w class often unspoken yet geo coded
• Much same way Jersey Shore employs certain stereotypes New Jersey inhabitants,
TOWIE draws on cult discourses stereotype Essex girls as dim-witted and sexualized and
Essex boys as loud and flashy
• Huge success and prompted other channels dev own structured reality programs,
including Made in Chelsea- while also following interpersonal dramas group 20-
somethings, focus on wealthy upper-class London neighbourhood of Chelsea
• Socialites and heirs w double-barrel surnames replace club singers and aspiring
footballer’s wives, offering aspirational glimpse of privileged lifestyle and using imagery
of “heritage” LN to disting itself from Essex-set competitor
• MIC drew sim, though not as problematically, stereotyped figure ostentatiously wealthy
young Sloane- airheaded, braying, conceited, absurd, term linked residents Sloane Square
and surrounding neighbourhoods of Chelsea and Knightsbridge
• Revival recent years connected w lifestyle young royals and club-going, polo-playing
social circle- socialite as celeb
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• Program maintains edge mockery- edits and reaction shots highlight characters’ inflated
sense self-regard/ foolishness- linked to cult distaste toward “posh” upper class and fed
through MIC status as British youth tv
• Think better than Essex chavs in sister show but just as dim, deluded, facile, self-serving
and attention-seeking as supposed inferiors
• Working-class celebrity- rep echo TOWIE- appeal celebs lies in their disconnection from
trad structs of influence (inheritance, edu and so forth)
• MIC cast born into privilege and influence- prog luxuriates while simultaneously
undercutting- thus lack populist appeal TOWIE, whose lifestyles have dif class
connotations
Tonal shifts and self-awareness: Reworking docusoap for the Big Brother generation:
• Internalizes pleasurable viewing practice ident in Big Brother, the search for moments
authenticity when real people are really themselves in constructed env
• Offers level construction within real-world env- TOWIE production company disting the
form from fly on the wall reality tv, as here producers set up dramatic scenarios which
are then filmed
• Combining docusoap’s crisis meetings w soap opera plotting, producers structure cast
meetings and plan events prompt conflict from cast members’ existing interpersonal
probs, heightening everyday melodrama
• Dem reality tv’s undermining discursive distinctions b/w reality and fiction, private and
public identities, authenticity and performance
• Unlike conv docusoaps, presence camera never addressed within digesis, w interviews
and talking head confessionals replacing expositional conversation and coincidental
meetings
• Nonprof performers often dem an awkwardness and performativity- structured reality
offers interweaving performativity and soap-like emotional realism, constructionism and
transparency
• Shifting docusoap closer fictional storytelling, tension created b/w glossy drama aesthetic
and British casts’ inability convincingly perf everyday life- tension= tone cringing
comedy fam from British sitcoms, disrupting emotional investment encouraged by
melodramatic content and offering British youth tv audience detached viewing position
flatters genre literacy- awareness reality tv’s construction
• Camp sharing delight artifice and play, refusal seriousness yet having pot for tenderness
Channel identity and distinguishing difference:
• Structured reality’s combo reality tv and soap opera provides economical format for low
budgets digital channels, offering long-form, melodrama-led storytelling at fraction of
cost of soap/ orig youth drama
• Progs help def channel’s ident, TOWIE’s succ asserting ITV2’s brand brightly coloured,
gossipy and fem, fascinated w celeb cult
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