As noted by Hill in his exploration of the genre, reality television is the uneasy hybridization of fact and fiction (Hill, A, 2005), a reconstruction of not only fiction but the facts that support it. This is similar to the methods news broadcasters employ in order to dramatize current events to illicit an emotional response from the viewer, the manipulation of the facts behind a story that allows it to be restructured by media corporations. Almost nothing in reality programming can be analysed as a means of making out the seams that conjoin the real and the unreal, as the margins are simply too obscured (Hill, A, 2005.)
Documentary film-making operates with a similar pretense in mind, but usually with greater emphasis on the facts that underpin them to lend the films credence, otherwise they risk losing a sense of credibility among those of the audience. Reality television, while still factual in the loosest sense of the word, dispenses with most of the facts in favour of the dramatic fictionalized elements that are the essence of reality programming.
Another area where reality television and documentary film-making converge is the treatment of their subjects via highly-stylized cinematography, awkward or erratic camera angles that are employed to capture the motion and flow of reality (Biressi and Nunn, 2005), allowing the camera's wielder to influence the construction of a bastardized variation of the real. It is through this posturing of camera angles that film makers are able to recreate a sense of "immediacy and intimacy", as described by Biressi and Nunn, that is coveted by the audience, and it is a style adopted by reality television in an attempt to achieve the very same.
Where reality television diverges from documentary films, however, is the emphasis on fictional dramatizations over factual interpretations of the subject, whereby the editing process gives producers the power to shape the fictional happenstances of everyday life in order to engineer something altogether different from the actual event that took place. In the same way that documentary films entice punters with emotional stories drawn from the lives of ordinary people (Biressi and Nunn, 2005.), reality television opts instead to record the friction that brews between people caught in trying circumstances, and exaggerates it for the sake of entertainment.
Documentaries, according to Biressi and Nunn, have a political and social conscience that peers into the lives of working-class folk only just making ends meet (Biressi and Nunn, 2005), often-times juxtaposing them against the theme of a rapidly urbanizing/industrializing/corporatizing world and how they fit into it, or shape it, whatever the case may be. Reality television is also concerned with ordinary people, but to a differing degree than that of the documentary genre, which surrenders its subjects' character flaws and insecurities to the microscopic scrutiny of the programme's producers and, by extension, the general public. Documentaries are more intellectual and informed in nature, often sharply contrasting with its uninformed and frivolous counterpart, reality television, which concerns itself with the superficial nature of human interaction and socialization.
In summary, while yes, the documentary genre has had a significant impact on the development of reality television, it has not always been in entirely positive ways. Reality programming has seen fit to borrow from the great leaps and bounds documentary cinema has made in the film industry, but rather than refine the formula, it has manipulated it in order to create an artificial construct of reality that does little to expand conscious thinking on important subjects.
As its popularity continues to escalate, it will become increasingly difficult to ascertain which percentage of reality television is fact and which percentage is fiction, further blurring the margins between the real and the unreal, potentially altering public perception of society as a consequence.
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