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True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us
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About This Book
Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2022 by EsquireA sociological study of reality TV that explores its rise as a culture-dominating medium--and what the genre reveals about our attitudes toward race, gender, class, and sexuality What do we see when we watch reality television? In True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us, the sociologist and TV-lover Danielle J. Lindemann takes a long, hard look in the "funhouse mirror" of this genre. From the first episodes of The Real World to countless rose ceremonies to the White House, reality TV has not just remade our entertainment and cultural landscape (which it undeniably has). Reality TV, Lindemann argues, uniquely reflects our everyday experiences and social topography back to us. Applying scholarly research--including studies of inequality, culture, and deviance--to specific shows, Lindemann layers sharp insights with social theory, humor, pop cultural references, and anecdotes from her own life to show us who we really are. By taking reality TV seriously, True Story argues, we can better understand key institutions (like families, schools, and prisons) and broad social constructs (such as gender, race, class, and sexuality). From The Bachelor to Real Housewives to COPS and more (so much more!), reality programming unveils the major circuits of power that organize our lives--and the extent to which our own realities are, in fact, socially constructed. Whether we're watching conniving Survivor contestants or three-year-old beauty queens, these "guilty pleasures" underscore how conservative our society remains, and how steadfastly we cling to our notions about who or what counts as legitimate or "real." At once an entertaining chronicle of reality TV obsession and a pioneering work of sociology, True Story holds up a mirror to our society: the reflection may not always be pretty--but we can't look away.
Reviews
"A professor of sociology at Lehigh whose previous books have studied commuter marriages and the professional dominatrix — excellent preparation for parsing the adventures of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills — Lindemann contends that, by holding up a mirror to society, reality TV has much to impart once we get past the histrionics ..."
"Fans of reality TV can relate."
"Characters on the shows Lindemann studies are shamelessly hedonistic, but she treats her own addiction to the genre as a guilty pleasure and frets to extract some educational value from it ..."
"Most of the chapters provide perspectives from scholars discussing why the boundaries of these social constructs are less clear-cut than they seem, as well as Lindemann's analysis of how they exist within reality television ..."
"She makes astute points by tracing the history of the genre all the way back to MTV's The Real World in 1992 ..."
"[A] deep dive into the most-talked about shows of the last three decades ..."
"A vigorous, sometimes predictable defense for reality TV that could use more of the genre's surprises."
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