Regents of the University of California

Reality TV and the Production of 'Ordinary Celebrity': Notes from the Field
Author(s): Laura Grindstaff
Source: Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Vol. 56, The Popular (2012), pp. 22-40
Published by: Regents of the University of California
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23345258
Accessed: 25-09-2017 20:06 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

Regents of the University of California is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve

and extend access to Berkeley Journal of Sociology

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
22 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Reality TV and the Production of

'Ordinary Celebrity': Notes from the Field
Laura Grindstaff

Abstract

In this paper I draw on insights from my ethnographic work on daytime talk

shows and reality programming to explore the meaning of "ordinary celebrity"
as it unfolds in the reality television context. I characterize reality programming
as a form of "self-service television" in which producers construct the necessary
conditions of performance and real-people participants serve themselves (more or
less successfully) to these performances. The result is ordinary — or self-serve
— celebrity. My aim here is to use the concept of ordinary celebrity to consider
what media exposure means to, and how it operates for, so-called ordinary
people, with an eye to its gendered, classed, and racialized dimensions. Inspired
by but not limited to ethnographic evidence, I explore the cultural work being
done by self-service television and the implications of this work for rethinking
the connection betiveen "celebrity" and the performance of everyday life, as well
as the place of ordinary celebrity in American popidar culture.

Introduction

I have long been interested in the process by which ordinary people

— that is, people who are not professional experts or celebrities (and
this definition has very little to do with "averageness" or typicality) —
become part of commercial media. In my past research on daytime talk
shows, I explored the process by which ordinary people (euphemistically
called "guests") were incorporated into televisual discourse, the
strategies deployed to make them legible in that space, their reasons
for participating, and what their participation tells us about the
cultural dimensions of class inequality in the U.S. (Grindstaff 2002). In
subsequent research on the MTV reality show Sorority Life, I explored
some similar issues, focusing primarily on the gendered implications of
ordinariness. So, modeled after the MTV series The Real World, Sorority
Life followed a group of "ordinary" college girls as they pledged a
sorority, mixing observational footage with interviews. And because
MTV filmed the debut season of the series at UC Davis, where I teach, I
was able to interview the young women who participated in the series,
including those who really played the starring roles. Although it was
never as popular as its predecessor, The Real World, Sorority Life it did last
for about five or six seasons, and then led to a spinoff, Fraternity Life, as
well, also by MTV.

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
GRINDSTAFF 23

Now, using that research as a springboard, this essay focuses on

the concept of "ordinary celebrity" within the context of old and new
variants of reality-television programming. Inspired by but not limited
to ethnographic evidence — that's key; "not limited to ethnographic
evidence," please remember that — I explore the cultural work being
done by reality TV, what I call "self-service" television, as well as the
implications of this work for thinking through the connection between
celebrity and the performance of everyday life. What is the relation
of ordinary celebrity to "real" ordinariness (rooted outside media
visibility), and "real" celebrity (rooted inside media visibility)? And
where should we locate ordinary celebrity within the space of the
"popular" — that is, as an expression of popular but commercial culture?

Setting the Scene: A Brief History

Media critics often point to the new millennium — and the debut of
Survivor — as the start of the reality-TV boom, but there are longstanding
precedents and precursors, of course. COPS, for example, first aired
in 1989 on FOX, showcasing on-duty police officers apprehending
suspected street criminals,? COPS helped to introduce the camcorder
cinema-verite look that has now become stock in trade on television,
and was developed at least partly in response to the 1988 strike by the
members of the Writers' Guild of America (more on this later). Another
important pre-Survivor reality-based show is The Real World, begun in
1992 and still on the air. The longest-running program in MTV's history,
The Real World features a group of young adults, total strangers, living
together under one roof while the cameras roll, and was itself modeled
after the 1977 television-documentary verite series titled An American
Family, which aired on PBS. An American Family is widely considered to
be the first U.S. reality show in the contemporary sense of the term.
But of course, television from the very beginning has trafficked in
"reality" in one form or another, in the sense of inviting ordinary people
to share the limelight or subjecting them to the camera's gaze. Two
shows from the 1950s, Queen for a Day and Strike It Rich, foreshadowed
daytime talk shows because they featured ordinary people — almost
always women — willing to step forward and relate their woeful life
stories on camera in exchange for a reward. This is Queen for a Day
[indicating slide]. Then, it was prizes like refrigerators and washing
machines; today it's media visibility. Consider, too, Alan Funt's long
running Candid Camera. This is the TV Guide cover of Alan Flint with his
producers [indicating slide]. Candid Camera put "ordinary people" in
trick situations while hidden cameras recorded their reactions. The 1970s
saw the Chuck Barris productions — The Dating Game, The Newly wed
Game, The Gong Show. Around the same time, The Phil Donahue Show
debuted, and ran for almost 30 years. And I could have gotten a better

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
24 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

image of Donahue [indicating slide], but I like this one because that is me
asking a question on The Donahue Show. Right? Self-publicity! [laughter]
Donahue revolutionized the talk-show format: not only did he eliminate
the opening monologue and the host's desk, he invited ordinary people
on stage to talk about issues alongside experts and celebrities. He
roamed studio audiences with a microphone and included them, too.
Donahue made everyday life a matter of discussion and debate, blending
the personal and the political in a more or less conscious nod to the
emerging feminist movement.
And then, we all know where Donahue led: to Jerry Springer. In
fact, in the early '90s, when Springer first came on the air, he was billed
to be the next Phil Donahue, and he actually focused — a former mayor
of Cincinnati with a law degree —on serious issues, and then went in
a different direction. Today, the types and range of shows that exist
under the umbrella of reality television are many and vast. Anything
and everything is grist for the mill, from the staged theatrics of Donald
Trump's boardroom to bikini-clad beerfests on the Jersey Shore. "Reality
television" is something of an oxymoron, of course, as a term: the wide
range of programs subsumed under the label — quiz shows, game
docs, audition and dating shows, docu-soaps, emergency-rescue shows,
makeovers, etc. — are "real" not because they faithfully render a world
that already exists, but because they create, for real, an alternative
world or set of conditions that individuals must really navigate. As with
daytime talk shows, audience interactivity is an important part of the
mix, with online viewers and fans replacing the more traditional concept
of studio audience. A survey commissioned by American Demographics
reports that 25 percent — and actually this survey is now eight years
old, I think it's probably much higher at this point, maybe 30, 35 percent
— of those who watch reality shows actively read or post messages on
affiliated websites. The U.S. version of Big Brother, in fact, was more
popular online via live web-feeds than the "regular" television series on
CBS (see Wilson 2004).
Representing a loose compilation of related genres, then, rather
than a single set of conventions, reality TV has clearly gained a strong
foothold in the contemporary media landscape, both in the U.S. and
abroad.1 During the first season of American Idol — it's not the greatest
image, but you can see Kelly [Clarkson] there [indicating slide] — more
people voted to select a winner than voted in the 2000 presidential
election, while the same year the season finale of Survivor attracted more
viewers than any other program except the Super Bowl (Abiniak 2002).
The U.S. website Reality TV World, which provides news and episode

1 Scholarship on reality programming has grown apace with the genre itself. For a partial list, see
the following: Friedman (2002); Breton and Cohen (2003); Kilborn (2003); Smith and Wood (2003);
Andrejevic (2004), Murray and Ouellette (2004); Mathijs and Jones (2004), Holmes and Jermyn
(2004); Hill (2005); Biressi and Nunn (2005), Lewis (2008); Mayer et al. (2009), Kraidy and Sender
(2010); Skeggs and Wood (2012).

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
GRINDSTAFF 25

summaries, lists 917 reality shows. And then when you eliminate
multiple mentions of a show, like you count Survivor only once instead
of the twenty-two times that it's been in thirteen-week installments, the
number is closer to 650. Most of the shows listed are made and broadcast
in the U.S., but reality programming is particularly well suited to global
media production. It combines local casts and viewer participation
with customizable transnational formulas at a fraction of the cost of
traditional dramatic programming.
Economically speaking, then, reality programming is an outgrowth
of both the rapid development of media technologies and a changing
industrial landscape characterized by deregulation, increasing
competition, and financial scarcity. Culturally speaking, it is consistent
with the seepage of performance demands into everyday life (see
McKenzie 2001) and a preponderance of social and psychic spaces for
externalizing the self — for watching others "play themselves" and
being watched in turn. Once the province of professional actors, the
self-reflexive cultivation of emotional expressiveness is now expected
and highly prized, and this state of affairs suggests a general cultural
drift across many different spheres, but including, especially, the
media. Indeed, we may be better served by the concept of a public stage
(Alexander 2004) or a public screen (DeLuca and Peeples 2002) rather
than a public sphere (Habermas 1987), as reality shows, video logs,
webcams, and social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter
provide opportunities for being oneself, only more so, in front of the
camera. There are even reality-TV "schools" whose training programs
promise to give would-be participants a competitive edge in the pursuit
of ordinary celebrity. Probably the best known is the one shown here
in this slide of the New York Reality TV School, which bills itself as a
"one-of-a-kind program that takes students through the spectrum of
experiences that any reality TV cast member will face." And actually, if
I can get some funding I'm going to go to New York and do this. They
have a franchise in L.A., which would be a little closer, but not nearly so
exciting.

Self-Service TV

I'm going to talk a little bit now about this term self-serve,' or
"self-service television." As I learned in the course of conducting
research on reality-based television, incorporating ordinary people into
television entertainment puts enormous pressure on producers (and,
in the case of Sorority Life, camera crews) to simultaneously cultivate
individual performers and to create or control the performative context —
that is, to erect the conditions of possibility for maximizing emotional
expressiveness. These conditions of possibility are built on familiar
cultural scripts (white-trash guests, girls-gone-wild sorority pledges) and

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
26 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

on highly structured situations (contests or competitions with specific

rules and parameters, for example) which, in turn, allow guests to "serve
themselves" to their performances. Self-service television affords the
opportunity for acquiring celebrity cafeteria-style: it enables ordinary
people to walk in and serve themselves to celebrity status without the
bother of extensive training, formal credentials, or even much in the
way of talent, because performances are already strongly shaped by
underlying cultural assumptions about particular character types and
by carefully assembled frameworks of action. In other words, it is a
form of "readymade" or "pre-made" television in which the scaffolding
for a successful performance is constructed by production staff out of
particular contexts of performance rather than the content of scripts,
rehearsals, etc. In the research that I've done, ordinary celebrity requires
self-service television and self-service television produces ordinary
celebrity (see Grindstaff 2009,2010).
I witnessed (and participated in) the construction of ordinary
celebrity in considerable detail during my year-long foray into the
world of daytime talk shows. On talk shows, producers have to erect
the conditions of possibility for a successful performance before a
guest ever sets foot on stage. This is a screen capture of the Ricki Lake
show [indicating slide]. Drama is built partly into the choice of subject
matter. For "soft-core" topics — you know, something like "I Survived
Sex Abuse," which doesn't sound "soft-core," but compared to topics
that came later, that was fairly tame — producers orchestrate scenarios
designed to evoke public expressions of joy, sorrow, or remorse.
Whereas "hard-core" topics ("My Man Is Two-Timing Me!") rely on
the orchestration of on-air conflict, usually by bringing into direct
confrontation guests who are on opposing sides of an issue. Drama is
also built into generic definitions of ordinariness. Guests are "ordinary"
not only because they lack professional expert or celebrity credentials,
but also because they are experiencing some problem or crisis — which
is why they respond to on-air plugs soliciting their participation
and why producers find their stories compelling. Paradoxically, this
construction of ordinariness helps maximize both the probability of
emotional display and the unpredictability associated with producing
it. So, consequently — there's a whole section of my research that I won't
go into here — but the production of whether it's soft-core or hard-core
forms of the "money shot" require a considerable amount of "emotional
labor" on the part of producers and other production staff, which, for all
intents and purposes, is also a performance of sorts, and it's very central
to the infrastructure of self-service television.2
All genres of reality programming are forms of self-service television
whose success depends upon the construction of particular performative
contexts that require emotional labor from production staff. But different
2 The concepts of "emotion work" and "emotional labor" stem from the work of sociologist Arlie
Russell Hochschild; in particular, see Hochschild (1983).

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
GRINDSTAFF 27

genres marshal and deploy these resources in different ways. Whereas

talk shows draw upon a theater-based mode of performance complete
with stage and studio audience, docu-soaps such as Sorority Life or The
Real World or Jersey Shore evince a more observational mode in which
performances unfold over time in a more naturalistic setting. Here,
too, participants bare their "private parts" in public, just according
to a different logic of performance. Sorority Life, for example, asks
participants to live their lives in front of the camera as they go about
a "normal" ten-week term at college — which just happens to include
rushing and pledging a sorority. Dramatic potential inheres in the
setting, and dramatic interest stems from watching specific personalities
interact on camera. That is, the potential for drama is built into specific
contexts of interaction, the specific circumstances under which a pledge
process takes place, and broader cultural assumptions about who
sorority girls are and how they behave. Indeed, cultural cliches are the
foundation of ordinary celebrity in the era of self-service television.
This does not simply reflect producers' lack of imagination or even their
assumptions about audiences, guests, or participants; it reflects the self
service nature of the performance. To ensure that participants take up
their roles with relative confidence in the absence of formal training, the
roles have to be readily recognized and readily assumed. And there's
actually an interesting quote from Alison Hearn (2006: 621) which speaks
directly to this issue: "Much like donning Mickey Mouse ears, becoming
part of the immersive television experience involves adopting a 'persona'
consistent with its dictates: the jock, the vixen, the asshole, the gay guy,
the rich bitch, the grizzled vet, the buddy." To this we might now add
"the sorority girl."
By and large, talk-show guests and reality-TV participants
understand that they are expected to play heightened version of
themselves. In other words, they understand that ordinariness is a
construction and not an objective state of being. With observational
modes of reality programming, because participants are knit into
the fabric of production in a more sustained way, the conditions of
possibility that provide the grounding for successful performance are
co-produced between producer and participants, or production staff and
participants, to a greater degree. And the burden of performing emotion
work is also dispersed, not just to those creative people "above the
line" — you know, the production line — but those "below," including,
especially, the camera crews.

Who Wants to be Ordinary?

Every episode of Sorority Life opens with a musical refrain with the
following lyrics: "Who wants to be ordinary in a crazy, mixed-up world?
I don't care what they're sayin' as long as I'm your girl." If you listen

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
28 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

to the entire song, it tells the story of a misfit alternative girl who is
misunderstood by everyone but the one who loves her. Chosen no doubt
for its explicit reference to "ordinariness," the message conveyed is that
ordinariness is overrated, and that one needn't be ordinary to be loved
and accepted. It's an interesting choice for the series, because reality TV
is precisely about celebrating "ordinary" people while at the same time
offering an escape from that ordinariness via the celebrity frame. Being
an ordinary person is, indeed, overrated when one could be an ordinary
celebrity instead. But contrary to the song, being an ordinary celebrity on
Sorority Life, as on other reality shows, has little to do with embracing an
"alternative" identity.
So, I'm not sure how familiar people are with Sorority Life. Has
anyone ever seen any episodes of the series? Or Fraternity Life? Way in
the back... Okay, so it features a group of young women pledging a
sorority — meaning they are applying for sorority membership by first
being accepted as "pledges" and then, after a specified probationary
period, they are accepted into the membership of the sorority as sisters.
And so the first inaugural series filmed at UC Davis chose the sorority
named — let me get it right — Sigma Alpha Epsilon Pi, which is Sigma
for short, a small, Jewish-themed organization chosen by MTV largely
because at the time it was not a member of the National Pan-Hellenic
Conference (the PNC) and thus not bound by the PNC's prohibition
against media exposure. I'm going to see if this works and play you a
clip from Sorority Life, [plays video clip, available online at: http:/ /www,
youtube.com /watch?v=pq69V 9QCrU&feature=relmfu (runs until
minute 4:22] All right, so you get the idea.
bo, the existing sisterhood at Sigma was torn over whether to
participate in the MTV project: they recognized that being on television
offered a kind of opportunity, in their case for conveying a message,
highlighting the community-service orientation of their organization,
af which they were proud. Members of Sigma had the highest GPA, the
highest collective GPA, of any group on campus, or that's what they
told me. But it also represented a risk: being on television represented a
risk, of course, of being misrepresented or thwarted in their goals. The
issue of stereotypes figured centrally in their debates. All were aware of
the sorority-girl image — shallow, narcissistic, preoccupied with parties
and boys — and of the potential overlap between this image and that of
[ewish girls as clannish, self-absorbed, and exclusive. (Although Sigma
is Jewish-themed, it is not exclusive and non-Jewish members could join
and did join). Yet those wanting to participate among the sisterhood
argued that here was a chance to prove the stereotype wrong: they could
show the whole country, and indeed the world, that Sigma was different,
a special organization. According to my interviewees, no one lobbied
to participate solely for the excitement of being on TV or wanting
media celebrity, although according to some of my interviewees, these
motivations were at play among those in favor of participating.

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
GRINDSTAFF

In the end, they voted to do the show. What the sisters did not fully
understand at the time was that the series would focus primarily on only
a small subset of the entire pledge class — six, to be exact, who were
landpicked by MTV to live apart from the others in a special "Pledge
House," outfitted by Ikea — and the sisters' ability to convey anything
much about Sigma itself would be limited. They also failed to anticipate
the degree to which MTV's involvement would significantly change the
pool of young women who opted to pledge, as well as the pledge process
itself. Rather predictably, when the series aired, as you saw in the
opening of the fourth episode, the "ordinariness" depicted was entirely
consistent with the normative image of sorority girls that the members
of Sigma wanted to avoid. With hundreds of hours of footage shot and
Dnly thirteen half-hour episodes slated for broadcast, "ordinariness" had
to be conveyed in very broad strokes. Overall, the series showcased a
great deal of partying — two of the pledges celebrated their twenty-first
birthdays on the show — and considerable bickering, including one bar
scene in which a pledge accuses a sorority sister of acting "slutty" and
gets slapped in the face. Scenes of the sisters and pledges getting along
were relatively rare, as were scenes of the women studying and doing
community service, even though these other activities took place while
the cameras rolled.
On the one hand, given the dramatic requirements oi reality TV, one
could legitimately wonder, what did the sisterhood of Sigma expect?
On the other hand, the conditions of possibility that get forged during
the production process are complex and not nearly so easy to interpret
when they unfold around you as when you examine them after the
fact. And the other thing complicating this is that once the membership
voted to allow MTV into their lives, they were caught in a kind of double
bind that worked to producers' advantage: if they refused to accept as
pledges the girls who were rushing the sorority solely because MTV was
there — they're rushing the sorority because of the cameras, not because
they believe in the sorority's identity and mission — then the sisterhood
risked being perceived as clannish and exclusive, because their normal
policy was to just accept all pledges. However, if they accepted all
pledges, they risked losing control of who represented Sigma to the
public and they risked reinforcing a different stereotype, the "girls
gone wild" image. Either way, MTV had a potential hook for fulfilling
the mandate of reality television for dramatic action built on characters
engaged in interpersonal conflict.
Certainly, some of the pledges under surveillance in the House
facilitated that mandate, at times unwittingly, but for the most part with
a kind of self-reflexive knowledge about what constituted a "good"
versus a "bad" performance. Like the ordinary guests on daytime talk
shows, the pledges starring in Sorority Life were not naive about the
dramatic requirements of the show. Having grown up with The Real

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
30 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

World and being familiar with a wide range of reality shows, they
understood they were to play heightened versions of themselves. There
were differences among them, however, on what it meant to "play
ordinariness" on national television and why this was an attractive
proposition; what they sought cannot uniformly be characterized as a
desire for celebrity or fame.
And I want to talk just a little bit about one of the pledges that you
saw there in this episode, Jessica, who had motivations, in fact, much
like the sisterhood, much like the leadership of the sorority, in that she
wanted to use the show as a vehicle for achieving a social goal. The
only Mexican American student to rush the sorority, Jessica wanted
to participate, and she actually lobbied hard to participate, when the
original sixth member dropped out. So she was a replacement after
the fact, which is why you got this dynamic — again, this worked to
producers' advantage — of "there's five girls already there and this
sixth one enters afterwards." She lobbied hard to be the sixth pledge
when the original choice fell through in order to increase the visibility of
Latinas on national television and represent them with dignity. She was
aware of the risks that visibility posed given the media's penchant for
caricature. Moreover, her racial and ethnic otherness was compounded
by her larger physical size: she knew that her inclusion would serve as
a visual counterpoint to the whiteness and thinness of the other girls.
But she wanted to participate anyway, she told me, because she wanted
to give Latina viewers someone "real" with whom to identify (and
then this explains her careful behavior on the show, which online fans
interpreted as boring and which relegated her largely to the background
of events). The other five pledges in the house, not surprisingly, had less
noble aspirations. Being white and middle-class — and therefore "free"
to represent no one but themselves — they were motivated primarily
by curiosity and a sense of personal adventure. They recognized that
appearing on national television was not an affirmation of their ordinary
life; it was a unique, once-in-a-lifetime event. And yet only two of
those five said that they entertained half-serious hopes for using their
television appearance as a springboard for obtaining "real," ongoing
celebrity. What this illustrates is that wanting to be on TV may be
bound up with social-identity categories (in this case, race and ethnicity)
and the commitments and obligations they produce, rather than, or in
addition to, more individualistic desires. Moreover, what individuals
desire may be the excitement and adventure of being part of the process
of what produces ordinary celebrity rather than the celebrity per se —
and I'll return to that point.
This complex layering of motivations was at work in the world of
daytime talk shows that I studied, too. There, however, the lesser status of
the genre — if you can believe, it had lesser status than Sorority Life — the
lower-class status of guests, and the more explosive nature of on-stage

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
GRINDSTAFF 31

performances evoked stronger moral condemnation on the part or critics

md a sharper distinction between sort of "classy" versus "trashy" reasons
for participating. "Classy" guests wanted to champion a cause, promote
jn organization, or educate the public about an issue or event. The more
they wanted this, the "classier" they were said to be. It was the "trashy"
juest who had an ax to grind, a score to settle, or who simply wanted to
3e on TV. The willingness of such guests to deliver the money shot for
no apparent reason other than media exposure was considered proof of
their inherent trashiness. (I have a whole section of the talk-show research
that focuses on this concept of "white trash"). Indeed, it is easy enough
to understand why people seek out media exposure to advance a cause
they believe in, to sell a product or an idea, or to achieve "real," ongoing
fame. More opaque is the desire or willingness to air one's dirty laundry
in public in exchange for a brief interlude of ordinary celebrity.
But after many months ot working with and interviewing such
guests, I concluded that America's poor and working classes want much
the same thing as everybody else: to be noticed, to feel like they matter in
the world, and to participate in public discourse in a locally meaningful
way. Given the centrality of television in their lives — social class tends
to be inversely correlated with television viewing — but their limited
options for getting on TV, assuming the role of talk-show guest was one
of the few avenues for fulfilling this desire. It didn't much matter that
the portrayal was unflattering, for the larger goal was validation, to be
part of the discourse and part of the scene. "Trashy" guests oriented to
the ritual rather than the transmission function of media in which being
part of the process itself matters more than any specific communicative
outcome. If there was a communicative dimension at work here, the
communication is "I exist" rather than "here's what I think" — the
talking body rather than the talking head. As Nick Couldry (2002: 284)
points out, as a sort of support for this point, it is through the media
that people "gain access to what is marked off as social from the merely
individual.. .the media are [one] place we look for the reality we call
'social.'"
A similar distinction between transmission and ritual orientations
could be said to have characterized the Sorority Life participants, too,
but with the caveat that wanting "mere exposure" was clearly not the
purview of the poor and disenfranchised but of "ordinary" middle
class white women — and one Latina. And yet, with Sorority Life as
with daytime talk shows, the broad distinction between transmission
and ritual dimensions of media participation belies the messiness of
people's agendas and the impure nature of their desires. So, here I want
to trouble my own distinction between this ritual and transmission sort
of mode. I think it's a useful analytic concept, but when you actually
get in there and talk to people it's messier, much messier than that. The
women I interviewed could not be said to have possessed "purely"

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
32 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

communicative or "purely" ritualistic motivations. Rather, they had a

general inclination one way or another —either to educate the public or
experience the production of celebrity — but, for the most part, these
inclinations were conceptually impure, incorporating elements of each
orientation.

Ordinary Celebrity and DI(t)Y Culture

Why should we care about the production of "ordinary" people

on television? What of import is being produced? If ordinariness has
acquired increasing visibility across the media landscape, it's worth
considering the cultural "work" that is being done by this visibility. So
now here I'm going to leave my safe territory, which is my ethnographic
data, and talk a little bit more about trying to draw in some more meso
level and macro-level sociological theory.
[In terms of the culture work being done by media visibility:]
there are both distal and proximate factors at work, connected to an
emerging cultural imperative that sees the public display of private
life as increasingly legitimate, and that sees performativity as a central
feature of public discourse. So those are the things I'm going to try
to unpack a little bit. Writing in the 1970s, Christopher Lasch (1979)
noted the "pathological narcissism" of the "performing self," which he
believed to be fueled by a "therapeutic mindset," which he associated
with the shift from a manufacturing-based to an information-based
economy. The therapeutic turn requires the exteriorization of interior
life, and it requires the blurring of public-private distinctions, organized
and legitimated through the language of psychology. As Eva Illouz
(2008:184) observes, "like no other cultural language, the language of
psychology mixes together private emotionality and public norms. [It]
has codified the private self and made this private self ready for public
scrutiny and exposure."
The historic rise of therapeutic culture is generally taken to be a
white, middle-class phenomenon (Reiff 1966; Lears 1981; Kovel 1988).
According to Pfister (1997), inventing a therapeutic culture enabled
the white middle classes to embrace and value psychic (internal) labor
over physical (external) labor and to demonstrate its superiority over
subordinate groups. This is consistent with Bennett's (2003) observation
that the working classes are assumed to lack the psychological depth
necessary for self-governance, and also ties into ways of characterizing
them as "the masses." At the same time, and over time, the moral
imperative to narrate the self through the revelation and performance
of one's inner life has come to pervade the entire class structure,
constituting a new measure of individual worth and cultural value, a
kind of capital. One can even think of Giddens's "reflexive project of
the self" as sort of moving in that direction, to some degree. Reality TV

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
GRINDSTAFF 33

crystallizes this imperative for viewers and participants alike. According

to Skeggs and Wood (2009), British scholars working on reality TV in
the U.K., reality TV offers "the performance of heightened existence
and a more interesting psychic engagement of the ordinary transactions
in which we are daily often implicated...we see affect-in-action, people
in and out of control, relationships visualized, broken-down and
opened-out, amplified in intimate detail." The gendered valence of the
"ideal" performance cultivated by reality TV is notable, although not
many people are noting it, not only in the "intimate publics" (Berlant
1997) that create the narratives enacted or the "psychological excesses"
(Brooks 1976) of their melodramatic codes, but then also in what I had
mentioned before, in the "emotional labor" (Hochschild 1983) that is
required of those in front of and behind the camera. Reality shows may
not androgynize emotional labor in an expressly political way, but they
increasingly expect men to perform in an emotional register, both as
characters-participants delivering on-air performances and production
staffers cultivating those performances behind the scenes.
The specific contours of late-modern performativity may be informed
by a "reflexive project of the self" or a therapeutic sensibility, but in
addition, the broader cultural trend toward performance may have
a longer history. And here, I'm trying to bring in the work of Jeffrey
Alexander (2004), who has been doing some more cultural, meaning
based work around performativity. According to Alexander, the
development of the social role of actor as a distinct role separate from
that of a ritual performer [moves us from religious to secular authority]
— people realize that the theater, or what we now think of as the modern
theater, actually began within religious institutions and then became
separated [off from them]. The church was actually then quite down
on performance — that's a whole other conversation we can have.
But the transition from ritual to performance and the codification of
performance in formal and official institutions of the theater takes place
alongside this transition [to a secular society], which is a challenge to
sacred authority, to religious authority, and the introduction of sort of
"the mundane" in social life, in political life as well. So the shift from the
development of the role of actor as distinct from that of ritual performer
was tied to a shift in [performative] content from the sacred realm to the
mundane in the context of early state formation and the transition from a
religious to secular authority. The inclusion of secular concerns into the
sacred realm or formerly sacred realm via performance — performance
becomes this vehicle for introducing more secular concerns — helped
to reconfigure culture in a more socially oriented and dramaturgical
way. This is Alexander's argument: Throughout the Western world,
he says, ritual moved toward theatre in tandem with growing social
complexity and in tandem with the reconfiguration of power. As
power became more pluralized, the means of making and distributing

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
34 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

cultural representations became more accessible. This process went into

overdrive with the rise of digital media technologies and, in particular,
the internet. And here I will paraphrase my esteemed colleague,
Josh Gamson (2011), the Internet has served as a "launching pad" for
"celebrification" and, in concert with other cultural forces, pushed
ordinariness to the forefront of celebrity culture. Celebrity, as a key arena
for the cultivation of an American elite, is pluralized along with other
categories of power and authority.
Because the new forums of self-mediation involve real people
playing themselves outside traditional theatrical and media institutions,
the concept of "authenticity" becomes both more important and more
contested. According to Alexander (2004), authenticity reflects a state
of "fusion" between text and audience. This is a term he uses. I like
it: "fusion" between text and audience. Cultural texts are performed
to convey meaning to others, and "fusion" between text and the
audience is a marker of performative success. And so fusion is how you
accomplish authenticity. And yet fusion — authenticity — becomes
more difficult to achieve with increasing organizational complexity
because the formal elements of performance (writing, acting, directing,
critiquing, consuming) are independently variable and this de-fusion of
performative elements creates self-consciousness about the artificiality of
the performance process. Reality TV, with its claims to raw, unscripted
action, purports to move us from de-fusion back to fusion. I mean, of
course it does not, but even though it does not — and, you know, you
can argue that just simply one set of formal arrangements replaces
another; it's not any less formalized, necessarily — fusion is nevertheless
the self-proclaimed goal of reality programming and a compelling
legitimating narrative. By promising access to the "real" via the symbolic
action of ordinary people without the mediating effects of scripts,
rehearsals, etc., reality TV, in effect, attempts to re-fuse the elements of
performance by collapsing the conceptual distinctions between actor
and role (right, the actor plays herself) and between actor and audience
(we're all "ordinary" people). The authenticity of the performance
is presumed to stem from the shared social location of performer
and viewer outside the official production of traditional professional
celebrity.
Although Alexander does riot write about reality programming,
the participation of "ordinary" people in reality TV can be thus viewed
as yet another iteration in the gradual process whereby performance
moves from the sacred to the mundane. This is, at least in part, a class
based shift in a cultural if not a strictly socioeconomic sense. Just as
"profane" actors entered the "sacred" space of ritual performance in the
development of early social drama, so are "ordinary" people who are
not trained actors infiltrating the "sacred" spaces of professional media
production. In constructing an "ordinary" version of celebrity, reality

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
GRINDSTAFF 35

programming is therefore "democratizing" — with scare quotes — in

the sense that constructions of ordinariness now join constructions of
religious, political, economic, and/or cultural authority as a basis for
playing the game. Certainly none of the talk-show guests or reality
participants I interviewed would have appeared as characters on
national (and international) television had it not been for the rise of
reality programming. For better or worse, the genre represents a shift
in the structure of opportunity in the pursuit of celebrity status. At the
same time, as GraemeTurner and many other scholars have noted, there
is no necessary connection between demographic changes in patterns
of access to media and a progressive or democratic politics: semiotic
participation is not political self-determination.

I'm getting very close [to the end] here.

Moreover, it is important to recognize the value hierarchy that

results from the expansion of celebrity discourse. According to Sue
Collins (2008), the exchange value of cheaply produced "ordinary
celebrity" is inherently limited because the vast majority of reality
TV participants lack the accumulated intertextual capital that "real"
celebrities (professionally networked celebrities) have. She argues that
the increasing visibility of ordinariness on television actually reinforces
the value hierarchy separating ordinary from celebrity categories in the
first place, upholding the higher value of "real" celebrity by protecting
it from clutter. And Nick Couldry (2002) makes a similar point in a
somewhat different way when he notes that the "master frame" of reality
TV is this passage from ordinary persona to celebrity persona, but that
the fact that this passage is seen as laudable, and a laudable achievement,
only reinforces the hierarchy between the two categories. Critics
continually remind us of the value hierarchy surrounding ordinary
celebrity when they denigrate reality shows and their participants in
class-coded ways. These putdowns reflect the longstanding tension
within celebrity culture noted by Gamson (1994, 2011) between celebrity
based on hard work and talent versus clever manufacturing and
packaging, that is, "deserved" versus "undeserved" celebrity.
This double movement involving the expansion of celebrity on the
one hand and the protection or isolation of celebrity on the other hand
opens up and institutionalizes a middle ground for ordinary celebrity
to occupy. Ordinary celebrity constructs a sense of self that connects
simultaneously to those "below" — real, ordinary people — and
those "above" — stars with accumulated intertexual capital. It marks
the individual as special but not categorically outside or beyond the
everyday, ensuring that television exposure is both an escape from
and an affirmation of ordinary status. In other words, the proliferating
opportunities for playing oneself compete with but do not displace the

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
36 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

more established discourses of celebrity in circulation: they offer new

sites for identity construction that combine the sacred and the mundane.
What's ultimately at stake in the widespread pursuit of ordinary
celebrity is the desire to be actively involved in the creation and the
production of culture, albeit in a self-promoting way. It is about the
desire, as Lynne Conner (2008) has put it in another context, to "co
author" one's preferred forms of entertainment. According to Conner,
people don't want culture handed over on a platter or encased in glass;
they want a cultural experience. They want the opportunity to participate
in shaping the meaning of cultural events. And yet, for reality-TV
participants, this opportunity is fraught with pitfalls. Reality TV itself
occupies a middling space between the established entertainment
industries, which remain exclusive and difficult to access, and the more
flexible, accessible terrain of digital media and the Internet. Because the
tools for self-publicity are more or less within reach reality TV occupies
this middle space between the professional machinery of celebrity
production, but then also the Internet and social media and other spaces
for narrating the self. And in the latter, the tools for self-publicity are
certainly more accessible. The latter — the social media, what you're
seeing here on the screen [indicating slide] — is more conducive to a
DIY mode of person production: Do It Yourself. Reality TV, on the other
hand, is better characterized by what I call a DI(t)Y aesthetic or mode,
and that stands for Do It to Yourself. Not Do It Yourself, but Do It to
Yourself, because the tools of self-publicity remain deeply embedded
in, and indentured to, organizational and institutional constraints. And
here's where sociologists, I think, can really have a lot to contribute to
this conversation.
Okay, so I'm on my very last thought here. The expansion of
ordinariness via reality TV is taking place alongside the growth
of unprecedented economic and cultural inequality, and that
is a predictable irony. It is worth noting that reality TV became
institutionally viable and economically competitive after the Writers'
Guild strike of 1988, when the producers of COPS (at FOX) realized
they needed a form of programming that was not only cheap to produce
— no scripts, no actors, no pesky studio constraints — but also free of
union demands (see Raphael 1997). The shift to reality TV paid off for
networks nearly a decade later during the 2007 Writers' Guild strike,
when reality programming remained virtually unaffected compared
to more traditional media genres (Grazian, 2010). Reality TV has been
"successful" in dominating mainstream television in the US not only
because ordinary celebrity is seductive but because of the ascendance
of flexible modes of production in which the unpaid, non-union,
widely available labor of ordinary people generates new avenues for
profitability for media institutions (Raphael 1997; Turner 2006). In other
words, reality TV is entirely consistent with the political economy of

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
GRINDSTAFF 37

neoliberalism, characterized by a decline in welfare assistance and social

service provision, the weakening of union labor, the privatization of
publicly owned resources, the deregulation of industry, and global free
trade. So these opportunities and constraints are happening in the same
moment and happening together in a conjuncture. To paraphrase David
Grazian (2010), media companies take advantage of flexible borders
and globalizing markets to set up production in Third World countries
where labor laws, child protections, health codes, and environmental
regulations are relaxed in the service of promoting "business-friendly"
environments. And of course none of the people I interview were aware
of any of that, so that's another thing to think about.
The tension between producing opportunity by expanding the
terrain of celebrity discourse and reproducing inequality through
neoliberal ideology and practice is entirely consistent with the
contradictory nature of commercial popular culture in the U.S. Self
service television, for the most part, does not lie in the "long tail" of the
media, where amateur musicians, filmmakers, artists, and critics seize
upon new tools and technologies to curate their own cultural experiences
(Stephen Tepper calls this "the curatorial me,"). Self-service television
lies closer to the head of the monster, where old-school rules, hierarchies,
and profit imperatives still prevail. This works against an ethos of
democratization and makes the route to achieving ordinary celebrity
especially steep but, at the same time, especially important to explore.

References

Abiniak, P (2002) "Ideal, not idle summer for Fox," Broadcasting and Cable
(Sept. 9): 22.
Alexander, Jeffrey (2004) 'Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance
between Ritual and Strategy', Sociological Theory, 22(4): 527-73.
Andrejevic, Mark (2004). Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. New
York: Roman and Littlefield Publishers.
Bennett,Tony (2003) 'The Invention of the Modern Cultural Fact:Toward
a Critique of the Critique of Everyday Life', in E.B. Silva and
T.Bennett (eds),Contemporary Culture and Everyday Life (Durham,
NC: Sociology Press), pp. 21-36.
Berlant, Lauren (1997) The Queen of America Goes to Washington City:
Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC/London: Duke University
Press).
Biressi, Anita and Heather Nunn (2003) Reality TV: Realism and Revelation.
London: Wallflower Press.
Brenton, Sam and Reuben Cohen (2003) Shooting People: Adventures in
Reality TV. London and New York: Verso.

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
38 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Brooks, P (1976) The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James,

Melodrama and the Mode of Excess. New Haven, CT/London: Yale
University Press.
Collins, Sue (2008) "Making the Most out of 15 Minutes: Reality TV's
Dispensable Celebrity." Television and New Media, 9(2): 87-110.
Connor, Lyrtne (2008) "In and Out of the Dark: a Theory of Audience
Behavior from Sophocles to Spoken Word," pp. 103-124 in Engaging
Art: The Next Great Cultural Transformation, ed. by Steven Tepper and
Bill Ivey. Routledge.
Couldry, Nick (2002) "Playing for Celebrity: Big Brother as Ritual
Event," Television & New Media 3 (3): 283-293.
DeLuca, Kevin and Jennifer Peeples (2002) "From Public Sphere to Public
Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the "Violence" of Seattle,' Critical
Studies in Media Communication, 19(2): 125-51.
Friedman, James, ed. (2002) Reality Squared :Televisual Discourse of the Real.
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Gamson, Joshua (1994) Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gamson, Joshua (2011) "The Unwatched Life Is Not Worth Living: The
Elevation of the Ordinary in American Celebrity Culture" (invited
essay). PMLA (October).
Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the
Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity.
Grindstaff, Laura (2002) The Money ShotTrash, Class, and the Making of TV
Talk Shows. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Grindstaff, Laura (2009) "Self-Serve Celebrity:The Production of
Ordinariness and the Ordinariness of Production in Reality
Television," in Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries,
ed. by Vicki Mayer, Amanda Lotz, and John Thornton Caldwell.
London and New York: Routledge.
Grindstaff, Laura (2010) "Just Be Yourself - Only More So: Ordinary
Celebrity in the Era of Self-Service Television." Pp. 44-57 in The
Politics of Reality Television: Global Perspectives, ed. by Marwan Kraidy
and Katherine Sender. Routledge.
Grazian, David (2010). "Neoliberalism and the Realities of Reality
Television." Contexts 9/2: 68-71.
Habermas, Jurgen (1989) The StructuralTransformation of the Public
Sphere:An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by
Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hearn, Allison (2006). "John, a 20-year-old Boston native with a
great sense of humor": on the spectacularization of the 'self and
incorporation of identity in the age of reality television," in The
Celebrity Culture Reader, ed. P. David Marshall. London/New York:
Routledge.

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
GRINDSTAFF 39

Hill, Annette (2005). Reality TV: Audiences and Factual Television. London/
New York: Routledge.
Hochschild, Arlie (1983) The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of
Human Feeling. University of Chicago Press.
Holmes, Su, and Deborah Jermyn, eds. (2004). Understanding Reality
Television. London/New York: Routledge.
Illouz, Eva (2008) Saving the Modern SouLTherapy, Emotions, and the
Culture ofSelf-Help Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kilborn, Richard (2003) Staging the Real: Factual TV Programming in the
Age of Big Brother. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Kovel, J. (1988) The Radical Spirit: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Society.
London: Free Association Books.
Lasch, Christopher (1979) The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in the
Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: Norton Press.
Lears,T. Jackson (1981) No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the
Transformation of American Culture 1880-1920. New York: Pantheon.
Lewis,Tania (2008) Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise.
New York: Peter Lang.
Marwan Kraidy and Katherine Sender, eds. (2010) The Politics of Reality
Television: Global Perspectives. Routledge.
Mathijs, Ernest, and Janet Jones, eds. (2004) Big Brother International:
Formats, Critics, and Publics. London/New York: Wallflower Press.
Mayer, Vicki, Amanda Lotz, and John Thornton Caldwell, eds. (2009).
Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries. London and
New York: Routledge.
McKenzie, J. (2001) Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance.
London/New York: Routledge.
Murray, Susan, and Laurie Ouellette, eds. (2004). Reality TV: Remaking
Television Culture. New York University Press
Pfister, J. (1997) "On Conceptualising the Cultural History of Emotional
and Psychological Life in America," in J. Pfister and N. Schnog (eds),
Inventing the PsychologicaLToivards a Cultural History of Emotional Life
in America. New Haven, CT/London:Yale University Press.
Raphael, Chad (1997) 'Political Economy of Reali-TV', Jump Cut, 41:
102-9.

Rieff, Phillip (1966) The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud
(New York: Harper and Row).
Skeggs, Beverly and Helen Wood (2009) "The Moral Economy of
Person Production: The Class Relations of Self-Performance on
'Reality'Television.'" The Sociological Review, 57(4): 626-44.
Skeggs, Beverly and Helen Wood, eds. (2012) Real Class: Ordinary People
and Reality Television Across National Spaces. British Film Institute.
Smith, M. J. and A.F. Wood, eds. (2003) Survivor Lessons: Essays on
Communication and Reality Television. Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
Company.

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
40 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Tepper, Steven (2008). "The Next Great Cultural Transformation:

Leveraging Policy and Research to Advance Cultural Vitality,"
pp. 364-385 in Engaging Art, ed. by Steven Tepper and Bill Ivey.
Routledge, 2008.
Wilson, Pamela (2004) "Jamming Big Brother: Webcasting, Audience
Intervention, and Narrative Activism" in Reality TV: Remaking
Television Culture, ed. by Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette. New
York University Press: 323-343.
Turner, Graeme (2006) "Celebrity, the Tabloid and the Democratic Public
Sphere," in P. D. Marshall (ed.), The Celebrity Culture Reader. New
York/London: Routledge: 487-500.

This content downloaded from 200.10.131.117 on Mon, 25 Sep 2017 20:06:35 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms