Is Reality TV Dying?

Look at the ratings for reality TV Shows lately. They’re a mess; they’re certainly not drawing in the hordes of viewers that they use to. As someone who finds media trends fascinating, I wanted to explore this week whether reality TV is dying a slow painful death.

Reality TV is a loose label for the media genre. What generally tends to happen is that the show chronicles the life of real people as they have constructed roadblocks thrown into their path. So why did it grow to be so popular in the first place?

The Rise of a Juggernaut

The late 90’s saw a creativity vacuum in the media industry that resulted in the birth of reality based programming. We started off with flagship shows like Big Brother, Pop Idol and The X Factor, which drew in millions every week.

In my opinion these shows worked because we believed in the struggles of what people were going through. When Leona won the X Factor, we believed that she’d worked to earn the title and when Nadia became the first transgender woman to clinch the Big Brother crow, we felt a though we’d helped both her and society at large to embrace tolerance and diversity.

That was the whole idea of the genre; it showcased ordinary people and we watched how their lives changed forever. We identified with these people because of their humanity. We got to know them and we cared about them.

A Lack of Humanity

However as the decade wore on, we got a stiff introduction to the next generation of reality show. These are shows in the Jersey Shore mould; Towie, Made in Chelsea, Gordie Shore (gag!) etc.

Suddenly, we weren’t watching people we could identify with work towards a dream or travel the road to self-realisation. We were watching privileged brats drink their lives away. We couldn’t identify with these people and stopped believing in their innate humanity. We stopped caring.

Oliver Rawlings readers, reality TV is dying and that is because we have stopped caring about and identifying with who we are watching. Even the people we once identified with have been changed by fame. We no longer see ourselves in them as they stumble out of Funky Buddha at three in the morning. It’s not reality anymore.