Reality Meets America

3 Pages 732 Words

If you have heard about or talked about the upcoming season of Survivor, couldn’t quite figure out who the Outcast on The Mole, or wondered if a contestant would stray towards infidelity on Temptation Island, then you have been infected. This infection is the latest fixation on reality television. Whether a person tunes into the shows or not, it enters into many conversation, everyday. Reality television is presented in visual culture, with non-scripted. This may as well be network’s newest break: Reality Television is not expensive and totally addictive.

Reality television is a genre of television programming in which the fortunes of "real life" people as opposed to actors, or fictional characters. Although there have always been television programs that would satisfy this definition it is within the last two years that reality television has achieved its greatest success in hits such as the Survivor series, Temptation Island, Big Brother, Fear Factor and so on.
There are several reasons that reality television has become popular today. The three that I will focus on are the concepts of money, instant fame, and entertainment. The first means for reality television being popular today is money. Today’s shows offer huge sums of money to people who do not necessarily possess the career skills that would make them a productive enough member of society to collect such wealth through honest work. Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, for example, offered up to a million dollars to people answering a set of questions. The questions, however, differed from related shows in that they were usually trivia oriented. Also, the audience was involved, as well as calling a friend and so on, which added to the drama aspect. The lighting, music, and editing all were contrived to produce the maximum possible suspense surrounding rather innocent pop culture subjects one might find in any game suited for children. The promise of money and the jui...