The fourth wall is a performance convention in which an invisible, imagined wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see through this "wall," the convention assumes the actors act as if they cannot. In TV, it means don't look or acknowledge the camera.
The premise of a reality show is that you are watching real-life unscripted situations where the protagonists are not acting to the camera. The format has evolved throughout the years, but aside from the confessional scenes, protagonists have their lives documented without any interaction with the camera. The camera is the fourth wall.
Modernized Reality Show franchises have producers who help cast members create narratives that will help to boost their screen time. Often the storylines are loosely based on reality, and the cast members basically keep throwing spaghetti to the wall to see what sticks. Social media tracking and ratings will disclose the storylines performing better, guaranteeing to members another season or a better seat at the reunion episode. Their performance ratings can also help them sign up lucrative deals with brands, going from appearances at events to sponsorship and other business ventures.
Over the years – or seasons if you prefer –we watched the fight for attention become increasingly hostile and sometimes savage. The cast members' resentment to network favoring some with more air time than others or jealous of their social media tracking fostered an environment of aggressive competition and false alliances that ended pushing to break the fourth wall many times. But what happens when a cast member addresses the show itself and blames it for feeding a conflict? Is it still a reality show, or not?
The irony of it is that for most cast members, the show is their reality. Without the show, they wouldn't have any income, or the show is the source of most of their income they can get outside the show, but because of the show. So, when they break the fourth wall, they are actually not breaking it. It's almost like an existential and philosophical paradigm. If reality isn't reality, then what's real? (brain exploding gif)
Viewers have been binging on reality shows for decades. What started as an experiment and evolved into a fad, then went from a fringe guilty pleasure to cult, and finally became a household blockbuster, now seems to have been metastasized into the world of social media. It feels like it has completed the circle.
Andy Cohen, the man behind the mega-successful Real Housewives franchises, said reality TV is the soap opera of this generation. And it seems he is entirely correct. The drama shown in the franchise rivals the daytime 80s soap operas. But it went further: Reality shows fictionalized reality to the point that cast members are show characters in their real lives – or whatever they call it when the TV cameras are off. When they are not in the show, they are on social media, at an event on the pages of a gossip magazine. They live on and for the camera. The only difference of the Truman Show is that reality stars are aware they are on camera.
When Laurie Anderson, the avant-garde multi-media artist, wrote "Language Is a Virus" in 1986, she spoke about dreaming of living on an island where everybody was from TV and kept saying: "Look at me! Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!" How prophetic she was! Today, the constant battle for air time crashed the fourth wall and created an entire world of people living a fictionalized version of reality that viewers want to copy. Turning reality into a simulacrum, an image or representation of something, but in this case of life itself. The constant copying of a fictionalized reality created what the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would call a Simulacra, which is copies that depict things that either had no original or no longer have an original.
Putting aside all the symbolism, references, metaphors, and predictions we can find in modern culture, still, the critical question is: Have Reality Shows ended their cycle?
I thought the election of a TV reality star as the president of the most powerful nation in the world would change the show. But it didn't, although I argue it might have contributed to it by showing to the audience how it looks like the behavior reality shows notoriously enable. Well, maybe not.
But my guess is that the pandemic and streaming will kill reality TV. Hunkered down for months without anything to do but look at, but their screens, audiences became hungry for more content. Watching on TV the indulgent lives of the rich and famous while locked inside –most likely jobless–probably was too much to some viewers. But what probably hit reality TV hard was what actually made it so lucrative. It is a low-budget type of content compared to scripted streaming. And streaming had its moment during the pandemic, helping establish it as the choice of entertainment of the 21st century. Audiences wanted better production values, more intriguing and engaging storylines than what reality TV offers. Streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon, HBO Max, and Disney+ came out with quality, but they brought quantity. When it comes to Disney+ only, think about the entire Marvel catalog that is available on streaming. Now, audiences don't have to pick between quality and quantity; they can have both. At any time of the day, on-demand.
What will happen to reality TV then? With KUWTK -the most famous reality tv cast on TV – final season last month and other shows' high-profile cast members involved in some serious problems with the law, it will be interesting to watch what happens (wink) to reality TV. Indeed, producers will try to reinvent it. Maybe this time, to pump up the ratings, it will need more than a salacious adultery rumor or a dramatically turning of the table.