I'm Not Here to Make Friends!

In honor of this being reality week in our class, I thought I would post a compilation of that well-worn reality TV cliche: I'm not here to make friends!  Enjoy!

Core Post #3 Shahs of Sunset and the Politics of Representation

Most Iranians are not as shallow and materialistic as depicted in the series. We work hard and strive to achieve. The show's portrayal of Iranians is very narrow. As an Iranian these are not a group I would hang out with. We are normal people assimilating well in to American society as decent hard working friendly people. Most Iranians do not fit the mold depicted in the show. (Ardavan Ashrafi, 2012)

Shahs of Sunset (2012-2015), a reality television show telecast in Bravo featuring the Iranian-American community has been controversial for several reasons. Put together by Ryan Seacrest Productions, the show follows the affluent life of six Iranian-Americans in their mid 30s in Los Angeles. Los Angeles has a special relationship to the Iranian community. Following the mass influx of Iranians during and after the turbulent revolution in Iran, Los Angeles became the second largest settlement of Iranians outside the geographical space of Iran. Shahs of Sunet was subjected to a wave of negative opinion by the Persian community in LA who found it to be offensive on several counts. The opposition to the use of the tag of Persian identity in the reality programme was soon followed by counter allegations that “Iranians were not exactly Persians.” This in turn, led to bitterness among the Iranian community who had assimilated themselves within the syncretic melting pot of “Persian-ness” as a way to integrate themselves against the onslaughts of the revolution in Iran.

Some of the debates on the politics of representation and racial stereotyping hinted in last week’s readings can be directly connected to the controversies that were triggered off by Shahs of Sunset. In many ways it also opened up the element of “authenticity” for debate. This  becomes increasingly relevant considering the tense relationship shared by the United States and Iran in the recent past. When the pilot was launched in 2012, one of the concerns that many Iranian Americans faced was how the timing of the show could be detrimental in painting a picture of Iranians that were far removed from real. The escalating tension in the US over Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons programme had contributed to the tension among the Iranian community in the US.

One of the most stark representative elements of the show is the way it associates wealth with the community, inciting responses from the community that this might water down the “reality” of the Iranian community. The clash between the import of Western values and the erosion of the cultural purity was played out in the seething tensions that followed the telecast of the show. “We are not these people,” became the immediate response for majority of the community and some even invited journalists over to their houses to see for themselves the sea difference that separated their everyday lives from what was projected in the show. An online petition against the airing of the show on Change.org for instance contested that:

“The show, regardless of its intent to "entertain" is, in fact, political […]Many people lost everything during the revolution. They left their families, their friends and their home. They came to the United States completely alone and unable to speak the language […] Iranian-Americans quickly embodied the American ideals of hard work, self-sacrifice and family. It is this trait that has made the Iranian American so successful in the United States […] This show not only threatens the good name of Iranian-Americans, but it may also threaten the physical safety of Iranian-Americans in this country. In this day and age, caricatures of Middle Eastern groups in the media are even more likely than other forms of ethnic stereotyping to lead to threats or physical violence.”[1]

The concern of the petition that the American public would wrongly construe the character of Iranian-Americans connects directly to Anna McCarthy’s argument about citizenship and reality television. McCarthy suggests that “reality television is something of a privileged site, annotating transformations in the institution of the individual (citizenship’s raw material) through its consolidation of connections between three discursive apparatuses for the formation of citizen and self: state, family, and cultural text” (19). But McCarthy also points to the “affective weight of cultural artifacts” (19) that marks reality television. One could argue that the negative response to Shahs of Sunset was exactly that—a response to the affective weight of its politics of representation.

The fear that cultural stereotyping in a television show could “lead to threats or physical violence” in real life makes Shahs of Sunset a site for contesting the notion of an ideal Iranian-American notion of citizenship. In fact, the Change.org petition could be seen as an effort at crisis management outside the text of the show, but because of that very text. The crisis here is signaled by the larger politics of American involvement in the Middle East. The “social-text” of the show, then is formed by the triangulation of actual political and military action, a history of immigration, and the threat of xenophobic backlash. The Change.org petition then, becomes a sort of a preamble for “ideal” Iranian-American citizenship, widely understood. The petition states:

As has been shown by many studies, Iranian-Americans are much more likely than average to attend graduate or professional schools or be professionally employed as doctors, lawyers, dentists, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and academics. However, that reality is not well understood by the American public. The materialistic, shallow banter of six individuals on Bravo's "Shahs of Sunset" now represents the entire Iranian American community. 

The larger social-text of Shahs of Sunset then reflects a colloquial engagement with the idea of the “good citizen.” If one were to follow the logic of the petition, Shahs of Sunset militates against this ideal of the good immigrant-citizen, who having assimilated and succeeded in forms of public life after going through a historically traumatic experience, should be able to avoid justifiable violence. Even though Shahs of Sunset is not about suffering per se, it signals a crisis in public life that has deeper connections with historical trauma and migrant memory. The “excesses” of Shahs of Sunset then, does truly lead to “a rethinking of the place of suffering in civic life” (21), even though this might be a side-effect of its representational politics.

---

[1] https://www.change.org/p/bravo-television-comcast-nbc-universal-not-to-air-shahs-of-sunset

Core Post #4- TV & Reality

Chad Raphael starts the last paragraph of his article with “Nonetheless, Reali-TV is still with us and is not likely to go away” (138). As evidenced by the growing number of reality TV shows, no matter how absurd, reality TV is not going anywhere any time soon. Raphael’s perspective on the economic origins of reality TV was interesting as most times articles on reality TV focus more on the content and not how it began. Raphael states that emergence of reality TV was “in response to the economic restructuring of U.S. television” (125). Hollywood always at some point has a financial crisis that needs to be fixed by producing cheap content. In film, it was Blaxploitation films in the 70s and with television it was reality TV shows. Reality shows were/are cheap to make because it “can be developed more quickly than fictional programs partly because they do not rely on lining up talent and writers” (130). This is quite evident with the slew of reality TV shows currently in circuit.

There are so many reality TV shows that at this point it’s hard to keep up with them. Some popular shows have been Jersey Shore, America’s Next Top Model, Survivor, The Real World, American Idol, The Real Housewives of (fill in a city), and so many more. I want to focus on Raphael’s point that reality TV shows were popular because they were so cheap to make. I think one show that exemplifies how cheap and simple it is to continue to make reality TV shows is The Real Housewives franchise. Since the premiere of the first one, Orange County, in 2006 an additional 8 shows in different cities have been created. This shows how cheap it is to make a reality TV show, but also that there’s an audience for it as networks are continuously developing new shows. Though according to Raphael, the genre decline in the mid-1990s it seems that it’s making a strong comeback. Raphael also notes that “reality shows have a short shelf life” (137) but many seem to last at least 3-5 seasons tops. Some defy the odds and last up to 10 or more seasons. An example is America’s Next Top Model, which ran for 22 seasons and will possibly be rebooted soon due to its popularity. Even though reality TV shows were made in order to make money without having to spend much, they have become a big part of society and an economic asset to many studios.

Here's also a link to an article on the cost of reality TV programming and its results

http://source.southuniversity.edu/reality-tv-low-cost-programming-that-produces-high-ratings-119585.aspx

Core Post 3 - UnReal: Dramatizing the Neoliberal Nightmare

As all of our readings this week pertained to the exploitative economic structures and philosophies of reality television, I felt it appropriate to bring Lifetime’s Unreal into the conversation. Created by Marti Noxon and Sarah Gertrude Shapiro (who had previously worked on The Bachelor), Unreal follows the behind-the-scenes drama of a reality dating show titled Everlasting. The show primarily focuses on two women, Rachel Goldberg (Shiri Appleby), an emotionally perceptive, morally conflicted producer brought back to the show after an emotional and mental breakdown, and Quinn King (Constance Zimmer), the tenacious, morally flexible executive producer who lures Rachel back to the show.

            Over the course of the show’s first season (the second season is due this year), we watch Rachel (often against her will) prod and cajole the women competing for the affection of a pompous British playboy, including a single mother with a troubled past, a sexually aggressive model, a closeted virgin from the South, and a woman suffering from bulimia. This prodding leads to high drama both on and off camera on Everlasting, while Rachel is forced to put her economic self-interest ahead of her morals and ethics (it’s worth noting that she is first seen on the show wearing a shirt that reads “This is what a feminist looks like”). Throughout the show, we are reminded of the craven nature of reality TV; its systematic racism, its exploitation of both contestants and below the line laborers, and the disregard for decency in lieu of manufactured drama. Pointedly, one of the few major male characters on the show is Chet Wilson (Craig Bierko), the philandering, drug-addicted creator of Everlasting, who takes almost no part in the day to day functioning of the show.

            Unreal was born out of a short film by Shapiro titled Sequin Raze, and was developed into a series by Lifetime, which was in search of a show to compete in the landscape of dark, serialized cable dramas. Lifetime was in pursuit of its own Breaking Bad (an influence Shapiro cites frequently in interviews), and the comparisons are apt. Breaking Bad, while fundamentally a character study on the descent of Walter White, suggested a broader critique of American healthcare, the drug war, and contemporary masculinity. Unreal is similarly focused on the downward spiral of its heroine, but situates this character in an unforgiving world of perpetual exploitation. Rachel may even have fewer viable options than Walter White; she is trapped, unable to get away from the show that already caused one breakdown.

            In a fascinating turn, Lifetime has announced that Unreal season two will do something that The Bachelor has (very noticeably) not done, feature an African-American bachelor as its primary object of desire, seemingly in an effort to heighten the show’s already explicit critiques of the reality TV economy, and in particular its structural racism. The second season also promises even more timely cultural critique through two new characters described as a disgraced NFL player (the bachelor) and a Black Lives Matter activist (one of the contestants). It remains to be seen if the second season of the show will reach the artistic and critical heights of the first, but what information is out there suggests that the show is going to double down on its dark, satirical tone. I cannot wait.

Core Post 2: Reality Television and the Interruption of the State

In “Reality Television: A Neoliberal Theater of Suffering,” Anna McCarthy writes that “to see reality television as merely trivial entertainment is to avoid recognizing the degree to which the genre is preoccupied with the government of the self” (17). She describes reality television’s privileged ability to collapse the spheres of private life, public life, and the state – the apparatuses and institutions by which the individual is constituted as citizen – under the seemingly innocuous guise of excess and so-called ‘reality’. She specifically calls attention to the techniques and failures of “self-government” within the reality television program as analytical frameworks for understanding the machinations of neoliberalism, that is, “in which state policies synchronize with cultural practices to apply market-based individualism as a governmental rationale across the institutions and practices of everyday life” (21).

In thinking through these themes of self-government, the insidious control of the neoliberal state, and the structures of reality television, I would like to draw attention to one of the most fascinating examples of reality television I have ever seen: Pretty Wild, which premiered on E! in 2010. Initially conceived as a relatively standard docu-series about an non-traditional family of “party girls” exploring the Hollywood social scene, the program was thrown into total disarray by the arrest of its star, Alexis Neiers, shortly after the filming of the pilot. Neiers was arrested in connection with the (now-infamous) Bling Ring robberies, wherein a group of Los Angeles teenagers broke into and robbed the homes of a number of high-profile celebrities. What had initially been set up as a Kardashian-style personal profile was interrupted and became instead a portrait of a family in crisis and a lengthy, painful confrontation with the law, the press, and questions of guilt and responsibility – nevertheless intercut with traditional scenes of family drama, photoshoots, parties, flirting, and shopping.

The construction of Neiers herself as a figure – one who would later become infamous for an emotional phone call (filmed during the shooting of the series) she made to Nancy Jo Sales, a reporter Vanity Fair, who had published an unflattering profile of her during the trial – clearly works to locate her criminality not in the actions of the Bling Ring (after all, legal proceedings were ongoing during the shoot, which meant that a lot of information still had to be kept private) but instead in her party-girl persona, her youth, her conspicuous consumption, and her highly unconventional relationship with her adopted sister Tess. Her quest for redemption in the eyes of the law (and the series) became a public spectacle of self-flagellation and self-presentation, what McCarthy calls “the makeover as a kind of social reform”: performing the identity of innocence and apology for the cameras that had unwittingly recorded the revelation of her guilt (and were constantly searching for more). The spectre of the other camera throughout the show – the security camera, the ultimate in ‘reality’ filming, apparently neutral and unmotivated, that led to her arrest – haunts its every frame, reminding us that even in the fictive and fantasy world of reality television the state is still present, judging and assessing at every turn, and that the trauma Neiers is subjected to throughout the series is both personal and political, both entertainment and a kind of education in surrendering to state control.

Here is a link to the Nancy Jo call: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x10pkt3_alexis-neiers-phone-call-full-scene_fun

Also, here is the Vanity Fair profile of Alexis Neiers: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/03/billionaire-girls-201003

Politics as Reality TV

Somehow Donald Trump's campaign for president has been playing out as a kind of nightmare reality TV show in itself, so I can't say I was too surprised by the news today that the head of CBS has pronounced Trump's deplorable antics as "damn good for business." It's public acknowledgement of the mainstream media's ongoing complicity in Trump's rise to power.

"Surviving Survival TV" Core Post 3

I was very intrigued by Anna McCarthy's argument concerning reality TV as both a social text that reflected free market, neoliberal policies of the 1990s, and a low-cost solution to the '80s/'90s fracturing of the television industry. Her notion that public life was filtered through the image of "the government of the self," the theme of makeover, and the "theater of suffering" is quite convincing. While I don't watch a lot of reality TV, over the last couple of years, I have been known to watch the occasional survival show (namely "Man Vs. Wild" and "Survivorman") with my seven-year-old daughter; she enjoys the adventure and problem solving, and their lack of crass cultural themes or social behaviors makes them kid-friendly.

While they don't have an overt social function in the way McCarthy describes "Random 1," they do riff off of general reality TV motifs such as "the impossible challenge, the personal confrontation, and the scavenger hunt" (McCarthy 21) in their episodes, which detail survivalists trying to sustain themselves in various remote locations around the world. By their very nature, I suppose one might define them as asocial texts, promoting the idea of a retreat from society and the "purity" of self-sustenance in the wilds; in that way they dovetail into neoliberal ideas of rugged individualism and personal fortitude. So when I recently saw the star of "Man vs. Wild," Bear Grylls (in a new show), not only guide President Obama through a glacier but also through a Christian evangelical prayer, I was only partially surprised to infer that he must be some sort of rightwing celebrity now.

Grylls' shows emphasize his Navy seal training and begin and end with dramatic helicopter entries and exists into remote locations. With his movie star good looks and heroic affect, his film crews and presentations clearly stoke myths of the military-industrial complex. By contrast, "Survivorman" Les Stroud, a Canadian filmmaker who carries all of his equipment with him, and shoots and edits everything himself, typically barely ekes out some semblance of food/water/shelter in his episodes. In contrast to Grylls' polished spectacles, Stroud's DIY bohemian scrappiness often reflects McCarthy's "failure of self-management," her interpretation of trauma as a dramatic catalyst for these kinds of shows, and a subtext for the failed state. The fact that Stroud has also produced a TV series ("Surviving Urban Disasters," 2009) in which he interviews survivors of Hurricane Katrina and demonstrates survival techniques is especially conducive to McCarthy's political analysis.