Reality TV packaged contempt for misfits alongside their redemption

Evidence

The genre’s defining tension—a showcase for both undiscovered talent and grotesque degeneracy—was epitomized by Britain’s Got Talent in 2009. The show wheeled out Susan Boyle, a frumpy forty-seven-year-old Scottish woman with autism, and primed the audience to expect a William Hung–type travesty. Instead, she stunned judges and audiences alike with her virtuosic rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables. The clip went viral online, making Boyle an overnight sensation, and her debut, I Dreamed a Dream, was a top-selling album that year. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 240

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates the genre’s actual register: ambivalence that converts audience derision into a redemption payoff — the audience is primed to mock, then rewarded for relenting.
• XREF: connects to: Reality TV and gaming shifted from rewarding contestants to humiliating losers — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 372; Reality TV’s bourgeois gaze morally moralises working-class deficit as lack of will — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 710; Reality TV has escalated from observation into deliberate psychological cruelty — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 771 (+1 more)