Better Living through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship

From The Apprentice to Extreme Makeover, reality television has transformed network and cable television. Whether it is learning to succeed in business, navigating the rough waters of romance, managing our health or wallets, or perfecting the profile of our faces, reality television dispenses a powerful prescription for ways to live and conduct ourselves as “neo-liberal” citizen-subjects, who increasingly are expected to take responsibility for our own welfare in the aftermath of the “Great Society.”

Better Living through Reality TV asserts that reality television is a cultural technology through which we have come to monitor, motivate, improve, transform, and protect ourselves in the name of freedom, enterprise, and personal responsibility. Combining cutting-edge theories of culture and government with programming examples—including Todd TV, Survivor, and American Idol—Better Living through Reality TV moves beyond the established concerns of political economy and cultural studies to conceptualize television's evolving role in the contemporary period.