In Get Real, Eva Hageman examines how race is constructed in reality television from pre-production to broadcast. Hageman foregrounds an ethnography of production practices to analyze how and why difference is developed, narrated, and cast in the modern entertainment and economic landscape. Drawing on interviews with industry professionals, cast members, and fans, Hageman teases out themes of quality, relatability, participation, and lifestyle that function as racializing mechanisms within the reality TV marketplace. Hageman also places reality television in a lineage, from cinema verité to public access television, to consider the shifting structures of media participation in an evolving economy. In doing so, reality TV becomes an important site for investigating how race and gender emerge and intersect within neoliberalism at a supposedly post-racial cultural moment.

Eva Hageman is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland.

Introduction 1
1. Quality: Craft Versus Trash 22
2. That’s So Relatable: Pitching Narratives and Marketing Characters 49
3. The Lifestyle: Access Pleasure Value 78
4. Participation: From Public Access to the Neoliberal Self 108
Conclusion: Is This the End? 133
Acknowledgments 165
Notes 171
Videography 185
Bibliography 189
Index