David Core Response #3

 Both Raphael and McCarthy suggest that reality tv reflects the individualistic and competitive values of neoliberalism, while also reinforcing the idea that success is a matter of personal responsibility and ambition. Specifically, McCarthy writes that neoliberal reality TV presents individuals as “sovereign beings” responsible for “welfare, growth, and security that might otherwise be assumed by the state,” (25) which casts individuals as solely responsible for their success or downfall, while Raphael’s argument is that neoliberal market conditions created hyper-competitive industry practices that in turn created content based around neoliberal competitive values.  

I thought it was interesting to consider these ideas in the context of the TV show survivor, which used to frame its seasons by ‘theme’ – effectively drawing in certain demographics through its contestants. For example, Season 6 divided teams by gender, 12 by age, 13 by race, 28 by physical attractiveness, 30 by class (white collar vs blue collar), and so on and so forth. Survivor seems to exemplify the idea of reality tv representing neoliberal values as it pits different demographics against each other for corporate profit. On the surface, the show gives hope to the underrepresented or marginalized by providing a level playing field through an artificial ‘equal’ environment (a desert island in Fiji). And yet there’s something fundamentally tribalistic in how contestants are immediately divided by identity groups and expected to prove their superiority to other groups.

In recent seasons (starting from 40), Survivor has stopped with Season ‘themes’, probably in fear of getting canceled or deemed politically insensitive – it’s hard to imagine a show in 2023 that places divides teams by race, for example, as they did in 2006. So I thought that was an interesting complication to the idea of reality tv being a trojan horse for neoliberal values – it still holds that competition and individual struggle is a cornerstone of reality tv, but at the same time, producers are deftly responding to changing societal values and political correctness, at least on the surface.