ABSTRACT
Reality TV is one of the sites where people uneasiness about representation is most graphically manifested. This chapter reviews, definitions of reality TV, noting their fluidity, and the increasing integration of the form with discourses about surveillance, celebrity and the consumer society. Annette Hill, notes that reality TV is a catch-all category that includes a wide range of entertainment programmes about real people. It brings together 'a range of formats with distinctive programme characteristics'. Formats included talent formats, celebrity formats, infotainment, life experiment formats etc. Literature supports and complicates the idea that reality TV can lead to a widening or diversification of televisual representations. It is too simplistic to assert that reality TV mirrors, or even approximates, 'the real'. The tricky relationship between 'reality' and 'representation' is shown here. To stray into the historical film genre for a moment to exemplify, people note that Schindler's List has a high degree of verisimilitude.
