Page 451 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

0 | Real ty Telev s on

the Home & Garden, Style, and Discovery Home channels) make a game out
of domestic rearrangement and reorganization, as do shows in which personal
transformation is fused with property improvements (as in Pimp My Ride and
American Chopper).
Personal transformations occur through style overhauls (as in Queer Eye for
the Straight Guy, What Are You Wearing?, Ambush Makeover, What Not to Wear,
How Do I Look?, and Starting Over), seduction training (From Wack to Mack, How
to Get the Guy, Can’t Get a Date, and Wanna Come In?), bodily alterations (Ex-
treme Makeover, The Swan, Biggest Loser, I Want a Famous Face, and Dr. 90210),
and entire life overhauls (Made, Camp Jim, Changing Lives, Intervention, and
ToddTV). Other programs’ focus on transformation is more subtle, as when
contestants talk about the “learning process” of encountering different types of
people and living situations in MTV’s The Real World and Road Rules, or CW’s
Beauty and the Geek, as well as personal growth through self-knowledge in Big
Brother, The Amazing Race, and Survivor.
Youth and the nuclear family are two demographics as well as central social
clusters in reality programs. Broadcast networks consistently run prime-time
shows like Trading Spouses, Wife Swap, Nanny 911, Supernanny, and Extreme
Makeover: Home Edition, each of which takes the nuclear family as its subject.
Meanwhile, MTV targets youth around a variety of issues facing them: friendship
(Laguna Beach, Why Can’t I Be You?, You’ve Got a Friend), courtship (Parental
Control, Date My Mom, Next, Engaged and Underage, Room Raiders, Dismissed),
family (Damage Control, One Bad Trip, My Super Sweet 16), jobs (I’m from Rolling
Stone, The Assistant, 8th and Ocean, Power Girls), and tolerance (Boiling Points).

reality aCtiVisM and Counter-interVentions

Reality TV’s reliance on audience interactivity and immersion into everyday life has produced
some interesting unintended consequences. The first season of Big Brother (U.S.) saw an
ongoing series of interventions by activist fans, both online and in the material world. Tac-
tics involved throwing tennis balls with messages into the house’s yard, communicating with
megaphones, and flying planes with banners (with messages like “Big Brother is worse than
you think—get out now”). A group calling itself Media Jammers claimed responsibility for
some of the banners and tried to influence the audience voting. Activists plotted online to
convince contestants to stage a walkout and split the winnings. The houseguests came close
to doing so, but after a series of producer interventions (an attempted bribe; disseminating
information to one houseguest via an exiled contestant; limiting the online video feed to
prevent viewers from hearing the contestants’ deliberation; further controlling the communi-
cation coming in from outside) ultimately surrendered to the producers’ design. Subsequent
seasons eliminated the audience voting component. Culture jamming also describes the
events surrounding the Real World: Chicago season. In a number of seasons, the Real World
cast has encountered hostility from ordinary people, at times resulting in bar brawls and ar-
rests (a variation of this happened when the Project Runway contestants left New York for