Reality TV isn’t real; it’s a genre of live-action shows that has actors playing characters that emulate personalities the studio thinks are endearing to audiences, typically older adults.
There’s some kind of competition; the two reality TV shows that my family regularly watches are Big Brother and Survivor, and there’s your fair share of character dynamics in these shows. People are on the show to win money, and there is real social strategy involved. However, these competitors are celebrities on their own; they all gain large followings on social media and often get invited to other competition shows the moment they star in one of these.
I have one thing that I strongly dislike about these shows and other reality TV shows, however, and that’s the confessionals. They’re these short segments where the studio has someone walk into a private booth and talk to the camera, basically explaining the situation that just happened from their perspective.
A lot happens in these completion shows, and it’s hard for the viewer to fully process everything that’s happening, so to feed the correct information to the viewer in the easiest-to-digest way, they often have these confessional segments literally explaining what they’re doing and why. The most notable time for these is when someone gets voted out and everyone explains their vote.
There’s no authenticity to these confessionals in my opinion, as the name states someone’s supposed to confess something they’ve done, state their opinions on a subject, and give some real dialogue, but these shows water them down to reading a script explaining the current situation to make the most out of their runtime.
The worst part about these is that there are so many confessionals during these reality TV episodes. An episode of The Mob on Hulu was airing at the dinner table, and out of the 30ish minutes I watched, it felt like more than half of it was just confessionals explaining the current tension of the situation. I felt like I was getting spoon-fed while watching TV; it made me realize how often these confessionals happen and how sanitized they’ve become.
I understand that audiences need important information, and that people don’t want to take the time and think about whatever’s going on in front of them; the less thinking, the more audience engagement, but constantly getting spoon-fed information like I can’t understand someone’s thought process without them telling me outright feels a tad humiliating. They’re way too frequent, and they don’t offer any actual thoughts, just a script read out to distribute information.
