Narrative Dynamics in the Competitive Reality Show

Although the genre of reality television is mocked by critics and rarely discussed by narrative theorists, reality shows confront difficult storytelling problems that the best shows resolve in highly creative ways. As non-fiction, the reality show shares some of the norms associated with the documentary film, with the producers and editors assembling a story from an unwieldy mass of largely unscripted recorded footage. As a genre of television, however, the reality show, like the fictional episodic serial, must confront the challenge of maintaining viewer engagement through the commercial breaks and over the course of a long, multi-episode season. Together, these two sets of constraints serve to establish the reality genre as a distinctive mode of storytelling, one reducible neither to the film documentary nor to the fictional episodic serial, yet drawing storytelling strategies from both.

This essay will show how these strategies can produce surprisingly complex narrative dynamics, and here I use the term “dynamics” in the sense proposed by Meir Sternberg (2010). Sternberg emphasizes how narratives constantly engage the reader or viewer in the processes of prospection, retrospection, and re-cognition to make sense of the represented world and its sequence of events (2010: 640). In my discussion of how such dynamics manifest themselves in reality television programs, my primary example will be Project Runway, a long-running fashion show in the competitive reality show genre. This franchise is a particularly apt case study because the show’s complex narration, using flashbacks, flash-forwards, and spliced-in interviews to reflect multiple vantage points on storyworld events, pushes viewers to examine and reexamine their assumptions about the narration’s temporal structure and reliability. At the same time, the show’s playful montage sequences, which draw on recorded footage to project possible as well as actual event sequences, encourage viewers to hypothesize about what might come next, thus enhancing feelings of suspense. Indeed, I suggest that the show’s quite sophisticated, nuanced approach to television storytelling works to develop Project Runway’s larger themes concerning fashion, expression, and creativity.

Narrative Dynamics and Reality Television

In a series of essays on “Telling in Time” (e.g., Sternberg 1992), Meir Sternberg has developed an approach to “narrativity as the play of suspense/curiosity/surprise between represented and communicative time (in whatever combination, whatever medium, whatever manifest or latent form). Along the same functional lines, I define narrative as a discourse where such play dominates” (1992: 529). This is a rhetorical-functional model, positing that narratives are not naturally found objects but purpose-driven constructions, and that we make sense of narratives teleologically—that is, in light of the functions that narratives perform. The three master functions, here called suspense, curiosity, and surprise, all involve the manipulation of communicative time (the sequence of events as they are presented in the discourse) in order to shape our mental reconstruction of represented time (the events of the story’s world, defined and redefined throughout the reading or viewing process). For instance, a mystery novel might skip over an important event such as a murder, thereby prompting the reader’s curiosity about this past event. The discourse withholds the presentation of the murder, but the reader develops a set of hypotheses about the event, constantly modifying those hypotheses as new information is communicated. Alternatively, a film with a pronounced plot twist might force us to reexamine our assumptions about past events, producing a calculated surprise response from the viewer. Whereas curiosity and surprise are both oriented toward the past, suspense is oriented toward the future, as when a character’s goal prompts us to hope or fear a prospective outcome. All three functions are inherently temporal, and Sternberg (2010) has proposed the more obviously temporal terms “prospection,” “retrospection,” and “re-cognition” as corollaries for suspense, curiosity, and surprise (641).¹

There are several reasons why Sternberg’s model seems particularly appropriate for a study of reality television. For one thing, although his examples are usually drawn from written narratives, Sternberg insists that the model is designed to account for broadly shared—indeed, universal—features of narrative, both fictional and...