From \u201cThe Amish Mafia\u201d to \u201cKeeping Up With the Kardashians,\u201d it\u2019s obvious reality television is a firmly entrenched slice of today\u2019s cultural and entertainment landscape.\u00a0 And, there are university professors to chronicle and dissect the phenomenon.\u00a0 One of those scholars happens to be SCM\u2019s Hugh Curnutt, associate professor of Communication Studies.\u00a0 \u00a0According to Dr. Curnutt, reality television \u201cprovides the perfect solution for networks\u2019 ongoing quest for profitable programming that can be produced in abundance at a low cost.\u201d\u00a0 In his latest essay, \u201cCooking on Reality TV: Chef-Participants and Culinary Television,\u201d which appears in a new anthology on food and media, Dr. Curnutt examines what it is like for chefs to cook on reality TV and the impact television is having on the field of haute cuisine.<\/p>\n
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Dr. Curnutt argues that the growth of culinary reality TV is part of the larger evolution of \u201cpost-network\u201d television, which over the past decade has been due to a number of factors, beginning with the abolition of the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, or fin-sin rules, in 1993, which gave networks the ability to own the programming they aired in primetime.\u00a0 This, combined with the writers\u2019 strike of 2007 and the development of cable with its myriad, and increasingly niche channels, opened the floodgates to reality television.\u00a0 Reality television provided networks with the opportunity to produce lots of content at a much lower cost.\u00a0 After all, you don\u2019t need to pay actors or deal with unions, and you don\u2019t need to pay a writer to produce a script.<\/p>\n
On the culinary front, individual shows that featured television cooks, such as Julia Child and Jacques Pepin, have morphed into networks that provide an uninterrupted litany of cooking show after cooking show. Bravo\u2019s reality program \u201cTop Chef,\u201d for example, has spawned a number of spinoffs that feature its more notable participants on programs such as\u00a0 \u201cTop Chef Masters,\u201d\u00a0 \u201cTop Chef All Stars\u201d and \u201cLife After Top Chef.\u201d \u00a0This method of repurposing, what Dr. Curnutt calls \u00a0\u2018durable participants,\u2019 is part of a larger industry trend whereby\u2026casting ordinary people into game shows, docusoaps and reality TV enables television producers to \u201cgrow their own\u201d celebrities and to control how they are marketed before, during, and after production.<\/p>\n
Much of Dr. Curnutt\u2019s essay is based upon the experiences of Wiley Dufresne, a well-known and highly regarded chef and restaurateur, who has appeared on \u201cAfter Hours with Daniel,\u201d\u00a0 \u201cIron Chef,\u201d \u201cTop Chef,\u201d \u201cTop Chef All-Stars,\u201d and \u201cTop Chef Masters.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even though we may be living in a golden age of reality television, Charles B. Slocum of the Writers Guild of America West, points out that television has always had ordinary people on television.\u00a0\u00a0 Allen Funt, with his 1948 TV series \u201cCandid Camera\u201d<\/em> is often credited as reality TV’s first practitioner\u2026\u201dTruth or Consequences\u201d<\/em><\/em> started in 1950 and frequently used secret cameras. Both of these series created artificial realties to see how ordinary people would respond; the reality series of today borrow a lot from these precedents and differ mostly in scope and locale. MTV was the first network to take advantage of the eradication of the financial regulations and create its own content, \u201cThe Real World,\u201d which made its television debut on May 21, 1992.<\/p>\n Finally, Dr. Curnutt puts forth an interesting reality television paradox. \u201cPeople enjoy witnessing the behind-the-scenes lives of celebrities. They want to know what their favorite star looks like when they\u2019re at their most authentic.\u00a0 They want to see the performer being a real person,\u201d says Dr. Curnutt.\u00a0 \u201cBut, when reality participants become celebrities for often simply being themselves, what exactly are you looking at \u2013 a celebrity or an ordinary person?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From \u201cThe Amish Mafia\u201d to \u201cKeeping Up With the Kardashians,\u201d it\u2019s obvious reality television is a firmly entrenched slice of today\u2019s cultural and entertainment landscape.\u00a0 And, there are university professors to chronicle and dissect the phenomenon.\u00a0 One of those scholars happens to be SCM\u2019s Hugh Curnutt, associate professor of Communication Studies.\u00a0 \u00a0According to Dr. Curnutt, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-college-of-communication-and-media-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/college-of-communication-and-media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/college-of-communication-and-media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/college-of-communication-and-media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/college-of-communication-and-media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/college-of-communication-and-media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15894"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/college-of-communication-and-media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":206862,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/college-of-communication-and-media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15894\/revisions\/206862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/college-of-communication-and-media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/college-of-communication-and-media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/college-of-communication-and-media\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}