ABSTRACT
Sometimes it seems as if everything on television tells a story. Commercials are filled
with miniature narratives. Nightly newscasts and news magazine programs such as 60
Minutes (1968-) contain segments called “stories” which should, according to one news
executive, “display the attributes of fiction, of drama. [They] should have structure and
conflict, problem and denouement, rising and falling action, a beginning, a middle, and
an end.”1� Survivor (2000-) and other “reality-TV” series are sold like soap operas
—emphasizing dramatic conflict. As the executive vice president of programming at the Fox
network said about one reality program, “We need to market the characters and the stories like
you would market a good quality drama.”2 All these stories, all this narrative, cannot help
but make us wonder if there truly is anything real on TV, or if it is just one big fiction.
