Better Living through Reality TV: Television and Post–Welfare Citizenship

From The Apprentice to Extreme Makeover , reality television has transformed network and cable television. Whether it is learning to succeed in business, navigating the rough waters of romance, managing our health or wallets, or perfecting the profile of our faces, reality television dispenses a powerful prescription for ways to live and conduct ourselves as “neo–liberal” citizen–subjects, who increasingly are expected to take responsibility for our own welfare in the aftermath of the “Great Society.” Better Living through Reality TV asserts that reality television is a cultural technology through which we have come to monitor, motivate, improve, transform, and protect ourselves in the name of freedom, enterprise, and personal responsibility. Combining cutting–edge theories of culture and government with programming examples—including Todd TV , Survivor , and American Idol — Better Living through Reality TV moves beyond the established concerns of political economy and cultural studies to conceptualize television′s evolving role in the contemporary period.

List of Illustrations. Introduction. 1. Charity TV: Privatizing Care, Mobilizing Compassion. 2. TV Interventions: Personal Responsibility and Techniques of the Self. 3 Makeover TV: Labors of Reinvention. 4. TV and the Self–Defensive Citizen. 5. TV′s Constitutions of Citizenship. 6. Playing TV′s Democracy Game. Notes. Index.

Laurie Ouellette is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is co–editor of Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture and author of Viewers Like You? How Public TV Failed the People . James Hay is an Associate Professor in the College of Communication at the University of Illinois––Champaign–Urbana. He is a co–editor of The Audience and Its Landscape .

“This book does not simply pay lip service to the claim that reality television is a democratic and populist force.” ( Communication Booknotes Quarterly , Jan.–Mar. 2009) “ Better Living presents Foucault’s concept of govermentality in an accessible way as the authors combine this theoretical concept with rich textual examples from various reality TV shows. In fact, one of the strengths of Better Living is the detailed examples that Ouellette and Hay provide to support their arguments.” ( Journal of the Communication Inquiry )