Book Review: “True Story” by Danielle J. Lindemann
A Sociological Study of Reality TV
Not long after The Apprentice debuted on network TV in 2004, I was attending an Ottawa Senators hockey game on home ice. Beside me, two silver-haired men were talking, and their topic of conversation was the aforementioned reality TV show. They were dismissive of it and laughed a lot as they talked. However, one of the men then said, as a point of finality to the conversation, something like, “But, you know, the show at least shows kids entering the workforce what it’s like to be a project manager.” That comment was telling. I’ve long thought to myself that reality TV is “educational TV” as much as we like to dismiss the genre as being frivolous. After all, I feel that Survivor has a lot to teach people about how not to get voted off the island — which, in my mind, is equivalent to not being fired from a job. But as American author Danielle J. Lindemann demonstrates in her non-fiction book about reality TV titled True Story, the opposite is also true: reality TV reflects to us who we are as a society, and it turns out that a lot of what it says — despite tokenism such as casting Black characters on certain programs — is usually very conservative and perhaps regressive.
True Story is, in many ways, a sociological textbook probably geared best towards undergraduate students interested in knowing more about the genre and how it shapes and is shaped by society. Sociology is beyond my area of expertise — I never studied it in university, though I suspect I probably got small doses of it in my journalism classes — and I came up with a term to describe how I might critique this book: I have a kind of “prejudice against the unknown.” It’s easy to dismiss a book that you might not quite understand, after all. However, there are interesting tidbits for the casual reader lodged in this book, and the book is admirable for making what some may consider a rather lowbrow form of entertainment seem rather intellectual and academic. Thus, if you have any interest in reality TV and what it does, you’ll want to devour this tome. (Interestingly enough, while I have watched reality TV — obviously, given my Survivor example — I don’t watch television anymore, opting to put my nose into books instead. I have a new flat-screen TV that I received as a gift, but it remains unplugged. I keep it in the background from my laptop in my living room so that when I am taking part in work-related meetings, my workspace doesn’t broadcast the fact that I’m something of a Luddite. But this is a digression to illustrate that I may have an anti-television bias. Forgive me.)
To be sure, there are limitations to this type of book. Lindemann doesn’t discuss every reality TV series that ever existed — The Amazing Race is a notable omission — but many of the examples she uses are one-season wonders that broadcast on fringe specialty cable TV networks. She also flags that she is a fan of these types of shows and sets out not to offer a critique of them. However, what she does is show that reality TV “illuminates our everyday experiences and can help us make sense of complex social facts.” From there, she riffs on how these shows, well, show us what it means to be of a certain class, race, gender, and so on in American society. And, if anything, True Story is a very American book. If I have any criticism of this book, writing as a Canadian, it is that it doesn’t do a deep enough dive into non-American reality TV shows — which I feel is crucial as many of the programs that are up for discussion here have had international spin-offs. Still, if you can look past that, you will find a lot of food for thought to snack on.
In the end, True Story is a complex and brainy read. It is difficult. It will probably challenge you — especially if you are years removed from obtaining an undergraduate university degree (and didn’t go on to get a Masters or a Ph.D.) or haven’t obtained any kind of higher education at all. However, it goes to great lengths to show us how these programs are “a product of our times” insomuch as they might also be “behind the times.” Drawing from some 30 years of programming — Lindemann feels that the first true reality TV show was MTV’s The Real World, which debuted in 1992, even though she draws examples from Cops, which first aired at least three years before that — True Story is a fascinating look at a life lived on the tube through the lens of the study of American society. It is evident from reading this that the author has thought very deeply about her subject matter and takes the effort to make it more relatable (though still academically toned) by infusing her narrative with the odd dose of humour (which is probably apt because, after all, who can take some of these TV shows all that seriously?). At its very least, True Story sets out to make you think about both reality TV and your life in new ways. For that, this is an instructive and illuminating book and its one that certainly deserves an audience among those who share a passion for the subject matter. This is a book that has a lot to say about something that we all talk about: TV shows that shape us and instruct us on how to live and teach us how we already do. Fascinating and deeply penetrative, True Story should not be passed up by any students of sociology.
Danielle J. Lindemann’s True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us will be published by Picador on February 14, 2023.
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