ABSTRACT
While hosting the 2000 Emmy Awards on US television, comic actor Gary Shandling quipped petulantly, “I don’t like this reality television. Real people should not be on television; it’s for people like us, people who have trained and studied to appear to be real.” Shandling got a laugh in part because the joke rightly referenced the historic rise in the representation of “real” or “ordinary” people on television, both in the US and across the globe. It also referenced an emerging tension between professional and amateur domains of media participation. Now, a decade later, the statement appears anachronistic as the various sub-genres subsumed by the term “reality TV” have formed a large and seemingly stable part of the global television industry. Academic scholarship on reality programming has grown in tandem with
the genre itself.1 Much of this work focuses on broad questions of political economy, studies of fandom/consumption as accessed online, or textual readings of individual programs – particularly in relation to nationalism and/or neoliberalism on the one hand and identity politics on the other. Sustained ethnographic inquiry is relatively rare, due at least partly to the fragmented and dispersed nature of media production and consumption in the “new media” era. With an eye to this gap, I draw on insights gained from my ethnographic
study of daytime talk shows in the late 1990s in order to make sense of some new research on the MTV reality series Sorority Life. Specifically, I use the case of Sorority Life to explore the meaning of “ordinary celebrity” as it unfolds in the reality television context. Increasingly, I have come to think of reality programming as a form of “self-service television”2 in which producers construct the necessary conditions of performance and real-people participants serve themselves (more or less successfully) to these performances. The result is “ordinary” – or “selfserve” – celebrity. My aim here is to use the concept of ordinary celebrity to consider what media exposure means to, and how it operates for, so-called ordinary people, with an eye to its gendered, classed, and racialized dimensions. Inspired by but not limited to ethnographic evidence, I explore the cultural
“work” being done by self-service television and the implications of this work for rethinking the connection between “celebrity” and the performance of everyday life.
Reality programming, for whatever else it does, signals the increasing visibility of “ordinary” people as characters/performers across the media landscape. While this no doubt represents a certain democratization of the media insofar as constructions of ordinariness now join constructions of religious, political, economic, and/or culture authority as the basis for celebrity,3 the increasing visibility of ordinariness on television also protects the value-hierarchy that distinguishes between ordinary and celebrity categories in the first place. To paraphrase Nick Couldry, the passage of non-mediated “ordinary” persona to mediated “celebrity” persona is one of the master frames of reality TV; that this passage is seen as a laudable achievement reinforces the hierarchy between the two categories.4
