Core Response #2 - Emma

I have been thinking about Ouellette’s analysis of “participation” in reality TV, which she outlines in “Playing TV’s Democracy Game”. She raises points that Henry Jenkins makes about participatory media and participatory culture, about the power that consumers/users of media have as participants in that media itself. However, she says that Jenkins does not outline the extent of this participation, and adds that TV and reality TV in particular “involve a form of self-government,” wherein “the active (or ‘interactive’) citizen is an objective of current efforts to reinvent liberal government” (205). What holds this democracy-by-TV back is that it “occurs through the pluralization and mass customization of ‘popular’ constitutions, and through experiments that are as much about failure and setbacks as about provisional successes” (208). Reality TV demonstrates “group participation and governance,” which are “ways of instructing viewers about the techniques and rules of participation” (215). The reality shows that Ouellette discusses are based in audience participation—or, at least, there is a direct element of audience participation built into them, like American Idol or The Apprentice. In this way that Ouellette describes, reality TV instructs citizens in how to self-govern and be self-reliant in the neoliberal and democratic politics of the early 2000s.

I am very interested, though, in how we might apply this thinking to the landscape of reality TV today, which has significantly changed in some respects through the new participatory power of social media. Daniela in her Core Response for this week brings up the recent ousting of Chris Harrison, longtime host of The Bachelor and all of its iterations. I love her post about it, especially as she relates it to the Strings and Bui article, race, and “cancel culture,” but I’m also interested to think about this event in the context of Ouellette’s analysis. The Bachelor franchise builds its fanbase into the show in interesting ways, including addressing them directly. “Bachelor Nation has spoken,” Harrison often says, referring to something fans discuss on social media. Though there are no “votes” like in American Idol, social media becomes a way for fans to voice their opinion, usually about their favorite contestant or who the next Bachelor should be. Often this means very little, but this was recently challenged when fans surfaced photos of a current (apparently frontrunner) contestant attending an antebellum-themed party, and Harrison defended the contestant in an interview. His interviewer, a former Bachelorette, berated him, and subsequently fans and former contestants posted about their outrage, calling for Harrison’s removal from the show. It was then announced that Harrison would not host the “After the Final Rose” segment, a live portion of the final episode of the season, and fans noticed that his appearance in episodes following his ousting featured him less and less. It is unclear whether he will return to host the show at all. 

“TV does instruct” (224), Ouellette says, and The Bachelor had been instructing its audience that they had some form of power or participation in the series itself. If TV is teaching audiences to be self-reliant and self-governing, what about when audiences reflect that back to the show itself? 

Ouellette says that “TV networks and program producers conceive of their audiences as associations where viewers are expected to actively demonstrate their involvement and membership…deciding collectively who’s in and who’s out” (216). Instead of changing the show through regulated segments (polls in American Idol), I’m fascinated by the way that this kind of collective decision-making can spread to affect the production of the show itself, in new ways that were not afforded before social media. If voting for your favorite contestant in American Idol in polls regulated by the show is a demonstration of democracy, what kind of politics does it demonstrate when fans can change the show from the outside?