ABSTRACT
This chapter explains True Life within the transformation of factual television in recent decades, and develops the concept of voice as a critical framework for evaluating these hybrid programs. The analysis focuses mainly on texts and authors, which limits its usefulness to industrial mediums like television. The rapid growth of first-person media in the 1990s across many genres and platforms, including video diaries and television talk shows, inspired new ways of thinking about the voice of ordinary people in the media. The opening features a proliferating array of small screens, each featuring an image of a real person who has been featured on the program. In a critical reassessment of the concept of voice in documentary theory, Trish FitzSimons points out some problems and limitations, especially when extending the concept of voice to television documentaries. The presence of the television cameras, coupled with conventions of camera work, editing, music, and storytelling, further compromise any assumption of reality in the raw.
