29 June 2018 9pm

A performance by Josh Johnson and Thilo Garus

pith
pɪθ/Submit

noun
1. the spongy white tissue lining the rind of oranges, lemons, and other citrus fruits.
2. the essence of something.
"the pith and core of socialism"
synonyms: essence, essential part, main point, fundamental point, heart, substance, heart of the matter, nub, core, quintessence, point, crux, gist, salient point, focal point, nucleus, meat, kernel, marrow, burden; informality gritty "the pith of the argument"

verb
1. remove the pith from.
"peel and pith the oranges"
2. pierce or sever the spinal cord of (an animal) so as to kill or immobilize it.

25 June 2018 7pm

Family Matters

The June edition of Reality Forum will take a closer look at programs centered around the family. The genesis of reality television arguably stems from a public fascination with domestic life, beginning with the 1973 mini-series considered the first reality show, An American Family. An American Family was a fly-on-the-wall docuseries following the home life of a typical upper-middle-class California family over the course of seven months, during which the country witnessed the divorce proceedings of the parents and the coming out of their gay son, Lance.

With its heavy dose of prurience into generational conflict, ambient wealth, and coastal living, the show established a formula that is still followed today. The standard contemporary family reality series has increasingly pushed these variables, often modeling the archetypal family by presenting its recognizable (usually nuclear) dynamics in extreme circumstances: isolation, fame, tons of kids, exceptional kids, etc.

Some of these TV families are destroyed through tabloid scandal and legal problems (Hogan Knows Best: Hulk's affair with his daughter's friend, vehicular manslaughter; 18 Kids and Counting: family cover-up of child molestation by one of the older sons; Real Housewives: where to begin!); and some are transformed into billion-dollar dynasties.

Making or breaking the family – both the individual family on-air, and the idea of family in the public imagination – has successfully sustained reality television for over 40 years. It has also helped to push ethical questions about personal exploitation (including, crucially, exploitation of children) to the cultural center, parallel to the rise in erosive practices of monetizing privacy through social media and precarious 24-hr labor in our own unscripted lives.

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Reality Forum is a monthly screening and discussion group that focuses the genre that has come to be known as "unscripted television". The June edition is hosted by Sydney Smith. Sydney is a gallery stooge and all-around TV-watching lay-about based in Berlin.