Cluster

Reality TV in the Social Media Economy / Vanderpump Rules and the Labor of ‘Real’ Life

By Lesley Stevenson
Scheana Shay, Ariana Madix, Lala Kent appear in Vanderpump Rules. Photo by Casey Durkin/Bravo, used with permission of Bravo Media, LLC.

Reality television blurs the line between cast members’ “work” and “life,” particularly in shows that revolve around wealth (e.g., The Real Housewives) or occupations (e.g., Below Deck). Amid the lavishness on the one hand and lasciviousness on the other, these programs often obscure the fact that appearing on reality television is, itself, a job. Over 11 seasons, Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules (VPR, 2013–) has highlighted certain kinds of labor, portraying a young group of aspiring models, actors, and musicians working low-wage survival jobs at SUR, the “sexy unique restaurant” owned by Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ Lisa Vanderpump. Their proximity to wealth and status makes even their work life seem glamorous—that is, their work life in the service industry. Their work as television performers, however, is not discussed on camera, consistent with most reality docudramas, although reality television stars have recently begun fighting more earnestly for greater recognition of their performances as work.1

For their part, VPR cast members have turned to direct channels to educate fans about the process of depicting their work and personal lives on television. In defending their own labor, these cast members also inadvertently reveal the impact that the even more obscured labor of below-the-line workers can have on shaping what audiences ultimately see on screen. While scholarly literature has documented the labor required to produce an ‘authentic’ reality television product (itself a highly contested term2), this essay intervenes further by exploring the multiplicative power that reality stars gain when they leverage digital media to craft cross-platform commentaries about industrial practices, labor, and their own perceptions of ‘reality.’ Drawing on literature from genre and production studies, this essay undertakes a discourse analysis of current VPR cast member Ariana Madix and former member Kristen Doute’s online interactions with fans to highlight the affordances of social media as a media literacy tool with potential to explicate the apparatus of reality TV and challenge notions of authentic performance. 

The genre conventions of reality television frequently obscure the programs’ workers and their work—both in front of the camera and behind it—in service of capturing ‘reality.’3 For most programs without celebrity hosts or panels, this obfuscation also erases conventional distinctions between “above” and “below-the-line” labor—not by valuing both equally but by eliminating the need for “talent” who would otherwise exist above the line (and cost significantly more due to union requirements, agent fees, and more).4 As Grindstaff and Mayer explain, industry and production environments tend to reserve the term “talent” for trained, unionized, professional performers, while the “cast members” and “contestants” who appear on reality television, whether competition shows or docudramas, “are supposedly performing as themselves.”5 This vocabulary has the effect of minimizing, both discursively and ideologically, the amount and difficulty of the work performed by the people in front of the camera, while keeping other production laborers, such as casting directors, “production assistants, drivers, segment producers, assistant editors, and loggers,” equally invisible.6 In other words, language that downplays the work of the people appearing on-air also isolates them from other groups of similarly undervalued laborers rather than encouraging connections and solidarity between the groups. 

Resisting this denigration of reality television work, scholars have highlighted the growing depth and scope of labor it requires, especially in service of ‘authenticity.’ A growing number of terms help capture the nuances of this work. For example, “emotional labor” refers to giving the audience (via the camera) a “money shot,”—used in this way by Laura Grindstaff to describe a heightened emotional performance sometimes semi-manufactured by producers that abstracts the complexities of real people into consumable stereotypes and meme-able tropes.7 Growing from this term, “emotional camping” emphasizes the necessity of keeping the performance consistent enough over time and platforms to support the idea of a genuine, brandable self.8 “Housewifization” stresses the postfeminist sensibilities of this highly commodified, gendered labor, especially in the Housewives franchise, on which VPR is based, and “authenticity work” describes the negotiation of claiming or rejecting authenticity while acknowledging “that authenticity is socially and culturally constructed.”9 Attention on these topics is merited, particularly because the resulting “hybrid ‘person-characters’” are among the most lucrative products of reality
television.10

Yet, all these terms hinge on the concept of ‘authenticity,’ a set of competing demands that forms the core paradox of reality television as a genre.11 The idea typically functions as an “evaluative and legitimating notion” that identifies “genuine, sincere, trustworthy and, ultimately, ‘good’” products. In the context of reality TV, however, production staff, cast members, audiences, and publicity teams all have a vested interest in “negotiating the paradox between authentic and inauthentic elements.”12 As Hill explains, “the more entertaining a factual program is, the less real it appears to viewers. […] However, they are also distrustful of the authenticity of various reality formats precisely because these real people’s stories are presented in an entertaining manner.”13 In other words, identifying, debating, and deciphering the paradox between what is authentic and what is manufactured or exaggerated for the camera is what draws many viewers to engage with reality television and its stars across platforms, but it has the additional effect of putting cast members’ ‘real’ lives—the lives they live in front of the camera—up for debate. This discrepancy leads cast members, who typically want viewers to accept that what they see is ‘real,’ to take on an additional form of invisible labor: educating these viewers on how to ‘read’ reality TV in order to align their versions of authenticity. 

As the following case studies will demonstrate, the opportunity to engage across multiple platforms brings competing ideas of ‘authenticity’ head-to-head. Ariana Madix, a former SUR bartender who rose from recurring to main cast in VPR’s third season, has not shied away from using and explicating industry terminology to defend herself against critics of the show. In the show’s eighth season, Madix’s hair length varied by several inches over the course of one scene, prompting viewers to criticize the obvious continuity error as evidence that the show was staged or scripted. Madix pushed back on Twitter and Instagram by explaining the basic production concept of “pickups. not reshoots. pickups are in every season and every episode. happens when something doesn’t line up, a shot is blurry, etc. just a way to fill in the gaps. nothing about pickups makes the show inauthentic or our conversations less real” (sic). To a fan’s criticism on Twitter, she wrote, “absolutely not scripting. please don’t speak on this without knowledge of how we film. this is my real life” (sic).14 To Madix, the distinction between “pickups” and “reshoots” seems to lie in their purpose; the former are a necessary part of the production process after technical errors, while the latter might imply redoing a scene in a completely different way. Madix also seems to believe that the fans should be aware of pickups as standard practice and thus overlook the continuity error. This dialogue aligns with research showing that for many viewers, “the authenticity of words” is of “paramount” importance, but, again, it reveals differing perspectives on what makes the words “authentic”—their happening in real-time, or their conceptual faithfulness to the cast member’s intentions.15 The fans seem to crave the docu-realism of the former, even if that runs contrary to most reality television production practices. 

Madix had tried to bridge this impasse before; during season seven, she leveraged Twitter as an educational tool in defense of her then-boyfriend, Tom Sandoval, in a rare direct rebuke to the production team. Fans took to social media to critique the perceived unprofessionalism of Sandoval and his friend and business partner, Tom Schwartz, after an episode showed the two arriving to a private meeting that their senior partner Vanderpump had asked them not to attend. Engaging in a back-and-forth with one user who criticized “the Toms,” Madix explained, “We receive call times for filming,” followed by, “I’m saying it’s their job to show up for filming,” heavily implying that production staff had told Sandoval and Schwartz to attend the meeting that was later depicted as private. “They. Got. A. Call time. This is not hard. Do i need to tell you what a call time is [sic],” Madix continued in a later tweet. As other fans questioned why Sandoval and Schwartz had not clarified their presence at the meeting on-camera, Madix explained, “It’s called breaking the fourth wall. Something we aren’t allowed to do. […] We show up when we are given call times by our employers: production,” in essence defending the Toms’ actions in the scene while still implicitly challenging the circumstances of its creation.16 Although the terms of the cast’s contracts regarding what they can and cannot say publicly about the filming process are not known, by defending what appeared to be brashness on her then-boyfriend’s part, Madix insinuates that “[her] employers: production” set up a situation that the Toms then had to allow to play out. Madix’s points contribute to an ongoing education that social media uniquely provides in the era of multi-screen viewing, encouraging viewers to question not only what happened but how it was presented, a tool that serves to entertain but also prompts greater awareness of media industry processes.

Fig. 1. Kristen Doute appears in her new Bravo reality television show, The Valley. Photo by Casey Durkin/Bravo, used with permission of Bravo Media, LLC.

Madix’s public challenge, though thinly veiled, still contrasts with the approach of Kristen Doute, who explicitly claimed manipulation by production staff who had specific intentions for her role and storylines on the show. In an appearance on the Brav Bros podcast, which later circulated on TikTok and then YouTube, Doute defended an oft-maligned scene in which she wore a short, low-cut, green “revenge dress” seemingly just to pick up mail at the apartment of her very recent ex-boyfriend (the same Tom Sandoval):

Okay, I’ll break the fourth wall because I have no Bravo contract. I had two things to shoot that day. One did not air. […] [a non-castmate] and I were going to have what I was told was like a Sex and the City type lunch, like “dress like Sex and the City.” So that’s what I was doing. Then I got another call time that said, “well, you’re going to Tom’s first, real quick, and then you’re going to go straight to lunch in West Hollywood.” It didn’t even cross my mind.17

Though Doute does not clarify what “it” is, she suggests through the very telling of the story and her willingness to “break the fourth wall,” as she calls it, that she feels production staff led her into a trap that allowed editors to show her getting ready and stopping at Sandoval’s but not attending the lunch, which would have contextualized her choice of dress. Using (or rather, misusing) terminology that viewers might previously not have known, Doute is able to offer a retroactive explanation for her actions that upholds the authenticity of her performance while challenging that of the show—and the reality television apparatus itself.

Both Doute and Madix use this phrase, “breaking the fourth wall,” to describe the taboo practice of revealing the hidden mechanisms of reality TV production, but this usage differs from the term’s definition as a theatrical convention and points to a novel way in which reality stars understand the nature and context of their own labor. In theatre terminology, the “fourth wall” separates the time, place, and action on stage from the audience, allowing them to observe a closed-off space. Film and television scholars have also used the term in relation to the “direct address,” when characters of a story world speak beyond the screen to the viewer.18 A wide swath of reality television shows, from VPRto Food Network’s Chopped, use confessional interviews in a way that seems to break the fourth wall but shirks the full notion of direct address. In talking heads conducted after the events they discuss, participants are typically angled slightly away from the camera, framed from the waist-up. They offer perspectives, context, and additional drama to events as they play out on screen, never directly speaking to viewers but implicitly acknowledging their need for information. Thus, VPRand other shows that use confessional interviews are always already self-reflexive in the way that they break the seal on events as they happened in order to let viewers into the cast members’ minds in those scenes. The arena that remains sealed, however, is the production apparatus that establishes the scenes in the first place. While a confessional might reveal a person’s otherwise unspoken motivations for behaving a certain way, they never suggest the influence of production managers, directors, camera operators, and other personnel. For Madix and Doute, “breaking the fourth wall” is not giving a soliloquy. The perceived “wall” is not between themselves and the viewer but between the conditions of production and the action that happens on screen. Meant to be sealed off and hidden from viewers, the production team’s involvement inherently affects the relative authenticity of any given moment, but social media offers Madix, Doute, and others an outlet to poke holes in the barrier.

Madix’s and Doute’s interactions with fans reveal a rupture in how they understand their own realities versus how audiences perceive authenticity, or a lack thereof. Social media has allowed greater opportunities to engage directly with audiences in their “natural movement backwards and forwards between trust and suspicion of the truthfulness of ordinary people and their behavior on TV.”19 While the fans Madix sparred with seem to expect documentary-quality realism with no performance or do-overs, Madix herself defended the show as “10/10 authentic” to her own experience of the moments aired on TV.20 Madix’s commentary on Sandoval, however, and Doute’s revelations recontextualize scenes with additional information that changes their meaning and undermines the show’s claim to authenticity. Taken as a whole, these instances reveal not only that the viewers, cast members, and production staff all have an interest in “authenticity” but also that their understandings of authenticity and reality may vary and even directly conflict with one another. These spaces of misalignment then prompt cast members to perform the emotional labor of setting the record straight despite the “fourth wall” between the scenes as “real life” and the scenes as a produced event. This is, perhaps, another reason why reality television cast members and below-the-line workers have historically little solidarity: reality TV’s fourth wall exists precisely because the goals of each group may at times be at odds. 

Reality television performers do a substantial amount of work on and beyond the camera to maintain their own claim to authenticity, even if it contradicts viewer expectations or exposes reality TV conventions. Madix and Doute’s online interactions illustrate the degree to which “reality participants perform versions of themselves on TV and must sustain a coherent brand persona as it moves online” (emphasis added).21 However, producers and viewers may not always view this as the additional labor that it is, since such work has become a standard part of the Bravo package22 and since “the seemingly quotidian and ephemeral quality of social media masks the immense amount of time and effort involved in performing digital iterations of stars’ ‘real lives.’”23 Whether intentionally or not, their interactions also function as a form of media literacy education by exposing the influence of producers and editors and clarifying misunderstood aspects of the reality television production process. These efforts show perhaps above all how, as one journalist said of VPR, “the show isn’t scripted, but it is definitely produced.”24

Although I have focused here on the potential of social media as an educational tool between reality TV performer and consumer, this work invites further research into the ways in which a person’s understanding of the production process impacts their perception of ‘reality’ and the pleasures of reality television. Studies could explore if and to what degree 1) audiences truly understand the production process and 2) their awareness shapes their reaction to or engagement with the programs they watch. VPR remains a fertile ground for these questions, as the breakdown of Madix and Sandoval’s relationship in season ten prompted a huge amount of “#Scandoval” conversation online, though little engagement from Madix or Sandoval themselves. With the benefit of hindsight, they, like Doute, may also one day reveal the extent of industrial mechanisms at play. For some viewers, it will never matter—in the end, the debate of ‘authenticity’ is all that really matters.

: :

Endnotes

  1. Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, Critical Media Studies Institutions, Politics & Culture (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Lemi Baruh, “Publicized Intimacies on Reality Television: An Analysis of Voyeuristic Content and Its Contribution to the Appeal of Reality Programming,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 53, no. 2 (May 27, 2009): 190–210, https://doi.org/10.1080/08838150902907678. See, for example, former Real Housewives of New York City star Bethenny Frankel’s attempts to unionize reality television stars: Meredith Blake and Yvonne Villareal, “Reality TV Stars Say They’re Subject to Grueling Conditions and Low Pay. A Union Could Change That.,” Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2023-10-27/reality-tv-stars-union.
  2. Sarah Banet-Weiser, AuthenticTM: Politics and Ambivalence in a Brand Culture, Critical Cultural Communication (New York: New York University Press, 2012).
  3. Joshua Gamson, “The Unwatched Life Is Not Worth Living: The Elevation of the Ordinary in Celebrity Culture,” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 126, no. 4 (October 2011): 1061–69, https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2011.126.4.1061.
  4. Vicki Mayer, Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Sue Collins, “Making the Most out of 15 Minutes: Reality TV’s Dispensable Celebrity,” Television & New Media 9, no. 2 (March 2008): 87–110, https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476407313814; Gamson, “The Unwatched Life Is Not Worth Living.”
  5. Laura Grindstaff and Vicki Mayer, “The Importance of Being Ordinary: Brokering Talent in the New-TV Era,” in Brokerage and Production in the American and French Entertainment Industries: Invisible Hands in Cultural Markets, ed. Violaine Roussel and Denise Bielby (Lexington Books, 2015), 134.
  6. Grindstaff and Mayer, “The Importance of Being Ordinary.”; Alison Hearn, “Witches and Bitches: Reality Television, Housewifization and the New Hidden Abode of Production,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 20, no. 1 (February 1, 2017): 14, https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549416640553.
  7. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Updated with a New Preface, 3rd ed., 2012; Martina Baldwin and Suzanne Leonard, “Bravo: Branding, Fandom, and the Lifestyle Network,” in From Networks to Netflix, ed. Derek Johnson, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2022); Laura Grindstaff, The Money Shot: Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk Shows (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3630693.html.
  8. Evie Psarras, “‘It’s a Mix of Authenticity and Complete Fabrication’ Emotional Camping: The Cross-Platform Labor of the Real Housewives,” New Media & Society 24, no. 6 (June 1, 2022): 1382–98, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820975025.
  9. Hearn, “Witches and Bitches,” 12–14; Minna Aslama and Mervi Pantti, “Labourers of the Real: Authenticity Work in Reality Television,” ed. Ravi K. Dhar and Pooja Rana, Media in the Swirl (New Delhi: Pentagon Press, 2012), 3, http://hdl.handle.net/10138/230073.
  10. Ginia Bellafante, “West Coast Fashionista Takes On Manhattan, Manolos in Tow,” The New York Times, January 4, 2009, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/arts/television/05city.html, quoted in Hearn, “Witches and Bitches,” 18. See also: Jacquelyn Arcy, “The Digital Money Shot: Twitter Wars, The Real Housewives, and Transmedia Storytelling,” Celebrity Studies 9, no. 4 (October 2, 2018): 487–502, https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2018.1508951.
  11. Randall L. Rose and Stacy L. Wood, “Paradox and the Consumption of Authenticity through Reality Television,” Journal of Consumer Research 32, no. 2 (September 1, 2005): 284–96, https://doi.org/10.1086/432238.
  12. Aslama and Pantti, “Labourers of the Real,” 1, 2, 4.
  13. Annette Hill, “Reality TV: Performance, Authenticity, and Television Audiences,” in A Companion to Television, ed. Janet Wasko, Repr., Blackwell Companions in Cultural Studies 10 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008), 455.
  14. Madix has since hidden comments on her Instagram posts and disabled her Twitter account; however, the posts and comments were captured in tabloid media, including: Michelle Corriston, “Vanderpump Rules’ Ariana Madix Denies the Reality Show Is Scripted: ‘This Is My Real Life,’” People, January 17, 2020, https://people.com/tv/vanderpump-rules-ariana-madix-denies-the-reality-show-is-scripted-this-is-my-real-life/; Eileen Reslen, “‘Vanderpump Rules’ Fans Call Show Fake after Noticing Ariana Madix Shot Same Scene Twice,” Page Six, January 17, 2020, https://pagesix.com/2020/01/17/vanderpump-rules-fans-call-show-fake-after-noticing-ariana-madix-shot-same-scene-twice/; Lindsay Cronin, “Vanderpump Rules’ Ariana Madix Explains Why She Had Two Different Hairstyles During Scene With Lisa Vanderpump After Fans Question If Show Is Scripted,” Reality Blurb (blog), January 16, 2020, https://realityblurb.com/2020/01/16/vanderpump-rules-ariana-madix-explains-why-she-had-two-different-hairstyles-during-scene-with-lisa-vanderpump-after-fans-question-if-show-is-scripted/.
  15. Rose and Wood, “Paradox and the Consumption of Authenticity through Reality Television,” 293.
  16. Screenshots and summaries of Madix’s Twitter interactions remain available at: Sola Delano, “Ariana Madix Slams Vanderpump Rules Producers for Shady Editing and Making the Toms Look Like ‘Idiots’ On Show! See Her Surprising Tweets, Reality Blurb (blog), January 17, 2019, https://realityblurb.com/2019/01/17/ariana-madix-slams-vanderpump-rules-producers-for-shady-editing-and-making-the-toms-look-like-idiots-on-show-see-her-surprising-tweets/; Marenah, “Ariana Madix Calls Out Production For Making Tom Sandoval & Tom Schwartz Look Like ‘Idiots’ On Vanderpump Rules,” Reality Tea (blog), January 15, 2019, https://www.realitytea.com/2019/01/15/ariana-madix-calls-out-production-for-making-tom-sandoval-tom-schwartz-looking-like-idiots-on-vanderpump-rules/; Tara Parker, “Ariana Madix Clarifies ‘Why Can’t It Just Be Real’ Tweet,” Melrose Avenue (blog), January 23, 2019, https://www.melrose-avenue.com/living/entertainment-tv/ariana-madix-clarifies-why-cant-it-just-be-real-tweet/.
  17. Kristen Doute Finally Gives Us an Answer about the GREEN DRESS! #bravbros #scsndoval #pumprules, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwP6fzSPA30.
  18. Faye Woods, “Too Close for Comfort: Direct Address and the Affective Pull of the Confessional Comic Woman in Chewing Gum and Fleabag,” Communication, Culture and Critique 12, no. 2 (June 2, 2019): 194–212, https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz014.
  19. Hill, “Reality TV: Performance, Authenticity, and Television Audiences,” 465.
  20. Cronin, “VPR’s Ariana Madix Explains Why She Had Two Different Hairstyles.”
  21. Arcy, “The Digital Money Shot,” 487.
  22. Baldwin and Leonard, “Bravo.”
  23. Arcy, “The Digital Money Shot,” 488.
  24. Michelle Stark, “20 Things We Learned about ‘Vanderpump Rules’ from Jax Taylor and Lala Kent’s Visit to Tampa,” Tampa Bay Times, March 22, 2019, https://www.tampabay.com/florida/2019/03/22/20-things-we-learned-about-vanderpump-rules-from-jax-taylor-and-lala-kents-visit-to-tampa/.

  • Lesley Stevenson

    Lesley Stevenson is a Ph.D. candidate in Media & Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where her research explores the intersections of identity, labor, and power in the media and entertainment industries, particularly at the early-career level. She received her MA from Wisconsin and BA from the University of Notre Dame.