Last year, The Smoking Gun, a Web site owned by the Court TV network, procured and published an internal memorandum from the producers of the reality show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. It outlined in shocking detail the kinds of contestants the program hoped to attract: people bravely living with rare and incurable diseases, victims of hate crime and vandalism, and parents grieving children killed in drunk driving fatalities, among others.1 Somewhat disingenuously, given the sensationalist program content associated with its parent company, the Web site expressed sneering outrage at this ghoulish wish list and at ABC’s naked and callous exploitation of suffering for profit. Such outrage is understandable. But it does not really articulate the historical specificity — nor, indeed, the political saliency — of the reality-television format as a kind of social text. As Laurie Ouellette noted in a seminal 2004 essay, dismissive or outraged reactions should not obscure the fact that reality television “gained cultural presence . . . alongside the neoliberal policies and discourses of the 1990s.”2 Putting into circulation certain “idealized citizen subjectivities,” the genre’s growth is not so much evidence of television’s “subversion” of democratic ideals as it is an arena for their active transformation via new “templates for citizenship that complement the privatization of public life.”3 In short, 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, and how, in that capacity, it demarcates a zone for the production of everyday discourses of citizenship. If, as Lisa Duggan persuasively argues, neoliberalism in the United States is a rightwing project mobilized around “versions of identity politics and cultural policies [that are] inextricably connected to economic goals for upward distribution of resources,”4 then the reality program — produced (unlike fiction TV) without union labor and proposing the makeover (rather than state assistance) as the key to social mobility, stability, and civic empowerment — is an important arena in which to observe the vernacular diffusion of neoliberal common sense.
