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Better Living through Reality TV
Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship

"Better Living through Reality TV achieves what cultural theory does at its best: a fascinating, insightful, and clear-eyed look at contemporary society as seen through the lens of pop culture."
--Mark Andrejevic

"With this book, reality TV scholarship finally 'gets real'."
--Nick Couldry

Laurie Ouellette (Author), James Hay (Author)

9781405134415, Wiley

Paperback / softback, published 8 January 2008

264 pages
22.9 x 15.3 x 1.5 cm, 0.381 kg

"Better Living through Reality TV achieves what cultural theory does at its best: a fascinating, insightful, and clear-eyed look at contemporary society as seen through the lens of pop culture."
--Mark Andrejevic

"With this book, reality TV finally 'gets real'."
--Nick Couldry

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.

  • A major textbook on the impact of reality and lifestyle television on today’s programming, and on broader social, cultural and political trends
  • Draws on a range of examples from The Apprentice and American Idol to Extreme Makeover and Wife Swap
  • Argues that reality television teaches viewers to monitor, motivate, improve, transform and protect themselves in the name of freedom, enterprise, and personal responsibility

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.

Subject Areas: Sociology & anthropology [JH]
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