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Television & New Media
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Making the Most out of 15 Minutes

Reality TV's Dispensable Celebrity

Sue Collins

New York University

Reality TV invites new considerations for theorizing celebrity as a cultural commodity whose economic value is based on potential exchange. In this article, I argue that reality TV's construction of a new stratum of celebrity value—ordinary people performing "the real"—supports claims that the industry is moving toward a "flexible" model of economic organization. The production of reality TV expands the labor stock to include nonunionized, nonpaid or low-paid contestants playing themselves, while also displacing unionized actors from production opportunities. Moreover, reality TV's D-level celebrity generates novelty out of audience self-reflexivity with minimal risk and temporal flexibility. Celebrity value, as a mechanism to gather audiences, undergoes a new form of dispensable synergy that shelters the larger system of celebrity valorization from the dual problems of scarcity and clutter.

Key Words: reality TV • celebrity • political economy • cultural labor

This version was published on March 1, 2008

Television & New Media, Vol. 9, No. 2, 87-110 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1527476407313814
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