Week 11

How has the documentary genre influenced reality TV and how it presents the ‘real’?

It can be a difficult proposition explaining the differences between documentaries and reality TV, but once both are viewed it becomes clear which genre displays fact, and which displays an illusion of the truth. Documentaries have helped the Reality TV genre grow because they share many similar properties. Biressi and Nunn (2005) explained with their work how John Grierson who first “coined the term ‘documentary’, happily acknowledged the role of aesthetics in the genre, describing the documentary process as the ‘creative treatment of actuality.’” This clearly shows us which themes a documentary will often have. The viewpoint of a documentary is often seen by just one perspective, which unintentionally means the documentary will have a somewhat bias view on whatever issue is being presented, intentional or otherwise. However, the documentary will try to portray the information it is delivering in a factual way, in an attempt to deliver unbiased information, but unless they cover a wide range of conflicting viewpoints then this very rarely happens. So the documentary genre is almost the pre-reality TV genre simply because reality TV couldn’t exist if documentaries were never created. Reality TV however is full of biased viewpoints put in by the media to help portray any given situation in a certain glorified light. It is a genre that is guilty of having one sided views for nearly any situation. An example of this is when the cast is arguing over food and water in survivor, when the participants are making gourmet dishes on Masterchef, or when the bad boy criminal is being taken down by the righteous cop on Cops. The handheld cameras, subtitled dialogue and the character voiceover narratives are but the tip of the iceberg of the techniques used to add the stench of reality and the dirt of  actual characters facing off against eachother that only reality TV can provide.

Biressi, A. & Nunn, N. (2005). Real Lives, documentary approaches. Reality TV: Realism and Revelation. (page 35-58). London: Wallflower.