Better Living through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship / Edition 1

by Laurie Ouellette, James Hay

Overview

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.

• A major textbook on the impact of reality and lifestyle television on today’s programming, and on broader social, cultural and political trends
• Draws on a range of examples from The Apprentice and American Idol to Extreme Makeover and Wife Swap
• Argues that reality television teaches viewers to monitor, motivate, improve, transform and protect themselves in the name of freedom, enterprise, and personal responsibility

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781405134415
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	01/29/2008
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Laurie Ouellette is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is co-editor of Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture and author of Viewers Like You? How Public TV Failed the People.

James Hay is an Associate Professor in the College of Communication at the University of Illinois—Champaign-Urbana. He is a co-editor of The Audience and Its Landscape.

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations.

Introduction.

1. Charity TV: Privatizing Care, Mobilizing Compassion.

2. TV Interventions: Personal Responsibility and Techniques of the Self.

3 Makeover TV: Labors of Reinvention.

4. TV and the Self-Defensive Citizen.

5. TV's Constitutions of Citizenship.

6. Playing TV's Democracy Game.

Notes.

Index.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Better Living through Reality TV achieves what cultural theory does at its best: a fascinating, insightful, and clear-eyed look at contemporary society as seen through the lens of pop culture."
--Mark Andrejevic

"With this book, reality TV scholarship finally 'gets real'."
--Nick Couldry

Editorial Reviews

"Better Living through Reality TV achieves what culturaltheory does at its best: a fascinating, insightful, and clear-eyedlook at contemporary society as seen through the lens of popculture."
—Mark Andrejevic

"With this book, reality TV finally 'gets real'."
—Nick Couldry

From the Publisher