Administración Gubernamental de Ingresos Públicos
Falcon 4.709, Partida Matriz Nº 71612, por medio del presente, para que en el plazo
Following the blockbuster success of the feature film Juno (2007), about the stigmas and personal struggles around being a pregnant teenager, the senior vice
president of series development for a major cable network noticed that the US was ranked as having the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and among industrialized nations.216 In
response to this epidemic, that VP, Jan Hoffman, partnered with The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy to create a reality tv show that was “intended to document and deter teen pregnancy, to shed light on this issue and to show girls how hard teen parenting is.”217 That series quickly became very popular with US and
international audience, generating a spin-off that was even more popular, with ratings in 2010-2011 that left the show ranking second among all cable programming for the widely sought-after 18-34 demographic218 These two became the network's top shows, with that
216 Jan Hoffman, “Fighting Teenage Pregnancy,” New York Times, April 10, 2011, 1.
217 Sun Feifei “Teen Moms are Reality TV’s new stars. Is This A Good Thing?” Time Magazine, Vol. 178
Issue 3, p58.
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year's season finale “peaking at 5.6 million viewers.”219 As a result of this, the shows'
“stars” quickly became tabloid fodder, consistently featured on glossy magazine covers in supermarket aisles across America. Despite the explicitly stated didactic aims of the executive producers, quoted above, there has been tremendous public scrutiny regarding the representations of teenage pregnancy in both the original series PDSM (2009-12, 5 seasons) and the more successful spin offs PDSM I (2009-12, 4 seasons), and PDSM II (2011-2012, 2 seasons, ongoing), and PDSM III (in production).220
The program set-up on paper resembles a traditional documentary. Specifically, PDSM follows pregnant teenagers through their pregnancies until just after they deliver their children, and PDSM I, II, & III work a longer arc, picking four girls from a season of PDSM to follow for at least several seasons through the early stages of childrearing. These developmental arcs are supported by a large media presence, from periodicals and online news sources, to blogs and other online venues for user-generated commentary.
PDSM and PDSM I, II, & III are in this sense not formal documentaries, closed in a particular form, as the classic PBS Burns type documentaries, or part of a more
multiple-mediated documentary community event, such as Moore's work represented. Yet they are undeniably documentary based shows, part of the reality tv genre, a televised documentary/reality tv series for cable, set apart from the televised documentary long form for PBS, or the documentary for theatrical viewing, yet still very much part of the documentary genre. Nonetheless, such "reality tv" has not actually been positioned in
219 Donna Freydkin, “Oh baby! PDSM returns with more unwed woe; But are they really cautionary
tales?” USA Today, July 5 2011.
220 I worked as a camera operator on these series between 2010 and 2012, and due to my confidentiality
agreement can not disclose the names of the programs – particularly as I use behind the scenes interviews with cast and crew members herein. While it is improbable this dissertation would cause a problem, I can not afford to chance, it as the penalties for breaching that contract are millions of dollars. I am calling the programs PDSM, for please don’t sue me.
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discussions of documentary as an emerging variant. The emergence of reality tv as a current phenomena is most often traced to the 1980s and 1990s, with shows like Cops (1989-2012, Malcolm Barbour and John Langley), Survivor (2000-2012, Charlie Parsons), and Real World (1992-2012, Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray), although its roots were undeniably laid in the PBS series An American Family (1973, Jacqueline Donnet).
For the present, it is enough to signal that there is a different evolution of documentary history, still rooted in the same history that begins with Grierson and
Flaherty through the televised documentaries of the 1960s. In a real sense, such shows in their widest iterations are derivative of the reality-based hidden camera and game shows of that same era, and the decades that followed (most notably, the hugely successful international Big Brother, 2000-2012 in the US, developed by John de Mol and Robert Caplain - a series that started more as an exploration of living together in strained circumstances and evolved over the seasons ever more into a game show). Thus in various forms, reality TV constituted from the very first an interesting hybrid form of documentary and entertainment driven television, yet it has rarely been situated vis-à-vis the later evolutions of documentary that were discussed in the last chapter.
What we must acknowledge, however, is that reality television is constituted as a non-fiction genre with explicit roots in documentary, even if all shows that presently fall into the category do not instantly seem to have documentary value -- The American
Family is no The Osbournes (2002-2005, Elizabeth Hirschhorn and Charlie Schulman),
but there are undeniable continuities. Important for my argument is the ways that these shows both capitalize on and rapidly change the format for documentary representation,
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particularly in light of new media that allows for streaming episodes online with ongoing real-time user generated commentary. Such online assets serve as feedback loops for both producers and cast members in various configurations, depending on the time relation of the filming and the broadcasting (quite different for Survivor, which is assembled largely after the on-site footage is gathered, or Big Brother, where the
producers control cast access, than in more interactive situations like Real World, where cast members interact with the public). Importantly, these time relations are used not only to cut and shape the present seasons according to user feedback, but they can also affect subsequent seasons in production and/or post-production. Thus this second case study presents another concentrated example of how newer technologies are changing the genre’s instrumentality and space(s) of representation, through documentary texts and publics that are interacting more rapidly and plurally than ever before.
This chapter will focus on the production cycles of such shows, to demonstrate how their production practices, including controversies in the two teen pregnancy shows, need to be accommodated in theories of documentary. Reality TV is, I believe, creating new norms for representation of and assumptions about documentary’s objectivity and its subjects' agency that need to be factored into future discussions about instrumentality and subjectivity narratives.
Importantly, reality tv discourses emerge as incredibly limited forms of
documentary expression, both in popular culture and academic discourse, but ones which will impact viewers' expectations about how documentaries are supposed to look. To make this case, I will first present a brief look into existing scholarship on the subject as well as the main tenets of its debate in public sphere to highlight the keys terms of the
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controversy and scholarly inquiry. That will be followed by an explication of the production practices and conventions of the shows, to ask questions about objectivity, subjectivity narratives, and authorship. I believe this case will show how new technology is changing the conditions of production and representation in fundamental ways. Finally I will conclude on the areas of documentary studies and reality television that necessitate further scholarly inquiry.