Abstract
On ABC's I'm a Celebrity, Melissa Rivers (daughter of Joan) earned food for her team by pouring rats in her pants. Later, she complained that she “did not sign up to be humiliated.” Yet RTV contestants generally understand that moral weaknesses, body flaws, and intimate betrayals offer the most thrilling evidence of “reality” in the genre. As New York Times writer Alessandra Stanley (2002, p. A1) puts it, “humiliation is the unifying principle behind a successful reality show.” This commentary reviews research on the concept of humiliation and considers its usefulness for evaluating RTV texts. Given the brevity of this format, my aim is to suggest directions for further study and encourage closer scrutiny of humiliation as a prevailing theme in reality television programming