Dr. Danielle Lindemann

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124 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard Mar 2025

Dr. Danielle Lindemann’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Ologies with Alie Ward · Reality TV Sociology (‘TRASH’ TV) with Danielle Lindemann · 5 Mar 2025 podcast

More people are going to tune in to more conflict-driven shows, right? Like you see TLC, which was originally The Learning Channel, right? And now has been referred to as like a latter-day freak show, right? You have, you know, the families with a million kids and what have you.

So, yeah, I mean, it Like it's economical, right? It's like a cost benefit analysis. People, they want things that are going to bring in viewers and that are relatively cheap to make. And that's kind of the history and the story of reality TV in general is that it's relatively cheap to make because for the most part, you don't have to pay the people who go on it. Right.

You don't have to pay the crew union wages sometimes and you don't build sets. So there's a lot of reasons, right, like from the production side, why you'd want to create them. And then from the demand side, more people are going to watch the Duggars than they're going to watch a show about orcas. Now, whether or not we want that to be true is another question, but that's just the reality.

Oh, the Real Housewives title. I mean, we could write a dissertation about the title. I know. It's fascinating. First of all, none of them are housewives, right? I'm not the first to point this out. But this idea that they're kind of being defined through their relationships with men and is super fascinating.

The fact that that still resonates in our culture, that they're housewives is super interesting, that they would be defined that way. And then like on top of that, they're not housewives, they have jobs. Well, they all have jobs because they're all in the show, which is another dimension of it. And now more and more, they're bringing down the fourth wall.

This is a really interesting transition in reality TV now and really interesting development is that like more and more, we're like tearing down the fourth wall and they're talking about themselves as

as reality TV persona, as Real Housewives, because most of the conflicts now that they have are about things that happened because of the show, like happened at BravoCon or someone tweeted something about the show. And so that's been really fascinating to see as well.

So that's a good question, right? Again, it's a super messy construct. I would consider like YouTube and TikTok to be forms of reality TV. And there are people who study those genres specifically, but that's just an arbitrary guardrail. I consider those things to be reality TV as well.

Yeah, I mean, so there's literature on this, right? So again, there is that voyeurism, right, where we want to watch the train wreck to feel superior to the train wreck. There are a lot of different subgenres of reality TV and people might tune into different shows for a different reason. Like probably we're not watching Top Chef for the train wreck.

We might be watching it because we feel that it's educational in some ways. We're enjoying the conflicts that we're watching. And again, there is that paradox where at the same time that we're watching to feel smugly superior, we're also making connections with the people on the show, right? Saying like, oh, I'm more of a Bethany or I'm more of a Carol.

And we all kind of have one character that we can kind of grab onto, even if we don't support everything they do or we're unlike them in a lot of ways and say, you know, that's my character.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think part of the time is people trying to convince themselves that what they watch is not reality TV. It's almost like challenging. Well, I watch House Hunters. That's not reality TV. Is it? Is it? Because they want to feel superior to the people who watch reality TV.

Is that true? That's what I've heard. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I guess the sociology answer is we are all playing ourselves all of the time. Right. We are like all performing for audiences of others. So, yeah, my criteria is not are they acting because that's I mean, how do you parse that? Right. Are they acting or are they not? But are they basically playing themselves? whether or not there's any scripting involved.

Yeah, it's interesting because if you talk to people who are long-time reality TV personalities, they'll say that they eventually forget about the camera.

I can't imagine forgetting about the camera, but I mean, that's what they will say. Yeah, I mean, but obviously, right, like the presence of a camera is going to change the social dynamics of a situation. Now, is it going to kind of amplify what was already there? It's interesting because I think

A lot of people don't realize the psychological stressors that reality, or maybe don't even care, right? Because they'll just say, well, you shouldn't have gone on the show then, right? You knew what you were getting into. There's kind of that lack of sympathy there. I mean, there are multiple psychological stressors that these people are being pinged with on these shows.

So, I mean, you could argue that under these conditions, any of us would behave badly.

Yeah, there's that issue of coercion in reality TV. I do think there's more of an understanding about that, the sort of coercion dynamics of reality TV now. I think that's slightly starting to change. With people realizing like, oh, like, hey, maybe these drunk people who have had no sleep, right, cannot consent to being filmed.

Or what about these kids who are on these reality shows who have no choice but to film, right? Like, is that ethical? Is that coercive? And of course, then they cast people who really need the money.

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