Buy essay on How do reality TV stars fulfill or satisfy roles?

It is a well-known fact that nowadays reality shows is one of the largest, fastest growing and most popular genre on TV. Everyday millions of people all over the world turn on TV shows and became a part of a mass culture. There are really hundreds of different types of such shows, practically for everyone: men and women, young and old, teenagers and pensioners, business people and housewives. It is practically impossible to turn on the television and not be intended in some kind of reality television!
The main issue and the main problem is that people get so much information from television shows, get mainstreamed ideas that influence them. When people watch TV shows, they are intended in the actions, they not only look but do believe everything what they see. But what do people see: is it reality or just a good actors playing?
In fact, the term “reality television” means to viewers that what they see is a completely genuine and unbiased exposure of real life.(Squires, C)
But in fact, many reality television shows have well-thought out and well planned scenarios, and the participants are just actors, that are specially cast to fulfill certain stereotypical roles, to show certain people who they are really not.
So producers just cast the most bright combinations of people in order to maximize the odds of drama erupting. ()
And audience do believe everything that is said or done, do feel certain emotions about it – so in fact we are just being deceived?
It is interesting to point out an essay of Roland Barthes “The World of Wrestling”, that also touches upon the idea of acting instead of reality. In this essay the author speaks about the sport of wrestling, he takes the sport of wrestling and turns it into a modern day myth.
In “The World of Wrestling,” Roland Barthes analyzes wrestling as a spectacle that is based on signs: “What is portrayed by wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a little while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction.” (Roland Barthes, p. 25).
Barthes argues that wrestling is not a sport because there are no winners, and he states:
“The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees. (Roland Barthes, p. 15).
So watching a wrestling fighting, we are dealing with a real human comedy, where we can find most forms of passion: conceit, refined cruelty, rightfulness. So it becomes quite evident whether the passion is true or not, and what the public wants to see is the image of passion, but not passion itself. So it’s interesting to point out, but such sport as wrestling deals with emotional people playing even more than actors in the theater.
So what can the author say about wrestling as a public spectacle, that shows the audience suffering, defeat and justice, but in real all these emotions and feelings are just tragic masks? As the idea of “paying” is so evident in wrestling, then Roland Barthes points the main question: is wrestling is something real or just acting?
Practically, the same question can be asked about reality television. For example, when people cries in TV shows, do you think it’s real or fake? The truth is, that it is both. The same thing is in wrestling – it is a real fight, but just for pure entertainment, and sometimes the fight, jabs, kicks are not real, but just signs.
So the conclusion is evident: instead of being honest depictions of real life, TV reality shows “by definition, they mediate, even when it is real life, that is purportedly being revealed” (C. Squires).

 
Works cited:

Squires, C. (2008). “Tryin” to make it real—but real compared to what?” Critical Studies in Media Communication, pages 434–440.
Roland Barthes, “The World of Wrestling”. Hill and Wang, New York, 1984
Albert Swanepoel. “The strange world of Roland Barthes: some points of criticism”. Communicatio, Volume 16, Issue 2, 1990, pages 56 – 73
Murray, Susan, and Laurie Ouellette. “Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture”. New York University Press, 2004.