Harsh Reality: Unscripted TV Reality Shows Offensive to Families

Executive Summary

Although reality-based television series are not a new phenomenon (MTV created The Real World over a decade ago), it was not until the debut of Survivor on CBS during the summer of 2000 that the "reality" genre managed to overcome the "lowbrow" stigma attached to it by sensationalistic specials like When Animals Attack and Caught in the Act, and became not only popular, but respectable too.

But the fact that reality programs have become mainstream, does not mean that they've also become family-friendly.  Too often these series become a thinly veiled excuse for encouraging the contestants' reckless, irresponsible, or just plain stupid behavior, for the sake of an entertaining half-hour or hour of TV.

Because reality series are designed to last only a few weeks, they don't follow the traditional television "season," the way a scripted series does.  In constructing a methodology for this study, the PTC selected a sufficiently long span of time (January 1, 2001 to May 1, 2002) to find a representative sample (the first four episodes of each series).

Overall, the PTC reviewed all of the thirty-eight reality series that aired during that period, (twenty-five of which were broadcast series, thirteen were cable) for a total of 125.5 hours of programming (89.5 broadcast, 36 cable).  For series like Survivor, The Mole, The Real World and others that returned for sequel installments with new casts, each season was treated as a separate series.

Major findings include:

Ø       Of the broadcast networks, NBC and UPN's reality series had the highest levels of offensive content, with 19 and 14.9 instances of offensive content per-hour respectively. 

Ø       Of the cable networks, VH1 and MTV contained the most offensive content at 39.7 instances per hour and 36.1 instances per hour, respectively.

Ø       Offensive content was more than three times as frequent on cable reality series as on broadcast reality series.  The overall rate of sex, foul language, and violence on broadcast was 9.5 instances per hour.  The average for cable was 29.4 instances of offensive content per hour.

Ø       CBS's Big Brother 2 contained the most offensive content overall on broadcast, with a combined per hour rate of 26.3.

Ø       MTV's The Osbournes was the most offensive cable reality series, with a combined average of 140.5 instances of offensive content per hour, primarily because of the non-stop vulgar language.

Ø       NBC featured the highest frequency of foul language for broadcast TV reality series, with 16 instances per hour. 

Ø       MTV was the lead offender in the foul language category for cable reality series with an average of 31 instances per-hour. 

Ø       Of the broadcast networks, reality series appearing on UPN and Fox contained the most sexual content with 3.4 instances and 3.1 instances per hour respectively. 

Ø       On cable, sexual content was most prevalent on VH1 with almost 10 occurrences per hour. 

Ø       Reality series appearing on UPN and NBC also contained the most violent content on broadcast TV, with 3.1 and 3 instances of violence per hour, respectively.  

Ø       Violent content on cable was most prominent on USA with 3 occurrences per hour. 

Ø       The WB network had the cleanest reality series on broadcast television.

Ø        Fox Family had the cleanest reality series on expanded basic cable.

Full Study