Page 145 - A Handbook Genre Studies in Mass Media

CHAPTER 5

into a reality TV show. Spears and her husband, Kevin Federline, aired
personal videos of their relationship on UPN, in a series called Britney
and Kevin: Chaotic. Perhaps she was trying to tell her fans who she re-
ally was; perhaps her fans did not care.
According to Braudy, “The audience that awards the famous the ul-
timate accolade of its attention is less interested in what they think they
‘really’ are than in what role they play in the audience’s continuing drama
of the meaning of human nature” (p. 46).
Interestingly, this idea became the focus of the last two episodes of
The Surreal Life. Two of the “characters”—as they are described on
the show’s website—come to a head at the end of their two weeks in
the house. Each season, Sally Jesse Raphael appears on the show for a
segment called “Dirty Laundry.” As with her own talk show, Raphael
interviews each of the cast members and reveals secret footage of their
actual behavior. The second episode of The Surreal Life featuring “Dirty
Laundry” centered on Omarosa, a member of the cast of the original The
Apprentice, another reality show.
Omarosa has built a profession, as she calls it, out of being the self-
proclaimed “biggest villain in reality TV.” Raphael cornered Omarosa
on a number of issues, the biggest being the distinction between acting
and being herself. The object of the show is to see celebrities being
real, Raphael told her; the public just wants to see and like the real
person behind the image. In one of the episode’s multiple screaming
matches, Omarosa tells Raphael that she has been honest since the
beginning—she is only participating in the show to further her own
fame and gather research for a book on reality TV. She claims she is
being real—the video segments later prove she is only being real to
the character she has created.
In an interview with the show’s executive producer—while Omarosa
did not know she was being taped—she revealed that all of her house-
mates have alternate sources of income. Reality shows, she said, have
become her profession: “This profession is called acting for unscripted
dramas 101, by Omarosa.”
In a later confrontation with another cast member, Omarosa makes
a contradictory statement—she refuses to be herself while on reality
television.
“My fans love it when I’m naughty,” Omarosa tells Caprice, an inter-
national supermodel.
“We just want ‘real,’” Caprice tells her.

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