Reading Reality Television: Publicizing, Promoting, and Commodifying the Self

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Reading Reality Television: Publicizing, Promoting, and Reading Reality Television: Publicizing, Promoting, and

Commodifying the Self Commodifying the Self

Tamar Salibian

Claremont Graduate University

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Salibian, Tamar. (2020).

Reading Reality Television: Publicizing, Promoting, and Commodifying the Self

CGU Theses & Dissertations, 293. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/293.

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Reading Reality Television:

Publicizing, Promoting, and Commodifying the Self

Tamar Salibian

Claremont Graduate University

2020

Approval of the Dissertation Committee

This dissertation has been duly read, reviewed, and critiqued by the Committee listed below,

which hereby approves the manuscript of Tamar Salibian as fulfilling the scope and quality

requirements for meriting the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Cultural Studies.

Joshua Goode, Chair

Claremont Graduate University

Associate Professor of Cultural Studies

Elizabeth Affuso

Pitzer College

Professor of Media Studies

Mark Andrejevic

Pomona College

Professor of Media Studies

Abstract

Reading Reality Television:

Publicizing, Promoting, and Commodifying the Self

Tamar Salibian

Claremont Graduate University: 2020

This dissertation investigates the ways that ideology is dispensed through popular media

to drive the commodification of the self. These ideologies are reinforced in the televisual texts

examined in this research with the use of self-reflexivity and metacommentary. The use of these

tactics creates an onscreen illusion of transparency to co-opt the viewer with the suggestion of

authenticity, familiarity, and openness to inscribe the televisual and its visual codes with

meaning to perpetuate messages that support consumerism, hegemony, and power.

In order to consider these processes of self-commodification and the reproduction of

power in media and cultural production, this dissertation examines the MTV reality series Teen

Mom OG, a revival of the 16 and Pregnant program. Its production, editing, and narrative tools

reflect a new direction in this television genre, complicate questions of commodification, enforce

capitalist modes of exchange, emphasize hierarchies of labor and power, and uphold ideologies

in support of surveillance by connecting compulsive personal expression and publicizing private

labor in domestic spaces to success. Pairing a close reading methodological approach with

analysis of audience responses on fan blog pages, this dissertation considers the themes of

celebrity, labor, surveillance [and consent to it], and the emphasis on the commodification of the

self in the landscape of this contemporary moment.

For my parents

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my family for their support and to my mother Taline especially for cultivating a

unique and tender relationship with me during this process. It was as important to my success as

was my research. I began coursework at CGU a year after my father’s death. The memory and

spirit of my father Ohannes was ever-present during this time, and I am grateful for his

enthusiasm when I was applying to PhD programs. Thank you to my cousin Ani for checking up

on me during my self-imposed isolation while writing this dissertation, and to my great-aunt

Arsine for her enduring kindness and grace.

The adventure that led me here was informed by a number of experiences and

relationships outside academia. To my coworkers in reality TV, I am grateful for our animated

conversations about media, culture, and the bizarre situations we witnessed and lived. They

compelled me to pursue this advanced degree. To my dance-fitness collaborators, and to Holly,

Natalie, Meghan, Grace, Luisa, and Danielle especially: Each of you nurtured a relationship with

me beyond the dancefloor. I cherish you and am wholly grateful for your friendship.

My growth as a scholar was shaped by lifelong friendships cultivated in many different

environments. Thank you Ariadne, Jess, Resa, Matt, Lorky, Asbed, Badir, Andrew, Julie D.,

Julie F., Richard, Michael, Joe, Alejandra, Shuo, Adrienne, Shayda, Amy, Shona, LaShawn,

Ashley, Billy, Rachna, Anthony, Kelsey, Tim, Gabriel, Jesse, Tricia, and Mike. Thank you also

to my online network of PhD candidates worldwide.

To the faculty and my classmates at MassArt and CalArts: The instruction and guidance I

received during my BFA and MFA programs lifted and guided me during my time at CGU.

This dissertation project was overseen by a number of committee members throughout

the years. Thank you, Tracy Biga MacLean, Paul Faulstich, and Eve Oishi for serving on my

committee from my qualifying exams through the proposal phase. Thank you, Mark Andrejevic

and Elizabeth Affuso, for serving on my dissertation committee and for your feedback and

support as I wrote, edited, rewrote, and finalized this document. My gratitude also to the donors

of the CGU Friedman Award, the Toery-Kohler Memorial Award for academic achievement,

and the Maguire fellowships that supported my research and my service as a Teacher’s Assistant.

vii

Thank you to Shamini Dias in the Preparing Future Faculty college teaching certificate

program for your encouragement, and thank you Shelby and Lizbeth for your support. To my

PFF classmates: Our time together was brief, but meaningful.

It was a pleasure working with my colleagues in the School of Arts and Humanities.

Thank you Holly, Susan, Laurie Beth, Sarah, and Lisa. To my colleagues in the Career

Development Office, thank you for your energy, guidance, and collaborative spirit. Christine,

Michael, Leigh, Ahmed, Bailey, Devin, Josh, Tyler, Noemi, Theresa, and Jun, what a team!

Thanks to Jeff and Isabelle in the Career Strategy Office at Drucker School of Management for

your guidance and goodwill. Thanks also to the administrative staff at CGU and especially to

Veronica, Dana, and Kristal.

My gratitude to the counselors and staff at the Monsour Counseling and Psychological

Services, and especially to Carrie Park for her ongoing support.

My gratitude also to the staff at the Center for Writing and Rhetoric at CGU for

facilitating in-person and online writing and retreats and dissertation bootcamps, they gave me

the time and space to get the work done. Thanks especially to Marcus, Matt, and Lauren. I am

grateful also to my writing group buddies Carlos, Myles, Jocelyn, and Beth for our regular check

ins and writing sessions.

To my colleagues at After-School All-Stars and the students and staff at Alliance Gertz-

Ressler High School: I learned so much about teaching, learning, and building community during

my time with you, thank you.

Recently, I attended a talk given by a CGU alumnus who is the founder of WiLD

Leaders. Soon after that, I began attending weekly WiLD sessions focused on whole and

intentional leader development. I am heartened by the support of the WiLD team. Thank you

Rob, Daniel, Megan, Claire, and the many WiLD participants worldwide that I communicate

with regularly.

And finally, to my academic advisor and dissertation chair, Joshua Goode: Thank you for

your patience, humor, and support. I appreciate your many reminders to not pull my punches in

my writing and to stop overthinking. Thank you for finding creative ways to motivate me to keep

going. Perhaps what’s ahead can be imagined as one gloriously vast body of water after another.

I will keep swimming.

viii

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

About this research 1

About Teen Mom OG 5

Research Methodologies 9

Fan Responses and Blogs 11

Chapters 13

Keywords and Themes 16

Chapter 1: Origins and Approaches 19

Photography and Early Documentary Cinema 20

Duplicating and Rearranging Reality on Television 26

Daytime Television and Ideologies of Self-Improvement 29

Subversion and Legitimization in Metacommentary and Self-Reflexivity 34

Origins: From Candid Camera to An American Family to MTV 37

Candid Camera: Playfully Normalizing Surveillance 39

Candid Camera, Surveillance Anxiety, and Teen Mom OG 42

An American Family: From Cinéma Vérité to Reality TV 46

An American Family, Transactional Participation, and Teen Mom OG 48

MTV: From Music Television to Reality Hub 50

Introducing The Real World 53

Lifestyle Branding in The Real World 56

MTV, Celebrity, and The Development of Corporate Partnerships in Reality TV 58

Conclusion 61

Chapter 2: Teen Mom OG 63

First, there was 16 and Pregnant: Production and Impact 63

Introducing Teen Mom OG 68

Close Reading: Opening Sequence, “Back and Better Than Ever” 69

Close Reading: Reflections. 73

Why Teen Mom OG 75

Close Reading: Catelynn and Tyler Performing the Filmed Family 79

Close Reading: Reflections 81

A Whole New World Where Private is Made Public 82

The Markers of Value and Success in Reality TV 84

The Popularity of Teen Mom OG 87

The Perks and Punishments Embedded in Teen Mom OG 89

Close Reading: The Entrapments of Reality TV 92

Close Reading: Reflections 93

The Outcast: Farrah Abraham 96

Conclusion 99

Chapter 3: Media and Cultural Studies Frameworks 101

Labor, Capital, and Social Reproduction Theory 101

Alienation and Teen Mom OG 105

Labor and Teen Mom OG 108

Individualism, Self-Actualization, and the Culture of Narcissism 110

Televisual flow 113

Organizing Pleasure and the Act of Viewing 116

Looking at Looking 118

The Inauthenticity in Performing the Self as a Commodity 125

Self-Commodification and the Parasocial Relationship 128

Parasocial Relatability and Social Media 134

Conclusion 135

Chapter 4: Self-Reflexivity and Compulsive Self-Promotion 137

Self-Reflexivity in Teen Mom OG: Publicizing the Domestic Space 138

Ritual and Discipline Imposed by the Teen Mom OG Production 141

Close Reading: “Surprise, Surprise” and the Producer as Confidante 143

Close Reading: Reflections 144

Ritual, Conflict, and Validation Through Commodification 147

Close Reading: Refusing to Participate and the Limits of Agency 150

Close Reading: Reflections 152

Alienation and Publicizing the Domestic Space in Reality TV 155

Self-Reflexivity, Fan Reception, and Critical Media Literacy 156

Conclusion 159

Chapter 5: Metacommentary and the Reproduction of Power 161

Metacommentary and the Disciplining Reality TV Production 163

Close Reading: Maci and the Disciplining Power of Metacommentary 164

Close Reading: Reflections 166

Metacommentary and the Assertion of Authority 169

Close Reading: Breaking the Fourth Wall With “Old Wounds” 171

Close Reading: Reflections 172

Metacommentary, Labor, and Alienation 173

Close Reading: Beyond Self-Promotion, “This Ain’t It” 175

Close Reading: Reflections 176

Metacommentary, Fan Reception, and Critical Media Literacy 177

Conclusion 179

Conclusion and Future Areas of Consideration 181

Notes 188

Bibliography 190

Introduction

“What happens when a narrative takes the place of reality? It’s almost as if nothing really

happened in history unless it has been recorded in a movie. Or in a television series.”

– Erroll Morris, “A Wilderness of Error” Episode 1 “Girl in a Floppy Hat” (2020)

This dissertation investigates the promotion of ideologies of self-commodification

through the televisual text by focusing on reality television [Hereafter “reality TV”]. The

examination of this process as it operates in reality TV is rooted in the notion offered by Theodor

Adorno that, “the world wants to be deceived…[and people] desire a deception which is

nonetheless transparent to them” (106). This desired deception is reinforced in the programs

examined in this dissertation with the use of self-reflexivity and metacommentary. The use of

these tactics creates an onscreen illusion of transparency, which co-opts the viewer with the

suggestion of familiarity and openness to inscribe media and its complex visual codes with

meaning to perpetuate ideologies of consumerism, hegemony, and power.

The reality TV program examined here, MTV’s Teen Mom OG, highlights a type of life

without providing specific life-changing tips that are emphasized in traditional “lifestyle”

programs such as The Biggest Loser, What Not To Wear, or Trading Spaces which put emphasis

on such elements as home improvement (DIY or otherwise), wardrobe choice, or adjustments to

health and weight through diet, exercise, or plastic surgery. In its decades-long evolution, reality

TV now inhabits multiple spaces with many subgenres. For the purposes of this project, a

general understanding of what constitutes “reality TV” is best highlighted by Media Studies

scholar Rachel Dubrofsky. In her research on the dating competition series The Bachelor,

Dubrofsky explains the reality genre as “the filming of real people over time with the aim of

developing a narrative about their activities segmented into serial episodes (…) What occurs on a

[Reality TV] show is a constructed fiction, like the action on scripted shows, with the twist that

real people create the fiction of the series” ("Fallen women in reality TV: A pornography of

emotion" 354). With this understanding, the emphasis in this analysis of Teen Mom OG and its

ideological implications is less on factual details and instead on the structure, representation, and

meaning offered to the viewer.

All televisual media promotes ideology, even if specific programs do not explicitly

emphasize this act of promotion. While certain lifestyle choices are addressed and highlighted in

Teen Mom OG, the emphasis is instead on intangible changes represented by the words and

actions of the cast and crew through the pairing of conflict and habitual self-expression. This

pairing is framed to appear to drive personal and professional success. By utilizing self-

reflexivity and metacommentary in tandem with the ongoing narrative tether (found in most

television) between conflict and resolution, Teen Mom OG delivers suggestions of ideological

paths to improvement through the narrative structure, choice of participants, and tone infused

into the series.

Teen Mom OG is a revival of the 16 and Pregnant (2009-2014) and Teen Mom (2015-

present) programs. The original program and its offshoot Teen Mom follow young mothers

through their pregnancies, delivery, and life after having children as a teenager. In the OG

version of the series, six years after four of the original teen moms first went through the

pregnancies and had their children, what appears to be a fixed emphasis on the self appears to

foreground the program’s characters, giving the illusion that these characters – and not the

camera crew, producers, and editors crafting the narrative, or the networks making decisions

based on advertising, ratings, and profit – are in control of their story. Self-reflexivity, as it is

examined in this research, is the focus on an overwhelming emphasis on the self by the cast, their

family members, and the producers and crew who appear on screen alongside the cast.

Metacommentary, which claims to turn the production process inside out through the constant

response to (and discussion of) the production woven into the narrative, engages the viewer with

a complex, seemingly uncovered storyline. These components – paired with an emphasis on the

crew onscreen alongside the cast as well as the production’s recording devices, cameras, gadgets,

related technological tools – cooperate to engender the allure of transparency to promote what is

argued in this research as self-commodification.

This form of promoting the self, while appearing to empower the individual, acts as a

pacifying tool for both the cast and the viewer of the program. Masquerading as lifting the veil

from the wily nature of cultural production, the components examined here are arranged in this

program in ways that create an appearance of openness while upholding the deceptive elements

of the culture industry. The “culture industry” refers to the systems in media examined by

Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the seminal text, “The

Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In a 2016 New Yorker piece about the

culture industry, Alex Ross relates recent political events in the US to the writings of Adorno,

who believed that “the greatest danger to American democracy lay in the mass-culture apparatus

of film, radio, and television. Indeed, in his view, this apparatus operates in dictatorial fashion

even when no dictatorship is in place: it enforces conformity, quiets dissent, mutes thought” (par.

4). Bearing this supposition in mind, not only is it important to examine the visible and explicit

ways that dissent is quieted and thought is muted through the apparatuses in televisual media, it

is also necessary to uncover the often hidden or complicated tools used and the covert or veiled

ways that a televisual text may promote such ideologies through the commodification of its

onscreen characters. Important to this study also is the understanding of the way in which

Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) – as outlined by theorist Louis Althusser, who drew upon

the works of Marx, Lacan, and others – function in contemporary popular media. According to

Althusser, media is infused with meaning to influence ways of seeing and support “the

reproduction of the conditions of production” (1). These apparatuses help uphold existing

structures of power by utilizing the processes by which identity is acquired when individuals see

themselves within ideology.

It is important to uncover and examine the visual tools that deliver these apparatuses

particularly when the desired passivity underwrites the hegemony of corporate capitalism by

being presented as its opposite -- a form of empowerment and agency imperative to reaching

personal enlightenment, self-actualization, success, and capital. It is also important to

contextualize this supposition of passivity within a larger conversation – rooted in Media Studies

– that may not necessarily find its end point at a concrete assertion of hegemony. Calling upon

the positionality of Douglas Kellner in reference to that of Gramsci and Foucault, Andrew

Harrington explains in his research how “television is a multi-faceted discourse that certainly is

dominated by voices of the ruling class, but those voices are not monolithic nor are the

receptions of the audiences” (28). Harrington points to the difference between the Chomsky and

Herman (2002) “propaganda model” (which leaves little room for decoding meaning other than

what those in power dictate) and the hegemony model outlined by Kellner (1990), which allows

for a multiplicity of decodings of meaning within a more fluid, shifting framework. Harrington

favors the latter approach. The hegemony model also illuminates discursive elements within an

understanding of Teen Mom OG and the larger questions it reveals that an approach hinging

solely on a Marxist or a Frankfurt School contextualization may not do.

Therefore, this examination of the way the culture industry perpetuates ideology through

Teen Mom OG is situated within a discursive approach which welcomes and considers the ways

that meaning can be decoded in multiple ways, especially in consideration of the fans who

respond to the series by engaging with each other on blog sites devoted to the series. The guiding

question here isn’t whether or not Teen Mom OG and reality TV are tools for passivity within a

broad sweeping neoliberal project. We already know this to be true because they are products of

entertainment within the culture industry. The questions motivating this project are: How do

Teen Mom OG and reality TV, by adopting new ways of assembling imagery to build a narrative,

function within this ongoing neoliberal project to aid in the reproduction of power? And, what

are the ways, if any, that viewers and fans can engage in ways that acknowledge this system and

its tools while continuing to enjoy the process of consuming cultural products?

About Teen Mom OG

Teen Mom OG (2015-present) documents the lives of four of the original characters from

the first season of 16 and Pregnant (2009) as these young mothers maneuver their lives, personal

relationships, and fame (or infamy) six years after their initial participation on the show. Farrah

Abraham, Maci McKinney (née Bookout), Catelynn Baltierra (née Lowell), and Amber

Portwood starred in 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom OG and have contributed to developing the

Teen Mom brand with successes in the form of book deals and clothing lines, and controversies

such as a “leaked” sex tape. Despite their respective successes, the cast is invariably tethered to

the Teen Mom/MTV brand. On the show, the relationship between the cast and the on-screen

producers and crew members is incorporated into the dramatic narrative in ways that are not

done in similar lifestyle programs that highlight domestic situations of semi-celebrities such as

Keeping Up with the Kardashians. On Teen Mom OG, the camera crew and producers are

presented almost as if they are family or close friends of the cast members because of their

involvement in the characters’ lives since the cast’s original participation in 16 and Pregnant.

On Teen Mom OG, as with many other reality TV programs (on MTV and on other

networks) the emphasis on what appears to be self-examination by the main characters – while

talking with friends and family, in conversation with onscreen camera crew, or even in televised

therapy sessions – attempts to convince the viewer that the primary and most important act

taking place is the one highlighted in the self-reflexive action taking place. The presentation of

this narrative suggests that the self-reflexive focus will enlighten and entertain the at-home

audience, and it does. Yet the presentation of the narrative in this manner also aids the

perpetuation of the ideological apparatuses of hegemony, exploitative labor practices, and

mechanisms of surveillance that break down the barriers between public and private. Similar

results are achieved in other shows.

On other programs, the producers use similar tactics as the ones used in Teen Mom OG,

with related ideological promises connected to the implementation of self-reflection,

participation in recorded therapy sessions, use of metacommentary, publicizing the private

and/or the domestic, and overall self-commodification through participation in the process of

cultural production. One may argue that the genre itself hinges on these processes. Yet with Teen

Mom OG, the inclusion of the producers as costars in the narrative complicates the landscape of

the series and the ideological promises that it makes. The “enlightenment” that is offered in Teen

Mom OG reveals apparatuses that promote surveillance and exploitative labor which aren’t as

overt in other reality programs. These struggles endured by the cast are made to mirror the

viewer’s own conflicts and challenges within everyday life, yet closer scrutiny of the televisual

text reveals a narrative that places the onscreen character(s) in a never-ending state of self-

commodification. Publicizing private and domestic physical and emotional labor on the series as

a means to achieving success results in alienation from others as well as from the self in what

Marx considers the “species-being” or “species-essence” – an outcome that also reflects the

current state of culture in which reality TV is produced and consumed and intrusive social media

and surveillance practices are infused into our everyday lives.

While the emphasis in this research is on Teen Mom OG, other programs (reality TV and

otherwise, whether on MTV or not) must be considered as well in order to contextualize this

study within a broader understanding of the signs and symbols that are craftily configured to

affect the viewer. Also important to note is that the tactics used in Teen Mom OG that are

examined here are a reflection of growing trends and practices within cultural production and

must be treated as such, much like the way most Cultural Studies and Media Studies

examinations highlight the televisual as a representation of much larger issues at work. To use

the study of reality TV programs – as has been done in certain recent Media Studies scholarship

– to temper the importance of this televisual genre or even demonize its producers who are

themselves important participants in this complicated process is to neglect crucial elements in the

study of cultural production in the 21

century.

My personal reasons for this research stem from my connection to this genre and to the

televisual text in general. After a Bachelor’s degree in photography and a Master’s degree in

film, I worked in documentary and reality TV post-production, most notably on such programs

as I Love New York, Survivor, and The Apprentice. While working in this field, I began to

consider the intricate tapestry being woven in these shows, and I began to pair my practical

experience in photo research and sales for news and entertainment sources, film production and

reality TV post-production with a theoretical consideration of the structures of power that are

supported by the televisual text (and its consumption by fans and scholars). My approach to this

subject is that of a fan of popular culture with a background in the arts who is simultaneously an

active participant in the recognition and dissemination (through ongoing study) of the ways that

power is reproduced, and ideology is supported in palatable cultural products designed to

produce various forms of pleasure, emotion, excitement, and enjoyment through the process of

consumption. An additional motivation for this project and area of concentration – which I have

shared with friends, colleagues, strangers, high school students, and people from varying

socioeconomic backgrounds and levels of education – is the hope that this research stretches

beyond academic discourse to inspire non-academic readership, consideration, and a growing

media literacy among television viewers and consumers of culture.

Pairing a semiotic textual analysis of the signs and symbols in this program (through a

close reading of scenes from the first season of the Teen Mom OG reality TV series) with

research that considers both the audience and the entertainment industry (through an analysis of

responses to the series on two Teen Mom OG fan blogs and an historical look at the evolution of

metacommentary and self-reflexivity on television and in reality TV), this study will uncover the

ways that Teen Mom OG and other media subtly dispense what Slovenian philosopher Slavoj

Zizek refers to as effective and “nice” totalitarianism through signs, symbols, and meaning-

making (December 17, 2017). In order to understand cultural hegemony and the way hierarchies

of culture are rooted in capital and dispensed through cultural products, this research uncovers

the tools of self-commodification within the televisual by confronting, prioritizing, and

potentially reimagining the uses of self-reflexivity and metacommentary.

Research Methodologies

Within this examination of self-reflexivity, metacommentary, and self-commodification,

the aim is to overcome what Kellner considers “the divide between a text-based approach to

culture and an empiricist social science-based communication theory” (34). Breaking down this

divide requires the marriage of theoretical considerations and close reading of the televisual text

(and responses to it by audience members) in the research. The theoretical analysis employed in

this study confronts several connected concepts

– the system of capital and hegemony upheld by

the culture industry which results in alienation from the self and which is made possible by

mythmaking, infusing meaning into visual media in ways that are simultaneously pleasurable

and oppressive – to uncover the tools used to support ideological positions that privilege and

uphold existing power structures.

My primary source material is the first season of Teen Mom OG, first released in 2015.

Scholars such as Ien Ang, David Morley, and Roger Silverstone use an audience studies

framework to examine the role of the viewer within the encoding/decoding circuit of meaning as

outlined by Stuart Hall.

Motivated by the audience studies approach of Ang, Morley and others,

audience response is included in this study, but in support of the visual and theoretical study of

the reality series. The primary emphasis in this project is on a semiotic analysis of the

construction of Teen Mom OG and similar reality TV programs. Included in this approach is the

examination of the role that producers, cast, and crew – makers of culture who are at the same

time also influenced by cultural production through its circuits of meaning – embody to

distribute messages through the televisual text. In support of this study is a look at how fans

engage with this series.

The analysis of audience response and engagement with Teen Mom OG is presented

through consideration of message board posts and online discussions of the series taking place on

two Teen Mom OG sites – Teen Mom Junkies (teenmomjunkies.com) and the Teen Mom Central

Tumblr page. Both pages were created before Teen Mom OG premiered its first episode, and

their posts and responses are included in this research to challenge the theoretical assertions that

the series (as an extension of reality TV itself) encourages passivity and the adoption of the

ideological positionings and practices that the cast perform on the screen in the viewer. The goal

with this research is to examine the way the material is received in order to interrogate the

assertions of authenticity while simultaneously examining the engagement of the viewer in the

process of consumption of the product. A number of chapters will include close reading in the

form of descriptive explanations of various scenes from the first season Teen Mom OG in order

to point the reader to the construction of the televisual text and the ideological apparatuses at

play.

This project highlights the first season of Teen Mom OG because the inclusion of the

onscreen crew is newly introduced in this series. As with other programs, this newness does

embody some forms of authenticity that may dissipate as the cast and crew become more aware

of the mechanisms of production from season to season. While events that take place in later

seasons of Teen Mom OG and other series are mentioned, the emphasis is on the space in which

the newness of the metacommentary and self-reflexivity are most potent. The emphasis on the

construction of these televisual texts through the use of close reading follows Barry Brummett’s

understanding that the researcher must try to understand “who is empowered or disempowered

by a text. An ideological close reading assumes that power is always at work to some extent in a

text, and understanding how the text connects to structures and struggles over power helps to

reveal its ideological import” (104). In examining the power structures both in the production

and in the signs and televisual symbols in Teen Mom OG, this dissertation confronts and

challenges June Deery’s understanding that, in reality TV, “audience engagement – whether

participatory or interactive – is often radically sanctioned and even vital, but thus far it has not

established any radical shift of power or agency” (35). The lack of a shift in power or agency

may be confronted through the use of close reading with an emphasis on form and patterns of

form as well as through an understanding of the way the televisual is received by the audience.

According to Brummett, our minds follow patterns, seeking them out “to help us think about

how to live in the world. For that reason, form has more to do with rhetorical effect than content

does because it is usually form that gets and holds people’s interest, attention, and participation

in a text” (51). This approach – which highlights the importance of form and pattern over content

– also illuminates a general shift in culture that moves away from facts within narrative content

and factual importance to favor delivery and reception of the televisual which often becomes

ritualized and repeated for emphasis, whether it is wholly real and true or not.

Fan Responses and Blogs

Alongside the semiotic analysis in this study is a look at audience reception of the series.

The qualitative research in this project centers viewers’ online responses to Teen Mom OG in

posts and comments on two Teen Mom OG fan blogs – Teen Mom Junkies

(teenmomjunkies.com) and the Teen Mom Central Tumblr page. The fan comments were

organized by keyword: Money, Motherhood, Beauty, Fame, The Parasocial Relationship,

Production (signifying both the MTV crew/producers and the production process), Remorse,

Redemption, Class, Comedy (referring to fan creativity and humorous comments),

Pornography/Sexuality, and each of the main female cast member’s names. The consideration of

these blog posts and comments is to gauge fan engagement with the series, viewers’ skepticism

of the veracity of the cast and/or crew, intellectual and emotional response to the series,

creativity in responses (as an indicator of agency as well as community and camaraderie among

fans), willingness to engage in critical intervention of the televisual text, responses to specific

cast members, and considerations of the themes of motherhood, authenticity, and trust.

Both blog sites have been running for many years and began before Teen Mom OG

premiered its first episode in 2015. The posts considered were shared within the time period from

when the first episode of Teen Mom OG first began airing to the end of airing of that specific

season. The reason for this choice of timeframe was to gauge initial responses to the series

revamp and to understand what affected viewers the most. The analysis of these responses to the

series was made in consideration of over 500 posts and comments on both pages, some of them

original posts by page administrators (also fans), but most of the comments being responses to

series and cast news and updates. The most popular themes as revealed by the number of

responses according to keyword were posts about the production and onscreen camera crew and

producers (68), posts and comments that revealed a parasocial connection between viewer and

cast member (60), posts and comments about controversial cast member Farrah Abraham (56),

and posts and comments in which fans and viewers discussed or referred to motherhood (52).

The analysis of fan responses to the series is included as a way of questioning whether or not the

theoretical and textual considerations and question are received by the viewer in ways that

support, reject, or reimagine the encoded messages inscribed in the televisual text.

Key to this component of the research is the understanding of the circuit of culture Stuart

Hall outlined in his 1980 essay, “Encoding/decoding.” Hall sees the audience as both the source

and the receiver of the messaging within a larger process of communication, consumption, and

meaning-making. The tension between the encoder who is the producer of these messages, and

the decoder who is the audience member does not simply move in one direction. The encoder

frames meaning within the televisual text in a distinct way, which is then consumed and

potentially reinterpreted differently (according to background or habits) by the decoding

audience. The decoding viewer has multiple ways they can decode this messaging and its

embedded ideology. They may choose to decode meaning in the way the producer intended,

which is considered the dominant-hegemonic position. There is also the negotiated code, where

the viewer accepts the meaning of the text inscribed with meaning in the way the producer

intended, but with room for exceptions and alternative interpretations. And there is the

oppositional code where, according to Hall, the viewer “detotalizes the message in the preferred

code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework or reference” (137).

Within the oppositional code is the potential for agency through collective communication and

action. What is to be determined with the examination of the Teen Mom OG fan blogs is the way

fans of the series receive and share messaging embedded in the televisual text within the

framework of the dominant-hegemonic position, negotiated code, or oppositional code to

consider the ways that fans of this series encounter and embody agency as consumers of culture.

Chapters

Moving from theory to qualitative analysis, this dissertation utilizes multiple modes of

interpretation suitable for the complexity of the televisual experience, especially as reality TV

attempts to seamlessly portray “the real world” while hiding so much of its artifice. Thus, these

chapters describe theoretical precepts and offer interpretation, textual analysis of the show, and

analysis of the audience reception.

Important to understanding the themes and systems that this series reveals is placing Teen

Mom OG within the history of reality TV and visual culture. This historical context begins with

the Photography, Documentary Cinema, and Daytime Television sections in Chapter 1. This

chapter goes further by looking at two key programs: Candid Camera, which tapped into post-

war Cold War paranoia in the 1950s and An American Family, which revealed the breakdown of

the ideology of the American Dream in the 1970s. Chapter 1 also examines MTV’s The Real

World, in which the cohabitation of seven strangers in a stylized, surveilled environment in the

early 1990s changed television forever through the endeavor of publicizing the domestic space in

an intricately produced narrative that offered new ways of seeing and being seen and connected

it to fame, infamy, and obscurity. This series catapulted what is known as reality TV, placing it

squarely in the midst of the neoliberal project of defining value and meaning through the

framework of capital. Consideration of The Real World also offers an historical look at the

evolution of MTV and how it influenced reality TV as a genre, particularly after it brought

reality TV to the forefront of its programming, moving away from being a network that made its

profits solely from music and music-based merchandising and affiliations. The research for this

chapter also takes into consideration such MTV programs as Laguna Beach and The Hills. The

examination of the programs in this chapter reveals the different manifestations of surveillance

culture, performative self-reflexivity, and celebrity culture in television.

Chapter 2 examines Teen Mom OG in depth. It includes an outline of the series, a look at

its precursor 16 and Pregnant, an examination of the themes and ideologies at play in both

programs, close reading of the beginning of the series reboot where the crew now inhabit the

screen alongside the cast almost as costars, and an introduction of the tactics that support

exploitative capitalist modes of exchange as they are revealed in the program.

Chapter 3 outlines the theories examined in this research. In order to better understand

the ways that reality shows such as Teen Mom OG supports and upholds existing power

structures, this chapter also examines a number of interrelated questions including the parasocial

relationship between onscreen character and at-home viewer, the ways that Teen Mom OG

enforces ideologies related to the promotion of the self as a commodity without consideration of

the importance of the private self away from cameras, and the way the inclusion of social media

and other mechanisms that the onscreen characters navigate drives the normalization of ongoing

consent to increased surveillance and self-commodification.

Chapter 4 examines self-reflexivity and self-commodification by looking at the ways the

tactics used in Teen Mom OG are ritualized while being presented as messages of authentic,

introspective self-examination. The actual narrative details are less important than the way(s) in

which the producers and crew are introduced, incorporated, and infused into these characters’

visual representation, especially when the producers and crew are used as a vehicle for the

character(s) to recount their narrative not as a way to consider their particular dilemmas, but to

court viewership. Form trumps content. This chapter also examines ritual as a tool for discipline,

and the way the cast uses social media and digital technology in the episodes of the series. In the

construction of the visual and narrative landscape of Teen Mom OG, the use of social media is

not only allowed, but is welcomed. Its use propels the brand reach through the labor of its

characters. Included also in this chapter is analysis of the fan response to the themes in the series.

Chapter 5 examines how the use of metacommentary perpetuates ideologies of power and

authority, particularly as the ideological apparatus of surveillance acts as a form of discipline,

shaping the function of the cast, the onscreen crew, and the viewer within a digital panopticon.

Taking cues from Linda Hutcheon’s understanding of the simultaneous legitimation and

subversion of what is parodied within a parody, this chapter addresses the paradoxical

construction of this reality TV program to drive the narrative forward, court viewership, and

simultaneously problematize and normalize the ideological apparatuses highlighted.

The

apparatuses important to this chapter are also in utilized social media, news, sports, and even in

politics. This chapter uncovers the ways that the production-within-the-production informs our

understanding of a culture that relies on the continuous commodification of the self in order for it

to succeed. Included also are possible sites of agency through critical engagement with the

televisual text.

The Conclusion reexamines keywords and key themes outlined in the introduction,

reiterates the findings of this project, and offers future areas of interest and inquiry. At its core,

this research is an examination of the ways that power is reproduced by crafting enjoyable,

palatable, and often frustrating cultural products to deliver its messages. The masterful blend of

highly produced scenes from everyday life creates a product and a set of ideologies that are

consumed through the everyday act of watching television and often replicated in the viewer’s

own daily life.

Keywords and Themes

The research here follows a handful of main keywords and themes that are linked

critically: “Reality TV,” “Metacommentary,” “Self-Reflexivity,” “Self-Commodification,” and

“Alienation.” Reality TV is the televisual form examined here, a constructed and produced

episodic visual fiction that uses real individuals and parts of their actual lives in its narrative

tapestry. As it is examined in this research, metacommentary is the tactic whereby the production

process is included within the product itself. Self-reflexivity is the use of self-reference,

performed introspection, and a constant and intentional turn of the narrative back to the

individual character within the narrative. Self-commodification is the process by which the

individual identifies their identity through their relationship to capital and its practices and/or

organizes and structures their personal life and relationships on the model of market relations.

Alienation is the concept examined by Karl Marx which confronts the exploitation of the worker,

interrogating the space(s) within and away from the workplace that nourishes and/or detaches the

worker from their true essence or self.

Additional themes addressed include: The “Parasocial Relationship,” whereby onscreen

characters are part of a constructed relationship with viewers of cultural products within the

framework of real-life friendships or partnerships, but without the actual reciprocity between

participants; “Domesticity,” which is used here as a description of events and tasks within the

familial home and as an entry into the discussion of the publicizing of private spaces in reality

TV; “Motherhood,” which is confronted in this research as a as performing parental

responsibilities in ways that propel consumerism and assert value through visibility,

homogeneity, and materialism; “Hybridization,” which refers to the ways that reality TV fuses

multiple genres (and span different consuming platforms) to engage viewers; “Pleasure” with

regard to the emotions experienced while watching and interacting with the televisual product;

and “Engagement,” which refers to consuming content and to the connection between consuming

and to participation in the process of cultural production in ways that commodify and alienate the

individual. These and other themes inform this study of how power is upheld and reproduced

through popular visual media that often disguises itself as mere entertainment.

As the Errol Morris quote at the beginning of this introduction expresses, the

environment in this contemporary moment functions in such a way that consumers of cultural

products may not believe something unless it has been documented. What must follow is the

confrontation of who, what, and how that which is documented creates a narrative that serves a

particular purpose that may not act in the best interest of the individuals on the screen or those

watching what’s on the screen.

Chapter 1: Origins and Approaches

“This is the true story....”

– Opening narration, MTV’s The Real World (1992)

In order to understand the ways that metacommentary, self-reflexivity, and self-

commodification function as pacifying tools of self-commodification within the mechanism of

publicizing the private in Teen Mom OG, it is not only necessary to review the history of reality

TV and the network which airs Teen Mom OG, but to also consider also the landscape of

television and documentary cinema that informs the series examined here. Just as the visual

tactics in one series are informed by an entire history of televisual content, so does the process of

promotion and branding. As Jennifer Gillan explains, “branded entertainment of the present is

not a millennial development. Rather, it is a return to the dramatized advertisements and sponsor

entwinements pioneered by Ozzie Nelson and other 1950s television producers working in the

single and alternating sponsorship financing modes” (34). To track the evolution of production

and promotion within reality TV requires an understanding of how reality TV is informed by and

constructed differently from other television genres and visual media, and how this has evolved

and continues to evolve over time.

While fiction programs typically begin from the writing process in the form of a script

that is translated onto the TV screen via the actors, producers and crew, the process of creating

reality TV programs begins from the opposite end of the process. The producers build a skeleton

of what the program will be by arranging various shoot days and settings, choosing specific

personality types to perpetuate conflict and/or camaraderie, and selecting certain locations for

filming. At any given moment, spontaneous events are captured without prior planning by

production. Most reality TV follows a “shoot first, ask questions later” mode of production. As

the shoot progresses, the producers and story editors begin to construct the narrative skeleton of

the series to then build each episode with the video editors. Working together, the production and

post-production staff begin to piece together the tapestry of the cast members’ story lines and

narrative arcs within the series, often without knowing the outcome of the series.

During the post-production process, producers and editors typically piece together sounds

bytes and visual imagery that has been cataloged by transcribers, video loggers, and other

production crew in order to construct the story. The unpredictability of these plot-shaping events

not only affects the way the episodes are constructed, but it also challenges the editors’ and

producers’ approach to the material. The crafting of reality TV programming is a creative

process that requires an understanding of how to construct a compelling story when its

components are often changing throughout the filming period. Because of these intricacies in the

genre, it is necessary to examine the televisual text through close reading in tandem with an

understanding of the way televisual texts are formed and how they function. To have this happen

effectively, a history of the televisual explains the roots.

Photography and Early Documentary Cinema

The producers of Teen Mom OG shape a set of signs and symbols that appears to

privilege the cast member as a visual representative of the possible desires and/or concerns of the

at-home viewer. Here, relatability attracts viewership (through the use of self-reflexivity,

relatability, and the parasocial connection). The series highlights the ordinariness of its cast. But

in doing so, the show simultaneously cements the characters within an established hierarchy of

authority which privileges the producers of culture, and capital over the collective. Nicole

Aschoff examines the phenomenon of the celebrity super-elite, reminding her reader that “The

most powerful storytellers aren’t poor or working people, they are the super-elite” (9). This

emphasis on the celebrity storyteller supports and replicates an ideology of social, economic, and

cultural capital that is connected to visibility, self-commodification, and complicity with the

exploitative mechanisms of the culture industry. The mechanisms used in Teen Mom OG reveal a

sophisticated and cunning approach to crafting the televisual that is both reflective of, and that

affects culture today. The mechanisms in the construction of reality TV have their roots in other

visual forms.

Before the discovery of ways to create moving images, still photography was an

innovative way to study and catalog actions, places and events in a unique and essential way. By

the 1890s, photographer Edward Muybridge began work on his human and animal motion

experiments with his cameras. Deciding to push his work in a new direction, Muybridge created

a system whereby he placed many cameras next to each other on a track and opened the shutters

of the camera in succession. With this method of shooting multiple still images, Muybridge

created a moving image sequence that was later projected onto a screen. One of Muybridge’s

most famous sequences was one where a horse galloped across the screen, each detail of the

gallop distinctly recorded onto each frame of the film. Erik Barnouw describes the success of

these early moving picture experiments: “[Muybridge’s experiments] often evoked the poetry of

ordinary, familiar actions… [He] had foreshadowed a crucial aspect of the documentary film: its

ability to open our eyes to worlds available to us but, for one reason or another, not perceived”

(3).

While many of his motion experiments involved animal movement, Muybridge also

studied human action in his work. He often photographed models in ordinary situations.

Muybridge’s scenes often presented women paired with children. An example of such pairing is

Woman Picking Up Child, where the simple action of a mother and her infant is beautifully and

simply captured in a short moving segment. Dai Vaughan examines the shock and surprise over

this new form of capturing imagery. It was not, as Vaughan notes, the moving images that

perplexed viewers, but in the way this new format was able to “portray spontaneities of which

the theater was not capable. The movements of photographed people… were perceived as

performance, as simply a new mode of self-projection; but that the inanimate should participate

in self-projection was astonishing” (5). Roberta Pearson explains the effect of these early moving

pictures: “The first film audiences did not demand to be told stories, but found infinite

fascination in the mere recording and reproduction of the movement of animate and inanimate

objects” (17). The feeling of spontaneity embedded in these simple performances was important

to the success of early moving pictures. This feeling soon to be manipulated by documentary

filmmakers to produce complicated and enticing results.

After the success of Muybridge’s moving image experiments, two French brothers,

Auguste and Louis Lumiere began to film various subjects and situations. Owners of a

photographic equipment factory, the Lumiere brothers constructed a moving image camera

which they called the cinématographe; it shot, developed and projected the images that the

brothers recorded. With this camera, Auguste and Louis were able to film a variety of characters

whose ages ranged from newborn to middle-aged. Barnouw explains, “While a few of these early

[Lumiere] films involved deliberate performances for the camera… most were ‘actuality’ items.

None used actors; Louis Lumiere rejected the theater as a model for motion pictures. He

presented instead a panorama of French life that grows more fascinating as the years recede” (8).

The root of early documentary filmmaking, according to Vaughan, “comes down to what is not

predictable by – and not under the control of – the filmmaker” (7). And yet, as it is understood

now, the choice of subject or tone is absolutely under the control of the filmmaker. In later

works, many filmmakers such as Robert J. Flaherty and Louis Buñuel explored this power of the

choice of subject and tone to explore social and political themes in their work.

The masterful manipulation of real situations through the use of a system of production

tactics begins with documentary cinema. Documentary classics such as Robert J. Flaherty’s

Nanook of the North (1922), lauded as masterpieces of ethnography and the moving image, rely

on the manipulation of filmed environments and the use of different tactics to achieve an

intended purpose. In this silent documentary filmed on a portable, yet bulky Akeley camera,

Flaherty documented the daily life of an Inuk man and his family in the Canadian Arctic. After

the initial attempt to document the lives of multiple Inuk families resulted in Flaherty’s film

being destroyed by a fire, the filmmaker returned to the Arctic with the financial support of a

French fur company and a crew of local Eskimo cameramen to focus on only one family instead

of many. The finished film shows Nanook and his family searching for food and traveling across

a brutal landscape.

Many elements of this film were staged, altered, or produced, with title cards such as the

one at the beginning of this chapter employed as framing devices to shape and propel the

narrative and prioritize form over actual content. As Flaherty recounts, the production materials

included “75,000 feet of film, a Haulberg electric light plant and projector and two Akeley

cameras and a printing machine so that I could make prints of film as it was exposed and project

the pictures on the screen so that thereby the Eskimo would be able to see and understand

wherever mistakes were made” (par.6). Many of the scenes were planned in advance, and after

the filming of one scene in particular, the effects of the production began to reveal themselves.

Raw footage of the “Walrus Scene” was printed and shown to the Eskimos who “completely

forgot the picture—to them the walrus was real and living. The women and children in their high

shrill voices joined with the men in shouting admonitions, warnings and advice to Nanook and

his crew as the picture unfolded on the screen. The fame of that picture spread through all the

country” (par. 16). This fame affected everyone including the main character, Nanook.

According to Flaherty, “The walrus hunt having proved so successful, Nanook aspired to bigger

things. The first of the bigger things was to be a bear hunt at Cape Sir Thomas Smith which lay

some two hundred miles northward of us” (par. 19). It becomes evident that the correlation

between participation, visibility, fame, and the thirst for additional, potentially dangerous labor

was present since the early days of moving images. In these details recounted by Flaherty is the

understanding that what is considered “document” is itself a construction, which is carried from

one scene to the next and from one genre to its successors.

Arthur Calder-Marshall elaborates on Flaherty’s romanticized realism by commenting on

the imposition of the white man on territory previously unseen by white men, noting that the

white man “alters it by the mere fact of seeing it. The white man who wants to show what

Eskimo life is like normally has to manipulate it on film; a degree of organization comes in from

outside… the film unit is undermining the very patterns of life it is trying to film” (85). Nanook

of the North brings complex ideas about realism to the screen. Charles Musser explains how, “in

many respects, Nanook appropriated the techniques of Hollywood fiction film-making operating

on the borderline between fiction and documentary and turning ethnographic observations into a

narrativized romance” (90). The visual imagery in the documentary is carefully crafted. In one

scene showing Nanook and his Inuit family inside their igloo home, for example, film historians

explain how the scene was staged, with Flaherty completely altering his subject’s environment to

create the resulting narrative (See Barnouw, 1993). As documentary film progressed, filmmakers

began to use more meticulous and calculated methods of presenting their subjects to evoke

certain emotions from the viewers. Some filmmakers such as Robert J. Flaherty chose to present

the characters in a seemingly natural way in order to make the viewer sympathize with the

subject. The resulting imagery is a reality that is shaped to present a skillful, self-reliant hero to

the audience without revealing the authority of the filmmaker shaping the narrative. Yet that

authority, much like in the 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom franchise (and most other reality

series), is ever-present.

As with reality TV, documentary cinema continues this staging process in the editing

suite where the configuration of film edits develops the message of the film. It is in the careful

selection of the images that completes the process of the director and producer’s intended

message. As theorist Bill Nichols explains, with documentary film, “if there was a trick, it was

the trick of appearing to duplicate reality. What could have been more overwhelmingly

convincing of the powers of the cinématographe than to see something already recognizable and

familiar re-presented in a totally unfamiliar but remarkably recognizable manner?” (par. 5). The

visual, much like the ideological apparatuses it reveals, is hinged on a rearrangement of our

concerns into shapes that are welcoming, familiar, pleasurable, and easy to digest. These powers

of the cinematographe are visible throughout the history of documentary cinema, and confirm

what filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer explains as a collaboration between director, film crew,

and subjects “to simulate a reality in which they pretend the camera is not present…it helps us to

suspend our disbelief and perceive that simulation as reality” (qtd. in Adams, “Joshua

Oppenheimer’s Documentary Manifesto,” Indiewire). Reality TV production applies these very

tactics to fuel a new set of questions about the relationship between producers who craft a new

reality in which they encode meaning into the televisual text, the onscreen participants who

propels this process, and the at-home viewers who receive and decode the televisual text in

different ways. The application of this process of rearrangement, when altered through the

inclusion of the crew within the narrative, reimagines the role of subject to dispense the

consideration and invitation to engage in a process where anyone can make themself the subject.

It is now this consideration and invitation to embrace the commodification of the self that helps

suspend disbelief so that the participant does not consider the mechanisms, labor, exploitative

practices, and potential damage that treating an individual as a commodity that actually exist.

Duplicating and Rearranging Reality on Television

On Teen Mom OG, the participants do not pretend that the camera is not present. The

acknowledgment of the camera is front-and-center, challenging both the accepted norms that

govern meaning-making and visual culture and the traditional understanding of public and

private, particularly as it relates to the consumer. The series, like its precursor, documentary

cinema, is duplicating reality. That this reality now includes a constant, ongoing

acknowledgment of the surveilling gaze of the camera reflects not only a shift in approach to

constructing the televisual text, but also an evolution of culture itself. With Teen Mom OG, the

acknowledgment of this visibility reveals and supports power and authority and simultaneously

aims to appear to undermine them in order to appeal to the viewer. In the process, the ideologies

surrounding visibility are presented through the onscreen participant, a “regular citizen” who in

turn appeals to the sensibilities of the at-home viewer. The cast members perpetuate the ideology

of visibility even if they may not entirely embrace this process. The resulting televisual product

asks the viewer – acting under the guidance of the relatable, welcoming cast member – to

embrace the ideologies of consent to the authority of the producer(s), of publicizing the private

through self-commodification, and of perpetuating the ideology of the individual as a

commodity.

The branding of the self in Teen Mom OG relies on the authority inscribed in increased

visibility, consent to surveillance, and the normalization of voyeurism, such that, as Dubrofsky

examines in her research, a character’s legitimacy rests on the amount of information about them

that the audience has access to. Legitimacy, in this framework, is tied to the performance of the

self so deeply that, as Media and Cultural Studies scholars Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn

explain, on a series such as Big Brother, “To be evicted signifies a rejection by the public and by

their companions who select those to be expelled” (97). Series such as Big Brother, The Real

World, Love Island, and Survivor capitalize on this assumption of authenticity, which is

dependent on continuous access through what appears to be 24-hour surveillance of the cast

members. On Big Brother, the viewer has access to what appears to be unedited surveillance

footage of the houseguests inside the production house (through what makes each week’s

episodes as well as an online site that airs the 24-hour feed). And yet, the producers still maintain

a strict hold on the imagery being aired by selecting and promoting the moments in the narrative

that are most titillating, bookending each episodic act with images of the surveillance cameras

capturing the houseguests’ every move. In this case, what is “real” from the surveillance feeds is

offered to the viewer alongside a craftily edited set of episodes that serve not only to entertain,

but to also highlight the abilities and authority of the producers.

Similarly, on such series as Bravo TV’s Real Housewives, the question of veracity is

ever-present. In recent seasons of the shows, various cast members are involved in narratives

where their honesty is questioned by other cast members. On one season of The Real Housewives

of Orange County, for example, a cast member’s boyfriend is accused of faking a cancer

diagnosis in order to curry favor with his partner and their social circle. Another housewife’s

husband is accused of cheating and homosexuality. And yet another housewife accuses a

castmate of [unsubstantiated] drug abuse and lascivious sex acts throughout the season until they

address the matter and attempt a performed reconciliation during the reunion show hosted by

Executive Producer Andy Cohen. In these situations, Bravo TV propels the narrative through

repetitive points of conflict between characters before carrying the narrative toward some form

of half-hearted resolution by uncovering “the truth.” Andy Cohen revisits what was questioned

during the season in reunion shows as well as in his late-night Watch What Happen series. And,

while a quest for the truth appears to foreground the televisual content, it is the ongoing drama,

conflict, and tension that carries the series and much of reality TV as well.

Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what the truth is when the narrative is crafted to be

entertaining and fun to watch. Unlike in such documentary classics as Nanook of the North,

which attempt to valorize the main character through the rearrangement of a produced set of

moving images, the approach in reality TV often doesn’t reflect an interest in remaining positive

or uplifting. The Real Housewives is both supported by and offers support to a vast web of

televisual content on television and online. This content enriches the Bravo network and expands

its reach daily. The series itself is one piece of a system that functions on multiple levels and

requires a constant stream of new content. A never-ending stream of conflict helps this process

continue, regardless of what in the narrative is actually true. With Teen Mom OG, there is a

tension between highlighting drama and emphasizing the redemptive by championing the young

mothers. What is obscured in the production which foregrounds its choice to break the fourth

wall is the way the selection and configuration of imagery and content shape what is being

offered to the viewer.

Most reality TV employs multiple camera crews for filming, such that the ratio of filmed

footage and aired imagery is astoundingly imbalanced. And yet, the assertion – through the

choice of what makes it to air – is that it is “real” when it is in fact a heavily produced

reconstruction of reality into a piece of narrative fiction. In her examination of TV game shows,

Annette Hill explains how producers capitalize “on this tension between appearance and reality

by ensuring that viewers have to judge for themselves which of the [participants] are being

genuine” (70). This process of capitalizing on tension relies on the illusion of authenticity

offered to the viewer that invites or even requires ongoing commitment to watching and

interacting with the series and brand. With Teen Mom OG, the negotiation between the producer

and viewer that Hill examines becomes complicated because of the multiple “story within the

story” elements that are employed. The viewer is asked to simultaneously accept both cast

member and onscreen producer as genuine and on equal footing. Other television genres have

grappled with the rocky terrain of the construction of reality. In daytime talk shows, for example,

the relationship between host, guest, expert, and viewer have changed with the choices made by

the production and the motivations of those who support, fund, and profit from it.

Daytime Television and Ideologies of Self-Improvement

The use of self-reflexivity, metacommentary, and self-commodification in reality TV has

its roots in earlier (fiction and non-fiction) television series. Most significantly, it was utilized in

daytime talk shows such as The Jerry Springer Show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and Montel

Williams, which relied on these tactics to address social issues such as infidelity, incest, domestic

violence, sexuality and identity, obesity, addiction, depression, and AIDS. In many ways, these

programs signaled a starting point for the development of the tactics examined in this

dissertation. American daytime talk shows of the 1980s and early 1990s paired the subject’s

story with input from a guest expert, sometimes utilizing the background and authority of the

show’s host as a way to relate to the guest and to the at-home viewer.

For example, Oprah Winfrey revealed personal details about her own life, which, as Mary

McNamara explains, “shattered the fourth wall between interviewer and subject, between

medium and message, between marketing and personal revelation, and the world was never quite

the same again” (par. 3). Through the disclosure of such events as Winfrey’s childhood sexual

abuse, the TV host appeared human, relatable, and authentic while at the same time finding her

foothold within the hierarchy of power organized through the televisual codes employed by the

network. Through this process, and by employing tactics to help solidify the parasocial

relationship with viewers, Winfrey becomes humanized through her personal experiences and the

revelation of these experiences. She is also made to seem to be an authority by presenting her

admission from a position of success, vulnerability, and visibility within a neoliberal, American

Dream ideology that Aschoff explains as reliant on “sweat equity.” It is the notion that hard work

will get anyone somewhere, despite their background that Winfrey offers in her early

performance of persona. Winfred capitalizes on the correlation between disclosure or confession

and increased success, because the disclosure supports the “think yourself into success”

approach. By the mid-1990s, in the second generation of these daytime talk shows, a shift in the

use of on-screen participants took place.

In the early days of the daytime talk show, the “guest expert” was not featured as

prominently while, as scholar Glen Creeber explains, “the number of guests proliferated, each

programme staging a whirl succession of five-minute sound bites of conflict, crisis and

resolution…Fights between the guests, guests and audience members and audience members

became a staple” (86). Soon after, Winfrey and others shifted focus to underwrite a different

approach to advancement and success. In the process, this shift acted as confirmation and support

for the ways of being that benefitted such figures as Oprah Winfrey. Aschoff uncovers the

mechanisms that drive this way of being. She explains the equation that Winfrey and others

prescribe for those striving to achieve their dreams as “always to adapt ourselves to the changing

world, not to change the world we live in. We demand little or nothing from the system, from the

collective apparatus of powerful people and institutions We only make demands of ourselves.

We are perfect, depoliticized, complacent neoliberal subjects” (105-106). The compliance to

authority is inscribed in every breath of Winfrey’s approach. And it is supported by the corporate

model that her brand adheres to.

By the early 2000s, the focus in these programs changed. Earlier seasons of The Oprah

Winfrey Show highlighted issues affecting communities and included input from experts brought

in for their understanding or research. After the pivot away from this approach, the new and

improved The Oprah Winfrey Show vacillated between spectacle revealed through guests’

actions and emphasis on individualism and exceptionalism rather than discussions about issues

that related to community or larger social issues. Inviting such self-help gurus as Deepak Chopra,

superstars Tom Cruise and Madonna, and future presidential candidate/spiritual

leader/bestselling author Marianne Williamson to her show, Winfrey guided the viewer toward

visualizing a way out of “victim mentality” by focusing on self-care with a promise of increased

economic, social, and cultural capital. In problematizing this shift, what is revealed is the fallacy

in the assertion that these forms of capital are accessible with enough gumption and grit.

As Aschoff explains, “The mind-cure stories that people like Oprah tell us say…[that]

social and cultural capital are there for the taking if we want them and try for them. The real

barriers are inside us (…) But in a system stacked against everyone but the wealthiest, the inside

stuff is often all we are left with” (104) The resulting set of televisual codes – which use drama,

conflict, and resolution through an emphasis on bettering the self through offerings rooted in

capital and materialism – serve not only as a way to garner more viewership, but to situate the

viewer within a hierarchy that frames value and profit in ways that are not actually accessible for

most. Nevertheless, the tactic was successful, due largely to the appeal that figures such as Oprah

Winfrey embodied. The parasocial frames Winfrey and other popular daytime television figures

such as Ellen DeGeneres as friendly figures who traversed the same terrain as the at-home

viewer and achieved overwhelmingly positive results. The sense is that if they can achieve it, so

can anybody. The viewer seeks to emulate what is presented on the screen with hopes of

achieving similar forms of capital, with all failures blamed on that very same individual rather

than on the structures of authority, culture, capitalism, and power that favor only a select few.

The parasocial interaction between the onscreen character and at-home viewer appears to

privilege the audience, for the supposition is that the content in which the cast is situated is

created for the audience. But there is duplicity in this supposed prioritization. The viewer,

privately admiring what is presented onscreen, is placed in a position where they seek to emulate

how the television character acts by mimicking the onscreen personality in what they consume,

emphasize, and promote. The ability of the onscreen character to appear relatable to the viewer –

through the performed, “everyday” nature of their actions - helps the process even more, courting

capital generated by the viewing consumer. With Teen Mom OG, consent to surveillance and

cooperation with authority figures becomes embedded into the televised everyday actions. As

scholar Mark Andrejevic argues, the promise with reality TV is one that collapses “the distance

that separates those on either side of the screen by cultivating the fantasy that ‘it really could be

you up there on that screen – just send in your headshots and a homemade video and call this

number now’” through the blurring of public and private spheres (9). Yet what is presented as

bridging the gap between viewer and performer actually widens it, resulting in a clamoring

embrace of ideologies of self-commodification as a necessary precursor to success.

The promise of “it really could be you” is contingent upon the participant’s willingness to

live for the camera and not for the self or a community that thrives away from the gaze of the

camera lens. This is evident in the success that pivoting away from community and toward

individualism that took place on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The labor involved in being an

onscreen participant – highlighted in daytime talk shows as based on merit and expertise with

the guest “expert” – is distorted. Merit based on expertise is now overshadowed by merit

achieved through the assertion of the self, often without further explanation beyond this simple,

repeated and ritualized act. This tactic has various iterations rooted in the utterances and

assertions made by onscreen participants. An example is the sharing of items of gossip to carry a

storyline regardless of their veracity in such series as The Real Housewives, with the justification

of such perpetuations as the cast being forthright and “real.” The production that shows

participants performing what they call “just being real” dictates what being “real” should be –

namely, promoting the self in any way possible through the machine of the culture industry, all

the while promoting the series and network brand through their televised visibility. Through the

process of duplicating and shaping reality for the camera, the actual labor is obscured, serving to

support the framework which favors the producer over the consumer, and capital over

community.

Subversion and Legitimization in Metacommentary and Self-Reflexivity

According to philosopher Charles Taylor in his text The Ethics of Authenticity, the agent

“seeking significance in life, trying to define him- or herself meaningfully, has to exist in a

horizon of important questions. That is what is self-defeating in modes of contemporary culture

that concentrate on self-fulfillment in opposition to the demands of society, or nature, which shut

out history and the bonds of solidarity” (Taylor’s emphasis) (40). As with such daytime talk

shows as The Oprah Winfrey Show, the “bonds of solidarity” offered in Teen Mom OG frame

identity primarily through the assertion of one’s tastes, preferences, all of which are set within

various moments of conflict to create an enticing televisual text. These configured assertions and

dramatic moments are usually dispensed through messages that reject the direct address of the

kinds of social issues that were discussed in early reality TV and in the daytime talk shows of the

1980s and early 1990s. There are no significant bonds of solidarity; the emphasis on the self

rejects the concept of community as a viable possibility and roots salvation through a

consumerist approach.

Another way these bonds of solidarity are destroyed is the way reality TV places

emphasis on drama and conflict to propel the narrative. The cast often ends up acting against

each other with pledges to honor one’s personal needs over connecting in solidarity with others.

In the process, the onscreen producers and crew serve as a possible faulty avenue for solidarity.

Examples of this form of conflict highlighted on Teen Mom OG include tension between

castmates Maci and Farrah, Maci and her ex Ryan, Amber and her ex Gary, Maci and Ryan’s

new wife MacKenzie, Farrah and the crew, Maci and the crew, Farrah and her parents

(separately and collectively), Farrah and her occasional boyfriend Simon, Amber and her

cousins, Amber and the crew, Amber and both her second and third onscreen boyfriend (after her

daughter’s father, Gary), Amber and Gary’s new wife Kristina, and Farrah’s young daughter

Sofia and her former boyfriend Simon. In response to the emergence of this kind of self-involved

environment in contemporary culture, Taylor argues that “to shut out demands emanating

beyond the self is precisely to suppress the conditions of significance, and hence to court

trivialization” (40). The sheer volume of interpersonal conflicts between the young mothers and

their costars reveals this trivialization at work. On Teen Mom OG, as with other reality programs,

this trivialization is often masked as self-awareness, complicating the messages laden with

ideology that are dispensed to the viewer and consumed by the viewer with varying levels of

enjoyment, disdain, and glee.

These messages of self-awareness and self-reflexivity are visible in other forms of art and

creative expression. In her study of the self-reflexivity of postmodern fiction, Linda Hutcheon

considers the relationship between the real and the represented in the metacommentary text.

Exploring practices that deploy “seemingly mutually contradictory strategies [to] frustrate

critical attempts…to systematize them [and] order them with an eye to control and mastery – that

is, to totalize,” Hutcheon’s study demonstrates how a postmodern text that utilizes

metacommentary may act not merely as pastiche, but also as parody aimed to “legitimize and

subvert that which it parodies” [Emphasis mine] (61, 101). An examination of Hutcheon’s study

reveals that, as with postmodern fiction, in current reality TV, a subversion of ideological

apparatuses takes place in tandem with their legitimization, with the resulting instability used as

a method to court viewers. Taking Hutcheon’s research as a point of departure, the many

instances of simultaneously questioning and accepting the veracity of claims made by Real

Housewives characters, for example, both subverts and legitimizes the ideology that hard work

and a moral code results in success. The inclusion of the contradictions in its cast’s tepid quests

for the truth through superficial exclamations of self actually supports the narrative in the series.

Another example of this simultaneous subversion and legitimization may be found in

network television’s Bachelor in Paradise, a spin-off of the wildly popular Bachelor and

Bachelorette programs. The spinoff gathers a handful of Bachelor and Bachelorette contestants

who didn’t make it to the final rose ceremony and sends them to a tropical island on the premise

that they will compete with one another for the ultimate prize: love! Part-social experiment, part-

schlock, the series banks on the campiness of the environment it presents to the viewer, even

beginning every episode with a goofy 80s sitcom-inspired title sequence with cast members

performing poses and acts that reflect their various stereotypical character traits. The series stays

true to much of what The Bachelor and The Bachelorette strives for, with ideologies of

traditional family values and marriage as the optimal goal for each individual.

At the same time, some of the characters do not adhere to these values, and there are

some forms of subversion taking place while the series simultaneously legitimizes the values

supported in its parent franchise. Bachelor in Paradise also welcomes its winning Bachelors and

Bachelorettes to the show for “guest” appearances, crafting its own hierarchy of success while

opening the door to cross-promotion in episodes that tease upcoming seasons of each series

(including Paradise). The series utilizes discussion about the narrative and the production within

the production, and, while the crew isn’t featured onscreen like they are on Teen Mom OG, the

tactics used within the series succeed in translating a standard ideological framework related to

marriage and family while also subverting it for the purpose of entertainment. These tactics stem

from earlier television programs that contributed to the history of what we now consider reality

TV.

Origins: From Candid Camera to An American Family to MTV

Teen Mom OG employs established and emerging tactics and strategies to deliver

ideological messaging in an entertaining program about young mothers. Self-reflexivity – where

the characters rely on an excessive emphasis on the self – and metacommentary – where the

production is discussed within the production – are used in the series to inscribe the televisual

and its visual codes with meaning to perpetuate ideologies of consumerism, hegemony, labor,

and power and to normalize oppressive surveillance practices for profit, enrich ideologies of self-

commodification, and perpetuate a culture of narcissism masked as individualism. A review of

early photography, documentary cinema and daytime television provides us with a view of the

larger landscape within which Teen Mom OG resides. A look at key television programs to track

the development of the tactics that shape this televisual genre helps facilitate an even deeper

understanding of how self-commodification is produced through the use of metacommentary and

self-reflexivity in Teen Mom OG.

Three television programs are examined here. The first is the 1973 PBS docuseries An

American Family. This series follows a short period in the lives of The Louds, a white upper

middle-class family in Santa Barbara, California. Many consider An American Family a pioneer

as the first reality series, while others emphasize its differences from standard reality shows.

According to writer and film curator Dennis Lim, who researched the series for the New York

Times in conjunction with the release of the semi-fictionalized HBO series Cinema Verité, the

1973 series was unfairly “credited with — or blamed — for starting reality television. The

immersive, leisurely rhythms of the series are a stark contrast from the artificial situations (lab-

rat housemates, gladiatorial contests) that dominate today’s reality programs. With its grainy

look and distanced camerawork, it resembles an art film more than any reality show” (par. 14).

While An American Family does not resemble contemporary reality TV, its tactics, strategies,

and televised processes of self-reflexivity signal the beginnings of the reality TV genre that

populates the television screen today.

Others argue that the first in this genre was MTV’s The Real World, which first aired in

1992 (subsequent season of the series were simply called Real World). In this cinema verité-

informed series, a group of strangers were put into a fishbowl-style living situation where they

were watched, filmed, and, like in An American Family, in many ways manipulated (both on set

and through the editing process) to achieve an intended result (which in this case was a dramatic

interplay between a diverse cast of characters that fascinated and titillated viewers for more than

thirty seasons). In many ways, An American Family acts as a bridge between documentary and

reality television. While some consider An American Family the first reality TV series, the wide

reach of The Real World on the popular cable network MTV set in motion the mechanisms that

are now employed in such programs as Teen Mom OG.

Others argue that reality TV was first conceived even further back in the 1950s with

Allen Funt's prank show Candid Camera. In this wildly popular series that remained on the air

for decades, unsuspecting citizens were put into compromising, yet entertaining situations where

they were pranked or tricked in order to create funny scenarios for the viewing audience. One of

the reasons for the consideration of the contributions of Candid Camera to contemporary reality

TV is because of its use of surveillance practices within the televised entertainment-comedy

show. Placing such surveillance practices within a humorous context dispenses rich themes and

questions to the audience within a seemingly lighthearted gag show that highlights semi-public

events such as being trapped in an elevator or involved in a variety of hilarious mix-ups,

miscommunications, or mistakes. Candid Camera, An American Family, and The Real World –

as well as the sociocultural contexts within which they were each produced – set the stage for

what became the genre we experience, examine, and find pleasure within today.

While Candid Camera often relied on anonymous strangers in [mostly] public settings

where pranks were used to frustrate and to entertain, An American Family marked a drastic shift

from the reliance unknown characters to an emphasis on the family unit and on domestic spaces.

In the process, the cast gained a fame and notoriety it may not have anticipated it would. An

American Family brought the Loud family visibility, but at unforeseen costs, many of which are

also prevalent in Teen Mom OG. When examined more closely and put in the context not only of

television history, but also within an understanding of the social, cultural, political, and

economic motivations to create such programming, Teen Mom OG reveals the way it is situated

within a trajectory marked by other programs that utilized similar tactics in the past. The starting

point, therefore, is to provide an understanding of the construction of the symbolic

representations within the Teen Mom franchise, and the resulting impact it has had by looking at

some of its precursors.

Candid Camera: Playfully Normalizing Surveillance

The process of normalizing ideology by including it within entertaining products,

advertisements, and televisual texts can be traced to America in the 1940s and 1950s, when the

Cold War anxiety felt by many was met in response with such popular television programs as the

humorous hidden camera prank show Candid Camera. As with Teen Mom OG, what appears in

the constructed narrative in Candid Camera is at once a cautious, mistrustful awareness and the

normalizing of surveillance and commodification practices that perpetuate the culture industry.

While Candid Camera made viewers aware of their paranoia and anxiety over being watched, it

at the same time legitimized being watched by presenting funny pranks that placed participants

in a seemingly friendly environment after the prank was completed and the jokes were already

made. In this environment, the television producers fashioned themselves as friendly co-

conspirators alongside the participants. In the prank process, an exchange took place: The trick

was done, the tricked were asked to join the fun by agreeing to the use of their footage in the

show, and the resulting agreement saw these pranked citizens underwriting what the producers

were doing and contributing to increased advertising sales, profit, and the perpetuation of

favorable ideologies of surveillance. Candid Camera follows what Hutcheon outlines as a

process of legitimization and subversion. The tether between Cold War paranoia and finding the

funny within the cultural landscape was potent, and it helped keep the series popular for decades

after it premiered.

On Candid Camera, the “tricked” are those who happen to be in the environment in

which creator/producer/director Allen Funt and his crew enact their own special brand of social

experiment. And on An American Family, the emphasis is on an upper middle-class Santa

Barbara, California family as the production enacts is own experiment to film the family

members navigating their daily lives both on camera (edited and presented to the audience by the

production crew) and off (during the filming and after they became famous for participating in

the series). The family highlighted in the PBS series were not explicitly “tricked” into

participating an any form of televised antics, but they did react to the series with concerns over

misrepresentation after it aired. Participation in the filming of both programs reveal the tactics

that the evolved into what was used in such series as The Real World, and then later, in many

reality programs including Teen Mom OG.

The producer of Candid Camera, Allen Funt was born in NYC, graduated high school at

the age of 15, and attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn before getting a BA in Fine Arts from

Cornell University. He then studied business administration at Columbia University and took

more art courses at Pratt, which led to a job in the art department at an ad agency. Funt’s

understanding of the production of culture was informed by his education and his many jobs in

various related fields. After working as a copyrighter, he joined the radio division before his

service in the army during WWII. Funt’s precursor to Candid Camera was 1947's Candid

Microphone on ABC. In that series, he used hidden microphones to record unsuspecting

individuals in unexpectedly hilarious setups. Funt also developed a program called The Gripe

Booth, where servicemen could anonymously complain about service-related issues without fear

of consequences for speaking out. Funt's research with the use of a 2-way mirror at Cornell is

key to his conceptualization of Candid Camera. In his study of Candid Camera, scholar Bradley

Clissold discusses the reaction that servicemen had to the red light used during recording of The

Gripe Booth. By removing the signal that the "light is on," Funt began the path which brings us

all the way to present-day reality TV (Clissold 34). By turning off that red light, the panoptic

gaze becomes less cumbersome, allowing for visually palatable forms of manipulation to be

easily enacted. On Candid Camera, unsuspecting participants are “tricked” into participating in

various social experiments. The viewer watches these experiments unfold, witnessing the shock,

alarm, unease, and frustration of the participants, before the ruse is revealed and the reality that

the subjects are being filmed is made visible.

Two important elements alleviated the embarrassment of being “caught” in the prank on

the show: The element of connection which placated the recipients of the prank by considering

them co-conspirators rather than dupes; and the financial compensation for agreeing to be a part

of the televised prank. Funt framed the show as one where the unsuspecting participants were not

duped or infringed upon, but part of a larger network of participants. The participants early in the

history of what is considered reality TV were introduced to what Andrejevic explains as the “it

really could be you up there on that screen” notion that drives viewers and often acts as an

invitation to participate. According to scholar Misha Kavka, Funt was adept at “cajoling people

into seeing themselves as associates who ‘share’ the experience” with him, so that the

subsequent legally binding release the participants were asked to sign, a statement of

‘acquiescence to ‘sharing’ the experience was a guarantee against future lawsuits…[and] a literal

buy-in to the process, thereby redressing the ethical imbalance of power in the prank” (19). Part

of this buy-in was also literal. Participants who agreed to sign the release guaranteed no future

lawsuits and an amicable agreement to participate in the series were paid for their part in the

prank. As Kavka explains, “the release constituted the basis of an economic exchange. Paid on

average $50 for signing the release, participants turned their performance into a commodity”

(19). Kavka refers to Clissold’s examination of the show within the context of Cold War

surveillance anxiety. By turning the pranked individual’s participation into a commodity, Candid

Camera, as Clissold argues, frames surveillance a “business transaction” (Clissold, cited in

Kavka 19). As with The Real World 50 years later, and Teen Mom OG 20 years after that, the

business of performance was infused into Candid Camera to feature real people in constructed

realities.

Candid Camera, Surveillance Anxiety, and Teen Mom OG

How does an examination of a television series which first aired over sixty years ago

reveal strategies worthy of consideration today? In the 1950s, the United States dealt with

increasing Cold War anxiety brought about by the growing rivalry between the Soviet Union and

its allies that were unified under communism, while the United States and its allies functioned

within a capitalist framework. The exploitative elements within Candid Camera – highlighted

and obscured in different moments – reveal critical beginnings to the overall development of

reality TV as a medium that uses commodification and surveillance practices to translate self-

commodification into entertainment. Clissold considers Funt's programs not only "a source of

surveillance-anxiety…[but also] a cultural response to and exploitation of a social and political

shift" (35). Candid Camera was successful in large part due to the mood following World War II

in America. Clissold explains that Candid Camera "made surveillance entertaining, less

threatening and ideologically acceptable" while at the same time providing a "cathartic release"

from surveillance anxiety (35). The parallels to Teen Mom OG begin here, as the convergence of

elements that make the series entertaining is contingent on a palatable, welcome form of

surveillance. Participants on Candid Camera are encouraged to seek release from surveillance

anxiety. The cast of Teen Mom OG is encouraged to continue filming, with onscreen producers

acting as semi-permanent stand ins for actual friends or family, easing many of the tensions

associated with the burdens of both technology and its surveillance practices. Both programs act

as both source and release of the anxiety that permeates the respective cultural landscape within

which each production takes place. And both productions also require that anxiety to continue in

order to continue to sell the cultural and literal tools (technical devices, gadgets, social media

platforms and related apps) that support and are supported by the perpetuation of these

ideological apparatuses.

Like Teen Mom OG, Candid Camera places itself in a contradictory position, aiming to

both subvert and legitimize that which is used to court participation from its cast. As scholar

Fred Nadis explains, “In provoking these unrehearsed responses” on the program, Funt “thought

of himself as a researcher, conducting experiments in human nature; in his sketches he dared his

victims to act badly and dared his audiences to consider what ‘acting badly’ meant” (11). The

resulting program, while highly entertaining, made use of exploitative tactics within an

environment of overall tension among citizens in order to succeed, profit, and entertain.

Similarly, the producers of Teen Mom OG promote the series as a new approach because of the

involvement of the crew within the narrative. If Candid Camera was an early experiment, Teen

Mom OG is a contemporary confirmation of those tactics. And the difference rests in the

response to the cast acting badly. The cast of Teen Mom OG is invited to participate in conflict

and heated interpersonal exchanges, but only within the parameters defined by the production.

As seen with cast member Farrah Abraham who eventually cut ties with the series, autonomy or

decision-making without consideration of the program, network and brand is discouraged.

In his examination of Candid Camera, Clissold refers to Jeremy Bentham's outline of the

panopticon as considered by Foucault, where - taking cues from a design of a possible prison

system - prisoners are made to feel as though they are under constant surveillance as a response

to a watchtower erected in the middle of a square of prison cells which enforces the presence of a

surveilling eye. Whether or not a guard is actually watching, the prisoners act as if under

constant scrutiny. According to Clissold, "viewers are told to expect surveillance anywhere,

potentially everywhere" (39). The response to this supposed Cold War surveillance in Candid

Camera is to seek and embrace normalcy through participation (which was rewarded with a

small monetary sum by the producers). Further, because the normalcy that is sought and

embraced is one that is rooted in a monetized exchange of participation for a small monetary

sum, the business transaction becomes the comfort offered in exchange for this participation. As

this transaction takes place – within a series designed to titillate and offer an escape, capitalistic

modes of engagement are underwritten and supported.

That Funt's program reveals such potent themes as surveillance and the panopticon is one

reason it was such a long-lasting show. Another reason is that it was highly entertaining.

According to Clissold, some consider Candid Camera “a source of surveillance anxiety, rather

than seeing it for what it arguable was: a cultural response to and exploitation of a social and

political shift” (35). The series allowed participants to seemingly transform from the position of

being the victim of a prank to the relief of finally knowing that they were being duped. The

tactics enacted that resulted in participants eventually recognizing the prank appear to soften the

blow of the manipulation taking place. After the final reveal of each prank, the participants are

presented as willing agents in the ruse. Funt allowed participants a certain level of authority over

the decision of whether their footage would be used in the final cut. If a participant in the gag

didn't want to be on the show, the footage was scrapped, which underwrites the assertion of the

amiable partnership between the onscreen producer and the seemingly willing participant. Of

course, the crucial detail related to this is the fact is that individuals were paid $50 for their

participation (Clissold 41). If participants refused to sign a release to allow Funt to use the

footage, they were not awarded the $50. The nexus of meaning, value, and capital lies in the

agreement to participate, which in televisual media often carries over beyond the actual

participation. The extent to which participation affects the individual becomes overshadowed by

the monetary compensation.

This underlying consideration of the economic necessities that contribute to the

monetization of participation are key to understanding both the origins of reality TV and the

importance of these necessities in present day programming. Clissold argues that Candid

Camera "created an arena in which surveillance power dynamics were for once in favor of the

average citizen" (42). And yet, as the need for content within a hybridized global network of

capital grows, the participation of the average citizen is folded into a process that requires

ongoing exploitation to thrive. And, as television evolved, the methods involved in that

exploitation began to creep into the personal, private lives of its participants. If Candid Camera

was a beginning and Teen Mom OG is the current iteration in the evolution of the strategies and

practices that propel self-commodification, An American Family, is an important benchmark in

the evolution in this process.

An American Family: From Cinéma Vérité to Reality TV

PBS’s An American Family was conceived by producer Craig Gilbert as an exercise in

cinéma vérité for New York public TV station WNET. In interviews, Gilbert explains that he

didn't want to follow an established documentary route - which in many ways mirrors traditional

ethnographic methodology - of following a number of families and filming expert "talking

heads" explaining their situations, which would widen the chasm between documentary subject

and expert commentator (See Ruoff, 2002). Gilbert instead wished to spend a substantial amount

of time solely with one family (and their friends) to be able to delve deeper into his up-close and

personal investigation of suburban California life in the 1970s. Unlike Funt and Candid Camera,

in which there was a revolving door of participants each week, the shift in the 1970s turned to a

more intimate approach by selecting one family to follow.

After an arduous process of searching for this family, Gilbert finally met the Louds at a

social function in Santa Barbara. They were white, upper middle class, and lived in a ranch-style

home in Santa Barbara with their five children, one of whom came out as gay during the filming

of the series. The Louds as a visual representation of ideological signs and symbols on the screen

were unique material for TV because of the family’s socioeconomic position, their seemingly

idyllic life, the potential dramatic tension between the family members, and their initial

willingness to participate in the project. Gilbert and his crew spent seven months filming the

Louds, with matriarch Pat Loud as the focal point and guiding representative in the series. The

entire series cost about $1.2 million, filmed on 16mm film (Roiphe). None of that sum went

toward a salary for the cast members. The crew filming An American Family spent ten to twelve

hours a day with the Louds and filmed on 16mm film. At the time, this was an expensive and

time-consuming process. Despite the costly and time-intensive medium of choice, the equipment

the crew used and the manner with which they filmed was a direct precursor to the way reality

TV is produced today. The camera company Éclair had just released a new hand-held 16mm

camera, which used detachable film magazines which held ten-minute rolls of film. The ease

with which the crew could quickly attach and remove these magazines facilitated the vérité

approach. The crew would load up, shoot ten minutes, reload the magazine, shoot ten more

minutes and so on for up to twelve hours a day, except when cast members went into a private

space such as the bathroom or a closed room or deemed the scene not to be filmed.

This non-stop filming allowed for an almost uninterrupted stream of raw footage from

which the director and producer could cull their narrative. This approach is a direct precursor to

filming practices in current reality TV in which a cameraman – if filming on video – might start

a shift by loading up on eight or ten 60-minute video tapes and subsequently spend ten

continuous hours shooting footage of the subject in his environment, or B-Roll, or sit-down

interviews the entire time except for the cast’s bathroom breaks. The resulting library of Éclair

footage – which the editors and producers of An American Family then wove into a the twelve-

episode series – had a ratio of raw footage to final product that is strikingly similar to recent

reality TV ratios. This is now the standard approach to creating reality TV programs; a hefty

amount of raw footage is digitized into the editing system with the original tapes then stored in

archival vaults and only a portion of the content actually making it to air.

During the 7-month filming of An American Family, Pat and her husband Bill Loud

separated. They subsequently divorced. In the final edit of the series, the producers begin with an

explanation in narration by Gilbert that the series was an exercise in cinema verité and that the

couple had separated and divorced after filming was complete. According to Claire Palay, who

cites Jeffrey Ruoff’s research in her examination of the series and its cultural context, “The

teleological structure of the show suggests that the Louds’ marriage was doomed to failure from

the start. As a result, viewers were encouraged to analyze every action each of the Louds take as

signs of what is to come” (Ruoff 2002 as cited in Palay 2012). After the initial explanation, the

series uncovers the months leading up to the eventual divorce. Over the 7-month filming period,

the crew filmed over 300 hours of footage. The editing process took an entire year, and the end

result was twelve 1-hour episodes, which aired once a week on WNET. When the series finally

aired in 1973, it had over 10 million viewers. The series received mixed reviews, but was

applauded by cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, who, in a review for TV Guide, called it “a

new kind of art form...as significant as the invention of the drama or the novel” (qtd. in Ruoff).

Its significance rests as much in the space between documentary and fiction as it does in what

structural and ideological considerations the production process reveals.

An American Family, Transactional Participation, and Teen Mom OG

Unlike the various participants on Candid Camera, the cast members of The Real World,

or the mothers on Teen Mom OG, the Louds were not paid for their participation in An American

Family. Speaking in 2013 to New York Times writer Phillip Galanes and Real Housewives of

New York star Carole Radziwill, An American Family matriarch Pat Loud explained that the

producers did not offer payment, except that “I think they gave me something like $432 to

repaint my kitchen because they put gaffers tape up on the top” (Galanes). Galanes comments

briefly on the difference between participation by Pat Loud in the An American Family

docuseries and participation by such individuals as Carole Radziwill in reality shows today by

noting, “one of the big differences between you two — the alpha and omega of reality TV — is

that you’re getting paid, Carole. And when people pay you, it’s more complicated” (Galanes).

The observation that paying cast members complicates the relationships between cast, crew, and

network is important to remember. An American Family offered its viewers a fairy tale that

quickly devolved into a heartbreaking account of a disintegrating marriage and a broken family.

That the cast was not paid for their participation speaks to the manner with which ways of being

are navigated by capital.

For the Louds, social, economic, and cultural capital were already available, and thus the

relationship to the production was different than it was for participants on Candid Camera, Teen

Mom OG, and even reality TV breakout series such as The Real World. The process of exchange

in contemporary reality TV commodifies its players in ways that traditional documentary and

hybrid series such as An American Family did not. Taking Marx’s understanding of alienation

(from the product, the means of production, and the “species-being” or “species-essence” of the

worker) and potential liberation as a point of departure, Teen Mom OG plays with the ideas of

freedom, surveillance, and trauma, while enforcing and perpetuating the cast’s further

detachment from the self through participation in this private life performed for the screen. An

American Family contributed to the evolution of the genre within which The Real World and its

antecedents such as Teen Mom OG now reside.

MTV: From Music Television to Reality Hub

Candid Camera and An American Family, both fundamental to the development of

reality television and its use of the mechanisms of surveillance, ideology, and celebrity, represent

the beginnings of what now constitutes the genre. The series that many scholars and television

viewers consider the first breakthrough reality TV program, however, is MTV’s Real World

(originally titled The Real World). The references in style and structure to An American Family

in The Real World reveal the impact that the Louds made on the MTV program and countless

future reality shows. “By comparing the two series,” write scholars Laurie Rupert and Sayanti

Puckett, “it is easy to see Craig Gilbert’s influence [on The Real World]” (94). The Real World

contributed to the evolution of the televisual representation of home life and domesticity in

America. According to scholar Leigh Edwards, “A significant number of reality shows picture a

seemingly newfound family diversity. For every traditional ‘modern nuclear family’ …we see a

panoply of newer arrangements such as post-divorce, single-parent, blended, and gay and lesbian

families” (123. The Real World heralded an increase in diverse representations and the inclusion

of unconventional living setups and concepts of family – albeit often in crisis within the series –

such that, slightly more than twenty years later, this development has resulted in programs like

Teen Mom OG. Looking at The Real World in the context of what generates and constitutes

value serves to clarify the ways that Teen Mom OG presents what it deems meaningful to the

viewer as a commodity.

Curnutt problematizes the correlation between talent and being cast in reality TV:

“Participants’ solidifying status in television’s field of production appears to be informed by the

genesis and maturation of a performative craft. But approaching reality TV’s performances as a

craft requires that we question the extent to which unscripted programming actually makes

allowances for its participants’ lack of exceptionality” (1062) MTV confronts, underwrites, and

celebrates this lack of exceptionality in a number of ways in Teen Mom OG. In early reality

programming such as MTV’s The Real World, there was already an internal hierarchy of “value”

ascribed to its cast and onscreen personalities. As scholar Hugh Curnutt explains, “If The Real

World taught viewers how to watch reality TV, it also taught television producers how to make

reality TV. For Bunim-Murray, the producers of The Real World, this meant learning how to best

procure and manage a class of performer who was by definition untalented” (1063-64).

Understanding the perpetuation of value through the association between participation and profit

became a key element to the development of MTV programming and reality TV in general. The

original cast members were part of a “first generation” of personalities that helped shape the

series and the genre at a particular moment in cultural history when the network wanted to situate

itself somewhere between documentary and mass culture. Early seasons of Real World featured

artists and young professionals still working for pay and actively seeking opportunities and

visibility outside the confines of the series.

Later, as Curnutt explains, “Bunim-Murray moved away from selecting participants who

ranged in age and occupation in favor of unemployed college-age participants who showed an

ability to perform their identities in conjunction with The Real World’s increasingly formulaic

storylines” (1064). And even later, as Road Rules became a success on the network, the “second-

generation” of casting began to take shape, where those not cast in Real World were often cast in

Road Rules instead. According to Curnutt, this “can be seen as an instance in which the

television industry recognized that the participant was a specific kind of talent with a use-value

that directly corresponded to the process through which it was cast. Or, to put it in terms of

commodity production, these participants, like any readied material, are, once assembled,

inherently valuable” (1065). Like Teen Mom OG, which is one in a larger group of programs

within a franchise, The Real World successfully translated this concept of value without inherent

talent and assembled by the producer into a series with significant longevity. In 1992, MTV had

already been on air for over a decade, but the network until this point had placed its emphasis on

music videos on heavy rotation, and on programs geared toward the promotion of those videos,

their respective artists, and news related to the music world. Originally produced by Mary-Ellis

Bunim and Jonathan Murray, the first season of The Real World premiered in 1992. The series

aired more than 30 seasons on television and was resurrected in 2019 with three separate

versions filmed in different locations around the world for Facebook Watch, proving that the

formula adopted by its producers was highly profitable and able to be translated into different

streaming platforms.

With The Real World in the early 1990s, there was a chance to present an environment

that highlighted the creative Downtown New York music, art and culture within a docuseries that

relied on various televisual tropes and strategic configurations of artists and outsiders. The first

season was billed as an inside look at the cast members’ lives that was unconventional,

unabashed, and described in its weekly opening credits narrated by the cast as “the true story of

seven strangers picked to live in a house, work together, and have their lives taped to find out

what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.” The relationship between the

cast members, strangers at the start of production, quickly evolved into a dysfunctional family of

sorts due to what scholar Michael McKenna notes as the producers’ influence on the

development of the series. The producers “cast the program with disparate and often combustible

characters chosen selectively, with an eye toward potential drama, tension, and romance.

Consequently, supporters of The Real World cannot legitimately proclaim it to be pure reality,

considering the overt manipulation of cast and setting” (xiii). As with An American Family

twenty years prior, a blend of production strategies gave birth to a genre that maneuvered real,

but constructed conflict between its participants.

Introducing The Real World

As with documentary films such as Nanook of North or the PBS docuseries An American

Family in which the “reality” of the film is shaped in order to achieve a “version of the truth,”

The Real World is as much a crafted social experiment and constructed fiction as it is a reality-

based televisual and cultural document. “It was a very MTV idea,” explain scholars Sam Brenton

and Reuben Cohen, “one that allowed [MTV] to display their target audience to their target

audience, in logical expansion of the channel’s ‘lifestyle branding,’ explained by Naomi Klein as

the strategic incubation of a homogenous global youth culture, the better to consume MTV

products” (38 – author’s emphasis). The cast was young, good looking, connected to art, music,

and fashion, and willing to be infused into an assembled machine of promotion to promote a hip,

appealing, and aspirational way of being.

This lifestyle branding was accentuated in the way the cast lived: During filming of the

inaugural series, the seven cast members moved into a Manhattan loft, took a group vacation to

Jamaica, and lived an exciting, drama-filled life for the cameras. As cast member Kevin Powell

recounts in his memoir, “When I walked in, it felt like I’d won the grand prize of a game show. I

had been living in a dumpy room in a prewar building uptown in Harlem, and now I was moving

into this four-thousand-square-foot duplex loft with six other young people” (208-9). The

cultivation of a product marketed toward the growing “homogenous global youth culture”

outlined by Klein required finesse that capitalized on the growing issues and conversations

revolving around identity politics, race relations, gender, all of which required that it was

delivered in ways that were both palatable and exciting.

The original cast, selected through an audition process, was diverse, able-bodied,

attractive, energetic, and willing to discuss and debate controversial topics such as race, class,

sexuality, and socioeconomic status. The Real World offered viewers a product that quickly

transformed from documentary to a heavily mediated and produced series of images, signs and

symbols that was groundbreaking in its choices of topics and the willingness of its cast to engage

and have actual discussions. On The Real World, a young Black journalist (Kevin Powell) was

given as much space to ask questions and make assertions as a young white woman from

Arkansas (Julie Gentry – née Oliver) whose first trip away from home was to live in a co-ed,

racially diverse televised setup. The original Real World presented what appeared to be a

refreshingly transparent look at the publicized private lives of seven strangers. While doing so, it

included multiple perspectives from individuals without the traditional voice of the “expert”

dominating the narrative. This seemingly transparent tone was necessary for The Real World,

which was created during a time of transition and growth in television history. As McKenna

points out, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, “the immense pressure now placed on the networks

to turn a sizable profit made the lower production costs of reality TV very attractive” (138). The

number of local TV stations was increasing, and along with the competition among local stations

was the competition with newly formed cable TV networks.

The challenge to keep cable programming exciting in order to retain viewers was so

palpable that, as McKenna explains, “As some of these networks jockeyed for positions in an

increasingly competitive industry, they diversified their program offerings by presenting original

content. Once again, the lower-cost reality productions were a preferred option” (138). Inherent

to the genre itself, during its ascent to mass popularity, was its setup of cheap labor which

benefitted the production greatly. Cast member Kevin Powell, already a budding journalist and

music writer when selected to be on the series in 1992, explains his motivation to appear on the

series in his memoir, “I never thought about being famous or rich or that the show – whatever it

was – might be a hit. I simply thought that perhaps I could book a few speaking gigs from the

visibility, just as I remembered Sister Souljah always getting speech opportunities each time she

appeared on television, especially national television” (205). For Powell and others on the show,

participation in the production was part of a larger set of experiences that was independent of the

actual show itself. Appearing as a cast member on The Real World opened the door to

opportunities to speak and expand upon a larger project of understanding culture and identity.

With The Real World, there was a genuine opportunity to foster diversity on television.

For Powell, the series was not a vehicle to singular stardom, but rather a platform from which he

could develop his already-growing career as a media and culture journalist. The cast members on

the original The Real World were working people willing to sign much of their privacy away in

order to participate, be compensated, and use this project to their advantage. Powell remembers

how, “we all had signed contracts that paid us $1,300 at the beginning of taping and $1,300 at

the end of taping” (209). And yet, already during the filming of the first season of The Real

World, the mechanisms of power as they related to compensation and branding were already in

place. Powell remembers a detail that affected his understanding of the production: “One thing

that I had noticed on the paperwork bothered me: the producers would be able to use their

footage from this period ‘in perpetuity throughout the universe,’ or something like that. That

seemed like an awfully long time, and a great distance, but I signed the contract anyway” (209).

As with the participants on other key precursors to contemporary reality TV, the compensation

facilitated and framed the transaction taking place. The cast understood the unique opportunity

being offered and dove in headfirst.

Lifestyle Branding in The Real World

As the filming of the first season of The Real World continued and its episodes began to

air, what soon became clear was that the viewing audience did not want to watch programs that

solely relied on traditional documentary filmmaking practices. “Late into the first season,”

explain Rupert and Puckett, “the producers realized that the viewing public wanted drama” (94).

And as MTV began to craft its product to fit its task of catering to a “lifestyle branding,” the

network followed the feedback and interests of its consumer base – not only with the inclusion of

heightened moments of drama and conflict, but also with the visual way the narrative was

presented to the viewer. The first season of The Real World presented multiple scenes of the cast

members conversing with one another in groups or in pairs. The tone was conversational,

familiar, and slightly freeform, yet as the seasons progressed, the inclusion of the cast members’

commentary began to factor in very deeply, such that, as Brenton and Cohen explain, “The show

made use of ‘video diary’ segments, with participants delivering first-person monologues to the

camera, a technique later enshrined in the major reality game shows” (39). These diaries were

utilized in the editing process to heighten the dramatic tone of each episode by playing off of the

conversational sequences within the loft, juxtaposing familiarity with the gossipy, surveillance

mode of the video diaries. This pivot away from traditional documentary processes to one which

offered a more complicated set of imagery and perspectives resulted in a more dramatic

atmosphere presented to the viewer as the season progressed. This approach also allowed

viewers to feel closer to the cast because of the intimate feel of the “confessional” video diary

clips. The juxtaposition of conflict with confessionals presented a potent combination that

engaged viewers and gave MTV a reality TV hit.

As the series evolved, its subject matter followed the supposed need for conflict and

controversy, such that as Rupert and Puckett explain, The Real World “began showcasing more

highly controversial individuals and issues. AIDS activism, gay rights, abortion, plastic surgery,

physical abuse, politics, and even Lyme disease all found their forum on MTV” (94). The

differences between what The Real World emphasized – even with its glorification of conflict

and drama – and what programs like Teen Mom OG emphasize are important to track and

outline. Rupert and Puckett assert that “A series such as An American Family or the early years

of The Real World would never survive more than one season in today’s ratings-based climate”

(95). Similarly, the representations in Teen Mom OG reveal important insight into the nature of

the current ratings-based climate and what is required of both producer, cast, and viewer. Candid

Camera made surveillance entertaining, less threatening and ideologically acceptable through the

process of revealing an already-established mode of operation in American culture. An American

Family normalized publicizing private family details and interactions, and The Real World made

doing so the norm through the process of highlighting conflict. Teen Mom OG takes full

advantage of this evolution toward the emphasis on self-commodification with a tether between

drama and self-reflective self-centeredness. As MTV reaped the rewards from such series as Real

World, it developed its approach with programs that reconfigured the lives, life events, and

legitimate conflicts of actual individuals into ritualized drama shaped into palatable televisual

texts. What began to take place confronted and reimagined the notion of ”real.”

MTV, Celebrity, and the Development of Corporate Partnerships in Reality TV

MTV soon became a hub for reality TV programming. Perhaps motivated by the success

of such programs as Real World and Road Rules in the 1990s, the new century welcomed

countless reality shows that targeted various subgroups within their key demographic. One such

show that became highly popular was The Hills. Piggybacking off the success of its precursor,

Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County (2004-2006), MTV cast Laguna Beach breakout star

Lauren Conrad and her close friends in The Hills. What helped catapult The Hills to success was

what Curnutt refers to as a “lack of exceptionality” among the cast. The beautiful young

Southern California inhabitants cast on what was advertised as an “unscripted” show were

shaped into whatever MTV wanted to highlight in order to gain viewers, ratings and other

rewards. According to scholar Amanda Klein, what made The Hills an overwhelming success as

a “lifestyle television” series was the aspirational escape of it all. Klein explains how, on The

Hills, “the girls never express concerns over paying their rents, finding employment in today’s

dreary economic climate, or even engaging in the world that (presumably) exists beyond the

borders of Los Angeles’ club circuit” (par. 6). It is a perfect, sunny landscape within which the

cast engages in endless drama flowing from episode to episode. Within the production of the

series is an intricate web of mechanisms that drive corporate consumerist ideology and actual

transactions that are made for profit.

The Hills established corporate partnerships to drive the series, with the girls on the show

highlighting various eateries, bars, clubs, and even a few educational institutions in the Los

Angeles area. In her analysis of The Hills, scholar Elizabeth Affuso explains the function of

these corporate partnerships. In the collaboration with companies such as “Bolthouse

Productions, Epic Records, Teen Vogue, and by extension their parent corporations SBE

Entertainment, Sony BMG, and Condé Nast respectively, the narrative of The Hills exists to

promote these companies products, arguably solely to promote these products” (par. 1). Not only

is this unexceptional cast valuable in their willingness to be molded into TV celebrities as MTV

sees fit, they are also pretty placeholders within this representation of a particular lifestyle being

offered to the homogenized global youth culture that Naomi Klein outlined years before. And in

doing so, with these corporate partnerships that affect the literal landscape of the Southern

California food, fashion, and music scene, the series is both driven by and drives capital.

The Hills also offered viewers the chance to experience the series in a multiplatform

format. Like 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom later on, The Hills developed their corporate

partnerships in many different ways in order to engage viewers. According to Amanda Klein, the

series “relies on tabloid weeklies, entertainment news programs, Internet discussion boards and

even the casts’ own side projects to promote the show. These platforms also serve as alternative

venues for consuming the show’s content (i.e., the characters, their storylines and the goods they

purchase and promote)” (par. 11). What this multiplatform approach requires is for the viewer to

continually engage with content in order to feel like they are up to speed on the goings on of the

cast. The tether between the cast gallivanting around town and the private or at-home moments

drives the narrative, the series, and the way the brand functions on multiple platforms.

On The Hills, the cast engages in conflict and conversation in a number of private and/or

domestic spaces. The viewer has access to the small cubicles and office spaces at Teen Vogue,

Bolthouse Productions and Epic Records where intimate, often vulnerable moments between cast

members are highlighted for the viewer’s pleasure. And at their residences, the viewer is offered

an idealized view of living in Los Angeles as a young, up-and-coming employee of any given

hip and trendy company. The at-home settings present the viewer with an idealized living

situation, with gorgeous swimming pools, high ceilings, and ample space to have a tantrum, paint

over a graffiti mural your boyfriend commissioned from a rising street art star, or break up

forever with your best friend over drama that is only half-obscured from the narrative. It is a

reimagining of the consideration of the private and/or domestic space that Real World envisioned

more than a decade prior, this time with even more corporate backing and higher stakes for the

network as well as the companies involved in the promotional elements embedded in the series.

The Hills was initially touted as an unscripted drama, but as the seasons progressed, the

heavy hand of the production began to show. MTV capitalized on viewers questioning the

veracity of the storylines in ways that complicated the understanding of reality TV. According to

the show’s creator Avi Di Santo, “We want viewers to watch Lauren and the girls as the

characters we know instead of in a show about being the stars of The Hills” (qtd. in Armstrong).

This choice is evident in some of the key dramatic moments in the series, where viewers are not

privy to certain information that contributes to the conflict between the cast members. The

narrative becomes complicated for the viewer who do not seek out information from other

sources such as magazines, blogs, or other entertainment outlets. The cast exists somewhere

between truth and fiction, in that the stories they embody in the series simultaneously reveal

great emotion and little detail for the viewer to consume. This approach differs slightly from the

approach in Teen Mom OG, where the visibility and fame of the cast is a welcome topic on the

series. The shift in approach in The Hills to the one in Teen Mom OG allows for different types

of manipulation in order to drive the conflict, narrative, and profit.

Conclusion

Teen Mom OG employs many of the tactics and strategies employed in documentary

cinema, daytime television, and early reality TV. These tactics, developed over time, become

enriched in a series such as Teen Mom OG, because the landscape within which the series resides

relies on communication mechanisms working in tandem to deliver ideology through narrative

and form. The process of dispensing meaning in an entertaining, pleasurable, complicated format

which arranges real life into a produced reality has a long and layered history full of important

ideological considerations that affect the broader understanding of labor and capital, and are

infused into reality TV in various intertwining ways.

Reality-based programming first began in the 1950s with such programs as Candid

Camera. Later, with docuseries such as An American Family, the “real” family document was

reformulated to offer a slice of life view of a middle-class American home that was anything but

functional or sound. The end of the twentieth century brought an explosion of reality

programming to television, with programs ranging from competition series to lifestyle shows to

makeovers to family and/or constructed family situations such as The Real World that revealed

ideologies of family, capital, taste, and success within a growing landscape of online technology,

digital connectivity, and social media. After reality television first made its official mark in the

early nineties with such series as The Real World, the themes and approaches that had already

been examined and utilized in such daytime talk shows as The Oprah Winfrey Show, Jerry

Springer, and Donahue began to evolve. With programs like The Real World and later with The

Hills, suddenly there was the possibility of a closer look at the [constructed] work and domestic

spaces that the characters inhabited within a format where these characters performed and

reflected on their own environment and their experience as participants within a programs that

were driven by corporate partnerships and capital.

As with The Real World and The Hills, Teen Mom OG offers just enough specific

personal details to the viewer to keep the narrative going. There is specific information presented

to contextualize the characters in the story. The specificity surpasses such programs as The

Bachelor, Survivor, or other shows where the audience barely learns general information about

each cast member. But while humanizing and specifying its characters’ dramas in some ways

through conflict, interpersonal interactions, and emotional upheaval, the producers of Teen Mom

OG eliminate other unique elements and personality traits from the main characters in favor of

an overarching homogeneity that disconnects the cast members from interactions and

environments not governed by capital. Reality TV utilizes this homogeneity and adopts

processes of disconnection masked as access to greater connection that drive capital to propel the

narrative, to engage the viewer in a multiplatform viewing experience, and to assure that power

and authority are only reproduced by those who already have it. By studying the production

process, self-reflexivity, metacommentary, and the endless call for self-commodification, an

understanding of this disconnection can take place. A meticulous examination of the construction

and mechanisms employed in Teen Mom OG will help contextualize the series within an

understanding of the process of cultural production in this contemporary moment.

Chapter 2: Teen Mom OG

“This time, we’re doing things a little differently!”

– Catelynn Lowell, Teen Mom OG Episode 1, "Back and Better than Ever” (2015)

First, there was 16 and Pregnant: Production and Impact

In 2009, MTV released a new series about teen mothers. 16 and Pregnant (2009-2014)

followed a handful of young mothers-to-be who were navigating the personal, academic, and

economic struggles of being young and pregnant. One of the young couples was also considering

alternatives to keeping the child once it was born. On 16 and Pregnant, when we first come to

meet the cast, our main characters are introduced in the context of their connection to their

particular circumstances as well as to other individuals in their community. Screen time is given

to the cast within their respective cities and towns. A poignant scene in the first 16 and Pregnant

episode (“Maci,” aired June 11, 2009) is when young mother-to-be Maci is introduced to the

viewer. A very visibly pregnant Maci chats with her new classmates about her situation after

having transferred schools to obtain her diploma. The emphasis is on Maci, but she is placed in

conversation with relative strangers, and appears open, amiable to her classmates despite her

physical and discomfort over being so pregnant so young – unlike any of the other young women

in the room. The vulnerability Maci shares with the group humanizes her and contextualizes her

story within white working-class narrative by presenting an authentic, messy, and tender

connection between Maci and the outside world. Maci then appears alongside her baby’s father

Ryan – hugging him and giggling over her engagement ring. The scene appears to daintily sum

up her life as a young future mother who is finishing school and planning a wedding.

The success and impact of 16 and Pregnant led to the production of five additional

seasons starring various young mothers: Teen Mom, Teen Mom 2, Teen Mom 3, Teen Mom:

Young and Pregnant, and Teen Mom OG. Neither 16 and Pregnant nor any of the other Teen

Mom series includes the crew in the narrative alongside the cast in the way they are highlighted

on Teen Mom OG. Also, the tone of 16 and Pregnant is informed by the events taking place with

the narrative – doctor’s visits, arguments about money, heartbreak and resolve regarding a

decision about adoption, and health concerns – more than it is by the drama within the cast’s

interpersonal relationships. In placing its emphasis on the future mothers, 16 and Pregnant was a

series rooted in traditional documentary practices, closer in style and approach to MTV’s other

successful docuseries True Life than any of the reality programs such as The Osbournes or The

Jersey Shore that were produced by the network.

16 and Pregnant presented a compelling look at teenage pregnancy and has since been

given credit for helping to increase awareness and drive down the teen pregnancy rates in the

United States. In 2014, economists Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine examined the

influence of 16 and Pregnant on teen births. They began by considering the influence of media

on individuals: “It is a longstanding and open question how exposure to media images affects

viewers’ behavior. (…) In some circles, the idea that teenagers respond to media content is a

foregone conclusion, but determining whether media images themselves cause teens to behave in

certain ways is a difficult empirical task” (3) The research was conducted for the National

Bureau for Economic Research, with the goal of offering insight into ways to shape policy.

Kearney and Levine considered the hypothesis that 16 and Pregnant helped decrease teen

pregnancy rates as well as the possibility that the series glamorized the young mothers.

Bringing together analysis of statistical data at the time the series aired, Nielsen ratings,

and close reading of online activity including Google Trends, tweets, and internet searches in

relation to the airing of episodes, Kearney and Levine assert that the series did result in a

decrease in teens giving birth. “Our estimates imply that this show led to a 4.3 percent reduction

in teen births that would have been conceived between June 2009, when the show began, and the

end of 2010. This can explain 24 percent of the total decline in teen births over that period” (5).

Also, the research revealed that teens increased their internet activity when episodes – especially

the new weekly installments – aired. The data confirmed that 16 and Pregnant – and media texts

in general – can effect change in multiple ways. The study also revealed that the series sparked

increased social media use by fans during the airing of each episode that were undertaken

alongside the actual practice of watching television as a form of response to the series, its cast,

and the unfolding drama.

In their conclusion, Kearney and Levine point to this consideration: “The fact that MTV

knows how to make shows that teens like to watch, which speak to them in ways that resonate,

presumably is critical to the show’s impact. Apparently, this approach has the potential to yield

large results with important social consequences” (34). With 16 and Pregnant, the influence

appears to be positive because of the subject matter and the inclusion of the consequences of

sexual activity among teens within the narrative. And yet, the potential for less positive

consequences remains with the OG revamp, as does the unanswered question of what exactly is

being enjoyed in the new series. Kearney and Levine reiterate this consideration: “Presumably

the effect on the attitudes or behaviors of teens and young adults could be positive or negative,

depending on the specific media content and context. We find that media has the potential to be a

powerful driver of social outcomes” (35). There is a marked difference between 16 and Pregnant

and Teen Mom OG. A clear difference between the original series and its 2015 semi-celebrity

revamp is in the difference in the ways 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom OG employ self-

reflexivity and metacommentary. The official online description of OG labels it as “a first for the

Teen Mom franchise [in which the show] will break the fourth wall, pulling back the curtain to

reveal the relationships with the producers and crew, the challenges of raising children on

camera, and how life in the public eye has shaped them as parents and people” (“About the

Series”). This difference reveals a shift in motivation by production which is both culturally

reflective and constitutive. On Teen Mom OG, there are very few moments between the cast and

any outside characters or community members. Instead, the series utilizes the onscreen

production crew, social media, text messaging, and the cast’s connection to the machinery of

cyberspace to establish the realm in which the young mothers exist.

This new televisual format presents the four female characters alongside the on-screen

crew members and producers, with added metacommentary in the form of the filmed participants

discussing the production within the production. It signals a departure from the painstaking ways

that reality TV attempted to remove or distance the production process from the final televised

product. Earlier reality TV shows attempted to present a smooth and seamless onscreen

landscape devoid of any mention of (or artifacts from) the production process – be they crew

within the shot, discussion of the show within the show, or an emphasis on the filming process

through lighting, sound, or related filmmaking procedures. Often, on many reality programs such

as The Bachelor or Survivor, the presence of the production only makes it to the outtakes or

blooper reels. On other shows, the fourth wall is intact except when crisis ensues and the crew

steps in as mediator. With Teen Mom OG, the production is visible from the start, allowing for an

intense self-scrutiny by the characters that vacillates between a performed self-awareness by the

characters and a response or reaction prompted by the onscreen producers and crew that drives

the narrative and its representations.

With Teen Mom OG, MTV embraces the inclusion of the crew – producers, cameramen,

and production assistants – not only in the shot, but as active participants communicating with

the cast as if they are friends who might ask questions to learn about the cast member’s life

events taking place. The series breaks traditional modes of organizing the narrative by including

the crew and its ongoing inquiries while the action is taking place. Not only does the viewer

watch the cast, it is now watching the crew engaging with the cast which becomes part of the

new, complicated, yet seemingly unmasked narrative. And, in addition to the disruptive nature of

the crew’s intervention, the insularity of the entire setup – with not much commentary beyond its

direct effects on the characters – reveals a carefully crafted attempt to create a feedback loop that

revolves around the ideology of the self as a willing participant in practices of self-surveillance

and self-commodification. This loop perpetuates more than just a sense of the apparatus of

television production that would at best be designed to unmask the artifice the televisual

experience. Rather, it does the opposite. Rather than opening the possibility to multi-layered

experiences of audience appreciating the production, this loop limits the scope of the cast and

others even as the series champions the choice to break the fourth wall and use related tactics as

being wholly beneficial for both cast and viewer.

While the characters in Teen Mom OG remain as relatable as they were when navigating

their teenage pregnancies in 16 and Pregnant, their lives (as represented in the constructed

televisual text) appear to embody a general detachment from the rest of the world and from

broader questions of self, class, or any social interaction beyond conflict on social media that is

often heightened and centralized in the narrative. While the inclusion of the Teen Mom OG crew

alongside the cast may on the surface offer a potential for viewers to deconstruct the framework

and craftiness of the series, the opposite ends up taking place. What is set up as an avenue for

deconstruction results in a new construction that reifies the performed relationship not as an

actual partnership, but as a transactional one which ultimately benefits the authority figures and

individuals in power even as it tells a story to the contrary . This in turn underwrites transactional

capitalist ideologies within its seemingly fun-loving players on the screen.

In a 2014 New York Times article about Kearney and Levine’s study of declines in teen

birth rates during the original airing of 16 and Pregnant, Annie Lowrey reiterates how “the show

and its spinoffs seem to have helped accelerate a long-term decline in the teenage birthrate” (par.

20). But, in its new format, Teen Mom OG as an entity appears to be less concerned with actual

pregnancies and family matters than it is with a televisual tactics that support the series and

network and not the actual characters or the viewers it may influence. As with such programs as

Bravo’ TV’s The Real Housewives, drama and conflict become prioritized over actual life

events, milestones, or context within a larger community beyond social media arguments with

costars, fans, or internet trolls. And, by presenting the producers on screen as co-conspirators, the

show actually hides authority in plain sight, and in turn creates a new way to enforce a hierarchy

of authority by visually establishing the producers who are in charge as not being in charge. The

producers, aware of the impact and reach of 16 and Pregnant set out to influence and impact

culture in new ways and with sophisticated mechanisms at work. The employment of this new

set of tactics is implemented in ways that are made to appear benign.

Introducing Teen Mom OG

Teen Mom OG has proven appealing for a number of reasons. It presents its narrative to

the viewer in new ways but also retains the familiarity of its cast to appeal to both new and

existing fans. The series reunites four of the original 16 and Pregnant cast members – each of

them a household name because of their participation in the original series – with fans and

presents them in a new televisual product. And it continues the storyline in ways that refer to the

past without relying solely on it to propel the narrative. The inclusion of the crew in the story

drives this narrative. Teen Mom OG highlights the crew and the production-within-the-

production in ways that portray the inclusion of the production process in the narrative as

expected, required even. One way the inclusion of the crew is normalized in the series is by

breaking the fourth wall and revealing the cast looking directly into the camera as both a shared

moment with the camera crew and a moment of reaching out to the at-home audience. Another

way is by uncovering the private moments within the domestic spaces of the cast members that

were not examined in the same way before the series was produced. The producers and crew are

featured prominently within these domestic spaces, with most of the cast reactions to this new

setup with excitement. The first episode of the season begins with such a moment, as the cast

chats with the crew, looking directly into the camera within the first minute of the first episode.

Close Reading: Opening sequence, “Back and Better Than Ever”

In the opening scene of “Back and Better than Ever,” the first episode of Teen Mom OG

which first aired on March 23, 2015, the viewer is re-introduced to three of the original young

mothers from 16 and Pregnant through a quick succession of graphically-animated still images

followed by video footage from 16 and Pregnant which shows each of them in their daily lives

(00:00:00 –00:00:15). The fast pace of the edit feels both exciting and playful, and the viewer is

quickly introduced to the main players of the series. The scene cuts to footage of the production

crew filming the new season of the show.

There are close up shots of a film slate, a medium shot of a group of crew members

making their way to enter Teen Mom OG cast member Amber’s home in Anderson, Indiana with

their cameras and gear in tow, a medium shot of Amber, and then a cut to a close up shot of cast

member Catelynn’s husband Tyler smiling at unidentifiable crew members as they each

comment on being filmed in their home in Port Huron, Michigan (00:00:16 –00:00:22). The

viewer then sees cast member Maci’s young son Bentley breaking the fourth wall to point his

finger into the camera lens during filming in their hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee as

Catelynn explains in voiceover how a new emphasis in this season is on the production within

the production. The fast pace and emphasis on close up shots of the cast juxtaposed with medium

shots of the crew immediately invite the viewer into the scene and feel playful, endearing the

cast to the viewer.

The camera cuts to a close up of Amber’s ex Gary accentuating a tail slate (in addition to

the actual slate visible in the shot and held up by a member of the crew) by clapping his hands

together as he sits in the driver’s seat of his car, followed by Catelynn’s husband Tyler

explaining that with the presence of the film crew, “If anything, the cameras get us to open up

even more than we would, you know?” These comments appear to be in support of the

production being included within the narrative. This support feels unanimous, as Catelynn agrees

with her husband, noting that the cameras make them want to “be more real.” (00:00:25 –

00:00:32). After this short interaction, the video cuts to Amber’s daughter Leah sitting in the

back seat of a car and asking permission from her mother to say hello to the crew by looking and

speaking directly into the camera while mother and daughter drive around town. It is another

playful moment, and both Leah and Amber appear happy, amenable to the presence of the crew

in their personal space. Amber gleefully grants permission to her daughter to engage with the

crew through the camera lens, while behind her, through the window of the moving car, the

viewer notices an entirely different camera crew in a separate car filming Amber and Leah from

outside. This points not only to the production process being uncovered in the series, but to the

presence and abundance of crew members capturing footage. None of these cameras is obscured;

in fact, they are all emphasized, welcomed, and embraced as a new norm offered to the viewer

(00:00:32 –00:00:38).

As the sequence continues, barely forty seconds into the first episode of the newly

refashioned series, Maci’s ex-boyfriend (and Bentley’s father) the viewer sees a medium shot of

Ryan standing in the middle of a room in his parents’ home and expressing frustration at the

cameras “all up in my face,” to which the crew responds by telling him that they love his face.

The cameraman smiles and pushes his lens even closer to Ryan as his mother laughs in the

background (00:00:38 –00:00:42). The video then cuts to a close up of Amber and then of her ex,

Gary, commenting on how they’ve known the crew for six years, after which Gary tells an on-

screen crew member “welcome back,” before another cut to Maci and her new beau who

playfully kick the crew out of Bentley’s bedroom as the opening credits of the series begin

(00:00:43 –00:00:50). Within the first sixty seconds of the first episode of Teen Mom OG, a

complicated narrative weaving together multiple households, their inhabitants, and the

production capturing the scenes begins to take shape. The cast members in favor of this

production process who express their excitement and support of the production being included

within the production are shown to the viewer in close up shots while Ryan, who expressed

frustration is show in a medium shot, slightly obscured, and turning away from the cameras. This

subtle choice of shots edited in the way they are masterfully begin from the very first episode a

less than favorable characterization of those unwilling to embrace the production process

wholeheartedly.

The episode continues by catching up with cast member Amber, who has recently moved

into her own apartment. The scene cuts from a medium shot to a close up of Amber. Enjoying

freedom after being released early from prison for domestic assault (against her daughter’s

father, 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom OG cast member Gary Shirly), Amber looks directly into

the camera to express her excitement about getting her “motherfucking refrigerator” (00:04:30 –

00:04:40). Soon after, her cousin Krystal arrives, and they talk about Amber’s drug addiction

issues, her time in prison, and Krystal’s guilt over not being there for her cousin more than she

wanted to (00:04:40 –00:05:55).

The scene cuts to a sepia-toned flashback sequence highlighting Amber’s teen pregnancy

six years ago, conflict with her ex Gary, domestic assault inflicted by Amber onto Gary, Amber’s

court case and prison sentence, and Amber’s drug rehab program in prison. The sequence is

narrated by Amber, who gives a general description of these events over clips of herself and

Gary smiling with their daughter Leah, Amber slapping Gary and yelling at him, and B-roll of a

woman in an orange jumpsuit walking away from the camera in a prison courtyard (00:05:56 –

00:06:22). The sequence then cuts to a medium external shot of the correctional facility with a

sign noting its details, and Amber leaving prison with her family (00:06:23 –00:06:25). The Teen

Mom crew – visible on camera – wait outside the prison grounds. Amber asks her brother and

family who else is there for her on her release day. The shot cuts to the crew filming her arriving

in the car and then cheering and watching as Amber hugs MTV producer Kiki (00:06:25 –

00:06:28). As Amber emotionally embraces Kiki, it is clear that the connection between Amber

and her MTV family is as potent as is the emotional bond she shares her own family. If not more.

In voiceover, Amber explains her custody situation regarding her daughter Leah and

mentions ongoing tensions with her ex, Gary. (00:06:29 –00:06:34). The scene cuts to a medium

shot of Gary, his daughter Leah, and his new girlfriend Kristina at their house. The phone rings,

and Gary chats with Amber about picking Leah up for a visit. (00:06:35 –00:07:10). Amber

drives over, with happy music playing in the background, and Leah runs out of Gary’s house to

greet her. (00:07:11 –00:07:29). Gary follows, with an insistent tone in his explanation about

Leah’s medication for an ear infection. Amber immediately becomes irritated as Gary helps Leah

into her car seat in Amber’s car. As he does so, Leah asks, “Are the cameras around me so they

can see me talking?” Gary confirms this fact and chats with Amber as Leah makes funny faces

into the camera installed in the back seat to view her directly. (00:07:30 –00:08:28).

The scene alternates between medium shots of Amber and Gary and close ups of Leah

goofing off as she looks directly into the camera installed in the car so that it films her sitting in

the bac seat. Amber and Leah drive off, laughing and joking as they make their way to the park

to play before returning home, taking care of the ear infection medicine, and getting ready for

bed (00:08:29 –00:09:38). There is a significant optimism in the tone of these clips, as Amber

and her daughter are reunited and engaging playfully on camera for the world to see. The

initially positive tone in Teen Mom OG is markedly different from the one in much of the

episodes of 16 and Pregnant in which the viewer is first introduced to the cast.

Close Reading: Reflections

Within the first few moments of the first episode, the production and its technological

apparatuses are foregrounded. While the cast appears amenable to this new addition to the series

– even supporting it in informal, on the spot interviews and in voiceover – this normalized

imposition is still an imposition.

From the start, the placement of the crew within the narrative

establishes a power dynamic that, though obscured by the seemingly good-natured tone of those

involved, is nevertheless one that shapes the series and its ideological position. The editing of

clips shows two of the children who were barely born at the tail end of 16 and Pregnant. But

Bentley and Leah are not simply present in the scenes. Both children actively engage with the

camera and the production in the clips selected for the scene. The imprint of the production and

its surveillance practices is strong, and the use of the youngest members of the cast, while

endearing, is strategic. The viewer is invited to embrace the processes of surveillance and the

blurred line between public and private – already established with 16 and Pregnant – which are

pushed into overdrive on Teen Mom OG.

The narrative relies on surveillance, participation in the commodification of the self, and

ongoing access to the cast’s private lives. The camera crew is presented as family members

might be, amiable additions to the household for most of the participants involved. There is little

objection or dissent expressed toward the invasive nature of this process, and the cast generally

appears to enjoy the attention bestowed upon them by the camera crew. The discomfort

expressed by Ryan (who in later seasons falls into heavy drug use that is captured on tape and

included in the storyline) serves the introduction to the revamp well, for its opposition actually

acts in support of the series because of the seemingly playful response of both the crew and

Ryan’s family members. What is presented to the viewer in the first moments of the first episode

is a warmhearted environment marked by a seemingly transparent look at the construction of

what is actually an intricate and masterful manipulation of reality.

The juxtaposition of Ryan’s grumpy objection to the presence of the crew with Amber’s

excitement about a new life, apartment, and refrigerator also normalizes the power dynamic

offered to the viewer. Ryan is overpowered not only by the crew, but by the participation of his

parents who support the crew and downplay the invasiveness of the production. Amber’s home –

unlike the small room in which Ryan complains about having no space – is quite spacious, with

high ceilings and large, comfy couches where Amber can hang out while she gleefully films her

new TV show. The contrast of the visual space in each home is a juxtaposition within which

Amber is clearly painted as a victor. This paints the production in a favorable light and carries

the role of the onscreen crew through the less happy moments throughout the season. As the

series progresses, in spite of the many conflicts that take place, the power dynamic which

supports the production, network, and brand is upheld in every edit that is locked. This dynamic,

woven into the form of the series, supersedes the actual drama, facts, events, and cast members,

to ultimately offer the viewer a series that is as much about selling the act of commodification as

it is about young mothers. Teen Mom OG is not the first series to do this, nor will it be the last.

But it does implement its strategies in unique and complex ways that are worthy of consideration

and scrutiny.

Why Teen Mom OG?

There are several reasons for the emphasis on Teen Mom OG in this research. As seen in

the opening sequences of the first episode, the series deals with the aftermaths of personal,

professional, and/or familial upheavals. Throughout the series, the narrative addresses such

issues as teen pregnancy, incarceration, domestic violence, the adoption process, and the side

effects of both fame and the illness or death of loved ones. The series calls upon the televisual

trope of family disunion and rebuilding, and then turns it on its head by adding the crew

alongside the cast and within the narrative. Its precursor 16 and Pregnant offered the viewer an

inside look into the lives of working class and middle-class teenage girls [alongside their

significant others and family members] who had recently become pregnant. These are often

relatable stories. Or, if not, they appeal to viewers’ emotions.

By inviting its former cast back to the franchise, MTV simultaneously calls upon the

cast’s visibility and existing brand familiarity and uses it to further build the franchise. There is

the understanding of the appeal of using metacommentary in the choice to return to former

castmates and reveal the way the series affected their lives favorably. The emphasis on

publicizing the private lives of fairly visible individuals from working class and middle-class

families after crisis relates to questions worthy of further and ongoing consideration in Media

Studies scholarship for many reasons, including the relationship between class, value, and the

decision to participate in presenting a private life publicly. As the characters on Teen Mom OG

and other programs that developed this genre reveal and/or recover from some form of crisis or

familial upheaval, they simultaneously reveal a culture that is itself in upheaval. A reality show

about teen pregnancy – and the ensuing changes to life that include not only a variety of

emotions, fears, and worries, but economic factors as well – is not only a show about its

characters and their lives, but also about surveillance, performativity, gender, social class, and

culture itself – as envisioned by producers of culture. But, rather than offering a program that

contributes to an informed public and a drop in teen pregnancy rates (as was the case with 16 and

Pregnant), the visual construction of Teen Mom OG reveals mechanisms of discipline and

authority that reproduce power in ways that offer little room for messages that invite actual

agency.

The way the cast, their emotional lives, their relationships, and their domestic spaces are

presented and/or withheld on Teen Mom OG reveals ideological implications that support the

authority of the production and the crew which in turn supports authority and hegemony as

ideological imperatives. The process of deconstructing the televisual tapestry offered to the

viewer uncovers the ways that Teen Mom OG presents teen pregnancy as both a life-changing

event and a potential opportunity for gaining capital. Examining it as such can inform our

understanding of the ways that exploitative corporate capitalism requires endless, increasingly

commodified labor. By implementing self-reflexivity and metacommentary, MTV presents the

viewer with an exciting new approach. At the same time, to the discerning eye, MTV also

reveals the way various cultural and technological products increasingly infringe upon the

privacy, autonomy, and agency of consumers of cultural products. Analysis of the series

illuminates the way that power structures craftily enforce hierarchies of labor and authority while

appearing to break them down.

Teen Mom OG presents four young women, their families, and their daily lives in ways

that are relatable to a variety of viewers, both young and old. The mundane nature of everyday

tasks is situated in contrast with heightened drama that exists as a result of the young mothers’

pregnancies and related life choices. Unlike other televisual texts such as primetime dramas or

sitcoms where the conflict and its resolution are often presented to the viewer within one

episode, the conflict in Teen Mom OG (as with most reality TV series) is accentuated within each

episode and carries over throughout the series. The success of this process hinges on two key

elements presented as necessary precursors to resolution of conflict: Self-examination and

external intervention by the on-screen TV crew and/or its technological apparatuses. The conflict

continues throughout the season (and entire series) because of the structure of the production and

the way that resolution is presented to the viewer. The relationship between conflict and the

supposed self-reflexivity that is made to appear to cause resolution draws the viewer in and

carries the program from one episode to the next. This flow of messaging helps retain the viewer

while simultaneously reinforcing the authority of the producers and the underlying alienation of

the cast that contributes to (and is a consequence of) the drama in the first place. This process is

continuous, carried from season to season. This continuity is important to the perpetuation of

ideology that the program dispenses.

Turning toward a compulsive examination of the self as a reassurance of one’s worth

requires agents of authority that act as equals to the compliant participant in this hierarchy of

power. In this reality TV series, the illusion of equality is ensured by the inclusion of the

onscreen producer in the narrative. In this age of digital culture, public and private are presented

as flattened, and programs like Teen Mom OG reveal this to both the viewer and the scholar. It is

an insidious and complex onscreen narrative, where the hierarchy of power is presented as

collapsed, with participant (young mom) and authority figure (onscreen camera crew and

producer) seemingly acting (through the televisual representation) as equals, partners, and even

as friends. Yet upon closer inspection, the hierarchies of power and authority are in fact

concretized by utilizing the tactic of “breaking the fourth wall” and related production devices in

new ways to achieve ideological and representational goals. The resulting televisual text places

emphasis on young moms and their family members who are seemingly comfortable with being

filmed performing their private lives on-camera in acts that normalize surveillance.

As these participants become somewhat famous and more familiar to the viewer through

their participation in the program and its various related promotional tasks (such as blogs, online

interactions, online endorsement deals, and series spin-offs), the program in which they

participate underwrites a process that spans multiple televisual genres and multi-platform

promotion to transform them from anonymity to celebrity. Upon closer consideration of this

process, it is clear that most of the characters on Teen Mom OG rely on the show and its

producers as well as the mechanisms of surveillance that publicize the private for profit by

privileging the production over the individual cast member.

By normalizing the ideological apparatuses of surveillance and unending labor through

the adoption of a narrative that having one’s private moments filmed is a norm to be embraced,

this program also endorses the performance and labor involved in the production process. As

with earlier docuseries such as An American Family in the 1970s, the family unit on Teen Mom

OG becomes a filmed family that performs a version of reality for its viewers and online

followers. Becoming a performed family through the blurring of public and private spheres

underwrites the process of self-promotion through commodification via the apparatuses of

technological and ideological surveillance. This process both mirrors and informs contemporary

culture, such that the general public’s modes of communication are increasingly informed by

these modes of self-promotion, self-commodification, and a detachment from mindfully

participating in actual life. The suggestion offered in this series shifts from living to living to be

seen, reflecting trends visible in broader corporate capitalist landscapes that include social media

and online culture. This performative act of self-commodification is visible within the first few

minutes of the series revamp in the conversations, actions, and attitudes of the cast and the

onscreen producers and crew.

Close Reading: Catelynn and Tyler Performing the Filmed Family

In the first episode of Teen Mom OG, the first act after the intro and title credits

reintroduces the viewer to former 16 and Pregnant cast members Catelynn and Tyler who gave

their first child up for adoption during the filming of that series. The camera offers an intimate

view of the couple in their home as they sit in their dining room eating sandwiches and

discussing recent gossip on Twitter. There is speculation that Catelynn might be pregnant, and

Tyler reads information on his phone from an online blog that cites tweets about being ready for

a child that Catelynn previously posted. Catelynn calls Tyler a “phone whore” as he reads off the

phone screen to her. (00:01:04–00:01:25) It is both intimate and informal, and filmed in such a

way that the close ups and complete ease the couple appears to have in front of the camera gives

the feeling like the viewer is in the room with Catelynn and Tyler. At the same time, the banter

that is shared reveals how young the couple is. They then discuss being ready for a child at 22,

add mentioning that they weren’t ready at 16 when they gave up their first child for adoption.

(00:01:26–00:01:51) The cell phones they use to check social media remain a constant within the

scene, and remain so throughout the series almost as if technology is a third party in their

relationship. The machinery of social media and the gaze of the screen act as the spark that

motivates what appears to be a generative, introspective conversation, but it also repeatedly

brings the conversation back to itself, as the couple continue to discuss items related to social

media rather than to their new pregnancy or personal feelings about it away from the gaze of

technology. This reveals the hand of the editors, as they cut together the scene to focus on the

couple’s tangled involvement in social media and online culture.

The scene then cuts to a flashback sequence in sepia of Catelynn and Tyler’s journey,

with the couple holding their firstborn Carly in their arms and crying and then handing the infant

over to her adoptive parents Brandon and Teresa (00:01:52–00:02:05). Catelynn provides the

narrative in her voiceover, recounting her first pregnancy and conflict with her and Tyler’s

parents. Catelynn, her mother, and Tyler’s father Brandon (who for a time was married to

Catelynn’s mother April) argue and hurl insults at each other (00:02:06–00:02:16). The clips

alternate between medium shots and close ups throughout the sequence. The scene then cuts to

a medium shot of Catelynn trying on her wedding dress as she explains in voiceover that she and

Tyler are now engaged and they’re planning the wedding (00:02:17–00:02:21). The scene jumps

to close ups of magazine covers that feature the teen mom and her fiancé, then scenes of them

arguing, and Catelynn explaining some of their tension that was highlighted in a different reality

program (00:02:22–00:02:42). The pair participated in the third season of the VH1 series

Couples Therapy, during which time their personal struggles became more prominent and they

almost broke up. In voiceover, Catelynn explains that after Couples Therapy, Tyler proposed a

second time, and they are now back on track after working things out.

The shift from sepia back to full color brings the viewer to present day. Back to the

present moment in the season, Catelynn takes a pregnancy test in the bathroom while Tyler waits

impatiently in the kitchen. It is a medium shot. Catelynn emerges from the bathroom with a

positive pregnancy test in her hand. In a close up, they embrace, then talk about plans for the

future. Scrolling through her cell phone without looking up, Catelynn tells Tyler, “I always

wanted to be a Mom” and they discuss their education and career goals and how they will shift

with a new baby (00:02:43–00:03:55). Again in close up, Tyler asks Catelynn how she wants to

publicize the pregnancy, wondering “How do you wanna go about this? Do you wanna announce

it on Twitter, do you wanna…” Catelynn looks at Tyler, and tells him, “I will announce my

pregnancy when I feel the time is right” (00:03:56–00:04:06).

Close Reading: Reflections

The scene where Catelynn and Tyler respond to the pregnancy test presents Catelynn as

exuding a grounded feeling of empowerment. But underneath this positivity is the underlying

question about the necessity of announcing personal details publicly in the first place. The way

the scene is edited prepares the viewer for future episodes when the pregnancy eventually will

become public. It prioritizes the announcement of the pregnancy to the world over the actual

pregnancy and the couple’s initial, immediate response to the news. In fact the immediate

response is about publicizing their news. Throughout subsequent scenes in the episode, whether

in footage of Catelynn scrolling through social media feeds on her cellphone, Tyler reading

tweets, or the pair discussing Twitter announcements and online conflicts, the presence and gaze

of technology and the public facet of their personal, private, and domestic moment reveal the

intentional inclusion of the production and technical gadgetry as a force that is made to appear

commonplace, constant, and even expected.

A Whole New World Where Private is Made Public

Teen Mom OG incorporates multiple different elements into its edits to include

conversations between the characters and their close friends or family members that are typically

had in private, counseling sessions and mental health struggles that are often obscured in the

fantasy of the reality TV narrative, and the constant, ongoing onscreen participation of the

production crew (especially during moments of conflict) that is rarely give this much screen

time. The emphasis of the series is on both the private moments in the family’s personal lives as

well as their commentary on this turmoil. The joining of these private moments, heightened

emotional states, and metacommentary enforces an ideological position that equates sharing

information (through the use of technology such as cameras, cell phones, and social media that

are also tools of surveillance) with self-improvement, personal success, and various forms of

capital.

The series also reveals questions of agency and choice when it comes to consent to being

filmed (and in turn, consent to participate in public forums such as social media). Many of the

show’s characters grapple with the internal conflict regarding whether or not they want a life

away from the series and brand or even completely off-screen (by possibly quitting the show

altogether) instead of continuing to participate in a process that places them under a magnifying

glass. This consideration of rejecting the seemingly no-holds-barred access to the characters’

personal lives simultaneously challenges and supports the seemingly accepted notions of

participation, visibility, and consent to being filmed as precursors to success, status, and

achievement.

The inclusion of the production crew and their characterization as onscreen collaborators

complicates questions of value, labor, participation, and self-commodification through visibility.

According to John Fiske, “television provides ample evidence that our culture feels a need to

rank people in orders, either by physical or mental activity, or by appearance” (130). What is

important to note about Teen Mom OG is that the hierarchies are presented as if they are in flux,

supported not by the action in the narrative, but instead by the affirmation of its participants to

the camera. Yet the producers always retain control of the narrative as well as the fate of the cast,

whether through covert or overt actions that guide the young mothers and their families. The fate

of each cast member is in many ways dependent on their enthusiasm and willingness to be

constantly revealing more personal details to the authority figure that tempers any explicit

expressions of control.

The relationship between the cast and the Teen Mom OG production reflects a larger

framework of power. Andrejevic examines this growing tendency in culture by noting how

“individuals are becoming increasingly transparent to both public and private monitoring

agencies, even as the actions of these agencies remain stubbornly opaque in the face of

technologies that make collecting, sharing, and analyzing large amounts of information easier

than ever before” (pp. 6-7). The producers of Teen Mom OG replicate this relationship between

producer and consumer by using tactics that attempt to portray the producer as a friend and

support to the cast, and by extension, to the viewer. This strategy creates a new kind of opacity in

that the crew’s influence shapes this relationship and binds the cast to the production even

further. The reason this approach is successful with the cast is partly because the framework

within which the young mothers are seen as valuable does not require the same prerequisites that

exist in traditional television or other reality programs.

The Markers of Value and Success in Reality TV

Many reality TV programs measure value using traditional markers such as talent or

physical strength. On talent competitions such as American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance

or Dancing With the Stars, the characters that excel on the shows enter the narrative with pre-

existing abilities that are highlighted through various challenges and performances that are paired

with a look at their personal lives. Competition shows such as Survivor do not necessarily

emphasize one particular commodifiable talent, but do emphasize whatever will support the

“Outwit, outplay, outlast” branding of the series – namely, physical and psychological talent

connected to tenacity, perseverance, mental logic, and physical strength. Within this

representation rests the agreement that contestants will be filmed 24/7 because of the competition

to see who can persevere through any challenge. And, like talent-based competition shows, the

surveillance and invitation to consent is connected to a race to the finish which requires a

penchant for mastery, or a certain talent, genius, and ability to manipulate the competitor.

Unlike talent competitions such as So You Think You Can Dance, America’s Got Talent,

Dancing With the Stars, or American Idol, or skill-based competition shows such as Survivor or

Big Brother, the “talent” highlighted on shows like Teen Mom OG is replaced with the

willingness to perform self-scrutiny and reveal one’s private life. The talent is in the performance

of self-promotion and self-commodification. Teen Mom follows the approach utilized in such

shows as Keeping Up with the Kardashians, where compliance to the invasiveness of the

production becomes the avenue to fame and potential fortune. But the Kardashians were already

socio-economically sound (because of the success of their father Robert Kardashian’s work in

the entertainment industry and his participation in the trial of OJ Simpson as well as stepfather

Bruce Jenner’s athletic success in the Olympics and beyond). With the Kardashians, the social

and cultural capital is inherited and then built upon through the reality series, resulting in a

different kind of relationship to cultural production than the young mothers on MTV experience.

The differences in these markers of value are critical to understanding how alienation as a

result of self-commodification varies from show to show. The cast was unknown before MTV

picked them to star on 16 and Pregnant. They became famous as a reward for their willingness

to be visible and to reveal their private lives on camera. Without existing capital available like it

is for the Kardashians, the Hiltons, or the Osbournes (who have all had reality TV success in

addition to their other successes and existing wealth), the cast of Teen Mom OG must rely wholly

on the MTV brand to support the quest for various forms of capital. This distinction between

actual talent and performed self-involvement, and between entering a show with pre-existing

talent and/or capital born from nepotism versus performing a surveilled life for producers to

create content through the process of self-commodification rests at the root of the exploitative

nature of the MTV series.

The construction of Teen Mom OG raises crucial questions about everyday tasks being

shaped into commodifiable ones so that just “existing,” – when presented on a public platform –

results in the detachment from one’s personal life because the personal life is now comprised of

labor disguised as something else. As Rachel E. Dubrofsky explains in her examination of

surveillance and reality TV, “the action on [reality TV] centers on verifying authenticity: One

submits to surveillance as a means of verifying authenticity…the more willing one is to submit

to surveillance, the more able one is to appear ‘natural’ under surveillance and the more

seemingly authentic one becomes” ("Surveillance on Reality Television and Facebook From

Authenticity to Flowing Data" 117). This performed task of living one’s life as an assertion of

authenticity is made easily digestible for the viewer through the use of self-reflection and

metacommentary.

Yet as this assertion of authenticity takes place, the authenticity becomes overwhelmed

by the process of self-commodification which alienates the individual from any form of genuine

connection to self away from the labor of continuously asserting this supposed authenticity. The

“labor” here is presented to the viewing audience as positive because the self-reflexive approach

to one’s life is seen as therapeutic and cathartic. Thus, by performing self-reflection, one is led to

believe they are in command of one’s personal labor, output, environment, and value. The

question thus becomes whether the performed self in the public sphere actually robs the

individual of their autonomy, value, and authenticity, especially since the private spaces are now

made public for mass viewing. Similarly, the inclusion of the crew in the narrative of Teen Mom

OG acts as an assertion of authenticity of the production itself but can appear inauthentic to the

critical eye when the metacommentary examined reveals the authority of the production.

As John Fiske explains, “The more closely the signifier reproduces our common

experience, our culturally determined subjectivity, the more realistic it appears to be” (38). With

Teen Mom OG, the participants are television celebrities who are [framed as] regular, relatable

people. The allure of the fame embodied by the onscreen character(s) is designed to entice, while

the accessibility of a common experience shared with the viewer(s) and resulting verified

authenticity make for a perfect blend of factors set in place to welcome the viewer into the

narrative. The new appeal in reality TV and in programs like Teen Mom OG is the ideology of

success through self-commodification as a tangible possibility. Taking Fiske’s understanding a

step further, the producer shapes how the signifier is presented, affecting the culturally deemed

subjectivity of those decoding meaning from the televisual text. Viewers are invited to look to

the onscreen cast member with wonderment (for both positive and negative reasons), but to also

seek to emulate their actions or expressions and to believe they are able to do so with the simple

click of a few keystrokes. This is a tactic embedded into the production that invites the viewer to

continue watching as well as emulating the actions seen on the small screen. The televised

support of the cast of Teen Mom OG by the onscreen crewmembers and producers (who are

presented as friends and confidants) supports the illusion of access to fame and fortune through

visibility. The editing of Teen Mom OG makes the production and crew appear friendly because

of their amiable support of the main cast. The rewards for complying to the surveillance practices

that are woven into the fabric of the series normalizes hegemony while on the surface presenting

it as something else.

The Popularity of Teen Mom OG

Teen Mom OG is part of one of MTV’s longest-lasting franchises. The franchise includes

16 and Pregnant, multiple versions of Teen Mom, Teen Mom OG, and various spinoff specials

focused on the parents and relatives of the main cast such as Being Barbara, A Bae for Babs, and

Being Butch, each of which highlights the parents of the teen parents in the Teen Mom series.

The success of the franchise is in part because, as Kearney and Levine remarked their research,

MTV knows how to craft programming that is enjoyable for teens to watch. The characters are

presented as relatable “regular” people just like the viewers. The characters appear authentic,

with this authenticity propelled by their visibility that results from agreeing to the surveillance

involved in the production process. The success of the franchise is evident in many different

ways. According to statistics provided by the Social Security Administration (as reported by

Wendell Marsh and Jerry Norton for Reuters in 2011), just two years after 16 and Pregnant first

aired, the names “Maci” (one of the teen mothers on the show who is also an OG cast member)

and “Bentley” (one of Maci’s children featured on the show) were the names with the greatest

increase in popularity for newborn babies. Teen Mom was immediately well received, with Alex

Weprin reporting in Broadcasting & Cable magazine that its pilot episode was the network's

highest-rated premiere in over a year with 2.1 million total viewers (2009). The relatability of the

characters and their stories is what drives the series. According to scholar Jonathan Cohen who

studies audience reception, parasocial relationships, and media influence on viewers, “as we

come to understand and care about the characters, we come to care about what happens to them

and thus become involved in the plot and transported by the text” (186). In his research of

characterizations and televisual tropes that capture a viewer’s attention, Cohen identifies multiple

methods of garnering audience involvement depending on the target demographic. For example,

with fictional televisual texts, children identify with animals even though animals do not present

any similarities to young children.

Similarly, the characters in Teen Mom OG are presented in ways that make them appear

relatable and easily received as televisual representatives regardless of whether or not their

specific stories or background mirror those of the audience members. These representations offer

ways of being that the viewer may potentially seek to emulate. Psychology and mass culture

scholar Michael P. Sipiora offers the reminder that “television serials advertise lifestyles; they

bring styles of living to public notice” (188). With Teen Mom OG, the specific circumstances (of

teen pregnancy) may not necessarily present any aspirational elements that the viewer wishes to

embody, but the underlying ideology of overcoming odds is an established trope in American

culture. This trope (and its underlying ideological apparatuses) is infused into the narrative of the

series. The aspirational element resides in the methods with which these young parents appear to

overcome these odds. Added to this are the promises of capital and success in exchange for

visibility and access to private, domestic spaces. The way Teen Mom OG positions this pairing of

aspirational elements of overcoming the odds and exchanging visibility for success is that it

requires both a turn to the self (rather than revealing the actual real-world concerns caused by

class, social status, economic matters, or the exploitative nature of capitalism) and to genuflect to

authority – in this case the onscreen crew – which obscures the realities of the culture industry

and the exploitative processes taking place.

The Perks and Punishments Embedded in Teen Mom OG

The Teen Mom franchise connects value and capital to participation in processes of

surveillance and self-commodification. There is little focus by the cast of Teen Mom OG – as

was done in 16 and Pregnant and other versions of Teen Mom – on the economic or social

burdens of raising children. In this way, the revamped series does not accurately represent any

“regular” person’s life. It is a crafted presentation that does not reflect the actual realities of

raising a child. It instead presents the realities of existing in a semi-public sphere while backed

by the salary of being an onscreen talent without mentioning that financial backing at all. Despite

references in the first episode to past drama the cast faced during the 16 and Pregnant years, the

cast members initially appear put together, financially solvent, and relatively amiable when their

present situation is placed (via the flashback sequences) in juxtaposition with the events of years

past.

The cast members’ participation on Teen Mom OG itself is what affords them the stability

to raise their children (or navigate their decision to give up their child for adoption, in the case of

Catelynn and Tyler) without the financial burdens or other challenges of raising kids. Teen Mom

OG represents a homogenized view of motherhood, collapsing the complicated and nuanced

realities of parenting and including in its place a kind of stardom through participation. This

results in a normalizing of the processes involved in such programs -- surveillance, self-

promotion, and self-commodification. These young mothers (and fathers) are not presented as

wealthy, but they are not seen as impoverished either. This shapes the representation of young,

unwed single parents through the televisual text. And their salaries for appearing on the show

place them in a position of financial stability. In the February 2017 In Touch Weekly article “It

Would Appear It Really Pays to Be a Teen Mom — Find out Their Crazy Impressive Salaries!”

the magazine reported that most of the cast members from various seasons within the Teen Mom

franchise make six figure salaries for each of their six-month filming contracts. Each of the OG

cast members except for Farrah make at least $250,000 per year of filming in addition to various

endorsement deals and other reality show appearance fees. Farrah added to her fortune by

appearing on other series such as Couples Therapy and Single AF, increasing her net worth

considerably. Farrah also ran various businesses such as a frozen yogurt shop and a furniture

store as well as deals with adult entertainment companies – a matter which led to her eventual

termination from the series.

This information is readily available to the public, but it does not result in a formal

questioning of the representation of the cast on the screen. In fact, in the construction of the

series, the question of capital and socioeconomic standing is obscured, allowing for a

whitewashing of important ideological questions related to race, class, surveillance, and success.

The cast themselves support this representation in some ways. In her 2015 book, Bulletproof,

Maci downplays her wealth with a dose of transparency. “Reality TV can make you very

famous, but you basically get the shit end of the deal,” she writes. “Everyone knows your name

and talks about you, but there’s no red-carpet prestige or glamorous piles of money” (119). Maci

continues by affirming that her life hasn’t changed much from day to day. “The fact is, my real

life isn’t that much different from what it would have been without MTV. I still live in

Chattanooga and go to Walmart and buy bread and milk” (119). Maci’s assertion conveniently

upholds her characterization on the series .

As the private domestic space becomes public within and through the series, the

representation of the cast is simplified in favor of ideological positionings rooted in exploitation.

16 and Pregnant may have shown the cast interacting with other individuals in their community,

but the shift in focus in Teen Mom OG is one that emphasizes the interpersonal drama with

family members and the relationships with the onscreen producers and crew. Maci may still shop

at Walmart, but we never see her actually at Walmart in Teen Mom OG. These mothers, through

navigating daily commotions ranging from potentially relatable, real life matters to soap opera-

style melodrama, achieve success on many levels through their participation in a produced set of

signs and symbols sanctioned by a television network, its advertisers, and their supporters that

shape the representation of their lives in specific ways that benefit the series and the network.

And, if they are seen in spaces outside the domestic realm in the series, these are environments

that are separated from the actual public. The camera crew, by its very presence, already creates

a separation from the community. This creates not only a detachment from some forms of real

life, but it also creates a new sense of self that, when supported by the production in ways that

appear to benefit and support the cast, it appears there is no choice but to continue participating

in the process of production. The cast realizes this as they also realize the inescapability of what

they chose in starring on a reality TV series.

Close Reading: The Entrapments of Reality TV

Midway through the first episode of the season, Amber, her mother, and her cousin

Krystal get pedicures together at a local salon. While sitting at the individual pedicure stations

lined up in a row in a medium shot, Amber’s mother begins to criticize Gary for not being good

enough (00:25:55 –00:27:03). Amber becomes irritated, sticking up for her ex for taking care of

Leah when she was in prison (00:27:04 –00:27:10). Amber’s cousin Krystal steps in to support

Amber, but Amber’s mother shuts her down. Krystal begins to cry, and Amber threatens to leave

as the crew appears in the frame surrounding the drama (00:27:11 –00:27:52). The camera is

shaky as Krystal leaves, ordering the crew to remove her mic pack as Amber’s mother talks to

Teen Mom’s Executive Producer Morgan J. Freeman about how certain family members and

friends only show support to Amber when the cameras are around (00:27:53 –00:28:10). The

scene ends with everyone retreating to their respective corners with emotional music playing in

the background (00:28:11 –00:28:15).

Later in the episode, in a wider angle filmed outside at dusk, Amber and Krystal talk in

front of her house. Amber talks about feeling triggered to use drugs and her wish to just see her

daughter (00:31:10 –00:31:43). Two camera crew are visible in shot and filmed by an additional

cameraperson. Amber and Gary then chat on the phone. Gary explains details of a vacation he

will take with their daughter and his current girlfriend. Amber hangs up the phone and is shocked

and begins to get irritated. After she hangs up, visibly affected by the conversation, she yells out

in frustration into what initially seems like an empty room. The scene cuts to show MTV

producer Heather standing at the foot of Amber’s bed listening to Amber rant about her situation

with Gary. Amber expresses her frustration and implies that she still has feelings for her ex

(00:31:44–00:33:20). The camera is close and catches the heightened emotions in the room.

The conversation between Amber and producer Heather continues later in the episode.

The scene, like many before it, is intimate, and reveals Amber’s heartbreak and frustration. In

voiceover, Amber explains that she is close with her producer, and has cut ties with many of her

friends because she can no longer trust them since she’s sober and they may not be. Amber

elaborates on her woes over still having feelings for her as producer Heather looks on, quiet

again except when Amber complains that she feels like she lost her whole family. Heather asks

Amber to clarify how she lost her family, to which Amber responds that she didn’t. The

emphasis is on Amber realizing she has not lost her family because she is still alive to be there

for her daughter (00:38:18 –00:39:28). In a close up, Amber looks over at Heather, wipes tears

from her eyes, and regains her composure.

Close Reading: Reflections

In both scenes where Amber finds herself in the midst of conflict, the production acts her

mediator and protector. The inclusion of the production in this scene reflects the tactics used in

other reality programs where the camera, boom mic, producers, or items that make up the set are

revealed only when there is palpable tension, and it is made to appear like the production is

stepping in to help everyone regain calm.

This mediation is framed as an intervention or

mentorship type of support, when in fact the inclusion of the crew – both in the actual narrative

and in the final edit – reinforces the authority within the hierarchy outlined by Fiske and others.

The participants on Teen Mom OG willingly agree to reveal personal details of their lives as an

extension of their ongoing public narrative, but the exploitative nature of the series is still

important to dissect, particularly as the series places intense scrutiny on the characters’ personal

dramas and familial dilemmas for the viewer’s consumption. In order to keep viewers interested

in the narrative, the conflict is usually what is highlighted most vividly in the episodes and across

the span of the season and series. But the positioning of the onscreen producer and/or crew

within this narrative is what actually navigates the story and manages the characters.

During Amber’s rant about Gary, MTV producer Heather suddenly appearing in the

scene is a jarring moment, because the viewer is reminded that a crew is there filming and

watching the drama unfold. The jump cut from Amber by herself to Heather in the shot with

Amber as she complains changes the dynamic of the action taking place. The choice to use the

onscreen crew in the way MTV does is used to mollify the overwhelming nature of how invasive

this kind of scrutiny actually is. The jarring moments are often framed in ways that humanize the

crew or present them as support to the cast. Normalizing ideologies that are oppressive and

problematic in favor of those in culture who enjoy positions of authority and power helps to

make surveillance, exploitative labor practices, and alienation from the self as a consequence of

treating the self as commodity appear less crushing. In turn, this helps to make the imposition of

these same mechanisms and agents of power appear manageable for the at-home viewer.

The moments from the first episode of the first season of Teen Mom OG that are

examined in close reading in this chapter highlight the different ways that the crew is included in

the action and in the visual space of the series. The intention is clear: including the crew in these

scenes shows the closeness they share with the cast. But the motivation and the resulting

configuration of messages is far more complicated. While it is clear that the cast and crew have a

bond solidified over years of filming 16 and Pregnant, multiple reunion specials, and now Teen

Mom OG, critical scrutiny of the way the crew asserts its authority reveals the complexities in

this new method of branding the series. The crew is ever-present, and in the final scene examined

here, the framing of the intimate conversation and the editing of the scene leaves the producer

with the last word in the conversation because of how she is able to calm Amber down. The

inclusion of the crew in the series is handled masterfully, for the imposition of the production on

the cast, while jarring, is presented (through the cast’s voiceover and general tone between cast

and crew) as supportive.

In consideration of the complicated tangle of ideas and themes revealed in this series, a

number of questions are revealed: If the argument being made in seminal Cultural Studies theory

is that circuits of culture depend upon both producer and consumer, what happens when both

producer and consumer are included together within the televisual text? Does this deconstruct the

process of cultural production or uphold its machinations with new kinds of opacity? And, how

does this affect the reception, enjoyment, and pleasure of the televisual text? The production

tactics revealed in this chapter show that the crew is presented in ways that make them appear

amiable, warm, relatable, and not imposing, while the production continues to uphold its

authority over the entire process and the crew has the last word more often than not. What results

in the confirmation of this framework of authority affects the cast, altering their agency and

autonomy whether or not they agree to participate in ways that follow the network’s terms.

The Outcast: Farrah Abraham

While the themes of empowerment and overcoming the odds are woven throughout Teen

Mom OG, agency is treated in more complicated ways. At different points throughout the series,

many of the main characters express apprehension regarding their participation in the production,

challenging the normalization of surveillance and participation. This apprehension is framed as a

continuation of the upheaval the characters experience in their filmed lives and is incorporated

into the televisual flow of Teen Mom OG to embolden the overall mood that vacillates between

tension and ease. The production capitalizes on this upheaval, piecing together the narrative in

order to promote the kind of single-mindedness that author Barbara Ehrenreich refers to as

“reckless optimism,” ensure ongoing participation in acts that blur the lines of the public and

private, and framing potential revelatory acts within structures that [further] normalize the

control of the production (Bright-sided 24). Most of the cast complies with this agreement.

The characters who refuse to participate or express frustration about the production

process suffer consequences within the televised narrative by, for example, being vilified, placed

in a position of pity, or dropped from the show altogether. Value is asserted in this program

through the participation as well as the assertions of participation as a representation of an

embrace of self-commodification and cultural production. Unlike the other cast members who

threaten to leave at different points throughout the series but never do, Farrah recognizes her

capacity to act independently and make decisions on her own, eventually deciding in the 2018

season to part ways with MTV for good. The conflict is captured on tape, and the footage is

included in a multi-episode storyline as part of a multi-season flow of tension that reaches all the

way back to the first episode of Teen Mom OG in 2015. In the first season, Maci objects to

having Farrah return to the show because of her participation in an adult film. Unlike some of the

other cast members, whose only venture away from the MTV brand are book deals, a few small

clothing lines, or reality shows that capitalize on their existing visibility as it is connected to

MTV and to Teen Mom OG, Farrah expands her reach by starring on such shows as the British

installment of Celebrity Big Brother and VH1’s Couples Therapy. The appearances hinge as

much on her connection to MTV and the 16 and Pregnant/Teen Mom OG as they do on her

infamy from involvement in productions unrelated to the network and series. Like her return to

Teen Mom OG after appearing in a leaked sex tape (that may have been planned from the start),

all of the reality experiences external to MTV were wrought with drama.

Seizing the opportunity, Farrah capitalizes on that drama to propel her brand toward

global recognition, no matter her characterization or the consequences. It is a form of agency she

seizes, but it requires a different relationship to the production process than MTV wishes for her

because of the Teen Mom brand. The complicated form of agency embodied by Farrah is one

made of a different artifice than MTV cosigns, therefore rendering Farrah a liability. Farrah

undergoes multiple plastic surgeries, enjoys the tangled identity of young mother, entrepreneur,

and adult entertainer, but this proves outside the brand identity envisioned by MTV.

Later seasons of Teen Mom OG show Farrah exploring many career paths including

owning a frozen yogurt franchise, booking speaking engagements at entrepreneurial events and

conferences, doing celebrity appearances at nightclubs, and running a furniture store. In

numerous scenes in the 2018 season, Farrah and various producers and crew erupt in tension

over Farrah’s attitude and her potentially lucrative offers to star in adult-related content online.

While all of the cast members explore their career moves in the series, it is Farrah’s choice to

explore the field of adult entertainment that MTV does not condone. Ultimately this particular

issue deepens the rift and leads to her subsequent break with MTV. With the other cast members,

ideology is dispensed through a combination of fun, easy, palatable moments in conversation

with ongoing bits of tension and conflict that capture the viewer’s attention. Yet ideology can

also be dispensed by revealing the consequences that happen to those not falling in line. The

characterization of Farrah as an unsavory, “difficult” participant is evident from the very first

episode of Teen Mom OG even before Farrah returns to the show as a regular cast member.

As the tension between Farrah and the production escalates, Teen Mom OG includes her

explosive interactions with producers of the series, always emphasizing Abraham’s volatility in

the final edit. The episodes in which she engages in the conflict with producers receive extensive

coverage in online blogs and entertainment talk shows, fueling the tension even further and

strengthening her brand visibility, despite the negative backlash. The conflict between Farrah,

the other cast members, and the [onscreen and behind-the-scenes] producers is presented as a

liability, and her communication with the producers is presented as discord unfit for the network.

But a critical interrogation of the series suggests that the actual conflict lies within Farrah’s

willingness to prioritize her body as a commodity in adult films and web series while

simultaneously commodifying her immaterial labor within her domestic space for MTV.

In the March 12, 2018 episode (“Choose Your Path”), Farrah sits down with Executive

Producer Morgan J. Freeman to discuss her future with the network and the series. Episodes

leading up to the confrontation reveal Farrah arguing with junior producers over their treatment

of her daughter and their “attitude” toward Farrah and her family during filming. The February

26, 2018 episode (“I’m Beautiful, I’m Smart, I’m Strong”) sets up the conflict by showing

extensive footage of the producers and crew chatting about Farrah’s insufferable demeanor and

career choices. The producers head to Texas for a sit-down, after which Farrah ultimately quits.

On the series and in online coverage of the conflict, MTV and its producers are portrayed as the

reasonable party engaging with an unstable young woman. Yet it is crucial to remember that the

choice being highlighted as problematic is simply Farrah’s wish to exercise a right to control her

brand apart from and beyond Teen Mom and MTV.

What Farrah’s narrative points to is the implementation of a structure of authority

imposed upon the cast members within which the young women and their family members are

asked to follow the directive of the producers or risk consequences. Like other messaging

embedded within the series, the vilification of Farrah and favorable representation of MTV are

repeated throughout the season until Farrah’s departure. These repetitions become ritualized as

the continue through the series, supporting the way meaning is infused into the televisual text.

By utilizing a somewhat friendly tone, the producers who appear in the series put themselves in

the position of the relatable confidante that the cast adores. By doing so, the producers enforce a

pre-existing hierarchy of authority and power upon both cast member and viewer. Characters

such as Farrah are vilified in the series not only because they are difficult to work with, but also

because they refuse to be obedient to the type of performed transparency and opacity put in place

by the production. In the end, despite Farrah’s departure from the series – or perhaps because of

it – the frameworks put into place remain intact, and the remaining cast members continue their

ongoing work or self-commodification within the structures of power that require this ongoing

work.

Conclusion

By scrutinizing Teen Mom OG, the imprint of ideology on the cultural product begins to

reveal itself. The inclusion of the crew within the series is made to appear as if it is breaking

down the divide between producer and participant in fun, mutually agreed upon ways that frame

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the production and cast as equals. And yet, the production upholds this divide and the existing

hierarchy of authority in ways that are enacted with new and complicated methods. Not only

does Teen Mom OG rely on commodification to perpetuate ideology, it also complicates the role

of the producer of culture through the use and representation of the onscreen crew. This

complicated terrain of producer, consumer, and producer alongside the consumer reveals the

ways this visual landscape informs the process of media reception and affects our understanding

of media and culture.

In order to frame the ways that the tactics used in Teen Mom OG work to build a

narrative that functions within an ongoing neoliberal project designed to retain a passive,

obedient audience while supporting the production and producers of culture, it is important to

consider the theoretical underpinnings that reveal themselves in this study. An understanding of

how labor, alienation, and pleasure are carried within media designed to retain a structure of

power rooted in capital and profit is necessary to media literacy on many levels.

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Chapter 3: Media and Cultural Studies Frameworks

"I saw otters in real life, which was very exciting for me. I love otters, big fan! So I post about it

on Instagram, ‘cause that’s how you prove life happened.”

- Michelle Wolf in Michelle Wolf: Joke Show (2019)

Teen Mom OG is a popular MTV series about young mothers navigating motherhood,

family life, relationship issues, and the perks and consequences of agreeing to have their lives

taped six years after they first appeared on the MTV docuseries 16 and Pregnant in 2009. In

each episode of Teen Mom OG, the viewer is welcomed into the cast members’ homes and

relationships to view what is presented as any typical day in their lives. Daily dramas such as

interpersonal conflicts, custody issues, drug abuse, and mental health concerns are woven into a

narrative that places onscreen production crew alongside the cast as costars.

What Teen Mom OG does is publicly present what typically takes place in private,

domestic spaces. In doing so, the private sphere is transformed into a site for ongoing

commodification of the self. This process reveals a significant shift in the concept of labor. It

also situates what was once typically unseen (or not seen in this manner) within a performative

framework that necessitates continuous publicized labor. The quote at the beginning of this

chapter, stated by comedian Michelle Wolf in her 2019 Netflix stand-up special Michelle Wolf:

Joke Show illustrates the way capitalism becomes internalized and the way individuals now feel

compelled to perform acts that publicize private moments, feelings, and sites of pleasure in order

to feel legitimate or validated. Yet these acts may actually contribute to the individual becoming

even less connected to the self than before.

Labor, Capital, and Social Reproduction Theory

Teen Mom OG reveals significant theoretical considerations of capital, power, and public

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and private labor. In examining the labor that workers provide in order to generate profit, Social

Reproduction Theory scholars ask an important question: Who produces the worker? By asking

this question, theorists in this field of inquiry attempt to address the importance of the kind of

labor that takes place outside the typical workday that informs and shapes the worker. This

question provides a starting point for the research into the ideologies of self-commodification

and alienation that are embedded in Teen Mom OG. In the third volume of Capital, Karl Marx

discusses public and private labor and the alienation the worker feels in the productive sphere,

where the worker “only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He

is at home when he is not working, and when he is working, he is not at home” (959). In their

research, Social Reproduction Theory scholars emphasize the work done in private spaces (such

as the home) that allow the worker to then contribute what Marxist theory positions as the labor

that produces capital and wealth in society. This labor is ongoing, as the worker becomes

compelled to incessantly create the commodity and replicate this process.

Teen Mom OG publicizes and commodifies the cast performing these at-home practices,

diminishing and/or eliminating any privacy from the away-from-work spaces that Marx

considers the sole sites where individuals are themselves (meaning where they are connected to

the “species-being” or “species-essence”). On Teen Mom OG, the “at home,” which is typically

considered separate from the labor that produces capital, is now transformed into a site where

domestic, private, intangible labor is made profitable. By publicizing the private, it appears there

are no longer any spaces away from forms of labor that alienate because the private and domestic

have become coopted by neoliberal corporate capitalism. The tactics of metacommentary and

self-reflexivity that are employed in the production contribute to a false sense of agency through

which the cast is actually further alienated from the labor they provide and the means of

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production.

The process of alienation dwarfs and potentially eliminates the connection to the self as

well as to community. Reality TV contributes to complicated processes of off-site (away from

the traditional) labor that individuals increasingly perform publicly and on social media in

promotion of this labor. The function of the culture industry is to underwrite the ideological

positionings that these exploitative systems and processes support. Television programs such as

Teen Mom OG make these ideological impositions appear manageable or even appealing by

presenting them in ways that appear benign. The mechanisms utilized by the producers of this

televisual product make this private-made-public labor digestible for the viewer who then may

internalize these ideologies of labor, performativity, and self-commodification in everyday life.

Many scholars working in Social Reproduction Theory emphasize the importance of

understanding and prioritizing the labor that takes place away from the typical work environment

or working hours. A Marxist understanding of this labor is crucial to a deeper understanding of

what produces the worker. And, understanding what produces the worker helps understand the

tactics used to effectively and seamlessly invite the consumer into the process of endless private

labor made public that cements the individual’s place within the hierarchy of power. The

production tactics that are used to present a seemingly transparent cast, crew, narrative, and

filming process disperse the problematic elements of this exploitative environment to the tame

margins of comprehension. This is done while the consumer is asked to focus their attention

elsewhere. This distraction is successful because of the emphasis on the easily digestible

processes. One process is looking at life from a position of distance, either once removed from

the event itself (which can be considered “looking at looking”). Another might be looking from a

position twice removed by repetitiously emphasizing the self (which can be considered

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“performing to be seen”) while existing at a distance from the actual event taking place. These

distancing processes support the ongoing commodification of the self and contribute to the

perpetuation of a hollow culture of individualism that allows for the system of capitalism and its

gatekeepers to thrive and to rob the individual, the worker, and the consumer of their “species-

being” or “species-essence.” What is promoted as a way of being that seemingly brings people

deeper into themselves actually does the opposite by further alienating individuals and inviting

them to perform increasingly toxic forms of self-commodification that exacerbate the

exploitative nature of competitive individualism under neoliberal capitalism.

In Social Reproduction Theory, the life of the worker outside the workday is prioritized

as a site of inquiry. Rather than consider the worker’s private and/or unpaid labor irrelevant or

not instrumental to understanding the functions of capitalism and the hierarchies of power, these

scholars choose instead, as Tithi Bhattacharya explains, to “interrogate the complex network of

social processes and human relations that produces the conditions of existence for that entity”

(2). With Teen Mom OG, the footage is filmed mostly inside the homes of its cast members, in

domestic spaces and in seemingly private familial moments so that the viewer then sees the

home life of the characters on television. What is presented in the series is private physical

(tangible) and emotional (intangible) labor done primarily in domestic spaces (at-home

interactions, conversations about childcare, relationships, daycare and parent custody exchange

points in parks, cars, and nondescript public spaces, and home improvement projects). But with

Teen Mom OG, the process (as Dubrofsky explains) of taking real-life moments and creating a

constructed fiction called reality TV takes place within a framework where this private labor is

not presented as labor. As a result, the notion that Marx outlines where the worker only feels

himself outside his work becomes complicated, because the private sphere is now the onscreen

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character’s workspace made public.

Alienation and Teen Mom OG

In consideration of Marx’s theory of alienation as it relates to Teen Mom OG, workers

undergo alienation from themselves through the process of an increasingly intrusive environment

where the home becomes the workplace, and the worker essentially never leaves. In this case,

both the cast members and the onscreen crew members who are included in the narrative

potentially suffer certain burdens of alienation, but in different ways. While neither the cast nor

crew are factory workers and cannot be considered in the same manner as Marx’s understanding

of alienation in the mechanistic part of society, a form of alienation still takes place. Following

Marx’s line of thinking, cast and onscreen crew who sell their labor power are both potentially

alienated from their labor as a result of their economic, social, and cultural capital being

inextricably tied to their participation on this particular series in support of the MTV and Teen

Mom brand. Because of this, the private life of the cast member is coopted into the cast

member’s labor power and made a commodity to be sold through the series. In the process, the

life of the onscreen crew member is also forever altered because of their inclusion in this

televised process. The difference here lies in the literal and the performed role that each

participant embodies.

Onscreen, the crew is presented as doing their job, while the nature of the series – and

much of reality TV itself – functions to present the cast not as explicitly working, but instead as

living while the crew works by filming their daily lives. This distinction serves the production,

for it supports the framework of authority that the tone of the series attempts to soften by

showing the cast and crew as friends and collaborators. While alienation may affect both cast and

crew, the authority of the production remains relatively untouched, while the cast members’ lives

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are changed forever. The crew can leave the production, while the cast are tethered to the

production in multiple intertwined ways. And, in keeping with Marx’s theoretical outline, the

process of alienation also affects the relationship between individuals, changing the structure of

social life in contemporary culture itself. According to Marx, “in the relation of alienated labor

every man sees the others according to the standard and the relation in which he finds himself as

a worker” (qtd. in Simon 65). Marx points to the competition that arises as a consequence of the

process of alienation. The cast of Teen Mom OG – in an environment and a genre that thrives on

competition and drama – internalize this way of being, perpetuating it as part of their job, while

the onscreen and offscreen crew continue to navigate and manage the narrative and its characters

even if they appear not to.

The hierarchy of authority embedded in the framework of the series allows for the

onscreen crew member to inhabit sites away from their work where they may return to that

“species-essence” as examined by Marx. Paired with the established role of the crew and

onscreen producers, the freedom to leave work facilitates the autonomy of the onscreen crew

regardless of their inclusion in the televisual text. Because of the fame and visibility of the cast

members, the actual spaces and opportunities outside the cast member’s contribution as a

working participant on the series diminish as the processes of self-commodification become

increasingly prominent and overwhelm the cast member’s sense of actual community, self, and

worth. The series, which requires drama and conflict in order to retain viewers, hinges on the

exploitation that causes this alienation to propel the narrative. It is generally true, as queer

activist, author, and professor of sociology Alan Sears explains, that “in capitalist societies, there

is a separation between household and workplace,” but with Teen Mom OG (as with other reality

shows that highlight domestic life), this separation is collapsed and in many ways undone in

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order to present a product that generates profit through ratings, advertising, and the social media

reach of promotional content (“Body Politics: The Social Reproduction of Sexualities" 179).

Private labor and the labor power of the cast are now commodified in the public realm, even as

this labor is packaged as entertainment and presented simply as a glimpse into a young mother’s

home life.

Economics scholar Serap Saritas Oran examines the understanding of labor power

through interrogating Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s concept of the

decommodification of labor power. Oran reminds the reader that under capitalism, “workers

themselves become commodities when they must rely on their labor power for survival and

compete with one another to sell their labor power” (160). This process is made complex when

this competition involves publicizing the private and the domestic on shows such as Teen Mom

OG. The competition involves being so transparent that one’s personal life – part of what Marx

considers the time when the worker feels the most connected to a true self – becomes the

commodity being utilized for profit. And to keep this process continuous, the program employs

such strategies as bringing the cast and crew on camera appearing as friendly equals to make this

competition look pleasurable. Yet as author and Jacobin editor Nicole Aschoff explains, under

Marxist considerations of the issue, “even though workers and investors meet each other in the

marketplace, they do not confront each other as equals (…) Workers are free to sell their ability

to work for a wage, but history also ‘freed’ them from owning the means to support themselves

in any other way” (71). Utilizing such strategies as self-reflexivity, metacommentary, and

breaking the fourth wall to include the crew alongside the cast underwrites hegemonic structures

of power and cancels any other significant means of support, self-actualization, or agency

outside the framework of capital.

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Labor and Teen Mom OG

The publicized domestic moments on Teen Mom OG are comprised of acts and processes

of labor. The producers unmask the private labor that takes place inside the homes of these cast

members and embed it into new frameworks of labor to commodify the cast members’

participation for profit. They do this while also simultaneously presenting parts of their own

labor for the viewer within the narrative. This publicizing of the private and its repercussions

mirror the ways that culture at large (with the help of social media) has taken a turn toward an

emphasis of the personal and a neoliberal emphasis on competitive individualism over legitimate

consideration of critical engagement, and a genuine consideration of the collective. This process

of publicizing the private reveals the exploitative functions of the culture industry in ways that

are new to this televisual genre. It is true, as Aschoff explains, that “the vast majority of people

go to jobs that were not created to meet human needs but to give the owners of capital a return on

their investment….not to satisfy human needs or provide for the common good” (2). What

Aschoff points to is an oppressive framework that favors a certain population and requires the

ongoing labor of another.

This ongoing labor results in what Sipiora explains as an estrangement that occurs “when

people are separated from the process of externalization so that the what, how, and why of their

life activities is determined by forces both independent and alien to them. Alienation is thus

understood as a disruption of the relationships which structure the human world” (182). What is

taking place, in part with the support of such cultural products as Teen Mom OG, is a change to

the structure of the world in favor of welcoming, adopting and internalizing increasingly

exploitative practices that erode the strength and power of collective action that supports the

common good. The labor that results in this alienation requires upkeep, which requires the

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ongoing use of ideological apparatuses that help retain the worker and physical practices enacted

by the individual to uphold this process. The success of the perpetuation of these ideologies of

labor, power, and hegemony requires an embrace and internalizing by the general public. In

short, it requires framing ideology within a process that produces pleasure. How do the producers

of culture enforce the mechanisms of capitalism in ways that are subtle or even pleasurable?

Through the culture industry!

Producers of culture enforce mechanisms of capital, commodification, and alienation by

infusing the ideologies of capitalism into the everyday items, products, and events that the

consumer can enjoy in what Pierre Bourdieu (1977) explains as the imprints that form our

habitus or our socially ingrained habits, responses, or dispositions. As the detrimental elements

of these imprints of ideology become increasingly normalized through the consumption of

cultural products, publicizing private labor is made to feel pleasant, enjoyable, and necessary to

life and to achieving capital of all kinds. Aschoff is correct in her assertion that “for capitalism to

survive and thrive, people must willingly participate in and reproduce its structures and norms”

(2). One of the tools that supports these norms is the screen, which is examined by scholars such

as Aschoff and Sherry Turkle. As Sipiora explains, “the television screen becomes the

psychological world and, as we gaze into its mirror, a vicarious self-knowledge is programmed

through the stories told” (185). That Teen Mom OG (like other shows) obscures the labor

involved by framing it simply as at-home living with a friendly crew that appears to be casually

and amiably surveilling the cast’s every move for as long as is humanly possible reveals the

ways the televisual reinforces the structures and norms of capitalism. This is especially important

in Teen Mom OG because the program is targeted to young viewers beginning to embark upon a

lifetime of various forms of labor and the commodification of their own public and private lives.

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To make labor not look like labor, and to make the exploitation of labor power not feel

exploitative – while bringing the private into the public – requires the ongoing and repeated or

ritualized commodification of the self so that consumers internalize and embody the ideological

apparatuses that propel this process. A question that follows: How does Teen Mom OG make

publicizing the private labor enacted by its cast palatable, relatable, and enjoyable for the

viewer?

Individualism, Self-Actualization, and the Culture of Narcissism

In his examination of our American culture of narcissism (from the end of World War II

to the 1970s when he wrote the text), historian and social critic Christopher Lasch attempted to

understand culture through an examination of psychoanalytic terms and frameworks. He did so

to illuminate a period in western culture when psychoanalysis and varying modes of therapeutic

means of self-discovery were employed within a larger ideological movement. His was an

understanding of the burdens of capitalism and the infusion of commodification into the

everyday habits and rituals of the masses. The exploitative underbelly of this consumerist

framework continues to reveal itself today. Within this period of post-World War II American

enlightenment are revelatory moments that problematize this purportedly therapeutic and

empowering mode and reveal a narcissism masked as self-exploration and self-actualization.

Lasch examined various examples of “the culture of competitive individualism, which in its

decadence has carried the logic of individualism to the extreme of a war on all against all, the

pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self” (xv). The

culture that Lasch criticizes and laments is one that operates under the premise of individualism

as a channel toward deliverance and liberation. The ideology of American individualism is

supported in programs like Teen Mom OG by rooting the pleasure of witnessing individuals

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watching and performing various versions of the self for the camera within a competitive

capitalist framework that is made to appear appealing and relatable. This individualism rests

within two coexisting notions: the capitalist receives the benefits of the worker individual, and

the individual must conduct themself as a self-commodifying entity in order to succeed within

capitalism. Yet within this process lie the conditions that Marxist theory confronts as

manipulative and wholly exploitative of the labor of the working subject. As media scholars

Toby Miller and Alec McHoul assert, “For radicals, the taste for therapy and personal growth is a

bourgeois phenomenon, a luxury of commercial interiorization unavailable to those preoccupied

with subsistence living” (96). Programs such as Teen Mom OG address this phenomenon,

romanticizing these bourgeois notions to infuse them into the viewer’s consciousness while

simultaneously perpetuating them in every episode. By presenting a cast consisting primarily of

lower middle class and working-class young women attaining various forms of capital as a result

of their participation in the publicizing of their private lives, the possibility of class ascendance

and increase in various forms of capital appear tenable and possible for the viewer. But this

ascendance requires new, perpetually replicating forms of sacrifice and is not tied to any specific

talent, athleticism, intellectual prowess, or ability to strategically maneuver in any sort of

competitive arena. Within the televisual text, these sacrifices must be made to appear

manageable enough to disguise the authoritative manner with which they govern the individual.

The culture which Lasch illuminates is one where “strategies of narcissistic survival now

present themselves as emancipation from the repressive conditions of the past, thus giving rise to

a ‘cultural revolution’ that reproduces the worst features of the collapsing civilization it claims to

criticize” (xv). Lasch’s argument that the repressive shackles that are seemingly cast away but

are actually reinforced in the ideologies of self-commodification resonate even now (see De Vos,

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2010). Lasch highlighted the development of this culture of narcissism with an examination

focused on psychology and theory. As the tactics that perpetuate this narcissism masked as self-

exploration and self-improvement became increasingly infused into popular televisual texts in

the 1980s and 90s – first with daytime talk shows, and later with the confessional aspects within

early reality TV crafted for mass consumption – the emphasis on the self was infused into a

consumerist ideology where self-analysis and self-promotion became conjoined. Scholars such

as Janice Peck have examined the confessional elements to what can be called an “Oprah

phenomenon” in its influence on culture. As Aschoff explains (referring to Peck’s work),

“Oprah’s evolution from pathologizing problems to spiriting them away is mirrored in the

evolution of neoliberalism starting in the 1980s” (87). Viewers who look up to such cultural

icons as Oprah engage in a parasocial connection to the onscreen icon. Grasping onto the

aspirational tone infused into the Oprah brand, her fans often wish to emulate her approach,

which she presents as wholly embracing habits, rituals and practices rooted in the consumption

and practice of self-improvement and wellness products, exercises, and conversations.

Thus, the shift from critical self-examination as connected to self within a community

and its potential collective growth to a neoliberal, consumer-based self-help approach that is

rooted in individualism and easily allows for the exploitative mechanisms and consumerist

frameworks of the producers of culture takes place. The viewer does not immediately realize this

is taking place, because, as Aschoff reminds her reader, “Oprah is appealing precisely because

her stories hide the role of political, economic, and social structures” (100). And in hiding this

role, the hierarchy of power within culture is protected, all while the promises of the American

Dream are dispensed and upheld through the messages, representations, and products offered to

the viewer. This hierarchy of power and authority is retained and reproduced in programs such as

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Teen Mom OG even as it is presented in ways that make it appear broken down in favor of the

cast member as representative of the empowered individual and not as a worker beholden to the

producers of culture.

The evolution of this commodified individualism is one that gives rise to a guise of self-

exploration within conventional consumerist boundaries. Elements integral to the holistic

approach to spiritual enlightenment are now infused into this consumerist framework. The

repetitive mantra, for example, is now less about spiritual practice, and more about a ritualized

repetition of a commodified spirituality often connected to products and gadgets and wellness

plans for sale. The focus turns from understanding the self, to performing an understanding of

the self for the goal of self-promotion, brand expansion, and self-commodification. The shift in

content on Oprah’s daytime talk show in the early 2000s reveals this evolution. Reality TV

weaves these complicated matters into messages that mirror those in daytime talk shows. The

reality TV genre both obscures and reinforces the ideologies it asks its viewers to adopt through

a process of escape from the difficulties of reality and pleasure in the act of watching television.

Television itself succeeds in dispensing these signs and symbols because of the way the medium

functions and because of its ability to provide seemingly endless televisual imagery and stimuli.

This constant and ongoing televisual mechanism which began in the analog age and adapted to

the digital age and to social media is part of a natural evolution of the process of televisual flow

in the culture industry.

Televisual flow

The study of the landscape within which exists this ongoing and unending need for

content, labor, and commodification that reinforces and reproduces power has roots in Cultural

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Studies scholarship. Theorist Raymond Williams investigated the concept of the flow of

televisual messages in 1974, acknowledging the existence of “interruptions” (via the television

commercial, for example) to a continuous stream of broadcast imagery. Challenging the existing

understanding of interruptions to the televisual, Williams examined how modern broadcast

television presents imagery – and its signs, symbols, and ideologies – in a manner that comprises

an uninterrupted flow geared toward the television consumer. What is being offered, Williams

argues, is not, “in older terms, a programme of discrete units with particular insertions, but a

planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of programme items but this

sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, so that these sequences

together compose the real flow” of broadcasting itself. (91) Television, as Williams sees it, is less

about distinct and discreet visual narratives, the way one may refer to a book or a magazine

article, or even a film, but a continuous flow of images and, in turn, an ongoing presentation of

their representation of ideology. As Williams sees it, one does not really watch specific shows

rather than watching television as a whole. When reality TV officially became a staple in

televisual culture in the early 21

century, as Curnutt explains, “The significance of this moment

was also reflected in the way reality TV’s participants went from being ‘on television’ to being

‘on reality TV’” (1061). Teen Mom OG – as part of a larger franchise including but not limited to

16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom – is no different in its approach. As with most other reality

programs, the flow moves from the series to other series that exist alongside it, to blogs and

websites about it in an endless flow of content for the viewer to peruse or engage with in a

number of different ways.

Not only does reality TV follow Williams’ understanding of flow in terms of

broadcasting, narrative, and access, but, in this new age of digital technology and surveillance

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practices, televisual texts now perpetuate the flow of continuous visibility through surveillance,

self-surveillance, 24-hour access to news, entertainment, and related online content. If, in

Williams’ time, the shift moved from watching a specific film, play, or musical event to the

process of “watching television,” it is now one step further with the advent of online access.

There is rarely a time – save for power outage or mass catastrophe – where our access to content

is interrupted. The access to thousands of titles, memes, tweets, films, and commentary online is

advertised and promoted as a way to ease or inspire the consumer through the process of choice,

but the end result may also be considered as an all-encompassing blob.

The flow of televisual content in contemporary online culture allows the viewer

the ability to binge-watch an entire TV series in one sitting or view content on a phone, tablet, or

computer at any hour of the day. One may watch something while simultaneously looking up its

cast members’ social media pages or recent tweets. And, as revealed in the study conducted by

Kearney and Levine, 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom did spark new forms of engagement

whereby fans simultaneously checked social media before, during, and after watching the new

episode of their favorite television show about teen mothers. Viewers have moved from watching

specific programs to watching television to consuming content. And, as content is now available

anytime, so is the need for new content to be generated and displayed at all times. This need is

met with such an abundant output of televisual texts that the competition for viewership is

intensified and met with new tactics such as characters perpetually performing self-reflexivity

and metacommentary in their publicized private spaces to invite viewership through seemingly

endless visibility.

The flow, in the 21

century, is one that requires ongoing consent to surveillance,

acquiescence to the authority embedded in the hierarchy of power in cultural production, and the

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breakdown of boundaries between public and private. This requirement of ongoing and

increasing obedience to and participation in practices that pacify and dilute individual agency

necessitates the implementation of tactics that normalize production processes that require

visibility, surveillance, and consent. These tactics are used to normalize the flow of the televisual

and the system of authority and power within which the televisual resides. The most enticing

way that producers of culture have been able to court viewership as a means to invite consumers

to engage in this process of flow is by emphasizing the compulsive act of looking at oneself. The

embedding of ideological messaging that promotes acts focusing on the self occurs on multiple

levels, be it within a particular program, in multiple programs in conversation with one another,

or in layers of media under an overarching umbrella of visual content. And the motivator within

such visual content is what viewers find enjoyable, fun, exciting, enthralling, and pleasurable.

Organizing Pleasure and the Act of Viewing

What drives viewers to continue watching is the pursuit of pleasure. Ang considers the

kinds of pleasure experienced or obtained from the act of watching television. In her research on

viewer responses to the popular 1970s television series Dallas, Ang confronts the process by

which pleasure is produced. She begins with the reminder that many scholars point to by

connecting television and advertising: “Nobody is forced to watch television; at most, people can

be led to it by effective advertising. What then are the determining factors of this enjoyment, this

pleasure?” (9) Her examination delves into the functions involved in watching television. Ang’s

consideration offers an understanding of the mechanisms that are enacted in organizing pleasure

for the viewer. As she explains, “It is in the actual confrontation between viewer and programme

that pleasure is primarily generated” (10). Ang points to the relationship between viewer and

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onscreen talent as well as to the solitary and collective acts of receiving and decoding meaning

from within the televisual text.

Ang explores what she identifies as the ideology of mass culture, which places “bad

objects” such as Dallas, talk shows and other low culture “trash” TV in comparison or in

contrast with high culture or “good culture” which may be more intellectually stimulating or

aesthetically pleasing (94). What is key to the way viewers differentiate between bad and good in

their response to the televisual text is embedded in performing this ideology of mass culture.

Whether employing irony or humor into their response, or downplaying interest in the cultural

product by prefacing expressions of interest with criticism, the response to the way pleasure is

organized or produced reveals the potential sites of agency for the viewer as well as the

tendencies to deflect which may perpetuate passivity among the viewer.

The construction of Teen Mom OG makes it such that the confrontation between viewer

and the series includes more layers to it than other programs in which the crew is not featured

prominently. What this inclusion may do if the process of viewing is appealing for the viewer, is

suggest (in not-so-subtle ways) that the confrontation become infused with acts of self-promotion

in the way the cast of the series does and figures of authority – as represented by the crew in

relatively favorable light – support. The process of engaging with the feeling of pleasure is

coopted by the invitation to engage in ways that require labor and obedience but are framed

visually and technically as simply living on camera.

With Teen Mom OG, the reconfiguration of the mechanisms of pleasure contribute to the

experience of watching the program. And, as the possibilities of engaging with multiple

platforms while watching television grow, what is important to consider when examining the

reception of this televisual flow by closely reading the blog pages and fan comments is whether

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or not viewers engage in ways that stretch beyond the passive consumption of the television

series. How are the responses rooted in the expressions of the ideology of mass culture? How do

viewers perceive the cast and crew, and what does that reveal? Do the online responses from

Teen Mom OG fans simply reveal another manifestation of the ideology of mass culture, or do

viewers create new forms of community, connection, and critical consideration in their

interactions about the show? And, how do the problematic and potentially exploitative

ideological messages embedded in the series compel viewers to adopt or reject the habits, acts,

and practices normalized in the series in ways that will potentially help or hurt them?

Looking at Looking

One practice revealed in Teen Mom OG and in other reality programs is something that

may be called “looking at looking.” This is where the process of watching or of participation is

documented and then prioritized over the actual event that is taking place. “Looking at looking”

shares some elements with metacognition, which is generally explained as “thinking about

thinking.” According to scholar Jennifer A. Livingston who cites and examines the work of

developmental psychologist and researcher John Flavell (1979,1987), “metacognition consists of

both metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive experiences or regulation. Metacognitive

knowledge refers to acquired knowledge about cognitive processes, knowledge that can be used

to control cognitive processes” (3). Livingston summarizes Flavel’s studies by outlining three

categories: Knowledge of person variables, task variables and strategy variables. The

implementation of metacognitive practices is linked to an increase in reaching cognitive goals

such that, “Cognitive strategies are used to help an individual achieve a particular goal (e.g.

understanding a text) while metacognitive strategies are used to ensure that the goal has been

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reached (e.g. quizzing oneself to evaluate one's understanding of that text)” (4). Livingston adds

that metacognitive acts often occur when cognition fails, and the individual performs self-

assessment in order to devise strategies for future cognition and success. While metacognition is

referred to in the self-reflexive and metacommentary acts that drive reality TV, the difference

lies in the site of power that is engaged.

When considering “looking at looking” and its manifestations in self-reflexive televisual

content or metacommentary in popular cultural products, critical thinking is not the primary

emphasis. The turn to oneself is emphasized as a perpetual enactment of self-involvement that

producers of culture coopt in order to create a successful series, brand, and cultural product. The

turn inward is managed by external forces of capital. Further, while processes such as

metacognition aim to enrich the individual with tools (or the search for tools) for better cognition

or thinking, self-reflexivity and metacommentary in Teen Mom OG is often nudged along by the

onscreen producers, such that the end result takes the agency embedded in the cognition,

understanding, or problem-solving away from the cast member. This mode of cultural production

and courting viewers bears significance in the ways it is inscribed with value, and the way it

underwrites acts that support continuous [paid and unpaid, public and private] labor. For,

inscribed in the perpetual enactment of self-involvement as supported by the onscreen producers

is the acquiescence that perpetually upholds structures of power. This acquiescence is achieved

on Teen Mom OG not only with positive representations of publicizing the private for profit and

various forms of capital, but with moments of conflict or refusal to participate that also enforce

these frameworks as well.

As Aschoff explains, “at the systemic level, critical voices are productive and fruitful for

capitalism, forcing capitalism to evolve and temporarily resolve some of its contradictions and

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thus preserving it as a system for the long haul” (3). While a threat to quit by cast members on

any television series may seem dangerous, when it is infused by the producers and editors into

the narrative, it becomes utilized as a critical voice that continues to perpetuate ideologies of

capitalism, labor, and surveillance. The frustrated or disgruntled cast members on Teen Mom OG

whose exasperation over having their private lives publicized almost always decides to continue

filming, in part because their participation in the filming process seems to uphold their cultural,

social, and financial capital. And, most of the potentially “metacognitive” moments that the cast

may have undergone to reach certain decisions are conveniently omitted from the final cut of

each episode. Capital in this case requires continued allegiance to MTV and the Teen Mom

brand. While this allegiance is somewhat profitable to the cast members, it is contingent on labor

which favors the network rather than the individual. This framework does not translate in the

same way to the average working person who is not supported by a multi-million-dollar

television network. Thus, the ideology presented in the televisual text, while aspirational for the

viewer, is ultimately illusory. And, when adapted into everyday life, the framework upheld by

these ideological apparatuses confirms and perpetuates social, economic, and structural

inequality while simultaneously supporting the continued passivity of the viewer and reality TV

fan.

The pleasure in watching television is often explained in Media Studies as an escape, a

rejection of what plagues the viewer’s everyday, mundane life. Yet according to literary and

cultural critic Michael Wood, entertainment is not, “as we often think, a full-scale flight from our

problems, not a means of forgetting them completely, but rather a rearrangement of our problems

into shapes, which tame them, which disperse them to the margins of our attention” (18). Taming

these problems makes them easier to digest. Making these problems appear relatable and at the

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same time more burdensome than the viewer’s own life also appeals to the consumer. This

paradoxical rearrangement of problems delivers the viewer the opportunity to find safe, often

passive pleasure in the viewing process. Pleasure, it seems, lies in passively consuming rather

than actively engaging in the televisual text. This behavior may then become incorporated by the

viewer into daily life when the performed self-reflexivity witnessed on the television screen is

adopted under the illusion of agency and without consideration of its consequences, diminishing

the authentic and genuine connections to self (that actual metacognition embodies) and to

community that the televisual appears to support. Teen Mom OG reveals the ways in which MTV

has taken its cues from social media and online culture to embed their own cultural products with

practices and approaches that are prevalent in the digital world that are themselves rooted in

ongoing intangible labor.

Social media practices and platforms – which emphasize “looking at looking” rather than

bearing witness to [or participating in] the actual event, problem, or discussion – increasingly

influence the taming and rearrangement of problems and concerns in everyday life. Examples in

online culture of the type of “looking at looking” that informs this study include the repetitive

nature of the 24-hour news cycle, the disappearing “story” in such apps as Instagram, Snapchat,

and Facebook (where one may design their own daily narrative using text and images), the use of

selfies (where individuals emphasize the self-portrait snapshot in front of a place or event to

online “followers” rather than simply taking a picture of the thing they happen to be looking at),

the “Share a Memory” feature on Facebook (where the online platform selects a post that the

user uploaded in the past with the option for the Facebook user to repost it to their Timeline with

a new idea or comment related to the “remembering” of that event), trends on Tik Tok where

users imitate short dance sequences that have already been performed by countless others and are

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making the rounds online, and the #ThrowbackThursday and #FlashbackFriday (#TBT/#FBF)

trends on social media platforms where users post childhood photos or related nostalgic posts

that point to older content. These tools exist under an overarching system of flow that keeps the

viewer occupied and consumed much like the way Williams viewed broadcast television as a

seamlessly flow from one program or set of visual material to the next.

These social media tools invite users to think less about what is taking place in the world

around them within a larger context of systems, mythmaking, power structures and ideology, and

more about how these events can satiate their own desires. This process of “looking at looking”

relies on the inclusion of the self in the foreground. There is trickery taking place, for it appears

as if the focal point is on the self in relation to the world, with the promise of empowerment in

the expression of the enriched self who is seeing and experiencing life. But it is actually the self

in relation only to the self in which this expression requires the endless labor of self-assertion

(which simultaneously perpetuates the alienation of the self from their labor, the products of their

labor, and their “species-being” or ‘species-essence’). This emphasis (by producers and

consumers alike) on the self only somewhat in relation to what is happening rather than in

examining and engaging with the actual events taking place also shapes the way news and

current events are reported.

On mainstream American news these days, it is often less about the actual event

transpiring. Instead, it is about the coverage of the event, and retaining, preserving, or rebuilding

the cultural capital of the reporter, pseudo-celebrity, criminal suspect, or the commentator

presenting the event. Or, it becomes about provoking reactions to the event rather than bearing

witness – as part of a community as a collective entity – to the actual thing taking place. An

examination of both the 2016 and 2020 US presidential election processes and the news coverage

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of their events reveals daily instances where actual issues were trumped by sound bites, tweets,

commentary, or revisionist spin of the items in discussion that serve to reproduce power rather

than critically motivate the audience.

Often, participants engage in what might be considered a reformulating of encoded

messaging in order to create new content which follows the negotiated or oppositional codes as

outlined by Hall in his understanding of the circuit of culture. For example, while some news

outlets focused on the events of the first night of the Democratic National Convention in July

2016, other reporters and outlets emphasized panel discussions in response to the convention or

promoted articles and stories about watching the convention taking place, sometimes from afar.

Seattle-based writer and Editor-at-Large of The Establishment Ijeoma Oluo constructed an entire

story about her night of “drunk-tweeting the DNC,” as much for entertainment value and certain

forms of pleasure and/or titillation as for a shift of focus from the actual Democratic National

Convention event to the act of watching and witnessing the event taking place. The difference

between an engaged process whereby metacommentary and/or self-reflexivity can act as a

catalyst for generative metacognition, critical engagement and a disengaged act of “looking at

looking” is rooted in whether or not the act prioritizes a resulting visibility, likes, or retweets,

which in this cultural moment are inextricably tied to capital and value whether or not they

reformulate or reimagine existing content. And many, including politicians, rely on any path to

increased and ongoing visibility, especially if it obscures other potentially damaging or

exploitative acts taking place.

According to Tony Brasunas, writing about Donald Trump on Medium online about the

2016 presidential election, ”If any candidate receives hours of coverage by the major media, for

free, every single night, for a year, he or she will win elections, and possibly the presidency”

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(par. 4). An important caveat is that misrepresentation, within this framework, is excused for the

sake of contributing to the creation of more content and viewership, which then requires ongoing

participation. This process of self-promotion becomes its own self-consuming monster, detached

from the interrogation of actual issues and events, and eventually doing little more than simply

perpetuating the process of commodification and reproducing power. Within the political context,

the approach that propelled the 2016 presidential election cycle continues in the 2020 election

race, perhaps as part of an ongoing flow of political televisual media.

This detachment from critical and genuine consideration of the event itself to focus on

“looking at looking” as an extension of self-promotion, entertainment, and popularity is as

evident in our political and cultural leaders as it is in our journalists, reporters, and entertainers.

Peter Pomerantsev explains in Granta: “We are living in a ‘post-fact’ or ‘post-truth’ world. Not

merely a world where politicians and media lie – they have always lied – but one where they

don’t care whether they tell the truth or not” (par. 1). Opinion, provocation of emotion, and

constructed public relations promotion that obscures the truth are now accepted as on par with –

and as legitimate as – fact. The supposed transparency offered with metacommentary is now

legitimized with the use of photo, video, audio, or linguistic “proof” that the consumer consumed

what was being offered for consumption. What is taken as fact in this process is not reality, but a

highly produced, performed reality designed to evoke emotion to promote products and

ideologies for a desired outcome and keep the consumer detached from the actual events taking

place that affect individuals, communities, and culture at large. This process is a form of

discipline imposed on individuals within a televisual and digital panopticon. It is visible to the

critically minded viewer. And yet, in spite of understanding it, the emphasis still tends to shift

from critical intervention of the event itself to performing the witnessing of the event, which

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devalues and conceals the importance of the event itself (and its consequences) in order to situate

the consumer as commodity. It is as if Adorno’s words have come to life. The consumer desires

the deception but asks for it to appear uncovered for their enjoyment and entertainment.

The Inauthenticity in Performing the Self as a Commodity

The reproduction of power within the culture industry requires the participation of both

producer and consumer. This is one reason why the invitation to engage in the culture industry

must be made palatable, pleasurable, and fun. In televised sporting events, the TV camera will

often pan to the crowd, where viewers see attendees watching the sport and then recognizing

themselves on the stadium TV screens that air the live feed from the camera. The camera crew

captures and presents to the at-home viewer the open access to someone looking at something

else, then becoming exponentially more excited about seeing themself on the Jumbotron,

normalizing this performative act and its embedded ideologies along the way. This tactic of

engagement is not always embedded in a spontaneous act. The 2018 Super Bowl halftime

musical performance not only featured singer Justin Timberlake belting out some of his greatest

hits, but it also highlighted fans taking selfies next to and in front of the singer as he ran through

the crowd.

The selfie takers then performed unacknowledged labor by posting their selfies on social

media. Social media users then performed additional unacknowledged labor by reposting these

selfies, making them go viral and further promoting the singer, the sporting event, and the

multimillion-dollar entertainment event backed by billion-dollar corporations such as Pepsi and

Budweiser that sponsor the sporting highlight of the year. While Timberlake himself – like all

Super Bowl performers – did not get paid for his performance, the performance offered lasting

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support of his cultural capital, overall popularity, and future profit. As Zack O'Malley Greenburg

explains in a 2018 article for Forbes, “Halftime show stars in recent years have seen double- and

triple-digit percentage spikes in the consumption of their music in the days following the Super

Bowl” (par. 5). But the success of the event required the contribution of audience members

providing labor to promote his brand online. As with the cast of Teen Mom OG, the labor by fans

at such events is made to appear fun, personally rewarding, and not actual labor, while the pop

star – like the onscreen producers and crew – are recognized as the ones working for the

enjoyment of the viewer.

The interaction between onstage talent and the selfie-taking audience members (and folks

tweeting at home) reveals its performative aspects in its emphasis on capturing and presenting

commentary supported by participants who perform unacknowledged labor rather than on

emphasizing the facts, specific event, or larger ideas themselves. When a film crew captures

imagery of individuals at sporting events, a similar process takes place. The moment of onscreen

recognition of the gaze of the camera by the sports fan reveals the process whereby the

acknowledgment of seeing and being seen then quickly transfers into performing the “seeing to

be seen.” The viewer becomes infused into the processes of production and consumption through

the act of showing they are watching as a proof of participation. These acts of “performing to be

seen” are noticeable in social media, where the initial excitement of engaging with an app or

particular networking site soon results in the user either inadvertently or intentionally promoting

the app through a variety of forms of self-expression.

On online platforms, the invitation to engage through assertions of the self requires

engagement in a promotion of the platform and the tools that offer this engagement. This

interaction results in a coopting and a commodification of the user as consumer-promoter with

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applications and pastimes advertised for social and entertainment use. These platforms and tools

promote the desire to endlessly engage by existing in a constant state of promotion (of the self, of

the product – which is often also the user themself). In the process, a deceptive pleasure in self-

commodification is rendered as a component that is as important as the sporting event, the items

being advertised, or the highly paid athletes competing ferociously to win titles, medals, and

product endorsements. The seductive nature of visibility and fame adds to the appeal.

In online culture, “looking at looking” is a kind of endless process fortified by social

media algorithms that are designed to “match” users with other users, posts, or pages depending

on what the user prefers depending on their “likes.” Yet according to business professor Kartik

Hosanagar, “the primary issue is that we deliberately choose actions that push us down an echo

chamber” (par 15). Presenting research on the parallel between the gentrification of

neighborhoods of citizens from similar socioeconomic backgrounds to the landscape of social

media, Hosanagar emphasizes the consumer’s role in the perpetuation of this echo chamber,

reminding his reader that, “social discourse suffers when people have a narrow information base”

(par. 2). Similarly, critical thinking suffers when the consumer’s myopia contributes to an

ongoing culture of narcissism fueled by repetitive or ritualized acts of self-commodification. No

longer is the product the only commodity. It is now framed so that the consumer becomes the

commodity.

Within this context of considering the consumer also a commodifiable entity, the process

of “looking at looking” is manifested not only in the simple act of recognizing oneself on the

sports arena screen or the computer screen or a smartphone app, but also in the acts of surveilled

and/or televised self-expression. Self-reflexivity becomes performance through a superficial

assertion of self-expression, ideologically supporting the commodification of the self. The

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emphasis on “looking at looking” – whether in the televisual reality TV text, in social media, in

broadcast sports, or on the news, confirms what Lasch understands as “the narcissist’s pseudo-

insight into his own condition,” where the emphasis turns to “deflecting criticism and

disclaiming responsibility for his actions” (19). According to Lasch, these narcissistic processes

of self-expression do not reveal an authentic voice or identity, but instead, embody the opposite

of authenticity, resulting in the degeneration of the individual into a parody of the self (through

the process of self-commodification), while at the same time insulating them “against the horrors

around them – poverty, racism, injustice” through the processes of pacification and quietude

(25).

Even as parody, self-expression through its various modes of self-reflexivity provides the

individual a protection from genuine engagement with the world by offering a seemingly

legitimate emphasis and focus. Further, it allows space for deceptive practices rooted in the act

of self-promotion. Reality TV stars, celebrities, and even political candidates are given the

platform to speak untruths into existence simply by the repetitious nature of self-promotion. With

the young mothers on Teen Mom OG, as with contestants and characters on other reality

programs, this deceptive process can be damaging and even lethal, as it directly affects not only

the onscreen participant, but also the viewer who develops a relationship with the onscreen

figure.

Self-Commodification and the Parasocial Relationship

In order to interrogate and further contextualize into scholarship what is labeled in this

research as “looking at looking,” the emphasis on the self as a process of self-commodification

must be problematized by uncovering its complex method of engaging the consumer. In the

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framework of the Parasocial Interaction (PSI), the relationship is between the at-home television

viewer and what scholars Donald Horton and Richard Wohl (1956) refer to as the onscreen

“persona” in conversation with the at-home viewer. In the traditional understanding of the

psychology of relationships, a parasocial dynamic is one that is typically one-sided, requiring

energy and investment primarily from one party involved (See Giles 2003). In the case of the

interaction between television, film, and/or other forms of media audience members and the

onscreen persona, the element of celebrity is infused into this uneven relationship. In their

research, Horton and Wohl examine such representations as The Lonesome Gal on the radio in

the 1940s and Miss Nancy Berg in television’s Count Sheep, produced in the 1950s. In each

example, the star plays to the whims of the viewer/listener in ways that invite them into a

performed world designed to invite intimacy and evoke familiarity through the cultivation of a

kind of relationship with the audience.

In televisual media, the parasocial interaction is created through the use of various tactics

to mesmerize the viewer into feeling as if they are acquainted with the onscreen persona. Put

simply, the parasocial helps explain what makes an onscreen stranger seem relatable, authentic

(or not), and in many ways exciting to watch. As Horton and Wohl explain, “the spectacular fact

about such personae is that they can claim and achieve an intimacy with what are literally crowds

of strangers, and this intimacy, even if it is an imitation and a shadow of what is ordinarily meant

by that word, is extremely influential with, and satisfying for, the great numbers who willingly

receive it and share in it “ (216). In the case of The Lonesome Gal on the radio, and Count Sheep

on television, the producers cultivated a sense of intimacy between the onscreen persona and the

at-home audience. The way they did this was through the use of sex appeal and verbal assurances

meant to help ease the at-home viewer’s loneliness.

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Each of these programs presented audiences with a sexualized yet approachable female

who spoke to the audience and invited the audience into a parasocial relationship. The authors

explain how “both programs were geared to fostering and maintaining the illusion of intimacy "

(225). This intimacy allows the spectator a glimpse of what is presented as the private

environment of the onscreen persona. The viewer (or radio listener) may enjoy this illusion of

friendship, familiarity, or intimacy from the safety and comfort of their own home. It is a private

interaction with a public figure that is designed to mimic a genuine relationship that is offered

within a framework of idolatry and authority because of its aspirational representation of

celebrity rather than solidarity rooted in communication and equality. This idolatry upholds the

culture industry by inviting passivity by the viewer, who nevertheless feels emboldened by the

intimacy they are seemingly privy to as a result of the successful implementation of the tactics

employed in the framework of the parasocial. Unlike the sexualized characterizations in The

Lonesome Gal and Count Sheep, the young mothers in Teen Mom OG (who were pregnant at as

teen during the filming of 16 and Pregnant) are desexualized. In fact, overt sexuality appears to

be discouraged on the series, as is revealed in the way Farrah is characterized after appearing in

an adult entertainment production. A few examples of this discouragement are the latent shame

associated with teen pregnancy that occasionally bubbles up to the surface in the series, the overt

disdain by Maci for cast member Farrah Abraham, or the various expressions of judgement and

shame toward Farrah by the MTV producers and crew. With Teen Mom OG, viewers are not

necessarily invited to covet or desire the specific cast member(s) but are instead invited to

witness their vulnerabilities and potentially adopt certain performative actions in their own lives.

The parasocial in contemporary reality TV promotes practicing the assertion of the self through

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the form or tone of the practice of self-expression rather than supporting the exercise of genuine

awareness of the self.

What is important to remember, particularly as the concept of the parasocial relates to

Teen Mom OG, is the homogeneity in the portrayal of the cast members. With the characters that

Horton and Wohl examine in their research, “their actual personalities, and the details of their

backgrounds, are not allowed to become sharply focused and differentiated, for each

specification of particular detail might alienate some part of the audience, or might interfere with

rapport” (225) Further research in the decades since Horton and Wohl’s initial findings suggests

that it is less a matter of the persona being relatable to the viewer than it is the supposed

relationship between onscreen character and at-home audience member. According to semantics

scholar and professor Mark R. Levy (who researched parasocial relationships between news

anchors and viewers), the personae encourage this parasocial interaction “by speaking in

conversational tones directly into the television camera, by engaging in clever monologues

which appear to require audience reciprocity, and by interacting in a casual way with other media

communicators (‘side-kicks,’ confidants, antagonists, and the like)” (69). The cast of Teen Mom

OG participate in the cultivation of the parasocial in ways that incorporate the same tactics used

in news, entertainment, and other media.

The parasocial relationship is fueled from the very first scene of the first episode of Teen

Mom OG, which is itself a continuation of the narrative of each of these original 16 and

Pregnant cast members. The choice to return to these individuals already refers to the familiarity

and intimacy of a parasocial interaction that viewers may have cultivated when watching these

participants on the first season of 16 and Pregnant in 2009. The connection between the original

series and the new program facilitates the relationship between cast and viewer. In the opening

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scene of the first episode of Teen Mom OG, each cast member is introduced during at-home

moments of laughter, joy, and frustration showing a humanity that is made relatable to the

viewer. But while each character is made to appear accessible and relatable, as with other reality

series, the context remains only within the landscape of the show, and not within a larger,

collective context beyond the span that MTV designates as appropriate. Unlike in the original 16

and Pregnant season in 2009 where the OG cast was initially introduced and shown interacting

with schoolmates or other community members, the scope of the young mothers’ lives is

narrower and much more insular on Teen Mom OG.

The producers and crewmembers make themselves familiar and friendly to the cast and,

by extension, to the viewer. In this way, the crew mimics the methods that propel neoliberal

ideology in culture. According to writer Yasmin Nair, this form of ideology is “capitalism made

familiar” and “survives on vectors of intimacy, transforming capitalism into an emotional matter

rather than an economic one, even though its incursions and devastations are deadly and long-

lasting precisely because of the way it serves to insinuate itself into the machinations of the daily

world” (par. 44). The lack of racial diversity adds to the homogeneity which keeps the cast

familiar and safe. With the exception of Farrah Abraham, who is of mixed heritage (Syrian,

Italian, and Danish), the main characters on Teen Mom OG are white, not living in abject

poverty, and seemingly equipped to navigate the financial burden of having a child at such a

young age with minimal worry. Later seasons within the broader franchise do a more diverse

socioeconomic and racial spectrum, but the general whitewashing taking place with the emphasis

on characters who are primarily white and middle class on Teen Mom OG supports and is

supported by entitlement and privileges that allow for an emphasis instead on the superficial

dramas and self-assertions highlighted in the series.

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With an emphasis on feelings and a generic sense of identity, the result is such that, as

Levy explains, “except for a presumably complementary desire to inform and to be informed,

there is little identity of goals between the audience and the personae” (78). In consideration of

this approach, it is revealed that in order to cultivate a lasting impression that courts the audience

and keeps viewers watching, the persona is a simplified one which on Teen Mom OG is

presented as a one-dimensional youngster who is solely focused on themself and whose

vacillations between conflict and resolution comprise the flow of meaning that is both facilitated

and overseen by the producers and crew acting as pleasant authority figures. Similarly, the

relationship between the cast and onscreen crew is simplified, obscuring the complexities in their

relationships. And so, as Teen Mom OG takes everyday problems and reshapes them to be

pleasurable to consume, it also replicates the very frameworks of culture that it pretends to

dismantle. To the casual observer of the television program, the cast members are simply living

their lives while the crew films these daily interactions. But looking at this process through the

lens of the parasocial helps the understanding that, as Horton and Wohl explain, “the persona’s

image, while partial, contrived, and penetrated by illusion, is no fantasy or dream; his

performance is an objectively perceptible action in which the viewer is implicated imaginatively,

but which he does not imagine” (216). The relatability of the characters and the homogenized

interactions offered to the viewers are craftily constructed in Teen Mom OG.

According to Horton and Wohl, an audience is enmeshed in a program more deeply than

simply being spectators, such that the audience response is “as it were, subtly insinuated into the

program’s action and internal social relationships and, by dint of this kind of staging, is

ambiguously transformed into a group which observes and participates in the show by turns”

(215). The reception of popular televisual texts is made pleasurable when viewers find attitudes,

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approaches, and events taking place on screen that they relate to and/or interact with, either

positively, or in ways that make use of the ideology of mass culture. In this series, the producers

at MTV focus on the simplest way of courting appeal: emphasis on the self. The

producer/crewmember is not an onscreen persona in the traditional sense, as Horton and Wohl

outlined it to be, but instead acts as a conduit by which the ideology of authority is presented to

the viewer in an agreeable manner. But the onscreen producer/crewmember is presented as a

conduit of relatability to the at-home viewer through a performed positionality of the kindhearted

authority figure. In framing the cast, crew, and audience in this way, the series that proclaims

that breaking the fourth wall is a groundbreaking way to undo certain frameworks actually

creates new boundaries behind which its creators can uphold structures of power and ideologies

of authority while perpetuating the position that the illusion of transparency is now more

important than the truth itself.

Parasocial Relatability and Social Media

Teen Mom OG supports the element of familiarity as a tactic to court viewers by

including discussions about social media and moments showing the cast using technology such

as cell phones and various online platforms. By tapping into the parasocial using various

relatable tactics and tools in a program geared toward a younger demographic, MTV presents a

view of the world as a transformative agent of neoliberal competitive capitalism packaged as

something entirely different, a document of the lives of four young mothers. This is made to

appeal to a younger demographic. As social scientist and Media Studies scholar Toby Miller

explains, contextualizing his argument within an understanding of surveillance culture,

“Youthful audiences are of particular surveillant concern to the industry, because the young are

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thought to be still deciding on their favorite commodities – toothpaste, transport, tutus, and so

on” (93). By presenting a group of cast members not much older than the viewer who interact

with authority figures such as the onscreen TV crew with relative ease and who have daily

interaction with technological apparatuses just like those watching the series from a comfortable

distance, MTV and Teen Mom OG are able to infuse multiple ideological apparatuses into a

series that will help shape the decisions of the viewer for a lifetime.

The inclusion of social media use as a televisual trope or narrative element is on the rise

in reality TV. Examples on MTV include Catfish, Road Rules, The Challenge, The Hills and The

Gauntlet. Other networks also use social media and technological apparatuses in their storyline.

Examples include TLC’s 90 Day Fiancé and Netflix’s The Circle. Many network series use

texting and social media to engage the viewer in weekly vote processes and related shows of

support. British dating series Love Island and its American and Australian versions employ a text

message bit where cast receive challenges and directions on the competition via SMS/text

message. The “Got a text!” moments on Love Island are both entertaining and nerve-wracking

for they signal a new twist or change to the game. This engages the audience, for it sparks both

an anticipation of conflict and the excitement over upcoming events within the series, playing on

the conflict-disclosure-resolution process in the televisual text.

Conclusion

By examining Marx’s fundamental question of alienation within the context of the

construction and functions of reality TV, it is clear that questions of labor, self-actualization, and

technology are increasingly complicated in programs that promote surveillance, digital culture,

and self-commodification in new forms where the mechanisms of production are uncovered in

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certain ways yet simultaneously obscured in others. While the way the tactics used in Teen Mom

OG are not common in reality TV, producers of imagery and other media have been developing

these tactics since the beginnings of moving images. A depth of understanding of the way these

tactics function in media will help map the importance of these developments in Teen Mom OG.

While all reality TV deals with these types of ideological questions in the construction

and presentation of its characters, scenarios, and narrative, Teen Mom OG complicates questions

of communication (through the parasocial and the use of technology), obedience and authority

(through the inclusion of the crew on the show), and relatability (through the emphasis on its

characters’ homogeneity and self-involved tone). These themes and the tactics that help deliver

ideology to the consumer are visible in all televisual media. Tracking the course of their

evolution from early photography and documentary cinema to TV prank shows and daytime talk

shows to early reality TV through to the present reveals the intricate and increasingly complex

nature of media and its tactics.

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Chapter 4: Self-Reflexivity and Compulsive Self-Promotion

Warren Beatty [after Madonna declines to talk to her medical professional off-camera]: She

doesn't want to live off-camera, much less talk. There's nothing to say off-camera. Why would

you say something if it's off-camera? What point is there existing?

– Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991)

Self-reflexivity is often used as a televisual tool that contributes to self-commodification

when participants perform publicizing the private and the domestic in reality TV. The use of self-

reflexivity has the characters in Teen Mom OG in introspective confessional moments. Not only

does this propel the narrative of the series, but it also tempers recognition or critical

confrontation of the exploitative practices taking place. This works in favor of dispensing

ideologies that support surveillance and complicity to authority by coopting the private and

domestic for the benefit of the television series and the network.

The use here of the term “self-reflexivity” recognizes the way the main characters of the

series place emphasis on themselves in their actions, their conversations, and especially in their

perception of the world. Another way is to consider their actions as “self-referential,” taking into

consideration the ways in which the subjects refers to themselves and disconnect from external

subjects, systems, and events. As linguist and semiotician Winifried Nöth explains, “No message

in the media is completely devoid of self-reference. Even in everyday verbal communication, the

speaker indicates himself or herself as a speaker, whether intentionally or unintentionally” (13).

What is prevalent in Teen Mom OG happens beyond this established and everyday self-reference.

It is what Nöth refers to as enunciative or communicative self-reference, making the author,

character, or actor the “topic of the message. Instead of presenting or representing ideas or events

in the world from elsewhere, the text deals with its own communicative context, its function, the

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presuppositions of its narration, and the text has thus its own communicative situation as its

topic” (20). In tracking the evolution of Teen Mom OG by examining it and its precursors, what

becomes clear is that way the series attempts to appear more genuine and transparent with the

use of this turn inwards through self-reflexivity or self-reference.

Teen Mom OG makes use of the parasocial relationship so that the cast appears endearing

to the viewer and fan. Nöth explains how “The more the pictures distance themselves from

reality, the more doubts in the authenticity and plausibility of the feigned worlds arise” (21).

Teen Mom OG constructs its narrative reality by intertwining homogeneity, parasocial

interaction, and the familiarity of a returning cast. Also, as in other MTV series such as The Real

World and The Hills, the structure of the narrative of Teen Mom OG relies on the production and

its characters to uphold the constructed reality taking place on the screen regardless of the

veracity of the items being captured. Critical questioning of the series and its characters’ actions

by viewers and fans is possible, but the tactics used in the series complicate the function and

reception of the text because of the self-referential arranging of meaning and message.

Self-Reflexivity in Teen Mom OG: Publicizing the Domestic Space

Crucial to scrutinizing the structure of Teen Mom OG is understanding how tactics

promoting self-reflexivity enforce ideologies of self-commodification and labor that result in

alienation. These ideologies perpetuate homogeneity and isolation in the individuals publicizing

their private domestic lives through their participation on the series. Yet the series frames the

drama and narrative so that it appears as if the cast attains and exerts agency through the

televised process of the assertion of the self. These ideologies perpetuated by the series are made

available to be adopted by the viewer and replicated in the viewer’s own daily life. It is a cycle

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that continues with the aid of both the producer and the consumer of culture. Over time, this

approach – which prioritizes publicizing the private in ways that require a form of ritualized

repetition of self-commodification – informs culture through the televisual text.

In this examination, “ritual” is considered in terms of what the characters encounter and

react to in their day-to-day domestic functions in the episodes of the series. The reason for this

contextualization is that the organization of imagery in Teen Mom OG is made by duplicating

and rearranging the lived experiences of the cast to create a televised experience that offers both

escape and a suspension of disbelief. This is done effectively in the series through tactics that

refer to repetition, ritual, and reaction. An important component to this research is understanding

what is being ritualized in Teen Mom OG. Many studies of ritual reveal the ways it resides in the

repetition of religious or folkloric customs or traditions. Referencing religious scholar Jonathan

Z. Smith, Leah Rosenberg notes that ritual is both mode and process of paying attention and

marking interest through the recognition of place and space, since “this issue of place and ritual

seems especially important when it comes to discussing the personal and cultural significance of

how place is constructed” (19). On Teen Mom OG, the cast members are not involved in specific

religious rituals or traditional cultural events or traditions. But their daily lives are crafted for the

viewer in ways that ritualize an emphasis on the self, on conflict, and on the disclosure of

personal details and feelings to the onscreen producers and crew.

There is also a limited selection of space which the cast inhabits in the episodes, namely

the home, the car, and the occasional external site such as a park, restaurant, or school. This

marks a departure from the tactics used in such series as The Hills that rely heavily on corporate

partnerships and external sites to drive the narrative. As the first season of Teen Mom OG

progresses, place is primarily defined as the domestic space which is presented without

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connection to community. Relationships, family, and community are presented as disjointed,

juxtaposed with the relationships with the onscreen producers which are highlighted as

supportive. On Teen Mom OG, it is the publicized self-reflexivity under the gaze of the camera

(as represented by both the crew and the actual cameras filming the scenes that are visible in the

frame) within the domestic space that becomes ritualized through an ongoing tether between

conflict and resolution. Confession and performed reflexivity are the tools with which the

narrative moves from conflict to resolution and back to conflict again.

The domestic space is further flattened in favor of self-expression that courts and

responds to drama and conflict. The cameras and onscreen crew act as both a symbol of authority

and a conduit for resolution of conflict. In order to push the narrative, the cast is seen connecting

– in both positive and negative ways – to their fellow cast mates living elsewhere (each cast

member lives in a separate US state) and to viewers and critics online. These online exchanges

are highlighted while interactions with neighbors or fellow citizens are not explored. The way

the scenes are constructed to privilege self-reflexivity, interaction with the crew, and

communicating online over engaging with community in person reveals an emphasis motivated

by digital culture and the influence of hybridization that prioritizes digital connections over

actual engagement with the outside world. The series, like previous programs such as The Real

World, is designed to brand a lifestyle that prioritizes the rituals, habits, and practices that serve

the brand and the mechanisms it serves rather than the cast’s individuality, authenticity, or

genuine connection to others. This prioritization welcomes and supports ideologies of

surveillance and labor that both require ongoing self-commodification. The signs and symbols

revealed in the series support this intense self-involvement by promoting them as acts of self-

determination. The series succeeds in its efforts by presenting disclosure, confession, an insular

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emphasis on the self, and complicity to the authority of the gaze of the camera and the crew co-

starring in the series as a way of being that inscribes value rather than devaluing its participants.

Ritual and Discipline Imposed by the Teen Mom OG Production

In thinking about what becomes ritualized in and through Teen Mom OG, it is important

to interrogate ritualized self-reflexivity within a larger discussion of media in contemporary

culture. To do this involves consideration of the perspective offered by sociologist Nick Couldry,

where “Understanding ‘media rituals’ is not simply a matter of isolating particular performances

(rituals) and interpreting them; it is a matter of grasping the whole social space within which

anything like ‘ritual’ in relation to media becomes possible” (2). Couldry emphasizes talk shows

in this research, but his insight is relevant to a study of reality television as well. Teen Mom OG

reveals the increasing hybridization of genres in the way it blends documentary practices, the

drama and conflict in talk shows, and performed intimacy in private, domestic spaces. And like

talk shows, Teen Mom OG both informs and is informed by everyday life. Couldry emphasizes

the simultaneous acts of unmasking specific rituals and examining the political, cultural, and

ontological frameworks in which they reside. With this grasp of the broader social space, it is

possible to fully problematize the ideological apparatuses at play.

Consideration of this larger ontological framework may serve as a reminder of the work

of Foucault and his examination of ritual, confession, and the function of power in culture at

large. Foucault explains just how often confession is enacted on a daily basis. One of his

concerns is to locate “the forms of power, the channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates

in order to reach the most tenuous and individual modes of behavior” (11). Foucault connects

these channels and modes as part of the “polymorphous techniques of power” which reveal

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themselves in specific examples and can be utilized to reveal broader frameworks as well.

Foucault situates some of his study in problematizing confession with the reminder that “when it

is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal imperative, the confession is wrung from a

person by violence or threat…Western man has become a confessing animal” (59). What he

points to becomes complicated in contemporary media and digital culture. This is due, in part, to

the mechanisms of surveillance that are supported and reinforced by the culture industry.

In consideration of Foucault’s understanding of the violence or threat that leads to

confession, it is important to remember the hierarchies of power within reality television

production in which these impositions begin to reveal themselves. This hierarchy applies not

only to the onscreen cast and crew, but to the production staff as well, as it applies to all

producers and consumers of culture. The external imperative informs the internalized imperative

of which Foucault speaks. On Teen Mom OG, the producers are present in the narrative in a way

that appears to appease and support the cast member. This serves as a means to normalize the

environment in which the exploitative acts of commodification of the individual, the wholly

intrusive imposition of surveillance (and its side effects) on one’s private life, and the notional

that one’s private, personal life is now simply another chance for the participant to perform a

form of labor govern the everyday. The process of performing the personal and private within the

domestic space becomes ritualized through the involvement of both cast member and onscreen

production crew.

The imperative that Foucault examines is put in place by the threat of external forces that

inflict violence or threat. On Teen Mom OG, this is not a threat of literal violence, but a threat is

present nonetheless, for the cast members are under contract and may suffer the potential of

losing the salary, visibility, celebrity, and cultural capital that a TV star appears to enjoy if they

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choose to leave the show. The presence of the crew within the narrative acts as a reminder of this

threat, and the choice of clips to use in the narrative present this framework to the viewer. This

sense of threat acts as motivation to engage in an ongoing participation that relies on ritualized

self-reflexivity. Oftentimes, the potential threat of an external force becomes an internalized

force that drives the cast member to participate, confess, and engage with the onscreen producers

and crew even if their personal lives may suffer because of it. Each of the four young mothers

perform in response to imperative and threat, and the crew drives this relationship forward with

their presence and reminders of the production taking place within the production itself.

Close Reading: “Surprise Surprise” and the Producer as Confidante

In the fifth episode of the first season of Teen Mom OG (“Surprise Surprise,” first aired

on April 20, 2015), Amber is frustrated that her ex, Gary, is flirting with her even though he has

a new girlfriend with whom he will soon be having a child. The scene begins with a close-up of a

camera slate followed by a somber Amber looking at her phone as Gary calls her, and producer

Heather asking her who keeps calling. (00:07:35–00:07:41). The shot-reverse-shot clips are close

up, in the corner of Amber’s bedroom, where Amber sits next to an electrical outlet on the wall

to which a phone charger is attached.

Amber refuses to answer Gary’s call, but looks down at her cell phone incessantly. The

tone of the scene is somber, and Amber appears crestfallen and distraught. Heather and Amber

discuss the situation with Gary, as they sit across from each other on Amber’s bedroom floor.

Amber shows Heather a picture of her and Gary on her phone. “It is a picture from Season 1,”

Amber explains to producer Heather who replies, “Oh my God, I filmed this” (00:07:42–

00:08:28).

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The photo is from 16 and Pregnant in 2009, when Amber and Gary were still together

romantically. Amber somberly explains that she needs closure and doesn’t want to be with Gary

again. Heather pushes the issue by asking why she thinks it could never be a possibility again.

That Gary is having a child with his new girlfriend Kristina weighs heavily on Amber, and she

explains this to Heather.

The scene cuts from single shots of Amber and Heather to a medium shot of them

interacting back to single shots. Heather listens with her production headset and other gear on

display around her neck and on her body as she remains seated on the floor on an even plane as

Amber. She tells Amber that they will film her getting ready and then wrap up the shoot day.

Heather leaves by playfully referring to Amber as “Amby” as Amber looks down at her phone in

sadness and frustration. (00:08:29–00:09:06).

Close Reading: Reflections

What resonates in the scene between Amber and Heather is the reminder of how long

Amber’s life has been intertwined with the Teen Mom brand. There is also an underlying sense

of duty to continue filming regardless of the pain it unearths. The realization of the longevity in

both Amber and Heather’s history with MTV is revealed in both a lived and a documented

experience. Amber lived it, Heather filmed it (and also lived it), and Gary tries to reconnect with

Amber by sending a screen shot from the series that they then discuss in the scene. Each of the

three participants in this scene is umbilically connected to the other through technological

apparatuses: cameras, footage, smartphones, and the resulting cultural product. The series (and

the technology featured in it) is the conduit through which Amber craves closure, Gary seeks

connection, and Heather affirms her closeness to the story and its players in order to keep the TV

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shoot going and on schedule. The act that is made to appear to carry the onscreen characters is

the successful completion of the task of filming the scene.

The primary goal is surveillance and documenting the process, and not necessarily

addressing or resolving the issue at hand. The depth with which the series has affected Amber’s

personal life and decisions is clear, but it is the producer included in the scene and in the

narrative who determines and voices the necessity to continue filming as the primary act that

Amber needs to perform. The assertion to complete filming is offered as a tender, playful way to

get Amber to keep going just for a few more minutes, but it reveals the forces of discipline at

work and points to the many times when conflict and vulnerability in the private, domestic space

are ritualized for the cameras. Amber continues to film, but her reluctance is palpable. And, as

with many other scenes in the series, production has the final word in the interaction and in the

final edit that airs.

The internalized imperative to continue to participate in the production process is also

fueled by what theorist and activist Tiziana Terranova explains as a new system with “a tendency

of informational flows to spill over from whatever network they are circulating in and hence to

escape the narrowness of the channel and to open up to a larger milieu” (2). Terranova’s research

points to the ways that utterances asserted by what Foucault considers the “confessing animal”

now reach past their original medium and network, resulting in a landscape where each sign,

symbol, or message from a particular form of cultural production, as Terranova explains, is

“increasingly inseparable from the wider informational processes that determine the spread of

images and words, sounds, and affects across a hyperconnected planet.” (2). In this case, there is

a television series within which the cast and crew discuss the production, online web pages

including personal blogs that the cast contribute to with first-person accounts of the drama in

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each episode, an after-show chat series produced by MTV where a host and guests comment on

the events, reunion and catch-up specials where the cast talk to each other (and often fuel

ongoing conflict), Twitter, Facebook, and other online series such as AfterBuzz where hosts

recap and discuss the show, and related social media pages where the cast members contribute to

an ongoing discussion about the mothers and their lives and viewers offer their own opinions and

feedback about the show and its production. It is a new landscape where the flow examined by

Raymond Williams reaches far beyond previous boundaries, and requires ongoing participation.

This flow spans not only different platforms and interconnected forms of medium, but

also time, as the narrative simultaneously reveals current issues and points to past issues that

were revealed in a different time or on the previous television series. Terranova points to a

framework informed by Foucault’s confessional imperative that eternally replicates itself using

any medium it sees fit, where one sign connects to another symbol, sometimes regardless of

origin or context. Similarly, Teen Mom OG is structured in a way that makes the hierarchy of

power, authority and discipline appear unstable while at the same time underwriting and

enforcing that hierarchy in covert ways. The external imperative is internalized through the

framework within which the cast members appear to vacillate between communicating their

situation to a costar (usually a family member or friend), some third party (which may or may

not be the viewer) through the absence of a reverse shot in the construction of the clips, or the

onscreen members of production who insert themselves into the conversation. The series does

not rely on one singular tactic, often obscuring the imposing presence of the producers that were

there, surveying and crafting the drama the entire time, but always reminding the viewer that the

production has the final say, whether or not this is explicitly clear to the viewer.

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Ritual, Conflict, and Validation through Commodification

Programs such as Teen Mom OG reveal the ways that acts that enforce hegemony are

transformed into rituals to infuse content with ideological messaging in ways that are at once

new and familiar. These repetitions reveal and represent social formations and systems beyond

the specific televisual text. Couldry explains his understanding of media rituals as “the whole

range of situations where media themselves ‘stand in,’ or appear to ‘stand in,’ for something

wider, something linked to the fundamental organizational level on which we are, or imagine

ourselves to be, connected as members of society” (4). The approach he outlines rejects blanket

categorizations or adherence to one theoretical understanding of social spaces and culture itself,

for as Couldry explains, “The term ‘media rituals’ is designed to imply neither a simple order nor

a simple disorder, but a complex and never fully stable interaction between order and disorder”

(15). This relates to scholarship that aims to problematize, as Gerd Baumann explains, “rituals as

crystallizations of basic values uniformly endorsed by communities that perform them with a

view to themselves, ultimately to create and conform their cohesion as communities” (113). It is

within the instability of disorder that this field of cultural production thrives, whether by

simultaneously subverting and legitimizing structures of power, presenting and reproducing

power within a setup that appears not to do so, or attempting to offer transparency while

continuing to obscure reality. Teen Mom OG privileges conflict over cohesion, inviting its cast to

enter into a binding agreement which requires ongoing participation, and endless acts of

disclosure within private and domestic spaces.

The “community” the series supports is one that, like Candid Camera, The Real World

and The Hills is contingent upon a transactional relationship between producer and onscreen

talent. The pairing of conflict resolution navigated by the crew offers the appearance of cohesion,

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yet this cohesion is limited, for it rests on the ongoing ritual of participating in conflict. In this

series, ritual is distinctly connected to both confession and conflict, and it is revealed in the ways

that disclosing the private on a public platform moves the televisual narrative. This is not limited

to a television series, as it refers directly to the ways that public confession or disclosure is

utilized in social media and other online platforms. According to Couldry, “The relationship

between the meanings of self-disclosure and technological form is a subtle one and goes on

changing with the expanded possibilities for self-disclosure on the Internet” (115). The

compulsion to document one’s life online as a process of legitimacy and accountability as well as

a confession points to new self-imposed ideological imperatives that inform and are informed by

such participants as the cast in Teen Mom OG.

Unmasking these imperatives rests on the understanding of what media theorist Joshua

Meyrowitz considers “the overall pattern of situated behaviours” (42). In expanding upon

Meyrowitz’s understanding, Couldry addresses the layers related to class that affect the

performances within the televisual. These layers, as Couldry explains, reveal the socioeconomic

hierarchies existing in culture itself. In publicizing the private through self-reflexivity,

confession and disclosure, it appears, as Couldry explains, that the cast member has a sense that

“they and their story have somehow been validated or certified” (122). This quest for validation

is evident in almost every facet of contemporary culture and has been examined in numerous

contexts by such theorists as Bourdieu (in his understanding of class, field, habitus, and taste)

and Ang (in regard to situating oneself in relation to the reception of low culture). More recently,

scholars such as Biressi and Nunn examine this quest as it is governed by public disclosure and

the narrativizing of the personal experience as it is revealed in reality competition shows such as

Big Brother. They unfold in their research the ways that narcissism, surveillance and performing

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identity are complicated because “the apparent omnipresence of media observation is

internalized as a sort of self-scrutiny. But also the self becomes dependent on the consumption of

media images” (100). Expanding upon this consideration, Biressi and Nunn outline the ways in

which the performance of the self through self-reflexive utterances becomes as way of being that

is embedded in the sociocultural landscape of this contemporary moment, because “crucially, our

sense of self is guaranteed by the fantasy of an ‘other’ who observes us and whose gaze confirms

the solidity and worth of our existence. Therefore, rather than fearing the omnipresent surveying

gaze we embrace it” (101). And yet, the consequences of this embrace endure, especially with

the cast members on these reality programs.

In the case of Teen Mom OG, the quest for validation takes place in a number of

interconnected ways: During the filming process when the producers and crew intervene and

participate within the narrative as they are documenting and publicizing of the cast’s private

lives, the actual production centers the production while following the cast. This succeeds in

validating and supporting the participation of both the cast and the onscreen production crew.

This validation continues when the show airs, and viewers participate in the public consumption

of the cast’s seemingly private moments. Yet in both instances, the cast members are participants

in an exploitative cycle comprised of conflict followed by confession, consumed by the cameras,

their operators, the producers, and the at-home audience acting as a team of technicians

managing this complex validation that is contingent on the participation and the cast’s

complicity. By understanding the way that alienation functions in this process, it becomes clear

that the transactional relationship between producer and cast relies on the individual as

commodity. Through a ritualized repetition of this message within the televisual text, the

message is then delivered to consumers who may or may not adopt it in their own lives.

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The tension documented on Teen Mom OG exists in layers and is often a result of the

production’s intention to highlight and even instigate the drama rather than the cast member’s

overall personal life or multifaceted relationships. The producers interject to ask questions,

which often leads to new drama or exacerbates existing tensions. Each of the four young mothers

on the series has had her moments of refusing to participate. In almost every case, the cast

member relents, deciding to stay on to film more episodes and more seasons. When a cast

member such as Maci, for example, returns to the production, she acts as if all of the issues that

existed before were resolved, yet the viewer rarely sees the interactions that led to these

resolutions. This obscuring of vital moments in the process is an obfuscation that acts in contrast

to the assertion of transparency and the representation of a supportive entity made by MTV.

When actual transparency is revealed in the form of a cast member’s frustrations with the series

and choice to leave, the producers rely upon an established imperative in order to retain the cast

member. The reaction and subsequent symbolic and representational consequences that take

place when cast members want to quit the show confirm and underwrite the imperatives used to

retain the cast member in the first place.

Close Reading: Refusing to Participate and the Limits of Agency

What Teen Mom OG reveals, in addition to the breakdown of public and private and the

consequences of the surveillance by the seemingly friendly crew, is the necessity to participate

no matter the consequences. This is revealed in subtle and in obvious ways. The subtlety lies in

the way the producers and camera crew, now placed within the narrative and interacting with the

cast within the scenes, act in ways that normalize the surveillance and participation in a process

that entangled with alienation. The obvious ways this necessity to participate are revealed are

when a cast member refuses to participate. Each season of Teen Mom OG features multiple

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instances where a cast member threatens to quit the show. In the 2015-16 season, which was the

inaugural Teen Mom OG season that welcomed four of the original 16 and Pregnant mothers

back to the network full time, the producers invited cast member Farrah Abraham, initially

dropped from the show because of her participation in a sex tape she filmed with adult actor

James Deen. The April 27, 2015 episode (“The F Bomb”) focuses heavily on the producers and

camera crew as they travel from state to state to reach out to each cast member to inform them of

the decision to bring Farrah back to the show. The emphasis is as much on the producers as it is

on the cast members and their willingness to film when Farrah returns. In some scenes, the

producers are featured more prominently than the cast themselves as the crew step out from

behind the scenes to participate within the show even more than they already were throughout

the season.

Each scene where the producers approach the cast begins as if the producers are seeking

the cast members’ consent to bring Farrah back. Yet as each scene continues, the producers

assert their decision to bring Farrah back rather than asking for permission from the cast. When

co-executive producer Larry arrives at Amber’s house, he expresses how nervous he is to share

some news with her. Larry explains the decision to bring Farrah back to the series, Amber

expresses support of the decision, saying that Farrah deserves to be on the series. Amber refers to

her recent incarceration and the idea of second chances as a reason to bring Farrah back

(00:04:39–00:05:31). The scene cuts to Catelynn and Tyler’s house, where a crew member is

adjusting Catelynn’s microphone pack. Executive producer Dia and Tyler talk about how Tyler

is nervous for the news they are about to share with him and Catelynn.

Dia explains the plans regarding Farrah to Catelynn and Tyler. They immediately light up

and smile, exclaiming that they knew this was the news. Catelynn explains that her conflict with

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Farrah is over, and that Farrah can be a good person but that she “has a lot of issues.” Catelynn

and Tyler support the decision to bring Farrah back and decide to call Amber to discuss it.

(00:06:15–00:06:50). The clips are connected with the phone call between Amber, Catelynn and

Tyler. The cell phone unites the households, machinery tying these families with laughter and

agreement, and everyone acts warmly with one another over the phone. Tyler explains that

Farrah seemed to express genuine remorse and a willingness to change when they starred on a

different reality series together. Both of the young mothers express their support of the decision

made by MTV, but all three involved in the conversation laugh about whether or not Maci will

object. . (00:06:51–00:07:30).

The tension exhibited by Maci carries over into the following scene, where Catelynn,

Tyler, Executive Producer Dia Sokol Savage, and a cameraman discuss Maci’s refusal to

continue if Farrah returns. Catelynn expresses her wish to talk to Maci on the phone, to which

Dia responds with the information that Maci is refusing to film if Farrah participates. (00:09:59–

00:10:10). The producer and cameraman sit on one side of the room, while Catelynn and Tyler

recline on sofas on the other side of the room. Catelynn expresses her frustration over the

situation, calling Maci a “diva,” while Tyler takes a moment to offer his own take on the matter

by stating that “controversy’s good for reality TV” (00:10:11–00:10:46).

Close Reading: Reflections

The focal point of the scenes between Larry and Amber and between Catelynn, Tyler and

the producers shifts throughout the scene. The camera pans back and forth between the cast

members and the actual crew who are acting as secondary cast members as they are being filmed

by additional crewmembers not visible in the scene. This triangulation of cast members,

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onscreen crew, the crew not visible in the scene that are filming, and the off-screen cast member

Maci refusing to participate in the production initially appears to prioritize and privilege the

actual cast because of their situation. But upon further consideration, the authority of the visible

and the hidden production crew remains in place throughout the interaction. This is partly due to

the element of confession and disclosure, which delivers the narrative with the use of self-

reflexivity. The editing of the scene places co-executive producer Larry saying he feels very

nervous against executive producer Dia who calms Tyler down because he is nervous. It is a

sweet way to join the cast and crew through quick moments of vulnerability and emotion, but

joined in ways that attempt to humanize the crew and place them on an even playing field with

the cast. When Dia explains the facts about the situation to the individuals in the room, Catelynn

and Tyler are made doubly vulnerable – first by the possible ramifications of Maci quitting she

show, and also by the position they are in as cast members tasked with expressing their feelings

on camera for the public to consume.

While Catelynn and Tyler appear excited and joyful about the return of Farrah, the

potential consequences of being unable to perform this vulnerability affect the cast deeply. This

is especially visible in the Catelynn/Tyler storyline throughout the series and its multiple

seasons. Catelynn and Tyler often revisit the decision to give up their firstborn child for

adoption. Their role as ambassadors in support of the adoption process appears to motivate this

ongoing conversation despite the overwhelming mental health issues that they each experience

throughout their tenure on the show. In Catelynn’s case, she appears wholly forthcoming and

transparent from the beginning about the impact of allowing the MTV crew to film and publicize

her decision to give up her first child for adoption and the way her choices have shaped her life

moving forward. Yet this transparency reveals a complex set of perils connected to self-

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commodification, and her subsequent personal difficulties reflect these perils. In later seasons of

the series, Catelynn opens up about a miscarriage and her bouts with mental health issues and

drug abuse. In its own way, her reflective position in the admission of – and ongoing onscreen

discussion about – how the filming process affects her personal life offers a narrative that works

in opposition to the stories of the other three lead cast members who decided to keep and raise

their children. Again, the instability revealed in the narrative and its messengers carries the series

even when it debilitates and potentially paralyzes its main characters.

For Catelynn, her cultural (and literal) capital rests on her continued participation as an

on-camera ambassador and advocate. Yet it is clear that this responsibility affects her personally

as she struggles between needing space to recover from these matters and simultaneously feeling

compelled to devote herself to the gaze of the camera. In later seasons of Teen Mom OG,

Catelynn has a second daughter which the couple decides to keep and raise, then suffers a

miscarriage, and then temporarily leaves the show for treatment of depression and anxiety. The

couple initially refuses to allow the cameras to film her, but Catelynn eventually relents,

allowing for filming her inside the facility when her husband, their daughter Nova, and other

family members visit her. The pervasive gaze of the camera is unavoidable, and the return to

documenting her drama, stories of trauma, and ongoing personal challenges becomes ritualized

once more. The camera is made to appear as a companion, its gaze normalized and made to

appear pleasant by the inclusion of the crew within the televised program. But it is nevertheless

weaponized, revealing the imposed imperative in these moments of refusal.

Both Catelynn and Tyler discuss various modes of refusal to participate with the crew in

the series. For Catelynn, it is a question of leaving the show – either to complete rehab, or to

simply walk away from filming for good. For Tyler, it is ultimately a question of whether or not

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he can cope with his wife’s mental health issues, or if he wants to leave her and the family

entirely to be on his own. Both cast members always relent, choosing to return to the series as

regular participants. Their momentary consideration of refusing to participate is downplayed as

simply a passing thought, since the producers and crew are presented as extended family that has

somehow adopted the couple because of the production of 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom OG.

The potential departure acts as both tepid criticism and assertive confirmation of the landscape,

hierarchy, and authority at play in the series, especially since it never becomes a reality.

Alienation and Publicizing the Domestic Space in Reality TV

After the birth of their daughter Nova in a later season, the domestic space that Catelynn

and Tyler inhabit are forever changed, and the circumstances the couple endures become even

more emotionally taxing than before. Catelynn and Tyler begin to unravel, as Catelynn begins to

abuse drugs to mask her worsening depression. She enrolls in rehabilitation programs multiple

times, leaving her husband and child at home while she detoxes and receives intensive mental

health assistance. Perhaps to capitalize on this heightened state of emotions endured by both

Catelynn and Tyler as well as the entire extended family who are featured on the series, the

subsequent emphasis on Catelynn’s mental health concerns (both before and after her

miscarriage) offer the viewer numerous moments where she considers leaving the show, either

temporarily or permanently. The exploitative nature of this choice to include Catelynn’s mental

health issues is downplayed by framing the storyline as beneficial to the general public who may

also suffer from mental health issues.

By the 2018 season, Catelynn’s mental health declines even further, and it is reported in

news and media outlets that she is entering rehab for suicidal ideations. As this takes place,

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Catelynn continues to retain her ties to MTV via social media and a return to later season of the

series. The moments of refusal and return on Teen Mom OG reveal and reflect the complicated

terrain of celebrity, fame, and labor performed for visibility. The Foucauldian imperative on

Teen Mom OG becomes internalized through the process of publicizing the private so that the

cast does not follow the natural impulse to quit or the practical considerations rooted in actual

reflection and introspection, because entertaining either would alter the cycle of drama and

confession the production relies on for the success of the series. In order to perpetuate the

machinery within which the cast and crew function, the cast continues to commodify their

private lives. What is crucial to understanding why this process continues as it does is the

response to the series by viewers. A question that follows: How does Teen Mom OG make

publicizing the private labor enacted by its cast palatable, relatable, and enjoyable for the

viewer? What remains is an inquiry to determine how fans of the series receive and respond to

the messaging embedded in the television text to consider the potential sites of agency that the

series may open.

Self-Reflexivity, Fan Reception, and Critical Media Literacy

Research into fan responses demonstrates more than just the qualitative responses of the

audience to the story-line and characters. It also reveals that systems of power and social

hierarchies are structured and confirmed in the show. Here if one plumbs the posts and

comments on two Teen Mom OG fan blog sites – Teen Mom Junkies teenmomjunkies.com and

Teen Mom Central on Tumblr, one develops a nuanced sense not just of the show but the

structuring of power. Both blog pages studied for this research are long-standing sites, created

before Teen Mom OG premiered its first episode in 2015. The analysis examines posts from the

time period from when the first episode of Teen Mom OG first began airing to the end of airing

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of that specific season. The analysis was of over 500 posts and comments on both pages

combined. A guiding consideration in the analysis of this fan page content is whether fans

recognize or critically confront the tactics used in the series that reveal and confirm the

hierarchical organization embedded into the imagery. Much of the responses on the pages are

negative toward various cast members, as fans appear to be motivated to communicate on the

blog sites in order to gossip about the cast and sometimes the production. One question regarding

these online interactions is: In critiquing the cast, do fans engage in ways that are fruitful as far

as community or agency are concerned?

In general, fans communicated politely with one another on both blog sites, but they were

hypercritical of the cast and various moments revealed in the season. Miscommunication

between fans were resolved quickly and without much fanfare, with fans apologizing for

misunderstandings, and pursuing additional interaction amicably. The most popular themes as

revealed by the number of responses were about the production and onscreen camera crew and

producers (68), posts and comments that revealed a parasocial connection between viewer and

cast member (60), posts and comments about Teen Mom OG villain Farrah (56), and posts and

comments in which fans and viewers discussed or referred to motherhood and the cast members’

character as it relates to their potential abilities as a mother (52). The general response to the

series reboot reveals the complex way viewers of the series approach the program and the way

the confrontation between viewer and program generates pleasure.

Pleasure, it appears through these responses, is in the blend of criticism and hopefulness.

The fans do not hold back in their criticism of the cast members in their comments, and yet, the

response to the young mothers’ mistakes and difficulties reveal an overall trust in the redemptive

process that starting new, admitting mistakes, being honest, and being kind can offer. For

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example, in the response on Teen Mom Junkies to a thread about Catelynn and Tyler who

commit to the process on Teen Mom OG as a way to get “more real,” Catelynns Carly writes,

“Lol at Catelynn and Tyler saying they wouldn't let fame get to their head. Tyler is such a fame

whore. They both constantly check their social media accounts because they're obsessed with

other people talking about them. They didn't go to college or get real jobs because they think the

MTV money will last forever.”

Another fan on the same page (with the screenname Yes to the…) comments on the new

tactics on the series “The OG series looks like they are slowly letting all the girls' secrets out. I

always felt like I found out more about Maci from gossip sites, but these days it's like I'm seeing

the real her on the show.” In studying the responses on these blog pages, it becomes clear that

while fans recognize the tactics and manipulation of reality going on in the series, there is also an

embrace of what the production presents as real without much criticism of the production itself.

The reinvention of the wheel of production does little to motivate any change in the processes of

reception and pleasure in the cast. Fans have their favorites as well as those they despise, but

apart from interacting with other fans in amiable ways, there is little in the form of an

oppositional code decoded from the meaning embedded into the televisual text by the producers.

While many of the fans use the pages to gossip and criticize the cast, there are also

comments and exchanges in which fans consider the real-life influence of the series. For

example, in a thread on Teen Mom Junkies about Teen Mom OG, 16 and Pregnant, and

attributing the drop in teen pregnancies to these programs, fan Catelynns Carly comments in

response to a post about Farrah and compares the original series to the OG reboot, stating that 16

and Pregnant is a better series “to show teens who think that having a baby will be fun or easy.

These girls aren't living the lap of luxury and accomplishing all these things in an unrealistic

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amount of time. Most of them suffer quite a bit and are still suffering when the cameras turn off

and the production crew goes home.” This comment reveals genuine consideration of the

ramifications of both having a child young and appearing on a series about having a child young.

Related to this theme, many fans do communicate with one another about birth control and their

own personal choices related to pregnancy, birth control, and family. Some fans reveal personal

details on the page, and are welcomed by the other fans with kindness and support.

The posts on these pages reveal that fans do care for the wellbeing of the cast members,

but in their comments, they measure wellbeing through assertions of remorse. For example, on

Teen Mom Central, an anonymous fan responds to criticism about Farrah, “I think if Farrah

would just own up to her all her actions then people wouldn’t have as much of a problem with

her. I would definitely respect her more if she did that!” Similarly, many fans reach out on the

blog pages in support of Amber after her time in prison away from drugs and her daughter Leah.

Analysis of the fan pages within the context of self-reflexivity results in an understanding that,

while viewers use the opportunity to connect with one another that Teen Mom OG offers, the

actual engagement in the blog conversations does not show any groundbreaking changes to

viewer literacy of media.

Conclusion

In this new framework of reality TV which has evolved in exciting and complicated

ways, by fulfilling the desire to place oneself within the act of watching or doing, the consumer

is simultaneously consumed, perpetuating an ever-present ideology of self-commodification. The

collapse of the division between public and private fosters the individual’s constant state of

ritualized self-reflexivity. This practice serves as a mask under which the perpetual process of

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self-commodification alienates the individual from their true self, which exists, as Marx outlines,

when the worker is not working. As is expressed in the exchange quoted at the beginning of this

chapter, the act of self-commodification becomes a compulsion that defines the individual’s life.

Moments of refusal or attempted refusal to participate underscore this perpetual cycle of

commodification and increased alienation, as they reveal the potential consequences that will

affect the cultural, economic, and social capital that the cast – and by extension, any creator of

content – appears to enjoy. As revealed on blog pages devoted to commentary on the series, this

self-reflexive approach manifests in self-expression by Teen Mom OG fans in everyday life, but

it does not result in drastic changes to the practice of media consumption to reflect an established

or growing critical media literacy.

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Chapter 5: Metacommentary and the Reproduction of Power

Kris Jenner: MTV Award! (hands Khloé an award). Best reality show!

Khloé Kardashian: (Smiling) This is so much pressure!

Kris Jenner: Who would you like to thank?

Khloé Kardashian: My Lord and Savior…and Kimberly for fucking on camera!

- Keeping Up With the Kardashians season 16 episode 2, “Kourtney’s Choice” (2019)

Metacommentary is a process by which characters, cast members, or other participants

present a narrative within the narrative. This can happen by highlighting the overall intention of

the production within the production, or by commenting on the action during an event or scene

taking place. The structure of Teen Mom OG hinges on the ideology of self-actualization and

reclamation of power that the young women in the series are perceived to have lost after they

became pregnant as teenagers but are regaining through their participation in the series reboot.

When uncovering the mechanisms involved in the production of the series, the suggested

reclamation is not what actually takes place. What ensues is a situation where the potential for

reproduction of power is situated within the performance of the self within the televised

rearrangement of the cast’s real lives. Many scholars have examined the approaches to self in

media. Beverly Skeggs and Helen Wood outline the spectrum of voices from Foucault to Hearn

who seek to confront the “increased significance of the self as an aesthetic project” (49). The

authors examine the ways that “reality television thrives in a culture in which value is performed

through intimate and domestic relationships” (59). Like others such as Biressi and Nunn, Skeggs

and Wood consider the notion that the performance of the self in these personal spaces is now

overtly enacted. As the exchange from Keeping Up with the Kardashians quoted at the start of

this chapter suggests, the performance of the self in reality TV requires ongoing and sometimes

even increasingly intimate expressions that are then made palatable to the consumer through the

production process.

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Metacommentary has also been investigated in other areas of media studies. In video

game scholarship, Kevin Wong outlines the use of metacommentary typically as the “breaking of

the fourth wall,” when the characters on screen appear become aware of their existence in “an

electronic game and engage with the player directly. Taking cues from film and literature, story-

driven games have cleverly deployed self-reflexivity to critique formal issues such as the

narrative limitations imposed by interactivity, society’s attraction to violence in entertainment,

and geek culture’s disinterest in reality” (par. 2). The allure of “looking at looking” welcomes

the user’s commentary and performative acts within the game, yet what is important to

remember is that this process of commentary and “looking at looking” within such games also

cement the player’s hierarchical position by framing the action so that the player wants to

continue playing and is thus compliant to the will of the designers, manufacturers, advertisers,

and producers of the game. The game may flirt with ideas of subversion, but it does so within a

product wholly reliant on its legitimization through gaming and technological gadgetry sales and

game use.

On Teen Mom OG, the return to the TV show six years after the cast’s initial onscreen

experience of 2009’s 16 and Pregnant is presented as the vehicle through which this self-

actualization and reclamation of agency, self-awareness and self-confidence takes place. What is

revealed – through the structure of the series and the metacommentary in the episodes where the

series breaks the “fourth wall” to include the crew within the story alongside the cast – is that

this reclamation does not necessarily emancipate the cast in the ways that are intimated by the

series and its producers in the promotion of the series. What metacommentary does is present an

awareness of the production process taking place within the actual televisual product. The act of

acknowledging that one is placing oneself within the event as a participant within the event

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changes the narrative, the overall event, and the intricate tapestry of meaning embedded within

the text. While what is promoted by the production is the assertion that the production is an

avenue for personal growth, the messages embedded within the televisual text tell a different

story.

Metacommentary and the Disciplining Reality TV Production

Metacommentary is the tactic or connected tactics used to direct the reader or viewer to

note the production process and/or the overarching purpose of the narrative and messages

dispensed to the viewer within the text itself. For example, on a nightly news broadcast, the

anchor may explain the mechanisms in place that contribute to the process of producing the

news. They may mention where a colleague has been sent for on-the-scene reporting or mention

technical difficulties. Or, they may offer overarching messages that relay the goal of the news

staff and network to bring the most up-to-date information to the viewer. This may be done

seriously, or with humor in the way Khloé Kardashian references her sister Kim’s infamous sex

tape catapulting the family to stardom in the quote at the beginning of this chapter. On Teen

Mom OG, self-reflexivity and metacommentary are used together to dispense the messages that

the producers wish to emphasize. But whereas self-reflexivity deals mainly with the individual

characters and their personal issues, thoughts, and feelings, metacommentary draws attention to

the mechanisms involved in the production. The key difference between self-reflexivity and

metacommentary resides in the emphasis on the production crew, staff, and related participants

within the actual series.

By breaking the “fourth wall,” Teen Mom OG appears to deconstruct the production

process by showing the “story within the story.” The layered way in which this is done weaves

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together self-reflexivity and metacommentary, collapsing the space between the individual and

the production. Self-reflexivity emphasizes the cast and their [performed] introspection as an

extension of the overall act of performing the self, while the use of metacommentary – though

seeming to not do so on the surface – emphasizes and maintains the authority of the production

by supporting the narrative and the messages that the production wishes to offer the viewer. The

ritualized imposition of the crew in the series acts as a form of discipline, guiding its cast back to

filming because the personal and the public are no longer separate. Ultimately, with the pairing

of these tactics of self-reflexivity and metacommentary, the production benefits.

Close Reading: Maci and the Disciplining Power of Metacommentary

In episode 6 of the first season of Teen Mom OG (“The F Bomb” which first aired on

April 27, 2015), cast member Maci reacts to the news that MTV will bring former castmate

Farrah back to the show. It is a dramatic storyline that carries over multiple episodes in which the

cast engages in varying degrees of disagreement with the production about Farrah’s return. The

interaction between Maci and the crew reveals Maci’s refusal to participate. The scene features

Maci, her new fiancé Taylor, and a number of production crew including Teen Mom OG

Executive Producer Morgan J. Freeman. The scene cuts back and forth between the many camera

angles while Maci becomes increasingly emotional about Farrah’s involvement in the adult

entertainment industry (00:07:30–00:08:25). She gives Freeman an ultimatum, which he tries to

temper by justifying the inclusion of Farrah as part of the process of showing four very different

women sharing their lives on camera. (00:08:26–00:09:58).

Maci speaks to the producers outside her home, telling Executive Producer Morgan J.

Freeman “I don’t appreciate them going behind our backs.” Her response is of shock and anger

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that MTV did not consult with the rest of the cast, because Farrah – who is promoting adult

entertainment videos, webcams, and products at the time – will be on a show alongside the other

moms and their young children. The producer responds by mentioning the other cast members

who have had difficulties but stayed on the show. “Do we give Farrah the same chance that

Amber had,” he asks. Another point argued is that everyone involved in the series has made

mistakes at one point or another (00:08:00–00:09:58). While the focus in this scene is on Maci

and her reaction to the news about Farrah, the underlying emphasis – as it is argued by the two

onscreen producers – undercuts Maci’s frustration and anger about Farrah returning to the series.

The scene ends with Maci refusing to film if Farrah is in any way involved in the production.

She is adamant, but her emotions are heightened as she talks to production. That Maci expresses

her feelings on the matter cogently and directly to the onscreen producers reflects the use of self-

reflexivity as a tool that can drive the narrative and engage the viewer in a positive way. The

discussion of the production within the production offers the viewer a look at the way

metacommentary functions within the narrative.

In the following episode (“First Time For Everything” which first aired on May 4, 2015),

the cameras follow producer Kiki who is tells everyone “We have to shoot one more scene with

[Maci’s ex Ryan] now that we can’t shoot with Maci and [her son] Bentley.” As Kiki speaks, one

of the many cameras filming the scene pans across the scene and across the other camera crew

that is filming to show Maci, who tells the crew that they can keep filming her because she’s

decided to continue participating as a cast member (00:05:55–00:06:43). This adjustment, Maci

explains, is the compromise she made with production in order to continue filming. As the

conversation continues inside Ryan’s parents’ house, Ryan joins in (00:06:44–00:07:28). It is a

joyful environment, devoid of any reference to the ultimatum made in the previous episode.

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Later in the scene, when Maci and Ryan’s parents discuss cast member Farrah’s budding career

in porn, the group jokes about Maci, Taylor, and Ryan filming their own adult film to gain more

press and popularity. Audible during this exchange is a producer asking her crew to set up

Ryan’s microphone pack. The entire room (including the crew) laughs at the conversation about

porn, with Maci jokingly mentioning how lucrative an idea this may be (00:07:29–00:08:02).

Close Reading: Reflections

In the scene that offers the viewer a resolution to the conflict about Farrah, Maci’s

demeanor is placid. Maci appears to have made peace with the decisions made by production to

bring Farrah back, but a close reading of the text reveals the way the storyline once again

privileges the production, the producers, and the overall authority of the team that is crafting the

story. When the producer tries to steer the crew away from filming Maci, her tone is neutral, but

the words and edited action point to Maci’s decision as more of a nuisance than an assertion of

choice rooted in empowerment or stemming from a sense of personal integrity. Kiki, the

producer commenting on the filming process, frames Maci’s absence as an inconvenience to the

production. After Maci arrives and explains that she’s back to the show, the crew is once again

amiable and share hugs with her. Maci staying on the show returns the environment to stasis. The

message offered is that continuing on the series is advantageous, but the underlying message is

that making one’s home and personal life open to the cameras restores and upholds the status quo

constructed and shaped by production, which in this situation is framed in a positive manner. The

ideological messages in support of surveillance are positive and favor the authority of the

production, its key players who are the onscreen representatives of the production, and

ultimately, MTV and its partners.

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The interaction in these scenes between Maci, the producers and crew, and Maci’s ex

Ryan is cordial, but in examining the relationship between cast and onscreen crew more

carefully, the imposition of the producers becomes clear. It is an assertion of authority made to

appear pleasant. Its players are made to look amenable to Maci’s initial decision, but when this is

juxtaposed with how elated they appear after she shares her decision to stay on the show, the

preference of the producers and the ideological underpinnings are revealed. The cameras and

related gadgets and gear are displayed prominently as the crew works and engages with the cast.

In the end, Maci’s son Bentley does not appear in the episodes as part of an agreement Maci

strikes with MTV. But the way her decision to stay on the series is revealed in episode 7

sidelines any genuine sense of agency or empowerment. Any empowerment in this case, as

revealed in this and other scenes, resides within the confines of capital and ongoing

commodification, which is ultimately not in the hands of the cast member. The imperative to

keep filming is upheld repeatedly. What is presented as the conflict resolved as a series of

lighthearted moments, like many of the moments where the camera crew communicates with the

cast within the series, reveals the serpentine way that cast members and crew are interconnected

and tangled with little room for escape. Ultimately, it is the promise both of visibility and of

capital that keeps the players playing, even as they joke about the process of self-

commodification along the way. And, this promise reveals a sense of expectation that arises from

this private life made public. It is only cast member Farrah - whose response to those

expectations does not bow to the authority of the production – who ends up in a position that

explicitly reveals the insidious ways that ideology is upheld. MTV capitalizes on this refusal to

participate and then denigrates the only cast member who is unwilling to comply with the

authority and force of discipline embodied by the production.

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Returning to a consideration of violence as an imposed tactic as revealed by Foucault and

others, the imposition of the crew in Teen Mom OG is twofold: By implementing

metacommentary into the narrative, the production not only imposes its authority onto the cast,

but also onto the viewer through the messages dispensed in the text and in the narrative. The

perpetuation of authority masked as a call for enthusiastic participation builds throughout the

series. This imposition perpetuates messages of power through the production and reception of

the cultural product. And, throughout the entire series, the repeated use of metacommentary

becomes ritualized. The flow of televisual imagery also embodies a flow of ideology and cultural

habit-building. Repeated in each episode in different ways, metacommentary and self-reflexivity

offer an ongoing and evolving template by which the producers of culture dispense messages.

Teen Mom OG calls attention to the use of metacommentary in the layers of narrative and

response to this narrative infused into the story. To be aware of the story by commenting on it at

length within the story is presented as wholly authentic and transparent. This structure mirrors

online culture and the way social media perpetuates ideologies of visibility as authentic and

profitable (in a number of different ways related to various forms of capital) through the over-

sharing of information as an assertion of the value of the self. And yet, as Dubrofsky explains in

her examination of surveillance in reality TV and on Facebook, reality TV is largely considered

“a low form of entertainment (“trashy” TV), whereas [Social Networking Sites] are gaining

traction in every facet of the public and private arena, with private citizens, celebrities, and

politicians” engaged in social media practices (115). It is perhaps for this reason that Teen Mom

OG utilizes social media tactics in the structure of its television programs.

When utilized in the framework of a pleasant, entertaining series full of moving

snapshots of the personal lives of four young mothers that is less low culture and more a

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platform for tactics used on social media and in online culture, metacommentary reveals the

ways that asserting power can be manipulative in intention and oppressive while simultaneously

appearing fairly innocuous as it is woven into a family-friendly series about amiable participants.

The structure and editing of the episodes develop the representation of the crew as onscreen

collaborators who act as agents that design the narrative to favor the production even as the story

focuses on the cast in their daily lives.

Metacommentary and the Assertion of Authority

The inclusion of the onscreen crew in the story creates a complicated juxtaposition for the

viewer. The pairing of the cast’s voiceovers with the animated title sequences filled with quirky

images and line drawings infantilizes the cast to make the narrative more palatable with its

youthful tone. At the beginning of the season, the onscreen crew appears as a colorful reminder

of the fun process of reality TV production. Yet the crafty positioning of the crew is evident from

the start. As the season progresses, the crew appears in the narrative more frequently, asking

questions to interject in conversations or gain insight into the specific matter being discussed.

The careful crafting of a narrative that supports the authority of the production grows with each

episode.

As with other reality programs, the crew also becomes more visible when the drama

within the cast members increases. Yet unlike other series such as The Bachelor or Survivor,

where the invisible line between cast and crew still remains intact, the MTV producers break

down that separation in order to enforce other boundaries and frameworks of authority. It is as

the Maci/Farrah conflict progresses that the producers begin to ramp up their involvement

beyond serving as pleasant additions to the conversation within the series. The action of

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increasing the crew’s visible involvement in the onscreen narrative through metacommentary

takes its cue from other reality programs which include clips of the crew intervening when the

drama reaches a breaking point. The way that MTV and Teen Mom OG incorporate “breaking

the fourth wall” into the story differs from other series and alters the equation in favor of the

crew intervening in multiple covert and explicit ways.

Theorists have examined the strategies that are used to garner and retain viewers. In a

1971 essay, literary critic and political theorist Frederic Jameson considered the concept of

metacommentary within literature and art. In his response, Jameson argues: “What is wanted is a

kind of mental procedure which suddenly shifts gears, which throws everything in an

inextricable tangle one floor higher and turns the very problem itself…into its own solution…by

widening its frame in such a way that it now takes in its own mental processes as well as the

object of those processes” (9). The producers of Teen Mom OG use their own participation as

onscreen co-conspirators to manifest the inextricable tangle that Jameson describes. Inserting

themselves into the program to shift gears and offer themselves – as representatives of authority,

power, and surveillance – they appear to answer the problems they simultaneously propel using

their participation and imposition in each scene. As tensions increase, the crew steps in to act as

mediator, solidifying the ideologies associated with surveillance, hegemony, and authority. In

this regard, they follow what Jameson outlines in his confrontation of metacommentary in art

and literature.

Acting as the solution to the problem they created, the producers and onscreen crew of

Teen Mom OG control the narrative and its underlying messages. Power and its structures of

authority are presented in a positive light and are supported by the cast members. In the case of

its characters, self-reflexivity and metacommentary are the tools with which the cast moves from

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conflict to resolution (and often back to conflict again). This tactic is evident from the very first

episode of the series. Despite assertions [made by the producers in promotional material about

the show] that it is a groundbreaking series that utilizes a unique, unconventional approach, Teen

Mom OG is conventional and rooted in conservativism in that it privileges and upholds the

production, and by extension, established structures of power. Yet unlike in art, literature, or

other televisual texts where this disruption offers the possibility of active engagement in the

process and what it reveals, it is unclear if viewers of Teen Mom OG question or critically

interrogate the process utilized in the series.

Close Reading: Breaking the Fourth Wall With “Old Wounds”

The third episode of the first season of Teen Mom OG (“Old Wounds,” originally aired on April

6, 2015), includes a scene where Maci has planned to meet her ex, Ryan, at a public location to

drop off her son Bentley so that he can spend time with his father. Ryan is late for the drop off,

and Maci becomes frustrated (00:05:58–00:06:00). As Maci, Bentley, and her fiancé Tyler get

into the car to drive over to the meet up spot, the camera crew stop them to adjust one of the

dashcam devices that records the cast members as they drive (00:06:01–00:06:10). This detail

reminds the viewer that the production is taking place. Maci then reaches out to Ryan via text

while waiting for him in the car with Tyler and her son Bentley. Ryan finally responds to the

text, and the two have an argument over the phone (00:06:11–00:07:01).

Maci, Tyler, and Bentley drive off after deciding to drop Bentley at Ryan’s parents’

house instead of waiting around even further. Ryan and his girlfriend Shelby drive to the original

meeting place, but production stops them twice to let them know to reach out to Maci regarding

the situation (00:07:02–00:08:18).

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Close Reading: Reflections

The tension in the scene highlighting the Bentley drop off is not just between the two

parties involved in the situation. It is a triangulation of each parent and the production, with a

palpable imposition of the production on the narrative as well as the visual and literal

environment. MTV advertises these moments as simply “breaking the fourth wall,” because they

offer a kind of transparency as far as the production process is concerned. But this transparency

does little to shake the jarring nature of the imposition of the crew within the personal or private

spaces in which the cast members interact. This imposition also changes the action within the

episode. Without the production crew, Ryan might not know to drive to his parents’ house to

pick up his son, for example. Without their interruptions, he also may not be as frustrated with

his ex and everyone involved.

Like the drama in each episode, the imposition of the crew repeats as it transforms into

ritual, driving the series as a guiding force while presenting itself as an inconsequential added

element. The element of metacommentary imposed upon the scene with the inclusion of the crew

reproduces power and positions itself to stay in the viewer’s consciousness as a reminder of the

authority of the production, of the surveilling technology, and of the external and internalized

imperatives involved with participating in the production as cast members. The private and

personal is wrung from the individual to be made public in various tangled ways. The cast

member consents to this process, yet the blurred line between public and private remains, and the

presence of the crew within the narrative confuses the relationship between viewer and onscreen

talent. This triangulation of cast, onscreen crew is a boon to the production, for it allows the crew

to tangle and untangle the conflict and the players as they see fit, upholding the expectations and

requirements that affect and motivate the cast to continue in the production process.

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Metacommentary, Labor, and Alienation

While metacommentary offers the potential for genuine commentary on an event,

situation, or site, it often becomes an integral part of the process of alienation that takes place

because of the way it privileges the networks of power, authority, and capital that work in

tandem to serve the production of (social, economic, and cultural) capital. The superficial

message offered to the consumer depicts metacommentary practices as devoid of the exploitative

actions involved in late capitalist culture. Teen Mom OG offers the cast member and the at-home

viewer the sense of empowerment, agency, and self-assertion. But, what is promoted ultimately

benefits the network and the production rather than supporting the cast or any of their specific

victories or successes. The structure of the series aids the seamless incorporation of

metacommentary into a commodifying act of publicizing private trauma, challenges and

vulnerabilities for profit.

Teen Mom OG includes multiple instances of this type of underhanded, exploitative

metacommentary in each episode. The structure of the scenes allows for this to take place. The

main imagery captured on Teen Mom OG is similar to most other reality shows: A mix of

“action” footage such as dramatic exchanges and travel shots in cars or on foot, and B-Roll

(which includes insert shots of nature or neighborhood scenes nearby to be used as introduction

or closing shots). Where the production of Teen Mom OG differs from typical construction of

reality programming is in the way it substitutes in-person informal discussion between cast

members or between cast and crew woven into the narrative in place of formal sit-down

interviews typically used in traditional reality TV. In a many reality programs, the action or

drama between cast members takes place in one set of clips while the camera (and by extension,

the producers) acts as an all-seeing eye that follows the narrative. Within these clips are often

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interspersed a number of [on the fly or formal] interview clips, music to affect the tone of the

scene, “confessional” interviews, and sound bites that weave the scene together. These sound

bites often flow from one clip to the next, acting as a glue to the scene. The interviews that are

intercut are typically in a formal setting, but they can also be constructed within the set like in

the first season of The Real World where they took place in various spots around the Manhattan

Loft.

Also used is footage from the “confessionals.” These interviews and confessionals in

formal settings act as a structuring device which also cements the authority of the production

because the producers, editors, and network shape the narrative and imagery and have the final

say over what makes it to air. Any episode on programs such as Survivor, The Bachelor, The

Apprentice, or traditional reality programs will include such interview footage and/or audio as a

way to guide the narrative and insert a formal moment that includes details that drive the story.

Teen Mom OG does not follow this method. The cast narrate their own storylines in voiceovers

at the head and tail of each sequence, and the crew jump in and out of the narrative, disrupting

the understanding of their function in the series. On most traditional reality TV shows, the

producers or crew appear voiceless, hidden from the viewer except in an emergency. The cast

member is instructed to answer interview questions with the question folded into the answer so

that the producer’s voice is not included in the clip. On Teen Mom OG, the producers alternate

between asking questions off-camera that are heard and highlighted in the scene and involving

themselves directly in the action by appearing alongside the cast as costars. The ensuing

onscreen relationship that is nurtured through the exchange between cast and crew upholds their

authority of the production while making it appear as if the influence and authority of the

production are somehow shaken away in a newly democratized environment. The editing of the

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series supports this process, for each scene almost always returns to showing the cast’s

compliance and willingness to proceed, even when other figures of authority like family

members attempt to influence or motivate the cast.

Close Reading: Beyond Self-Promotion, “This Ain’t It”

In episode 3 of the first season of Teen Mom OG (“Old Wounds,” first aired on April 6,

2015), Tyler and his mother chat about Catelynn’s new pregnancy at a park on the waterfront

(00:03:24–00:03:40). Offscreen, a producer asks Tyler if he has wanted another baby since their

first child Carly, who they gave up for adoption during the filming of 16 and Pregnant. Tyler

answers quietly with a tone of frustration. Of course he wants another child, he replies, he

already wanted one when Carly [the daughter they gave up for adoption] was born. Tyler’s

mother then changes the subject to ask him if he registered for classes at the local college. She

urges him to do so, turning directly to the camera as she mentions her son having an actual

career, adding “No offense, MTV, this ain’t it” (00:03:41–00:04:01). It is a tender dose of reality

delivered by Tyler’s mother and a reminder that being on a reality TV show is hopefully not the

final and only career choice for her son.

The conversation does not progress, however, as Tyler changes the subject again to

lament over not seeing his first-born daughter Carly too often. Later in the episode, Catelynn and

Tyler discuss their daughter Carly who they gave up for adoption six years prior. They explain to

Tyler’s mother that signing away their rights for the adoption affects their access to Carly even

though it was arranged as an open adoption with access in the beginning. The discussion turns to

the other children featured in the series. Catelynn and Tyler express concern about the kids who

appear in the series, saying “They don’t have a normal life at all. They get noticed all the time.

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They are stopped all the time, asked for pictures all the time.” Catelynn expresses her support for

Carly’s adoptive parents who wish to limit Carly’s access to her birth parents because of the

series and its visibility (00:22:00–00:24:43).

In the following episode, (“New Kids on the Block,” first aired on April 13, 2015), Tyler

continues this discussion, saying “we never knew we were gonna have millions of followers on

social media” (00:34:30–00:34:53). Yet moments after sharing his concerns about the way their

fame affects them as a couple and a family, Tyler sticks capitulates to stick up for the series and

the filming process, suggesting that Carly’s adoptive parents should “accept the fact that your

daughter was born on MTV. Her birth parents are followed on reality TV, and that’s just life”

(00:34:54–00:35:12).

Close Reading: Reflections

The scenes are edited to highlight Tyler talking about his feelings about being a father

rather than elaborating on what his mother or wife refer to when they discuss privacy,

opportunities outside of MTV, and the consequences of being on the series. In later episodes,

Tyler revisits the possibility of going back to school, yet the emphasis remains on personal and

family issues rather than on career or related external connections. As with many of the narrative

arcs of the story, Tyler’s is one that benefits the network, the series, and the brand.

This capitulation by the cast to continued and constant surveillance by MTV regardless of

the consequences serves the production and the MTV brand. The scenes use metacommentary

about the environment in which Catelynn and Tyler find themselves to block any potential

criticality toward the production process, self-commodification, or ongoing surveillance apart

from Tyler’s Mom’s moment of candor. MTV creates a landscape for both the cast and viewer

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that envelops both parties in an illusion. The playful tone highlighted from the very first

moments of the series, when the young children of the cast members eagerly ask to be filmed as

the young parents exchange banter with the crew reveals the entry point into this agreement. It is

one that reveals its complexities while obscuring related manipulations. And it is all structured

into a narrative and visual landscape that the production presents as transparent to the viewer.

The production dispenses messages that uphold and normalize the practices taking place

in the series and in contemporary culture. These practices are painted as benign, part of one’s

daily life, and ultimately beneficial if adhered to with loyalty and willingness to sacrifice one’s

privacy. And yet, Teen Mom OG also contains moments of doubt or concern over the effects of

the production on the cast and their family members. This is done not to generate a genuine

critical response. The moments of concern simultaneously subvert and legitimize the production

itself. The resulting messages offered to the viewer – underwritten with the use of

metacommentary paired with the self-reflexivity of the cast – reveal and contribute to wider

formations that perpetuate the reproduction of power through the implementation of ideological

apparatuses that act as a set of guideposts and markers for the viewing audience.

Metacommentary, Fan Reception, and Critical Media Literacy

As with the research involved in understanding the tactic of self-reflexivity, the research

on fan responses to Teen Mom OG for the understanding of the function of metacommentary in

the series is comprised of analysis of posts and comments on two Teen Mom OG fan blog sites –

Teen Mom Junkies (teenmomjunkies.com) and Teen Mom Central on Tumblr. The keywords

used in organizing the fan responses on both pages were: Money, Motherhood, Beauty, Fame,

The Parasocial Relationship, Production (signifying both the MTV crew/producers and the

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production process), Remorse, Redemption, Class, Comedy (referring to fan creativity and

humorous comments), Pornography/Sexuality, and each of the main female cast member’s or

their child’s father’s names. A guiding consideration in the analysis of this fan page content as it

relates to metacommentary relates to the reception of the televisual text that is shaped by the use

of this tactic. Do fans respond to the series in ways that take notice of the inclusion of the

production within the production? Also, do fans engage in ways that adopt metacommentary

practices into their own participation on the blog pages? And, how is pleasure generated in ways

that take into consideration the practice of metacommentary as it revealed in the fan blog posts

and comments?

In general, the fan response to metacommentary is that there is a general understanding of

the influence of the production on the product (and its players), but there is little critical

intervention in the blog pages that reflects interest in the uses of this tactics beyond that it offers

a chance to see the crew onscreen. In one post on Teen Mom Junkies, teenmomofthemonth

comments on a scene in which Gary talks about private matters in a scene, suggesting that the

scene is “scripted for drama.” The same fan comments on another post with “That scene seemed

very staged and scripted to me.” In another post about how insufferable cast member Farrah is,

erb121 comments “I can’t believe the producers don’t refuse to work with her.” Both comments

reflect a success on the part of the production to deflect criticism of their actions and instead

focus all energy and attention on the cast. When there is discussion of MTV or the production, it

is as if viewers prefer to avoid acknowledging the influence of the producers and crew on the

cast and the finished product beyond simple statements about scenes being staged or scripted. In

one Teen Mom Junkies post about MTV and decreases in teen pregnancies, Catelynns Carly

comments, “I can’t credit MTV with this. It’s too much for me to handle.” What these comments

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reveal is that other than a response rooted in what Ang considers the ideology of mass culture in

the way the fans criticize the cast for their many flaws and mistakes and find joy in sharing their

criticisms with others, there is an overarching desire to disregard the imprint of the production

and network. The only exception is when fan teenmomofthemonth comments on Dr. Drew

Pinsky who hosts the Teen Mom OG reunion specials, “I get annoyed when Dr. Drew comes on

no matter what, because he’s a pushover and an insult to anyone who practices medicine.” In this

case, even though Dr. Drew presents as an authority figure and expert on the series, he is treated

as a cast member and not a representative of the series and the production.

One delightful way that fans incorporate metacommentary into their own practices is in

the way some narrate their own actions while on the blog site. On Teen Mom Junkies, a fan with

the username rae dreams up a fantastical horror movie scenario that involves cast member

Farrah. At the end of the creative offering, rae explains, “Sorry, I’m working a midnight shift and

I’m super bored.” This and related comments reflect similar considerations as those revealed in

the context of self-reflexivity. There is genuine engagement with the televisual text, and an

acknowledgment that metacommentary is used to guide the narrative and manage the cast, but

beyond simple connection to other fans through personal anecdotes or humorous delusional

stories punctuated by details about the fan’s particular situation at the time they commented, the

engagement does not reflect an interrogation of the tactics, practices, and ideological apparatuses

at work on Teen Mom OG.

Conclusion

Metacommentary can elevate individual stories to court viewers and aid the reception

(and popularity) of a series by engaging in ways that promote active participation in the process

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of spectatorship and consumption of the cultural product. But, metacommentary is often used to

court passivity in the viewer, even as it appears to welcome engagement with the cultural

product. The distinction between engagement and empowerment is important here, as the two are

often presented as interchangeable in televisual texts such as daytime TV, drama, and reality TV.

Failure to distinguish between the two misses an important critical assessment of the culture

industry. The impact of the use of self-reflexivity and metacommentary in Teen Mom OG is

necessary to confront. The messages and frameworks that metacommentary accentuates,

elements that are discarded or made less important, and the overall effects of metacommentary

on the messages offered to the viewer are carefully arranged in order resulting in a set of

messages within a televisual text that delivers conservative, market-driven imperatives to the

consumer in order to quiet criticality and encourage the adoption of these very same practices in

their own daily lives.

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Conclusion and Future Areas of Consideration

“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

– “Hotel California,” The Eagles (1976)

This project is being completed during the outbreak of the global Covid-19 Coronavirus

pandemic. During this time, many cities in the United States have shut down as their inhabitants

work, study, socialize and shop all online. At the same time, as the US continues to experience

ongoing police brutality and abuses of power, there is a public reckoning with history and the

age-old racisms that have long plagued the United States. The themes and problems addressed in

this research couldn’t be timelier. For, in this state of pandemic pandemonium, where work is

home and home is work and there appears to be no difference, the imperative to continuously be

present and online and ready to hustle as and be surveilled is palpable. But also, in this state of

mass uprising, many are beginning to seek genuine community through acts of protest and

rebellion, mutual aid, and related exchanges that can be supported by digital culture, but are not

governed by it. It is a time when many are asking themselves important and crucial questions

about selfhood, success, privilege, and community.

On Teen Mom OG, the ideologies of individualism, success and the American Dream are

reinforced in complicated ways. The way these ideologies are infused into the narrative

normalizes and romanticizes them for the viewer. The answer appears to be an overwhelming

emphasis on the self – by focusing on the cast members’ self-reflexive moments, and by

fostering a production environment primarily within the home that pulls the cast away from the

community in which they reside and isolates them within an insular relationship in an imagined

community where producer and cast member are on a level playing field. Conveniently, this

allows for the production to form the narrative and the representation of the cast even when it

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appears not to. The production exerts control by placing its own players directly into the

narrative, inviting increased self-reflexivity from the cast as a distraction and disciplining tool,

employing skillful tactics of metacommentary, and crafting a narrative in ways that obscure the

complexity of these new forms of manipulation while appearing to do the opposite. The intrusive

setup (for the cast and the viewer) is made to appear palatable, friendly, and enacted with the

best of intentions. The ease with which this form of control is possible is because of the nature of

reality television in its choice of casting, its treatment of talent in the characters (or navigating its

absence), and its position within a growing multiplatform system.

These tactics are pervasive in all contemporary media, for they help reproduce power and

soften the blow of surveillance, exploitative labor practices, and increasingly unobtainable

standards of participation as a means to legitimacy, verified authenticity, and increased capital.

As with social media, reality programs such as Teen Mom OG emphasize a wholehearted

embrace of the confessing, self-involved individual governed by the processes of expression and

the machinery that records them that in this framework requires an ongoing, increasingly

sacrificial acts of self-commodification that court alienation from the self and from the bonds

that give meaning to one’s life. The way of being that is endorsed is navigated by capital, and

rooted in situating oneself a step away from the actual thing by watching the watching of it

which serves as a distraction from the agents of authority that require the reproduction of power

in order to obtain and retain power. This is not reserved for reality TV. Politics also employs

these practices, with its players offering one aspirational, tantalizing, or infuriating distraction

after another to turn the attention away from the functions and consequences of capital and

power.

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Participation in programs such as Teen Mom OG offers the cast financial, social, and

cultural capital, but requires the cast to change their way of living to accommodate the intrusion

of the crew, the camera, and the surveilling gaze on an arena with a worldwide reach which

rarely rests. The transactional relationship required in participating in this kind of program is

made appealing to the cast with salary, the allure of fame, and the promise of visibility and

recognition. The relationship into which the cast is invited is made sweeter by the kind of

connection that the producers and crew appear to share with the cast. The resulting interaction is

filmed, and shared with the viewer, who may be motivated by a parasocial connection and aspire

to emulate such processes, relationships, and ideological positionings as well. Much like the

ideologies of excellence that personalities such as Oprah Winfrey represent within this

framework of capital, success, and fame, the cast and crew of Teen Mom OG also support actions

and characterizations that emphasize performing the self, self-commodification, and consent to

endless surveillance in exchange for visibility and increased forms of capital. And the way the

series presents this to the viewer is done in a way that normalizes these actions, making them

appear appealing, even if these actions cause conflict or discomfort at the time of filming or

beyond.

The reasons the cast may continue to participate and reject the idea of stepping away or

even quitting altogether rests in the relationship between capital, talent, and the flimsy promises

of fame embedded in reality TV and contemporary culture. When there appears to be no other

commodifiable talent or skill to draw attention to, the emphasis becomes publicizing everyday

exchanges in private and domestic spaces through processes. The adverse effects of participating

in this process become infused into the narrative to actually support the series when the use of

tactics such as metacommentary help to simultaneously subvert and legitimize the process. In

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order to retain control of the narrative, the producers of these cultural products twist and shape

these lived experiences that are now filmed into a configuration that serves to retain the

structures of capital and power in the way they currently exists. The preceding chapters that

outline how this takes place serve to answer one of the guiding questions of this process to reveal

how Teen Mom OG and reality TV function to to aid in the reproduction of power within an

ongoing neoliberal project that is upheld by the culture industry.

A question that persists: Is it possible to be critically aware of the way capital and power

function and still enjoy media and cultural products? This question points to an unresolved,

ongoing consideration of the ways, if any, that viewers and fans can engage in ways that

acknowledge this system and its tools while continuing to enjoy the process of consuming

cultural products. A hope is that engagement with cultural products may become even more

enjoyable when experienced from a perspective informed by a rich and growing practice of

media literacy. The fan responses to Teen Mom OG reveal little in the form of viewers

questioning the characterizations as they are shaped in the narrative by the production.

Uncovering what is seemingly already uncovered is one tactic in response to this proposed blend

of awareness and enjoyment. Another tactic might be to seek insight into the ways that practices

such as textual poaching or reappropriation might energize the criticality of fans and viewers in

creative ways.

The existing areas of consideration outlined in this dissertation open many possibilities of

future study. One application of this scholarship might be to expand its reach to examine how the

compulsion to treat the self as commodity manifests on various social media platforms. How

does TikTok stardom, for example differ from reality TV fame? How does the framework of

alienation function in a purely digital landscape that appears to be more user-driven than a reality

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series? How might social media practices characterized as empowering avenues of self-

expression and agency retain similar kinds of opacity as what is revealed in how breaking the

fourth wall and including the “production within the production” function in Teen Mom OG?

Embedded in these areas of interest are questions of race, class, and ideologies of upward

mobility and/or privilege. An examination of the commodification of motherhood on television,

social media, and in visual culture may open important channels of scholarship. For some

celebrities, motherhood becomes an avenue to exponentially increasing profit through the sale of

children’s books, clothing, health and beauty aids, and the production of more visual content. Yet

for other mothers in the public eye who come from working class families like the cast of Teen

Mom OG, the burdens often outweigh the perks.

Another area of consideration is the physical and emotional effects and consequences that

the alienating process of participating in reality TV or any number of related manifestations of

publicizing one’s private life may have on the individual. This alienation manifests among the

young mothers in Teen Mom OG as depression, anxiety, drug abuse, and even domestic violence.

These consequences and manifestations of self-commodification and alienation are not unique to

the cast of Teen Mom OG. In fact, they have existed since the genre began. This alienating

process has even become lethal. On the British series Love Island, for example, two cast

members from different seasons committed suicide after appearing on the series. The series

incorporates audience tweets and viewer votes on popularity into the narrative, causing

considerable stress and anxiety to some contestants who are unable to handle their newfound

visibility and the burden that comes from the public seeking 24-hour access to their lives. After

the deaths of 2016 Love Island cast member Sophie Gradon and 2017 cast member Mike

Thalassitis, their castmates were outspoken about the lack of aftercare by production after each

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season. British paper The Sun also published an online article noting that 38 people have died in

suspected suicides linked to participation in reality TV shows (Spencer 2019).

In a growing number of cases, existential alienation leads to literal isolation and eventual

self-harm or even death. Like Love Island contestants Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis who

both committed suicide soon after their participation on the competition series, cast member

Hana Kimura from the Japanese reality series Terrace House also recently committed suicide

after being extensively harassed and bulled online. While the cast of Terrace House is not

obligated to remain filming if they choose to depart, and any consideration of terminating one’s

tenure as an on-camera participant is accepted and even welcomed, the visibility that

participation on the series brings can still become crippling for some. Terrace House

incorporates the “production within the production” by presenting a panel of comedians and

actors who watch and comment on the series in a studio separate from the filmed location. The

panel discusses many themes with a generally favorable response to a cast member deciding to

leave the show to move on to other opportunities. Despite what appears as support of the power

to choose how and how much to participate, issues of self-commodification and alienation

remain, as does the divisiveness that drives social media and online culture. There appears no

other option than the assertion of participation and allegiance to an incessant force of

surveillance despite these possible consequences. The enduring illusion is that value is

contingent on remaining within this circuit of visibility and surveillance in multiple

interconnected ways while becoming increasingly alienated from one’s true self. As the song

lyrics go, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

A wise person recently advised me to consider the dissertation process not an ending, but

a beginning. A mission, as this project comes to a close and new projects begin, is to imagine the

187

ways forward. Implementing an approach rooted in media literacy, the goal is to confront the

oppressive structures that encourage the reproduction of power in damaging ways, and to do so

through scholarship, an emphasis on community, and the hope that perhaps, if we’re lucky and

smart enough, we will turn away from the weighty anvil of capital toward a system rooted in

solidarity, discourse and genuine support.

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Notes

Examination of many current or recent reality dating and/or competition programs will

reveal the way ideological apparatuses that uphold and reproduce power are promoted

through tactics break down the barriers between public and private. A few examples

include The Bachelor/Bachelorette, Survivor, Love Island, Love at First Sight, American

Idol, and Big Brother. In these programs, the domestic and/or interpersonal relationships

are highlighted in ways that exploit the personal and private for the sake of capital, profit,

and support of exploitative practices that pull its participants into an ongoing process of

self-commodification or eject cast members into obscurity and often, toward personal,

professional, or economic failure.

The starting point for understanding the ideas and questions here is “Culture Industry

Reconsidered” by Theodor Adorno. A study of Adorno’s work can then be paired with

reading the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by Karl Marx in which Marx

outlines the concept of alienation or estrangement from the self. Roland Barthes

examines the way ideology is infused into visual media in Mythologies, and Ien Ang

examines how ideology is infused in media in ways that elicit pleasure in Watching

Dallas.

See Watching Dallas by Ang (1985), The ‘Nationwide’ Audience by Morley (1980),

Television and Everyday Life by Roger Silverstone (1994). Also relevant are

Silverstone’s 1991 paper "From audiences to consumers: the household and the

consumption of communication and information technologies" in the European Journal

of Communication and Silverstone’s paper co-authored with David Morley “Media

audiences communication and context: Ethnographic perspectives on the media

audience" in A handbook of qualitative methodologies for mass communication research

(2002). Stuart Hall’s 1980 paper on “encoding/decoding” is available in The Cultural

Studies Reader, edited by Simon During (2007).

See Hutcheon’s The politics of postmodernism for further consideration of this theme.

The worker in the context of the Marxist understanding of alienation is typically used in

regard to factory workers. For the purposes of this research, the term is reimagined within

the framework of the reality TV production process.

These seemingly spontaneous interviews filmed within the action taking place are

referred to in reality TV post-production as OTF or “On the Fly” interviews. They are

often contrasted with formal interview “INTV” footage where the cast appears seated,

sometimes with a green screen background that shows a static image of the interior of a

home or film location. The difference in tone, pace, and perspective (the cast may not be

looking directly at the producer conducting the interview like they would be in a formal

interview) that can be created with an OTF can alter the direction of the narrative of any

given scene or episode when edited together in a crafty and creative way. To deliver a

type of message or meaning with the use of this kind of skill is beneficial to the

production, network and sponsors because it constructs an appealing product - exciting,

and potentially frustrating - leaving the viewer in anticipation for the next episode.

189

In many ways the performed heroism revealed in scenes where the crew steps in to

intervene during times of conflict can be traced to daytime “trash TV” talk shows such as

The Jerry Springer Show where security often jumps into the scene when an individual

launches at another in a moment of rage. But this inclusion of the production’s

intervention is not limited to daytime talk shows. This tactic is used on such programs as

The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, where the crew will step in whenever there is a

heightened moment of tension or emotion. What is different about the intervention of the

crew on Teen Mom OG is that the crew is part of the narrative all along, jumping in to ask

questions, stoke conflict, step in as savior, or act as mediator in some sort of performed

advocacy for both the cast and the production.

190

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