What Do We Learn From Reality TV?

You watch reality TV. So does a sociology professor from Lehigh University — and she's here to tell you it's not a guilty pleasure. It's a mirror.

Reality TV composes nearly half of current U.S. shows and yet we stuff our enjoyment of it in a shoebox and hope nobody finds out. Sociology professor Danielle Lindemann wants to know why, and what that shame reveals about us just as much as the shows themselves.

In this solo episode of Good Is In The Details, Gwendolyn Dolske sits down with Professor Danielle Lindemann — Associate Professor of Sociology at Lehigh University and author of True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2022 by Esquire and featured in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, NPR, and Rolling Stone — for a conversation that will completely change how you watch television.

Reality TV, Lindemann argues, is a funhouse mirror of our dominant culture, and even as it deals in stereotypes and archetypes, it also reveals the possibilities for transcending our deeply entrenched roles and expectations. In other words: the shows you binge say something real about the world you live in.

What we explore in this episode:

• Why the question "is reality TV really real?" completely misses the point, and what the right question actually is.
• How reality TV uniquely refracts our everyday experiences back to us, exposing the major circuits of power that organize our lives and the extent to which our own realities are socially constructed.
• What The Bachelor reveals about race and gender in dating, and why participants' choices are not random but reflect deeply learned social expectations.
• How shows like Survivor, Real Housewives, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, and Honey Boo Boo illuminate class, gender, race, and sexuality in American life.
• Why we can name more Kardashians than Supreme Court justices, and what that actually tells us about culture and power.
• Why these "guilty pleasures" underscore how conservative our society remains and how steadfastly we cling to notions about who counts as legitimate or "real."
• What Émile Durkheim and Michel Foucault have to do with My Strange Addiction and COPS
• The philosophy underneath all of it: what does it mean for something to be "real" and who gets to decide?

This is public philosophy meets pop culture at its most entertaining and most revealing. Whether you watch reality TV unabashedly or consider yourself above it entirely, this episode will make you think differently about both the shows and yourself.

Guest: Danielle J. Lindemann — Associate Professor of Sociology, Lehigh University. Author of True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist.

Learn more about Professor Lindemann and get her book: https://daniellelindemann.com

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