7 - ‘There's No Place Like Home’: emotional exposure, excess and empathy on TV

Summary

In Restyling Factual TV, discussed in Chapter 1, Annette Hill argues that if viewers relate to people in certain programmes, then the way they view themselves and their experiences change. ‘When viewers witness the “ordinary drive of life” in reality programmes, they are immersed in the experience of watching and also reflecting on how this relates to them, storing information and ideas, collecting generic material along the way’ (2007: 106). She goes on to suggest that: ‘The most dominant response to Wife Swap is to mirror the judgemental attitudes of the participants’ (ibid: 198); ‘In this respect, participants in Wife Swap often let their emotions out and damn the consequences’ (ibid.: 199). As the last chapter considered, one reason to watch film and television is to be moved. But how does emotion function in television, how is it fashioned by producers to elicit a response from the audience and what role does it play in our moral judgements of what we watch?

Charlotte Brunsdon concludes her work on lifestyling Britain with the argument that: ‘Lifestyle programs are replete with implicit and explicit aesthetic judgment, and television scholars need to make the case why some are better than others’ (2004: 89–90). In this chapter I argue that emotion in television is used to direct viewers' aesthetic judgements and to privilege the notion of self-transformation.