Consumer Capitalism and the (Reality) Star: An American Family and the Invention of Contemporary Televisio

Television is not an art form which has ever enjoyed much privilege in academic departments. Too often its subject matter is looked down on and explained away as too low an artifact to be put under much scrutiny. However, there are some new media theorists, like Lynn Spiegel and Graeme Turner, who argue that it is exactly television's place in mass culture that should encourage its study. Television, as a medium, represents art commodified. That is, it has no value in itself; its only value is in the ways in which it can be used to further the culture industry, and my project seeks to examine how television has come to enhance the ongoing trends of the industry through the reality television celebrity. Instead of an art form which captures social anxieties, we have---as Jameson says of mass culture---a balancing act between television entertaining certain social anxieties and creating imagined solutions to those anxieties. Television, then, serves to divert attention away from the causes of these anxieties and repress them.;The ways in which television is made useful is primarily through its celebrities, and particularly in terms of reality television, the commodification of people to serve the needs of the culture industry is quite complex. There are a number of discussions about why so many viewers turn to reality programming every evening, but my project does not see the answer as simple as "at least we aren't those people" formulations. Instead, I look at the different pleasures and imagined solutions being sold to us through reality television and how those solutions change (or do not change) as our culture needs and social anxieties change. I argue it is not enough to look at contemporary reality programming, we must also examine its beginnings to understand the scope of how the reality television celebrity functions today.;In 1973, Craig Gilbert introduced the William C. Loud family of Santa Barbara, CA to viewers across the nation. The first program of its kind, and dubbed as "significant as the invention of drama or the novel" by Margaret Mead, An American Family was created, as Gilbert said, to expose the crisis facing American families. My project analyzes An American Family through celebrity theories by Dyer and Marshall to understand how An American Family ultimately became a new way for which television to package and sell good life fantasies, as explained by Lauren Berlant, and naturalized behaviors exhibited by the Louds, mainly consumer capitalism, as something all middle-class families did.;In the fifty years that have elapsed since the airing of An American Family, reality television has exploded across nearly every network available to viewers. Moreover, many have stated that reality programming has democratized celebrity to the point of making it accessible to ordinary people. However, if we understand how the Louds were packaged and sold to audiences to fulfill very specific good life scenarios and connect that to the dispensable nature of today's reality television celebrity, what has been created is a very intricate system through which the culture industry can ensure old modes of celebrity making can go on unquestioned. Instead of the modern reality television celebrity altering perceptions of celebrity, they still serve the same purpose to make natural the behaviors deemed appropriate by the culture industry.