Shark Tank, The Promise of Upward Mobility and Self-Management
ABC’s Shark Tank is a long-running entrepreneurial reality show where aspiring contestants can bring their ideas to a table of investors, referred to as “Sharks,” who will listen to their pitches and decide whether to invest in the idea or not. Products being pitched come to the Sharks at different stages of maturity—some are very new and therefore need angel investing to get off the ground, and others have a successful track record but are looking for money to expand their reach. Furthermore, the Sharks analyze the contestants themselves for business acumen, charisma, adaptability, and willingness to collaborate. When negotiating, the Sharks have different personalities, but all seem to embody a Vegas-style “the house always wins” mantra, where no deal can be more beneficial to the aspiring entrepreneur than to the Shark themselves.
In keeping with Hays and Ouelette’s ideas that “TV offers demonstrations in group participation and governance,” Shark Tank is self-governing and refers to and glorifies the proletariat as controlling producers (215). While the "Sharks" are seen as "superiors," it is only by merit of their experience and capital, and all contestants are treated as capable of upward mobility along the same lines. In addition, the show intentionally spends time relating the Sharks to the hopefuls as is the case in our first clip (S07E27), in which “Shark” Robert Herjavec relates to the immigrant childhood of entrepreneur contestant Mai Lieu:
Herjavec can be heard in both clips discussing his immigrant background, coming to the capitalist Americas as a child with his parents, “escaping communism” in former Yugoslavia, and the inherent lack of individual merit-to-reward that implies. In the land of milk and honey, when his mother was scammed into spending seven weeks of wages on a vacuum cleaner, he took that lesson and engaged in the democratic capitalist system as a way to protect his family financially (The Toronto Star). Most of the biographies on ABC’s show site for the Sharks emphasize either their “come from nothing” backstories or their one-man founding of business empires. The message is clear: you only get somewhere by putting in the work. It upholds a long-cherished American idyll of self-salvation, a reinforcement that this social nation is an inanimate “land of opportunity” in which one has the natural resources to achieve the social lifestyle one desires. No other value is raised higher on Shark Tank than the concept of self-reliance, and the list of ironies this affects abounds. With the Sharks' chairs arranged in a semi-circle akin to a medieval council, the show becomes about a "lesser figure" begging for support from a higher power. The basis of the show itself is about a “lesser” figure begging for support from high powers arranged in a semicircle, their chairs arranged not unlike that of a medieval council. There is a strong element of performance from contestants, not only in the clearly constructed pitch, but in the way emotions are strategically utilized. Consider our second clip, which features an emotional interlude among the contestants’ pitch and negotiations:
As fascinating as it is to see attempts to bridge emotional connections, such as when with Mai Lieu or Phillip Lapuz give their backstories in the second clip, the true intent of these moments seems to serve less as persuasive arguments for the Sharks, and more as lessons for the entrepreneurs to let their backstories serve to motivate them. The key is precisely this: motivation, but not distraction. In the business world, emotions serve as fodder for inspiration, but must never take away from the true goal of financial success. In this way, entrepreneurship becomes a commodification of affect. Perhaps the most stark display of this is after Lapuz tearfully shares that he cannot marry his fiancee without his business succeeding first, as he is not financially stable enough to bring her from Japan to the US. Shark Kevin O’Leary, after shedding some tears himself, says, “I was moved by that story but now I’m back in reality… You don’t want to let emotions make financial decisions, and I don’t, and that’s what’s kept me true as a great investor.” O’Leary’s use of the term ‘reality’ suggests that to the Sharks, emotions exist in a fantasy land that has no place in business investment. A truly great investor and entrepreneur, he posits, is someone who does not engage in strongly affective pursuits. In cases like these, then, tender moments shared by contestants also serve as openings for the Sharks to scrutinize their character and determine whether or not they truly have “entrepreneurial spirit.” This irony is especially visible in the second clip (S06E02), in which Phillip Lapuz and Eric Williams seek investment to expand their handmade, luxury golf club business. This 13 minute pitch and response seems to dance around two major sociocultural points: the straightforward fact that any luxury item business will necessarily have a niche market on the one hand (which the Kronos founders don’t seem to acknowledge) and the fact that American consumers are so reliant on public approval that Kronos has failed to find a domestic market because it hasn’t been recommended by 4 out of 5 dentists (re: golf pros). Lapuz lampshades the darker side of this practice when he says that getting such recommendations comes down to how much you are willing to spend to buy approval. The Sharks continuously ignore this seemingly principle-level obstacle as they ask three or more times about the “US distribution issue.” That there might be a failure of the democratic environment that allows for any product to succeed based on merit is simply not possible, and instead something must be wrong with Kronos’ founders’ business acumen. The system is not at fault, only the user. Such ideas are in line with the neoliberal model of entrepreneurship and democracy writ large, ideals that Shark Tank works to uphold through its form and content. Reflecting on our clips, and Shark Tank as a whole, the show seeks to democratize fundamentally unequal class separation by convincing viewers that everyone starts on the same page while simultaneously ostracizing those who start on unequal footing and browbeating those who lean too much on their social lives in their business actions. And yet, given the widespread glorification of the show and its Sharks as potential keys to success (or at the very least, tools for the signal boosting of companies), one has to consider Hay and Ouelette’s position that reality TV teaches us to participate in our own oppression. Shark Tank is not the only one of its kind—in many ways, it is simply one instance of a public pitchfest. Angel investors and venture capitalists abound, and neoliberalist-inflected hustle culture has permeated all ranks of society. Has Shark Tank, in all of its fame/infamy, fed such culture? Or is it simply a product of it? In actuality, Shark Tank represents a microcosm of a greater social hegemony. Within its premises, the same conflicts of social self-government play out as in our day-to-day lives, keeping viewers in a constant loop of confirmation bias. Shark Tank exploits the existing system to form its own structure as one pre-sold to audiences, then ensures its survival by constantly upholding the system off of which it is sustained. It is a Mobïus strip parasite. It has no beginning and no end as long as the social structure it feeds on remains.
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