The Search for Reality

The artifact of popular culture I chose to analyze this week was HGTV’s (Home and Garden Television) reality series House Hunters (Pie Town, 1999). House Hunters takes you along on the ride with a prospective home buyer as they view three homes in hopes of finding their perfect dream house. The show focuses on the emotional experience that greets a home buyer, while at the same time illuminating the process and some of the critical factors that go into what often times is the largest purchase an individual makes. House Hunters doesn’t fit my stereotypical image of a reality show.

When I think of a reality TV show, I think of Survivor or Big Brother, not a show about buying a house. The term reality television is defined by the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary (2009), as “television programming” depicting “actual occurrences,” ostensibly real people in the “raw.” When I watch House Hunters, I have conditioned myself to view it as a self-help exercise, analogous to becoming a better, more informed person. Murray and Ouellette (2008) posit that we can sometimes confuse the commercial messages in reality TV to the informational messages of news and documentaries. I must admit that I am guilty of having my vision blurred by the commercialistic aspect of the show. Viewers dream about moving to sunny Florida or Las Vegas, not to Stockton, California and Cleveland, Ohio, whom made the Forbes top five most miserable cities (Badenhausen, 2009). I guess it is not strictly by chance that Las Vegas and Orlando are showcased with greater regularity.

However, there too is even a voyeuristic dimension that draws me to the show (Samuals, p. 199). I am drawn to the stealth-like way I can walk through somebody’s home and get a “firsthand” glimpse of how some stranger lives. Who hasn’t seen a house on a drive through a neighborhood and wondered what it looked like inside? Possibly you have even stopped at an “Open House” or a tour of homes in order to get a glimpse of how others live. House Hunters allows me to look inside peoples homes as opposed to looking inside people, which is typically required of other reality shows like The Bachelor or Temptation Island. I feel “cleaner” after watching House Hunters than I do the other shows that require an introspective look inside some stranger’s character. The show allows me to live vicariously through the “home buyers” and feel the anticipation, fear and delight of the search process. It also is fun to make an informal wager with my wife on which home will be chosen the dream house of that particular “hunter.”

I do feel a bit used after reading that the producers often recruit buyers who are already in escrow with the house of their choice (Logan, 2009). I guess when I think it through, it only makes sense, but it still makes it more enjoyable for me to view the show in a more naive way. I don’t want to accept that two homes are filmed just to carry out the selection process and often may be homes never before seen or considered in the actual search. Then to add insult to injury, the producers admit that they “re-do” certain scenes, so that better shots or a preferable camera angles are achieved. Even the non-scripted dialogue is at times suggested by the producers so that answers or comments are delivered in a more succinct manner (Pie Town, 2009).

Reality television is a genre of shows that will be around for a long time to come. From Cops to The Dog Whisperer, to competitive shows like Survivor and The Next Food Network Star, these reality shows seem to have captivated the American television viewing audience. Just as popular culture is influenced through the cinema, so too will these reality television shows impact our society’s moral standards. It will be left to further study and analysis to determine if those consequences are positive or negative.


References

Badenhausen, K. (2009, February 6). America's most miserable cities. Retrieved September 4, 2009, from http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/06/most-miserable-cities-business-washington_0206_miserable_cities.html

Logan, T. (2009). HGTV’s House Hunters’ coming to St. Louis. Retrieved September 3, 2009, from, http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/building-blocks/uncategorized/2009/07/hgtvs-house-hunters-coming-to-st-louis/

Murray, S. & Ouellette, L. (2008). Reality TV: Remaking television culture. New York: New York University Press.

Pie Town Productions (Executive Producer). (1999). House Hunters [Television series]. Knoxville: Home and Garden Television.

Pie Town Productions. (2009). House Hunters – buyers. Retrieved September 4, 2009, from http://www.pietown.tv/Shows/hh_applicationbuyer.html

Reality. (2009). In Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Retrieved September 4, 2009, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reality

Samuels, R. (2007). Keeping it real: Why we like to watch reality dating television. In M. Petracca (Ed.), Common culture (pp. 193-200). Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall.