The Waves: What Reality TV Says About Us

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4.4 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2022

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this week’s episode of The Waves, historian and original Waves host, Marcia Chatelain is joined by sociologist Danielle Lindemann to talk all things reality TV. They discuss Danielle’s new book, True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us and why we don’t take reality television as seriously as we should. Later in the show they talk about why women are more successful at monetizing their reality TV brand and how the genre takes us on a tour of the class system. In Slate Plus: Is The Bachelorette feminist? Recommendations: Marcia: The True Crime Obsessed podcast, Let the Women Do the Work Danielle: The Netflix series Selling Sunset Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Shannon Palus and Alicia Montgomery. Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Waves. Slates podcast about gender, feminism, and why you certainly are
0:19.7	not here to make friends. Every episode you get a new pair of feminists to talk about
0:24.4	the thing we can't get off our minds. And today you've got me, a former waiver,
0:28.8	Marsha Tellan. I'm a historian of African American life and culture and author of the book
0:33.8	Franchise, The Golden Arches in Black America. And I'm here today with fellow writer and academic,
0:39.6	Danielle Lindemann, author of the new book True Story, What Reality TV Says About Us.
0:46.1	Thanks so much for having me. Professor Lindemann, if I may, throughout the book you
0:52.4	introduce readers to the heavy hitters of sociology, you've got Durkheim, you've got Foucault,
0:57.8	you've got Mills, and the heavy hitters of reality TV. We've got Kim, we've got Snucky, we've
1:03.2	got Honey Boo Boo. What sparked your interest in connecting what I imagine are your two great
1:09.2	intellectual loves? Well, you imagine correctly. So I've been teaching a course at Lehigh University
1:16.1	called Sociology of Reality TV for a few years now in which we pair episodes of
1:21.9	reality TV with these heavy hitters in sociology. It's a pretty popular course obviously because
1:28.4	it's reality TV. A lot of students want to take it. And I always thought that I could turn it
1:33.2	into a pretty interesting book. So that was sort of the seed of the idea for the book.
1:37.7	So as a sociologist, you have written about a number of topics including commuter marriages,
1:43.9	the sexual practices of American people. What is it about reality TV that you think is such a
1:51.2	helpful lens for understanding sociology? Yeah, so it's kind of interesting because I have written
1:56.1	on a quid and array of topics and it's kind of like one of those like Sesame Street things,
1:59.8	like what do these three things have in common? So in general, I say I'm a sociologist of what we
2:04.8	call deviance, which is a loaded term, but it just really means in sociology, it just means behavior
2:10.2	that falls outside the norm. And we often argue that paradoxically by looking at people who engage
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