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An exploratory study of the “observation format” in transnational Korean and Chinese reality television

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An exploratory study of the “observation format” in transnational Korean and Chinese reality television

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Content AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF THE “OBSERVATION FORMAT” IN TRANSNATIONAL KOREAN AND CHINESE REALITY TELEVISION by Xinyuan Chen A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC DORNSIFE COLLEGE OF LETTERS, ARTS AND SCIENCES UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS (EAST ASIAN AREA STUDIES) August 2020 Copyright 2020 Xinyuan Chen ii Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to all of my advisors, Professor Youngmin Choe, Professor Jenny Chio and Professor Brian Bernards, who have navigated and encouraged me during my two-year academic studies at USC, and also provided constructive advices and detailed comments on my thesis despite the less-than-ideal circumstances under this global pandemic. Your academic insights and kind guidance have expanded my vision and inspired me on my own research interests. Also, I would like to give my special thanks to Grace Ryu, Jasmine Yu, Alexandria Eloriaga from East Asian Studies Center, and all of my fellows in this East Asian Studies master program, who have provided the warmest support for my academic and everyday life at USC. The two years I have spent with you mean so much to my life that I will never forget the encouragement and inspiration all of you have ever offered me generously. Last but not least, I am extremely grateful to my parents who have been wholeheartedly supporting me in the past 24 years and providing opportunities for me to pursue my own dreams. I also want to thank my best friends who are always by my side and bolstering my confidence when I feel frustrated or distressed. I could not have fulfilled this important phase of my life without you. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... ii List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ iv Abstract ................................................................................................................................. v Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1 Defining “Observation Format” in Reality Television ........................................... 6 1.1 Overview ..................................................................................................... 6 1.2 The Observed: Documentary or Performance? ......................................... 10 1.3 The Observers: Multi-perspective Narrators and Fact-checkers .............. 14 1.4 Post-Production: Authorial Voice, Manipulation and Affects .................. 21 Chapter 2 Transnational Affectivity and Remake Politics: A comparative case study of Korean and Chinese observation programs .......................................................... 26 2.1 Backgrounds of Transnational Reality Programming in East Asia .......... 27 2.2 Empathetic “Ordinariness” in Family-centered Observation Programs ... 34 2.3 The Transmission of Affect and Homogeneous Cultural Anxieties ......... 42 2.3.1 The Feeling of Shame and the Unmarried Children ..................... 44 2.3.2 The Feeling of Envy and Desirable Conjugal Relationships ........ 48 Chapter 3 Audience Receptions and the Politics of Consumption ........................................ 55 3.1 Observation Reality Format V.S. Internet Reaction Videos ..................... 57 3.2 On the UGT Theory: Motives and Performance ....................................... 65 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 74 References ............................................................................................................................... 77 iv List of Figures Figure 1 A Screenshot of the Korean Program My Little Old Boy from Chinese Streaming Website Bilibili ............................................................................................................ 1 Figure 2 A Screenshot of the Chinese Program My Little One from Chinese Streaming Website Mango TV ......................................................................................................... 2 Figure 3 Picture-in-picture Structure .................................................................................... 22 Figure 4 Side-by-side Structure ............................................................................................ 22 Figure 5 Subtitle Example 1 from Same Bed, Different Dreams 2 ...................................... 25 Figure 6 Subtitle Example 2 from My Little Old Boy .......................................................... 25 Figure 7 Subtitle Example 3 from My Little Old Boy .......................................................... 25 Figure 8 Screenshots of Mr. & Mrs. ..................................................................................... 50 Figure 9 Bullet-screen Comments ........................................................................................ 72 v Abstract In the era of New Korean Wave, transnational reality television is calling increasing attention. Over the past decade, a fresh hybrid reality format that features a keyword of “observation” has prevailed in East Asian countries. Named as “kwan-ch'al ye-nŭng (관찰 예능)” in Koran and “guanchalei zhenrenxiu (观察类真人秀) in Chinese, this particular format has derived its own category of reality programs and received widespread popularity in both South Korea and China, which speaks to the transnational consumption and production of East Asian popular culture products. This thesis offers an exploratory study of what I call the “observation format” with an analysis emphasis on the concept of “transnationality”. Drawing upon the literature review of reality television, media theory and affect theory, this thesis aims to dig into the underlying cultural and political meanings of this transnational reality format in Korean and Chinese contexts. By emphasizing on the three typical themes of this format, that are Confucian family values, ordinary lives and celebrities, this thesis points to the questions regarding the relationships among the televised reality, individual realities and a general idea of social reality. 1 Introduction This is a screenshot of a video titled “My Little Old Boy Ep.79 180318 [Korean language; Chinese CC]” (in Chinese: 我家的熊孩子, Ep.79 180318 [韩语中字]) on Bilibili, a Chinese online video-sharing platform. (Figure 1) As it may seem confusing at first sight, you can probably tell that there are three constituent parts in the picture: the bright studio-like scene where seven people sit around a table, the picture box above them in which a man is shot in dim light and from an abnormal angle, and the scattered Chinese words that are scrolling across the screen. The people below are wearing astonished faces with seven stylistic exclamation marks being superimposed next to each of them, which makes their surprise emotions even more outstanding. Their synchronous states and fixed gazes at a same direction indicate that they are watching something together that can be deduced as the picture above. At the same time, there are words in the scrolling texts sent by viewers that are expressing similar surprised feelings as these people in picture. Though the three parts are presented in separate spaces, they have remarkably achieved a simultaneous and interactive state with each other, and joined forces together to construct a highly descriptive and affective visual image. Figure 1 A Screenshot of the Korean Program My Little Old Boy from Chinese Streaming Website Bilibili 2 This is another screenshot from a series titled My Little One (in Chinese: 我家那闺女) on another video platform Mango TV. (Figure 2) It displays a similar layout of three spaces, only with a reversed proportional relationship between the two inner spaces as told by that the person who is watching is shown in a small circle built in the picture of whom is being watched. The subtitles attached to the small circle suggest that the watcher is agreeing with the words said by the other, and at the meantime, many external comments are repeating the expression “so do/am I…” while others either disagree or express their own thoughts, which again presents the interrelation among the three spaces. Figure 2 A Screenshot of the Chinese Program My Little One from Chinese Streaming Website Mango TV The two videos I illustrate above are reality shows that have been gaining popularity in recent years, one from South Korea and the other from mainland China, both belonging to the category of what I name “observation programs” in this thesis. This reality format typically involves a “documentary-like” (“다큐처럼”) record of the celebrity participants’ everyday lives, a narrative focus on their personal intimate relationships, and a panel of “observers” with diversified backgrounds sitting in the studio reacting to and commenting on the pre-edited video 3 clips. (Kim G. , 2018) It is noteworthy that there are two groups of participants, one as the “observed object” and the other as the “observers”, who are arranged in two separate spaces on the screen. In original Korean and Chinese languages, such programs have been tagged as “kwan-ch'al ye-nŭng (관찰 예능)” or “guanchalei zhenrenxiu (观察类真人秀) by the producers themselves, a term that has also been adopted by Chinese and Korean academia. (Sun, 2019; Hou, 2020; Lee S., 2018) Without an established name in English, I would like to borrow the literal translation of the Korean and Chinese name and adopt the term “observation format” as the English equivalent in this thesis. As indicated in the name, this thesis focuses on the aspect of “observation,” not simply as referring to the viewing practice between the audience and the television screen but as explicitly instructed behavior that is established between the two spaces within the screen. Following this concept, I suggest that the setup of double spaces within the screen should be one of the most defining parts of the observation format. This design is significant for reality programming in the way that the setting of the “observing space” creates a sense of distance between the “observed space” and the audience, which is able to mediate the guilty feeling of those who engage in voyeuristic uses of reality television and meanwhile build multi-layered, complex relationships between the onscreen contents and the offscreen audience groups. Besides the act of “observation” itself, the main themes of the observation subject — the “everyday lives” (일상 ilsang/ 日常 ri chang) and family narratives — are competent in producing meanings in both emotional and ideological ways. The familiar topics can offer a stronger sense of intimacy and encourage the audience to seek empathetic identification from the shows. However, when the “ordinariness” concept is represented by the celebrities and put under the gaze of the “observers”, 4 I argue, the “observation” becomes a carefully designed technique in this new reality format that functions to shape social realities and plays a pedagogic role in public communication. The prevalence of the observation format from South Korea to China during the recent years intrigues me to think about the transnational exchange of reality programming between two countries in the light of Korean Wave (Hallyu) phenomenon. In this thesis, I pay special attention to the “transnationality” of this particular reality format and aim to investigate the underlying causes of its cross-border popularity. In Kim and Li’s (2018) study of the Running Man phenomenon in Asia, they put forward three significant tropes that speak to today’s Korean transnational popular culture: “reality television”, “affectivity”, and “remake politics”. (p. 163) Following their findings, I suggest that the popularity of “observation programs” provides a window for us to reexamine the development of Hallyu and the Chinese remake politics after the political conflicts between two countries provoked by THAAD in 2016. With a narrative focus on family, the observation format benefits from the shared Confucian values regarding familial roles to receive transnational attention within an East Asian cultural context. Its look-alike urban settings, everyday lifestyles and celebrity-driven contents further lay the foundation for a potential “pan East Asian identity” in popular media consumption. All these elements, along with its design of a double-spaced observing practice, contribute to the productive transnational affectivity embedded in this format. To be clearer, the observation programs work affectively by highlighting the intersubjectivity in their narratives and encouraging the experience of empathetic identification between the off-screen individuals and the on-screen contents. Reflecting this cross-boundary affectivity back to the Chinese remake phenomenon, I propose that this format enables the Chinese broadcasters to copy the success of Korean reality television while “de-Koreanize” the content to ensure the cultural security in Chinese popular media industry. 5 This thesis is divided into three chapters. It starts with the characterization of what I call “observation format” through a detailed introduction of its double-space setup and other fundamental components, based on a literature review of previous reality television research. Through deconstructing the key concept “observation” and analyzing the structural composition of the format, the first chapter provides a general picture of what observation programs are like and serves to lay the foundation for following exploration. The second chapter then moves to the question of how these defining elements contribute to the transnational popularity of the observation format. By closely examining the concepts of everyday life (일상 ilsang/ 日常 ri chang) and family narratives in Korean and Chinese observation shows, this chapter draws attention to an imaginable “pan East Asian identity” in the observation format programming and points out the transmission of affect as a critical strategy adopted to transnationalize this format. It specifically offers a comparative case study of two typical Korean observation shows and their Chinese remakes, in order to better elucidate how the “transnationality” is embedded in this format and also to delve into the politics of remake in China under recent political climates. The third (also the last) chapter then puts focus on the consumption side of this format. Based on 12 individual interviews and online resource, this part investigates the audience motives and performance to dig deeper into the relation between the affective appeal and the transnational content in the observation format. This chapter also involves a comparison between observation shows and Internet reaction videos, another video culture that resembles the viewing experience of “watching people watching people”, with an attempt to answer two general questions: why do people watch observation shows and what can they achieve by it? Despite its limited scope, this audience research can hopefully provide an entry point for future research on transnational reality programming. 6 Chapter 1 Defining “Observation Format” in Reality Television 1.1 Overview Based on the current available research that has addressed kwan-ch'al ye-nŭng (관찰 예능)” or “guanchalei zhenrenxiu (观察类真人秀 )”, it is recognized that the observation format originated from a Japanese reality show released in 2008 named Life-changing Deep Talk in One Minute (人生が变わる 1分间の深イイ话), which features a pattern of “reality show interspersed with segments of people commenting”. In 2013, Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) adopted a similar style as launching a reality show called I Live Alone (“나혼자산다”). The popularity of this show has led to an upsurge of interest in such reality TV format among broadcasting companies in South Korea. Programs such as My Little Old Boy (미운 우리 새끼, 2016), Same Bed, Different Dreams 2: You Are My Destiny (동상이몽 2 - 너는 내운명, 2017) by Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS), and Heart Signal (하트시그널, 2017) by Channel A have all gained satisfactory reception across South Korea. Following the success of the observation format in South Korea, Chinese producers started to produce a large number of remakes not only on television but web-based video platforms, such as My Little One (我家那小子/ 我家那闺女, 2018-) by Hunan Satellite TV, Viva La Romance (妻子的浪漫旅行, 2018-) by Mango TV, Mr. & Mrs. (我家小两口, 2019) and Daughters’ Boyfriends (女儿们的男朋友, 2019-) by Tencent Video. In the global history of reality television, the mixture of production practices is never an uncommon strategy. Since the late 1980s, with the increased commercialization within media industries and the advancement of media technology, television started to “cannibalize itself in order to survive, drawing on existing genres to create successful hybrid programs”. (Hill, 2005, p. 7 24) This “new” genre, called “popular factual television” by Hill, has experienced a “cross fertilization with tabloid journalism, documentary television and popular entertainment”. (p. 23) The observation format I am going to discuss is also a novel hybrid production that has drawn upon the existing territories of factual programs. In fact, many elements in observation programs, such as the physical presence of commentators on the site, the depiction of celebrities’ daily activities, and the shooting mode resembling documentaries, can be found in other reality program types such as gameshows, life experiment shows and docu-soaps. For example, in the gameshow Survivor (CBS, 1997-, U.S.), expert psychologists are invited to comment on the behaviors of participants in the game and predict the results; in the reality television series Keeping Up with the Kardashians (E!, 2007-, U.S.), the Kardashian family shows their personal lives and exposes their private living spaces to the cameras; in docu-soap shows like Airport (BBC, 1996-2008, U.K.), the everyday reality occurring at London Heathrow Airport is shot in a fly-on-the-wall documentary style. More than just combining various elements from other invented formats, the core concept of observation format lies in the act of “observation”, which should be considered as the most featured and valued component of this format just as its name indicates. It is always difficult to clearly delineate the boundaries of a specific reality TV category owing to its fluidity and hybridity in form and content. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to shed light on the concept of “observing” as an integral/definitive component of the observation format. Why is “observation” stressed as a keyword by the producers at the first place? What is the design of separating the “observing space” from the “observed space” able to achieve in establishing the relationship between the reality television and the audience? Departing from the questions, I propose in this chapter that the act of “observation” is a carefully designed technique that helps to diversify the 8 narrative voices and achieve a stronger sense of intimacy and interactivity within the popular factual television genre. To have a clearer image of what a typical observation program is like, I would like to take the Korean program My Little Old Boy (미운 우리 새끼, SBS, 2016) as an example to describe the most remarkable and frequent characteristics found among most observation programs. The show usually opens with the scene of an indoor studio where main MCs, celebrity guests (different people in every episode) and a group of “mothers” are casually talking to each other. The mothers are invited to watch the video records of their celebrity children’s “unknown” single life and share their feelings and opinions with each other. All the videos playing on the monitors in front of them are filmed in a “surveillance” style and already cut-edited and added with colorful captions/subtitles to provide narrative highlights and serve an entertaining purpose. Throughout the whole episode, the two spaces — the studio where observation takes place and the space where the observed subjects are filmed — remain co-existing with each other on the screen, which means the observer’s reactions are always synchronized with the pictures of the observed materials. The focus of observing may vary by different observers depending on their relationships with the observed object, but the whole program is more of a general examination of the participants’ everyday lifestyles and their familial/social relations. Discussions among the observers are interspersed in the observing process when any of them detects a point worthy of further exploration. All scenes of the observers are also post-edited with subtitles and other special effects to either highlight what is said by the people inside or deliver the messages from the producers. Above all, the integration of elements like surveillance footages, various types of observers and 9 everyday life narrations reveals a programming intention to convince the audience of its realness and to deliver a stronger sense of intimacy. Authenticity and intimacy are always among the most debated topics in the history of reality television studies. Kavka (2008) has argued reality television as “a technology of intimacy” due to its conflation between “information and entertainment, actuality and artificiality”. (p. 20) Looking back at the development of reality programs, ideas like hidden camera, documentary-like filming style and engaging ordinary people can all be regarded as attempts to create a sense of truthfulness to convince the audiences of their ability to represent the reality or at least resembles the real life. However, as Hill (2005) points out, though “the extent to which programs such as Cops or Survivor address issues of realism, accuracy and truth is significant”, they are still unable to reflect the actual reality due to their “reliance on entertainment formats, such as soap opera or gameshow”. (p. 20) In order to ensure their entertaining essence, many programs have taken intervention measures such as using a fictional setup or adopting sensational narrative techniques of soap opera, which renders them more as a simulated reality where the performativity of participants is to a great extent discernable. And precisely because the “reality” is presented in an expressively entertaining manner, audiences are usually highly skeptical about its authenticity and realistic value. (Hill, p. 58) Much scholarly attention has been paid to the “performed” nature of formats like gameshows and docu-soaps. For example, Jane Roscoe describes Big Brother as a reality program “constructed around performance” (Roscoe, 2001, p. 482) What I would like to stress here is that, it is exactly this ongoing debate on the authenticity of reality programming that drives me to take notice of this relatively new “observation format” in the first place. The presentation of real-life experience in this format, I suggest, is elevated to a different level of reality narrative in the reality television genre, in which the perceptible interference of the camera is 10 reduced to the least as so far, and the presence of the observers facilitates the process of fact- checking with a performing role of “supervisors”. With the emphasis on the “observation” concept, I would like to start my discussion by looking at three basic questions: What is being observed? Who is observing? How do people observe? One of my research goals is to grasp the deeper cultural and political messages behind this featured act of “observing” when it becomes staged and gets pulled into a complex participatory culture. To delve into the “reality” represented in these programs, it is fundamental to explore how this reality format is structured and what kinds of relationships are established among all involving parties. Compared with other existing formats, what kind of hybridity and specificity does it have? Besides the “observer” and the “observed”, are there any other roles being played within the program? What is the possible impact this format can have on the authenticity of reality programming after introducing the practice of “observation”? As a visual narrative product, what narrative strategies are commonly adopted in observation programs? How are these programs able to organically integrate the two spaces together and make use of various interactions within the show to develop certain types of narratives? To answer these questions, I will closely examine the three organic components of the observation format one by one in the following sections. 1.2 The Observed: Documentary or Performance? With the development of media technology and the advent of digital manipulation, reality programming has experienced a growing use of surveillance camera since the 1990s with the aim to produce a more “factual” television. Drawing on the development of photographic practices, Fetveit (2002) suggests that this technique managed to draw people’s attention to the “evidential 11 powers of on-scene reality footage” compared with the “digitally enhanced photography”. (p. 123) However, as Hill (2005) stresses in his study about reality TV audiences, the audiences’ trust in the “authenticity of reality television is complex, and dependent on the ways in which each reality format is set up to capture the stories of everyday people”. (p. 59) Despite the practices of camerawork that mimic documentaries and news footage in many formats, a large number of audiences believe that they are “designed to promote performance”. (Hill, p. 62) For example, as for gameshows like Big Brother (CBS, 2000-, U.S.), “ordinary people” participants are arranged to live in a performance space called Big Brother House and engaged in a popularity contest. As one audience member commented (who is a 31-year-old housewife): “I don’t think she (one participant) ever forgot that the cameras were there”. (p. 62) Audiences are sensitive about how the presence of the camera and the staged setting can affect people’s behaviors and thus undermines the truthfulness of the reality stories. Similarly, another similar format called docu- soap or drama-documentary (e.g.) has long been criticized for its dramatized reconstruction of ordinary people’s real-life events. In Paget’s words (2011), drama-documentaries like Airport (BBC, 1996-2008, U.K.), 999 (BBC One, 1992-2003, U.K.) and Driving School (BBC1, 1997, U.K.) are a ‘sequence of events from a real historical occurrence or situation and the identities of the protagonists to underpin a film script intended to provoke debate’. (p. 63) His analogy between this reality format and “a film script” reveals the audiences’ perception about the participants’ self- conscious acting up in front of cameras. It can be told from the cases above that, despite the similar use of surveillance camera, the viewers’ perception towards these televised realities can be disturbed by what kind of physical setting the participants are arranged in and how their relationship with the cameras is presented. Therefore, to answer the question of what is being observed in the “observation format”, first it is 12 important to figure out how the footage for observation is recorded and how it is different from other formats. The early studies on factual television have paid large amount of attention to this genre’s place within the context of other existing types of audio-visual documentations. Corner (2002) describes many factual TV programs such as Big Brother as doing “extensive borrowing of the ‘documentary look’” and offers them a new label as “post-documentary” television. (p. 263) Both gameshows and docu-soaps can be regarded as variants on the observational documentary model in terms of their filming techniques, evidenced by a “fly-on-the-wall” feel that is achieved by the use of lightweight, portable cameras and the tendency to “deal with current events”. (Corner, p. 20) But it is also noteworthy that, in programs like Airport or Keeping Up with the Kardashians, the filmed subjects are highly conscious of the cameras’ presence as they make eye contact with the camera and even directly talk to the camera. And in gameshows like Big Brother, the participants are arranged in an artificial setting, a house as a “predefined stage” where ordinary people can gain their own performative opportunities. (Corner, p. 263) Comparatively speaking, the shooting mode adopted in observation format owes much more to the observational documentary. First of all, instead of an artificial set-up, the shooting is conducted in a natural, everyday life environment, mostly in the spaces that the participants actually live in and their typical workplaces. For example, I Live Alone shows the celebrities’ own living spaces and what their everyday lives are like when they live by themselves, while Omniscient Interfering View (MBC, 2017-, South Korea) shows the behind scenes of celebrities’ daily work and how they interact with their working partners. Secondly, the presence of the cameras and the producing team has been arranged as unobtrusively as possible. In Same Bed, Different Dreams, most of footages are shot in the participants’ apartments with the non-manually operated cameras that are fixed at multiple spots in the room, such as on the wall, on the table and 13 hidden inside the furniture. The absence of the camera men can be evidenced by long takes, fixed and sometimes abnormal shooting angles, and the lower resolution of close-up images that have been zoomed in during post-editing process. In an interview about how Chinese reality shows are filmed in this new television era, Leng Quan, the leader of the shooting team for Happiness Trio (幸福三重奏, 2018-), reveals that the latest shooting equipment, such as PXW- Z90, is able to automatically focus and track faces in a very high speed so that they can simply position the cameras at multiple spots inside the building and monitor them remotely. (Videography, 2018) This style is even described as “CCTV-like” by some Korean journalists. (Kim G. , 2018) That is to say, the observed subjects in observation format have received less interventions, or at least act as being less interfered by the production teams, when compared with other reality television programs. What’s more, the ordinariness of daily life, instead of drama, is highlighted in many observation programs. According to the introduction posted on the homepage of I Live Alone, this program aims to “record the participants’ everyday lives with documentary techniques” (그들의 일상을 다큐멘터리 기법으로 촬영). (MBC, n.d.) The Chinese program My Little One introduce itself as revealing “daily activities of single male popular entertainers who live alone” (独居男艺人的日常生活). (MGTV, n.d.) The concept of “everyday/daily lives” (il-sang, 일상/ richang, 日常) has been repeatedly underscored in this type of programs. Chinese scholar Sun Yan (2019) has described guanchalei zhenrenxiu (观察类真人秀) as a format that is designed to “show the participants’ daily lives and how they behave and react in specific situations or under rules”. (p. 60) Unlike in life experiment programs, where people are filmed as “they experience the trials and tribulations of living/working in an alternative manner to that which they are used to in their 14 everyday lives”, or in gameshows where the participants are expected to achieve some outcome or fulfill some tasks, participants in observation shows are expected to maintain their original lifestyle and experience in a conventional manner. Nevertheless, the unobtrusive filming style and the “ordinariness-oriented” value of these programs do not mean that people being observed would act “truly”. In fact, it is risky to measure how “real” a reality show is and whether the participants treat the program as a documentary or a performance, since there essentially involves some degree of construction in reality programming. Taking an inquire into the featured elements of these visual contents, such as filming technique, setting and theme, is helpful to figure out the construction of the “first space” in observation programs and its relationship with the “second space” where the observers display their reactions and comments towards the filmed subjects. Once we accept that the reality is constructed in reality television, the more critical question should be asked in examining a reality show is: what kind of reality is it trying to construct? If the purpose of the observation shows is to invite the audience to directly observe the celebrities’ ordinary lives, then what is the point of arranging a group of on- screen observers and offering an option for the audience to vicariously observe? To dig into the essence of “observation” in this format, it is important to evaluate the functions of the “observers”. 1.3 The Observers: Multi-perspective Narrators and Fact-checkers The arrangement of on-camera commentators is no novelty in factual television genre. In the famous gameshow Big Brother, expert psychologists like Linda Papadopoulos are recruited to give a weekly analysis of the psychological states of the participants. Their academic knowledge combined with empathetic manner have provided additional diversion to the audiences’ viewing experience. Their professional status functions not only when helping the audience to understand 15 the behaviors and personalities of those housemates but also when convincing them of the rationality and accuracy of the narratives. Different from the voice-over commentary or a program host, a commentator who is physically present in the screen appears to be more reliable considering his/her role as also an audience, just like those who are sitting in front of the screen at the same time. In observation programs, this group of “on-set audiences” has been given a new identity as “observers” or guanchayuan (观察员) in Chinese. And it is notable that the casting of “observers” is no longer limited to experts but becomes much more diversified. In general, they can be divided into three main types in terms of their interpersonal relationships with the observed subjects: people with pre-existing relations, people without pre-existing relations, and the subjects themselves. As for the first type, the pre-existing relations frequently refer to intimate relationships, including familial relationships, romantic relationships and friendships. In the original Korean program My Little Old Boy (미운 우리 새끼) and its Chinese remake My Little One (我家那小子 /我家那闺女 ), mothers are invited to watch and react to the footages of their celebrity son/daughters’ single life routines. In My Daughter’s Men: the Dads Are Watching (내 딸의 남자들 : 아빠가 보고 있다, E Channel, 2017) and Meeting Mr. Right (女儿们的恋爱, Mango TV, 2019-), celebrity fathers come on stage to watch the video clips of their daughters dating with boyfriends and share their own feelings towards it. In Single Wife (싱글와이프, SBS, 2017) and Viva La Romance (妻子的浪漫旅行, Mango TV, 2018), celebrity husbands stay in the indoor studio and watch the records of their wives going on travels together. Other programs like Women 16 Say (女人有话说, Zhejiang Satellite TV, 2018) invites different friends of the observed subjects in each episode to show their reactions to the clips. The second type, the ones without pre-existing relations, can be referred to a wider range of people. The most common role is “MC” or program host, whose major duty is usually to encourage the on-site interaction, lead the discussion and monitor the agenda. As mentioned before, experts are also among the most popular choices of panel members in observation programs, who generally include psychologists, therapists, writers and others who are able to offer life advice and professional opinions on interpersonal relationships. The rest among this type of observers are a relatively variable and slippery group to define. They are usually positioned as simply celebrity guests who have the least relations with the observed subjects and are closest to the role of “onlooker” similar to the program audiences. Though without direct relations, they tend to find common ground as much as they can when making comments, such as both being celebrity, sons/daughters, male/female or having same interests/ lifestyles/ experiences/ etc. The third type is the most unique group among the observers: the subjects themselves. It means people will come to the studio and watch themselves on a screen publicly with other observers. In programs like I Live Alone, Omniscient Interfering View and Same Bed, Different Dreams, the observed subjects become observers as well while reviewing their behaviors in the videos and discussing with other panelists. Different from the off-camera audiences, all the reactions and comments made by this group of “observers” are rendered as a component of the TV program, which gives them another identity— narrators. Gerald Prince has introduced a theory for us to evaluate different types of narrators in his theoretical work Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative, based on 17 four major qualities: intrusiveness, self-consciousness, reliability and distance. (Prince, 2012, p. 10) As he further explains, they are important in the sense that the degree of these qualities can not only characterize a narrator himself but also “affect our interpretation of and response to the narrative”. As I see it, every observer is addressing the audience as an “I” in various degrees even though they are not necessarily the protagonist of the story. For example, in the program My Little Old Boy where main narratives are constructed around the celebrities’ single life, their mothers who are watching the videos have positioned themselves as a productive narrator when being asked “How much do you know about your son?” (당신은 아들에 대해 얼마나 알고 있습니까?). (SBS, n.d.) As implied by the subheading “moms’ rewritten parenting diary” (“엄마의 다시 쓰는 육아일기”), the mothers are explicitly characterized as a narrating self and clearly aware that they are narrating the stories of their celebrity children. (SBS, n.d.)Therefore, they can be regarded as intrusive and self-conscious narrators. Also, given the unique maternal bonding between the narrator and the narrated, these mothers’ accounts tend to be considered as more worthy of trust by the listeners. Among the four qualities Prince has proposed, distance should be the most interesting one in the case of observation programs. Those who are supposed to keep the most intimate relationships with the narratees, such as parents, spouse and friends, get pulled far away from the other and separated in two spaces with a monitor screen in between. And this changing distance is very likely to bring influence on a given narrative. As indicated in the word “rewriting” (다시 쓰려고 합니다), mothers are encouraged to find out the missing part in their previous narrations of their children, and expected to share a newer version of narrations. (SBS, n.d.) The distance among different parties, which may be intellectual, moral, physical or emotional, constantly affects 18 “the nature and rhetorical impact of that dialogue”. (Salyer, 2001, p. 67) To simply put in the framework of observation TV shows, an observer’s distance (in whatever forms) from an observed object is able to determine the quality of his/her narration, and the audience’s distance from both of them affects the way how they interpret the information received from that narration. When there are multiple observers present at the same time, their different physical, emotional, intellectual and moral stances evoke varying distances from the observed object, ranging from “the most perfect identification to the most complete opposition”, which together constitute the final production of a multi-narrative presented on television. (Prince, 2012, p. 20) To obtain a full image of the narratives embedded in these observation programs, it is necessary to explicate what kinds of perspectives are contributed by three different types of observers to these multi-narratives. The first type of people, who enjoy intimate relationships with the characters being observed, are usually expected to provide extra stories beyond the available narration in recorded footage. Since in most observation programs, the narrative focus is not only on the character’s personality but also on their intimate relationships, this type of observer is frequently set as the main narrator besides the built-in video clips. One prominent difference between the first type and the second type of observers is that the latter can by no means witness the events themselves but only follow the visual images presented by the videos from the outside. Borrowing Genette’s (1988) definition of “focalization”, a term that denotes “a restriction of ‘field’” in narrating, (p. 74) the second type of observers can be regarded as “external focalizors”, who function as a narrating agent “situated outside the fabula” with no bind with the characters. (Bal & Boheemen, 2009, p. 152) One advantage of external focalization, as Genette’s mention of a “behaviorist” bias, lies in the possible objectivity when 19 they narrate a story by simply extracting information from the character’s behaviors displayed in a visual text. However, just like reading is an activity of a subjective nature, one’s interpretation of the visual images is normally carried with a certain subjectivity. In addition to narration, they are encouraged to have their own expression of feelings or opinions, in which “ideological statements” are likely to be made. (Bal & Boheemen, 2009, p. 31) As a result, their words can contribute to the ideology construction of the whole narrative presented on television. Sometimes their comments can also function to authenticate the narrative contents provided by other narrators, through their active identification with the character. After finding some basic common links with the character, such as both being a male/female, son/daughter, or singer/actor/athlete/…, etc., they can choose how to identify with the characters, and every individual identification can serve as a mechanism to produce affective elements in the final narrative. Finally, the third type of observers who are the observed objects themselves is a relatively unique case. On a narratological level, they can be characterized as “internal focalizors” or “homodiegetic narrators” who are both narrators and characters in the story, following Genette’s definition. However, considering they are engaged in double narrative levels— one inside and the other outside the observation videos— their narrating stances and techniques worth closer examination. Here I would like to take I Live Alone and Same Bed, Different Dreams 2 as two typical examples. In both programs, the observed objects, or say, the protagonists of the observation videos have also been interviewed in person after the recording of their daily life episodes, which are included in the final videos for the observers to watch. That is to say, in addition to the visual narration captured by camera, these protagonists also provide retrospective first-person narrations verbally, based on mere memories. Then they would be involved in the observing part as well, where they watch the edited videos that have put the fragments of their life 20 records and self-narrations together. During this process, I suggest, the role they play is far beyond either “internal focalizor” or commenter, but instead, an extra-homodiegetic narrator who is performing a self-evaluation task at the same time. In what Genette (1988) calls a “extradiegetic- homodiegetic—paradigm”, there are two levels of narratives so that the narrator-character has to “detach himself from himself” at different levels. (p. 249) Technically speaking, when one narrates a story based on mere subjective memory, he/she would filter the information through his/her consciousness. But when the objective records are available, he/she would get to notice the details he/she was unaware of. For instance, in episode 11 of Same Bed, Different Dreams (air date: September 18, 2017), when Lee Jae-myung is asked about the feeling of watching his own video, he says: “I thought I was doing a pretty good job as a husband, but when everything is captured by the camera and being watched together, I have to inspect my behaviors from a third person perspective and then come to realize that things could be different from what I have perceived. And then many things can be changed”. (저는 나름 잘한다고 생각했거든요. 근데 이거를 카메라로 찍어서 다 같이 보니까……이거는 제 3자들의 입장에서 보고 검증을 하지 않습니까? 그러는 거 보니까, ‘내 생각은 다르구나’, 그래서 바뀐게 많죠.) As told in his words, when people observe themselves through a video feedback, there is likely a spontaneous act of self-inspection and self-evaluation. Compared with other observers, they are able to offer more “effective secondary interpretation” (有效的二次解读) of their own behaviors and psychologies. (Huang X. , 2019, p. 44) In short, when the observer and the observed object is the same person, the narrative can be further enriched by various first-person discourses such as self-inspection, self-assessment and self-reflection. In sum, the observation act is in nature designed as a narrative method in these programs. The observers can not only enrich the stories but also deliver educational messages for the audience, 21 and therefore, become a part of the “constructed reality” on the screen. The separation of two spaces functions to provide a distance for assessment and self-assessment. However, one thing to keep in mind is that except for the observed objects themselves, other observers are not direct witnesses to the events recorded in the videos but narrating what has been narrated by the video. Those videos themselves are already constructed narratives by the program producers, so that all acts of narrating the videos should all be considered as at an extradiegetic level. Nevertheless, there is another narrator should not be ignored — the “author” of the whole narrative, that is, the production team, who is absent from the story as a character but present in the visual narratives as an “omniscient” narrator. Their influence is considerable as it to most extent decides how the narrative information would be processed by the audience. 1.4 Post-Production: Authorial Voice, Manipulation and Affects Although unscripted reality television is not a fictional work like novels in which all characters and events are created by the author, it still submits to the producers who are the final decision-makers of the broadcasting contents. Instead of using an explicit narrating “I”, they have exploited a colorful array of post-production techniques to create their own narrative voice, such as editing, subtitles in different fonts and colors, sound effects and background music. Post-editing in observation programs has played a significant role in making sense of the cluttered footage and giving it narrative logics. Unlike the fast and dramatic editing style used in the gameshows or docu-dramas, this format typically pursues a natural pacing and the consistency of daily life events according to chronological development. To retain the dailiness and entertain the audiences at the same time, they would pick out the most representative or informative scenes from a great quantity of documentary footages and then restructure them in a certain sequence in 22 order to make a point, such as highlighting a characteristic, habit or ability of the character. When the scenes are relatively dramatic, the editors would further heighten the theatricality with various techniques like zooming in the expressive details and adding sound effects. Apart from those common editing strategies, what’s most featured in the observation format is its cutting between the observation videos and the observers’ scenes. The regular practice is that while observation videos are displayed on the screen, the observers’ voices are simultaneously played out as background audio. Some programs would also show the observers’ face in a small window as picture-in-picture. (Figure 3) Generally, the full screen will cut to the observation room at the points when the observers are having strong reactions or focusing on discussions. In particular, when there are clues indicating the observers are identifying with the objects, no matter through words, facial expression or body language, both scenes would be displayed side-by-side to show the synchronistic and immersive experience of the observers. (Figure 4) Figure 3 Picture-in-picture Structure Figure 4 Side-by-side Structure 23 In whatever way the picture is laid out, the concurrency between two spaces stands out as if the observers are watching the videos in real time with the audience. Moreover, when identification happens across two spaces, the juxtaposition of visual images can give rise to a discursive conflation, which would then “strengthen the appeal to identification”. (Bal & Boheemen, 2009, p. 167) Therefore, such editing techniques have successfully interweaved two narrative voices together and integrated them into one narrative body. Yet still, when it comes to the most salient technique, it has to be the multimodal subtitles. The incorporation of subtitles in different colors, fonts, sizes and placements has first appeared in Japanese reality shows, usually known as telop. It has then been drawn into Korean television, usually addressed as ye-nŭng cha-mak (예능 자막), and increasingly become a prominent composition in variety-reality TV shows. In addition to its main purpose of highlighting humorous effects, intralingual subtitles are also frequently used for a wide range of functions such as to transcribe or paraphrase speech, provide supplementary information, characterize nonverbal actions, deliver producers’ commentary, and transmit affects. (Kimura, et al., 2000; Shiota, 2011; Park, 2009) Far beyond merely “decorative effects” (Shitara, 2011), these superimposed texts on the screen manages to direct the viewer’s attention and exert control over the viewers’ interpretative agency, as previous studies have indicated. (Ju, 2000; Yi, 2003; Park 2009) Following my discussion above on narrativity, the subtitles and captions in the case of the observation format can also be viewed as an authorial narrative voice, but with more manipulative power compared than other narrators within the programs. To be more specific, a large portion of subtitles function as an interpretative tool for the actions, emotions, unspoken thoughts, situations and even personalities of both observers and their objects. For example, in the first episode of 24 Same Bed, Different Dreams (air date: July 10, 2017), when the observation video is played to the part when the husband Lee Jae-myung tells his wife Kim Hye-kyung that he would like to have lunch at home, the picture cuts to the close-up shot of Kim’s face, with the subtitles aside saying “Do you have to have lunch at home…Then I have to prepare more side dishes… It’s weekend and I want to take a rest…Should I suggest eating out?”. (Figure 5) The use of parenthesis implies that these words are not directly spoken out by the character but surmised by the producers. Unlike captions that explain the character’s state through the voice of a narrator, these words are written in the first person with a colloquial style and inserted into the images, as if they are dubbing for the character’s inner voice as what a thought balloon does in a comic book. What’s more, such subtitles are designed in multimodal visual effects to conform to different emotional contexts. To illustrate from another program My Little Old Boy, in the section of Hong Jin-yeong and Hong Seon-yeong, when their mother appears slightly nettled while watching the sisters bickering over some trivial things, the subtitles go as “Ah…my daughter” in brackets along with animated graphics being added to the background, in order to highlight the mother’s emotional status and thus to achieve a comic effect. (Figure 6) During Hong sisters’ dialogues, various visual designs are featured in the subtitles, in which some are direct transcript of their speech and others are text (or just punctuation marks) descriptions of their physical/emotional state. (Figure 7) One major characteristic of those subtitles is that they all follow closely with the characters’ facial expressions, body languages and any other affective signs. Whether in a first-person tone or a third-person tone, their vivid language style and expressive contents are very likely to distract the audience from criticizing the intertextual distance between the original visual text and the literal representation. As previous studies have argued, these subtitles are “often assumed to be neutral, unmediated representations of discourse”, which allows the producers to project themselves into 25 the visual texts and present themselves as “the voice of authority on how the network of languages and discourses should be mapped onto people, values, and ideas”. (Park, 2009, p. 550) As a result, this narrative voice seems to hold an “omniscient” view in which all characters are knowable, and meanwhile, it becomes manipulative because, with their intervention, the original visual images appear incapable of illustrating themselves allegedly but have to be legitimized through other on- screen elements. Figure 5 Subtitle Example 1 from Same Bed, Different Dreams 2 Figure 6 Subtitle Example 2 from My Little Old Boy Figure 7 Subtitle Example 3 from My Little Old Boy 26 Chapter 2 Transnational Affectivity and Remake Politics: A comparative case study of Korean and Chinese observation programs In the history of the Korean Wave, television programs have long been a significant domain given the transnational flow of K-dramas like Winter Sonata and Dae Jang Geum. With the advent of the New Korean Wave era since 2008, Korean broadcasters started to diversify their exports of TV formats and pay particular attention to reality shows, which are mainly represented by a survival audition format like Super Star K (2009). (Jin, 2016) As a hybrid production drawn from western talent show tradition, Korean audition programs have gained its own recognition among many Asian countries by using “the image of Hallyu in the audition on a full-scale level” and “emphasizing interconnection and interdependency of all global areas”. (Jin, 2016, pp. 61-64) Basically, this audition format involves a similar discipline with other globally successful formats like talent shows and gameshows, in that they all boost the participation of viewers and offer them the opportunities for individual expression within a framework of competition. In Kim & Li’s research on Running Man, one of the most celebrated Korean reality-variety (ye-nŭng, 예능) shows in recent year’s Asia, they highlight the positive affective value of this show as a “happy object” and its promotion of Confucian affectivity (such as by valorizing failure and emphasizing group enjoyment) as the core of its transnationality, yet owing less to its competition design or participation of K-pop idols. Drawing on this finding, I propose to shed light on the affectivity of the observation format as a main contributor for its transnational consumption and remakes. This chapter deals with three fundamental elements of the observation format: family- centered theme, “ordinariness” represented by celebrities, and the productivity of affects. What can they contribute to the transnational consumption of the observation format? In light of the 27 Korean Wave, how should we understand the cross-border success of this reality format in China when a potential “pan East Asian identity” is imaginable? Moreover, locating this remake phenomenon at the specific media environment in China and taking the political situation between two countries into account, what can Chinese broadcasters benefit from adapting this format and what can we learn from its compatibility in exploring the Chinese remake politics of Hallyu products? By illustrating two typical Korean programs, My Little Old Boy and Same Bed, Different Dreams2, and their Chinese reproductions, this chapter aims to investigate both the “East Asian- ness” embedded in the original Korean programming and the political implications of Chinese remakes in the case of the observation format. In suggesting that the family themes in the context of Confucianism and the strategic representation of an accessible “ordinariness” provide the basis for transnational popularity of this format, I pay special attention to the transmission of affects (specifically shame and envy) as a significant strategy shared by both Korean and Chinese programs to draw the audience’s attention. Situating this reproducible format in Chinese broadcasting environment, I argue that the Chinese producers have exploited the empathetic cultural anxieties regarding familial roles in this reality format, with an intention to replicate the success without notifying the local audience of its being a remake, which reveals a tendency of “de-Koreanization” in Chinese remake politics as an aftershock of the THAAD disputes. 2.1 Backgrounds of Transnational Reality Programming in East Asia Reality television in South Korea was incubated under the big inflows of Western and Japanese television programs since 1980s. By copying formats and replicating inner narratives, Korean broadcasters’ dependence on foreign program models has provoked much concerns on “the possibility of cultural subordination to Japan”, which drove the producers to “conduct an 28 inevitable modification to tune themselves to local ‘structures of feeling’”. (Lee D.-h. , 2004, pp. 48-52) Their localization practices have as a result facilitated the cultural hybridization inside the country and merged the global and local popular cultures. Meanwhile, the intensified competition among three major national terrestrial networks— KBS (Korean Broadcasting System), SBS (Seoul Broadcasting System) and MBC (Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation)—pushed the development of local genres. Since the mid 2000s, Korean reality programming has experienced an innovative reform in which various hybrid formats were invented. Generally known as a “real- variety genre” (ye-nŭng, 예능), this genre is typically featured by “celebrity-centered casting that focuses on entertainment in reality” and narratives that “seek mutual growth and development through shared team experience” as well as “promote public interest and national awareness”. (as cited in Jung, 2019, p.6) Also notably, the concept of family is repeated in a no small part of Korean reality programs. Whether the program narrative is directly constructed around a family or not, the content is frequently designed as accessible to audience in all ages so that the whole family can enjoy together. Craig Plestis, the producer of the American reproduction of The Masked Singer, also mentions in an interview that “if there is something being shared in common among successful Korean formats, it would be its ‘family-friendliness’”. (Kim, 2018) In fact, the family narrative in reality television is never unfamiliar to audiences in many Asian countries. One of the most famous examples is Happy Family Plan (しあわせ家族計画), a Japanese game show that aired on TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System) from April 1997 to September 2000. This program was featured by a documentary-style home video filming and a task-fulfilling contest form, demonstrating the challenges the participants faced on their family ties and especially the father’s authority. Despite the effective ban on Japanese program export, SBS 29 broadcasted an unofficial adaption of it called Special Task! Dad’s Challenge (특명 아빠의 도전) since October 1997. This imitation program ended up being forced off-air due to the lawsuit threat from the original producer at TBS, but it still can be considered as a locally sought-after format since it was reproduced by SBS again in 2005. Later in 2001, China’s Beijing Television licensed this format and made a local adaption called Dreams Become Reality (梦想成真). It was so successful that many regional broadcasting stations started to make clones and imitations, which drew attention from China’s Ministry of Culture to regulate the “knock-offs”. (Beijing Times, 2001) This format was also sold to several western countries with big modifications on multiple elements such as setting, rules and casts in their adapted versions. According to Koichi Iwabuchi’s interview (2004) with the manager of the international sales division of TBS in 2001, this family- centered format is not easy for western producers to copy in the sense of “entertainingly demonstrating the ‘real’ development of family ties”, which reflects the cultural nuances in between. However, this concern is apparently not on Korean or Chinese adaptions given the “similar patriarchal positioning of the father within the family”. (p. 32) There is a shared set of family values among East Asian countries as a part of the Confucian heritage, that includes the socio-political importance of family, the patriarchal authority of the father, obedience and respect for the elders and the hierarchical relationship between genders. It is, to a large extent, the cultural familiarity derived from Confucianism that has laid the foundation for the cross-border consumption of television products within East Asian countries. Nevertheless, when we consider the hybrid nature of Korean reality television, the idea of a Confucian East Asia seems no longer sufficient to rationalize the formation of a transborder audience community. In Chua’s (2004) discussion on a potential “pan East Asian identity” that 30 emerges from the transnational consumption of popular cultural products, he suggests that these products are likely to create a “discursive and imaginative space for the emergence of such an identity” through their emphasis on an urban, young lifestyle. (pp. 216-217) In his words, the urban, unlike the idea of tradition that “specifies ‘uniqueness’ and ‘boundedness’ of a culture”, can pass through “cultural boundaries through its insistence on ‘sameness’”. (p. 216) Though the inscription of Confucian ideology in everyday life becomes less obtrusive, the family remains a strong presence in a contested situation where traditional family values are negotiated with the development of individualism. Also, when the focus is on lifestyle, the “geographical location dispersion and income differences” can be ignored by the urban middle-class Asians. (Chua, p. 216) What Chua has noted in the contents of these so-called “East Asian popular cultural products” is particularly helpful for us to interpret the narrative constructed in Korean and Chinese observation programs, which I will elaborate on in the next section. Before going to examine the Chinese remakes of Korean reality shows, it is crucial to have a general picture of the development environment of reality television in mainland China over the past decade. The Chinese television industry is situated in a unique system with “commercialized operations organized into a hierarchical structure of administrative monopoly”. (Zhao & Guo, 2005, p. 527) Following the marketization policies, provincial satellite stations were established during the 1990s with business interests. Unlike the state-owned network CCTV (China Central Television), these provincial-level stations are faced with a highly competitive market as well as the state censorship implemented by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT). The restructuring and commercialization of media system has given risen to what some researchers call an “entertainment storm” since the 2000s, which is articulated by Bai as “strong commercial pressure exists for television stations to transform themselves into 31 entertainment vendors”. (Bai, 2005, p. 4) The new concept of “yule” (entertainment), compared to wenyi (literature and art) in the late 20 th -century entertaining programs, is “much closer to ordinary people and everyday life, avoiding pomposity and elitism” and added with “a sense of choice and participation”, according to Meng. (2018, p. 108) Markedly, it is under such a climate that reality programming started to thrive in mainland China. By the middle of the 2010s, provincial broadcasters such as Hunan Satellite TV, Dragon TV (Shanghai station) and Zhejiang Satellite TV have been leading the production of reality programs mainly through borrowing and adapting foreign formats. However, the reinforced control from SAPPRFT (or SARFT, State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, before 2013 institutional reform) has profoundly influenced the direction of the development of reality television since the 2010s. In October 2011, SARFT issued an order titled “Opinions on Strengthening the Program Management of Satellite Television Channels” (关于进一步加强电视上星综合频道节目管理的意见). The state demanded 34 satellite channels increase the proportion of news programs and other educational programs while restricting the volume of entertainment programs, mainly referring to dating shows, talent shows, gameshows, talk shows and variety shows. This policy was addressed by the Chinese public as Xian Yu Ling ( “the order of limiting entertainment”, 限娱令) due to its specific criticism on the “tendency of over- entertainment” in public television programming, which is further explained in Xinhua News Agency’s interview as “not simply about the television genres but more concerned with the problem of vulgar, duplicated, and clap-trap content creating tendency” (Xinhua News Agency, 2011) In October 2013, an enhanced version of Xian Yu Ling was issued. Titled “Notice on the Programming and Reporting Work of Satellite Television Channels” (关于做好2014年电视上 32 星综合频道节目编排和备案工作的通知), this updated policy encouraged more diversified genres in television programming and especially stressed on the “educational value” of reality programming; meanwhile, it limited the number of reality shows that are arranged in prime-time slot and restricted the import of foreign formats to no more than one format per year for each channel. Facing both policies against over-entertainment, many broadcasters chose to play with the fine line by rearranging the time slots of reality shows and seeking new-fashioned formats from other countries. At the end of 2013, the unexpected popularity of Where Are We Going Dad? (爸爸去哪儿) by Hunan Satellite TV led to the rapid growth of commercial values in reality television and also an upsurge of adapting Korean reality formats. (Hu, Li, & Tang, 2014) More importantly, the narrative of parent-child relationship within Where Are We Going Dad? and its close relevance to issues of family education successfully kept itself from the critique of being overly entertaining, which has paved a new way for Chinese reality programmers and spawned the following trend of family-centered reality formats. (Huang, 2015) From 2014 to 2015, a flood of parenting-themed shows swept many satellite channels in China, such as Dad is Back (爸爸回来了) by Zhejiang TV, Star Knows My Heart (星星知我心) by Jiangsu TV, Mom, Listen to Me (妈妈听我说) by Beijing TV, etc. In spite of their compliance to Xian Yu Ling, the excessive exposure of children and some programs’ intentional depiction of the wealth gap in childrearing were brought to the state’s attention and then resulted in a new broadcasting guideline that restricts the participation of underage children in reality shows. (Xinhua News Agency, 2016) As a result, these producers had to stop sticking to the “baby parenting” topic but to dig for other comparable subjects, so to speak, more diversified family narratives in new formats. 33 Another impactful instruction from SAPPRFT was “The Notice on Strengthening Management of the Reality Shows” (关于加强真人秀节目管理的通知) in July 2015, which was also addressed by the public as Xian Zhen Ling (“the order of regulating reality shows” 限真令). It directly targeted the reality television genre and demanded all satellite channels pay attention to the genre’s particular functions of guiding values, representing traditional culture and reflecting social reality. (SAPPRFT, 2015) This new policy has further ensured the ideological safety of family-centered reality formats and again reminded the broadcasters of their “educational” role. While some Chinese producers are deliberating on how to adapt Korean family-themed formats and fit them with national policies, another popular gameshow format represented by Running man (SBS, 2010-) started to gain attention from other Chinese broadcasters. The Chinese remake Hurry Up, Brother (Zhejiang TV, 2014-) was even recognized as “the most successful remake of a Korean-originated entertainment program” in China. (Kim & Li, 2018, p. 165) However, its huge success later drew criticism on the “Korean DNA” embedded in Chinese entertainment television, which reveals the problem of a national identity crisis in the Chinese remake phenomenon of Korean reality television. Moreover, starting from July 2016, the increasing political tension between China and South Korea provoked by the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) dispute has caused a huge impact on the consumption of Korean cultural products in China. Though without an official announcement from SAPPRFT, Chinese social media became flooded with news and public speeches calling for a boycott of Hallyu, and prompting the Chinese entertainment industry to self-impose a ban on the cooperation with South Korea, which was widely known as Xian Han Ling (限韩令) or Anti-Korea Measures. (Jo, 2016) Consequently, the trade and co-production of popular cultural products with Korean broadcasters, 34 including reality programs, were forced to a pause, and even more radical was that any possible cultural imprint from Hallyu was shunned by Chinese producers when the tension mounted to the highest. Under such circumstances, family-centered narratives could remain a viable subject in reality programming whether in a commercial, cultural or political concern, not to mention the crucial role of family in building national unity according to Confucianism. In other words, the compatibility of Korean family-centered reality formats in China benefitted from not only the cross-boundary connection about family values but also the recent surge in attention to Confucianism and “traditional” Chinese values under Xi administration. The narrative focus on adapting traditional family values into modern Chinese society enables the observation format to obscure its status of being imported and its imprint of “Korean-ness”. On such basis, the observation format, I suggest, is particularly potent in being localized and accepted in current Chinese broadcasting environment. In the next few sections, I will take a closer look at other characteristics of the observation format that guarantee it with transnational reception in East Asian countries. Through a comparative case study that illustrates two representative programs, I pay special attention to the representation of ordinary family life and the affective values derived by it, in an attempt to grasp the meaning of “transnational affects” in the observation format. 2.2 Empathetic “Ordinariness” in Family-centered Observation Programs Reality television, as a postmodern production, has been grappling with contemporary sociopolitical debates on family values for decades. In the history of American television, various reality formats have been deployed to speak to the “prevailing trends and beliefs concerning the changing American family”, that is more precisely, “an uneasy shift from modern nuclear family 35 ideals to the postmodern reality of diverse practices”. (Edwards, 2013, p. 94) Programs like The Osbournes (MTV, 2002-2005, U.S.) captured the tensions in present family life, ranging “from sibling rivalry to teen sex and drug use to a serious illness”, and thus aroused extended contentions on the value of postmodern American families. (Edwards, 2013, p. 97) A modern suburban commodity culture is highlighted in a variety of family factual programs such as wife swapping, baby parenting, home improvement and celebrity household documentary. Likewise, the Korean and Chinese family-centered TV programs have also formulated a specific landscape where the traditional family norms are challenged by the newly emerged lifestyle cultures in both societies. In attempt to understand the approach of representation and to seize the changing pictures of family sketched in the most recent Korean and Chinese reality television, I choose to review two typical observation shows, My Little Old Boy (미운 우리 새끼, 2016-) and Same Bed, Different Dreams2 (동상이몽 2- 너는 내 운명, 2017-), and their corresponding Chinese reproductions My Little One 1 (我家那小子/我家那闺女, 2018-) and Mr. & Mrs. (我家小两口, 2019-), one of which focuses on the parent-child relationships and the other focuses on the conjugal relationships. First of all, it is crucial to acknowledge that all four shows invite celebrities instead of ordinary people to narrate contemporary family life. There are mainly singers, actors, comedians, TV hosts, athletes, and one politician (who appears in 1-11 episodes of Same Bed, Different Dreams2). Different from Keeping Up with the Kardashians, in which luxurious lifestyles, subverted gender roles and family dramas spotlight an uncommon celebrity family image, or 1 The Chinese version separate the male celebrities and female celebrities into two shows that are respectively titled “Wo Jia Na X iao Zi” (我家那小子, literally translated as My Son) and “Wo Jia Na Gui Nv” (我家那闺女, literally translated as My Daughter), but with the same official English translation name as My Little One. 36 celebrity documentaries like Miss Americana that show the celebrities’ unusual career/life path, the four observation shows go towards a reverse direction: to reveal the “ordinariness” of the celebrities. Here the “ordinariness” not only serves as a marketing tactic to arouse the public’s curiosity, but also functions to “confirm the ‘reality’ of what is shown”. (Couldry, 2003, p. 107) As I have mentioned in the last chapter, a concept of “everyday lives” (il-sang일상/ richang日常)” prevails in both Korean and Chinese observation programs. Along with this concept, their production teams repeatedly encourage viewers to find connections with the programs by using similar expressions like “stories that you are able to identify with” (공감할 수 있다/可以找到同感). For instance, My Little Old Boy writes “the stories that you can find lots of connections to” (공감 100배 이야기) on its homepage (SBS, n.d.), and the producer of Same Bed, Different Dreams 2 also described the program as “the audiences seem to be identifying with the stories” (시청자들이 공감하는 것 같다) in an interview. (OSEN, 2019) Similarly, in the Chinese versions, My Little One and Mr. & Mrs. use the expressions like “Is it like you?” (是你吗?) and “Let’s find our connections together” (一起找共鸣) in their promotion video and social media posts 2 . The everyday experiences that the majority of people can identify with or relate to can generally be described as “common” or “mundane”, which echoes with Silverstone’s (1994) explanation of “ordinariness” as “the taken for granted” and “the more or less secure normality of everyday life, and our capacity to manage it on a daily basis”. (p. 166) If we look at the documentary clips within all these programs in general, we can tell that they tend to show the quotidian routines that all look 2 Promotion video of My Little One, posted by the program’s official Weibo account at the date of July 4, 2018. Link: https://m.w eibo.cn/status/4257993132262532. Also see other posts on the official Weibo account of Mr. & Mrs. Link: https://m.weibo.cn/71 89910775/4404085346235211 37 alike, such as having meals, doing housework, hanging out with friends, going out for grocery shopping, etc., except being performed by different celebrities and presented with different details. Such everyday-based contents to a large degree crisscross with what Bonner (2003) has termed as “ordinary television”. In her book Ordinary Television: Analyzing Popular TV, Bonner evaluates the “ordinariness” embedded in a certain range of existing reality TV formats, and suggests that when ordinary people get access to these programs, they are expected to “project a personality on television”, without which they “have neither talent nor presence”. (p. 53) In other words, those who can participate in the ordinary TV programs show a trait of ordinariness that is more useful than others, and they are carefully selected by these programs to produce “a particular, and motivated, construction of ordinariness for us to watch”. (Turner, 2013, p. 89) The media space has been argued to have a “symbolic power” that is achieved through the capitals of “public visibility, broad circulation and mass diffusion”. (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 47) This power renders the media world “higher than ‘the ordinary world’” and thus creates a hierarchical relationship between what is presented on and off the screen (Couldry, 2003, p. 107) A compelling example that has been illustrated by Couldry to articulate the media/ordinary boundary is the act of self-disclosure at a talk show stage. The considerable participation of ordinary people and their discussions on the public issues turn the talk show into a “media version of everyday life”. Every time when an ordinary person discloses him/herself, the effect is never a simple status transition to “media people”, but even remarkably, a transformation of his/her words from “something merely personal into something special, something representative”. (Couldry, 2003, p. 122) But what if the ordinary people are replaced by celebrities? Owing to the naturalized hierarchy, celebrities, as a group of “media people”, are usually assumed to own a special status “as if they stood for ‘something more’, something central about contemporary social life”. (Couldry, 2003, p. 38 27) How do privileged people try to recover their status of being ordinary in the observation programs? What is the possible consequence after media people making confessions about their so-called “ordinariness” and trying to convince the audience of the “reality” that is shown on the screen? From a marketing perspective, revealing the ordinary side of a celebrity is able to flatter the audience. Stam (1983) has pointed out that the importance of television is being “watched out of desire ... in the hope that it will please” (p. 39) Displaying the celebrities’ family life satisfies the public’s voyeuristic desire to peer into their private spaces, and a sense of “ordinariness” helps to foster some intimacy in between because it seems to assert the centrality of the ordinary world. A typical example is Princess Diana, whose popularity is formed through a mixture of conventional royal celebrity and a constructed discourse on her ordinariness. However, compared with the representative role of ordinary people in reality television, the “ordinariness” performed by celebrities on screen cannot be simply reviewed as a mediated representation but more of “a mode of intervention into the social”. (Turner, 2013, p. 146) It differs from the type of direct intervention in, for instance, transformation programs where a needy ordinary person asks for professionals’ help to solve their problems on house design, body shape or fashion style. Instead, it exploits the celebrities’ “symbolic power” to normalize a certain kind of behavior and give free coaching about “‘correct’ social, political, cultural and environmental values” to the viewers. (Rojek, 2012, p. 139) Such intervention is less blatant but perhaps more penetrating since the celebrities have become the participators in the production of everyday life on a social level. In the observation programs I investigate, there is another function of celebrities — to capture a larger transnational audience. The participation of K-pop stars, such as Kim Hee-chul in 39 My Little Old Boy and Choo Ja-hyun in Same Bed, Different Dreams 2, assisted in gathering the attention from Chinese audience at the first place. 3 Though being disassociated from a well-crafted visual space within traditional Hallyu products like K-drama and K-pop music video, these Hallyu celebrities can still attract cross-border attentions given the inherently modernized and urbanized context they are framed in, which renders it furthermore viable to reproduce. It can be told from the inner scenes that all four programs choose to narrate non-working-class families in contemporary Korean and Chinese societies. All participating celebrities, despite their difference in occupation, fame or financial ability, are sharing a nearly equal status of being middle- or upper- class citizens. Both Chinese and Korean programs prefer to delineate urban, metropolitan areas as the main habitat of bourgeois families. For instance, up to the 180th episode (air date: May 8, 2020) of My Little Old Boy, all celebrities 4 who have been casted in the show reside in Seoul City, the capital of South Korea; while in the first three seasons of My Little One (by the end of 2019), the areas that celebrity participants 5 live in include Beijing, Shanghai, Changsha and Hangzhou, all belonging to the “first-tier cities” 6 in China. From Korean versions to Chinese versions, there exists a sense of sameness in the visual appearance of the spaces on screen. As Chua (2004) points out, the emphasis of urban spaces in television products “facilitates culture-border crossing” due to the urban’s increasing lack of specificity. (p. 216) Their exploitation of modern urban spaces 3 According to the data of trending topic chart on Weibo, one of the largest social media in China 4 The casts include Kim Je-dong, Heo Ji-woong, Kim Gun-mo, Tony An, Park Soo-hong, Lee Sang-min, Kim Jong-kook, Hong Ji n-young and Kim Hee-chul. (according to the program homepage) 5 The male casts include Zhu Yuchen, Xu Haiqiao, Qian Feng, Chen Xuedong, Wu Yi, Yu Xiaotong, Wu Dajing; the female casts include Wu Xin, Yuan Shanshan, Jiao Junyan, Guo Yue, He Wenna, Fu Yuanhui. (according to Baidu Baike) 6 The list of Chinese city tier system is not officially made by the central government but is frequently referred to by various medi a publications for purposes including commerce, transportation, tourism, education, and more. The “first-tier cities” list I cite here is published by China Business Network (第一财经周刊), one of the biggest media group in China. 40 not only enables an interchangeable viewing experience between two visual texts, but also helps to co-construct a dominant discourse on a bourgeois urban lifestyle associated with modernity. What’s more, as Turner (2010) has argued about the “demotic turn” of the television as “a dramatic extension of the pedagogic capacity of the medium”, the presentation of everyday life in observation programs also manifests a pedagogic motif. (p. 67) In the case of parent-child relationship shows, My Little Old Boy is introduced by SBS as grown-up children’s “growth stories” (성장기) 7 , while My Little One is classified by Hunan Satellite TV into a category named “qinqing guancha chengzhang xiu” (亲情观察成长秀) 8 that can be literally translated as “programs that show the family affections and personal growth through observation”. Their use of “growth” as keyword seems as a rhetoric strategy to mimic the tone of a parent who is watching his/her child growing up day by day. But in fact, their plot of people growth is articulated as a process of negotiation between the older generation who stick to the traditional Confucian family value and the younger generation who more adhere to individualism. Both programs speak to the question of how to deal with the ideological conflicts between generations and try to deliver a positive message to the audience. But compared to the emphasis on the “intercommunication” (소통) in the Korean version, the Chinese one tends to be more blatant in its educational purpose. To take its first season as example, the relentless focus on the “unsatisfactory” everyday life details has portrayed the four male celebrities as grown-up sons who are incapable of taking care of themselves. The mothers and panelists’ criticism on Wu Yi’s unwillingness to do housework, Qian Feng’s overeating, Chen Xuedong’s insomnia and Zhu Yucheng’s negative emotion makes them 7 SBS, My Little Old Boy program homepage. 8 MGTV, My Little One program homepage. 41 become a somehow “bad life” model; and along with the slogan “live a better life” (好好去生活), the program has explicitly turned itself into a positive force aimed at helping people by providing them a model for “better living”. (as cited in Turner 2010, p.67) Likewise in Same Bed, Different Dreams 2 and Mr. & Mrs., both programs attempt to build a model of good conjugal relationship by romanticizing the celebrities’ marriage. In program promotion, they have employed similar descriptions about the celebrity couples’ stories as “movie-like” (영화 같은 이야기) 9 or “drama- like” (偶像剧般的爱情) 10 , which renders their presentation of marriage life as desirable. Instead of direct intervention into ordinary people’s life, all the four programs choose to convince the public of what family lives are favorable and what are not through the celebrities’ demonstration, and then urge people to make “self-improvement”. Again, family-centered reality shows generally speak to the changing pictures of family in contemporary times and the related social issues. Kompare (2004) indicates that television families are “sites of cultural anxieties”, where “the work of social cohesion is ritually enacted”. (p. 102) Drawing upon it, I argue that the celebrities’ presentation of ordinary family life in Korean and Chinese observation programs also functions to arouse “cultural anxieties” domestically and even transnationally by adopting a similar affective strategy. Through producing and transmitting multiple affects, they encourage the audience’s self-reflection and affective commitment in order to achieve a discursive construction of modern family realities. In next section, by dividing the four shows into two groups, with different type focus of family relationships, I will deliver a 9 SBS, Same Bed Different Dreams program homepage. 10 See in the post by program’s official account on Weibo. Link: https://programs.sbs.co.kr/enter/dongsang2/about/52009 42 specific analysis of the dominating affects transmitted in each group and discuss how these affects function to reflect the social reality and convey pedagogical messages to the audience. 2.3 The Transmission of Affect and Homogeneous Cultural Anxieties As I have enunciated in the first chapter, the multi-perspectivity and post-production techniques produce affective messages in the observation format. Television as a “technology of intimacy” is competent in transmitting affects to the off-screen viewers because “the affective elements—intersubjectivity, privacy, and presentism—come to the fore”. (Kavka, 2008, p. 5) By emphasizing on the possible identification between the televised content and the audience’s own experience, these observation programs encourage the audience to project themselves into the on- screen subject and recognize the intersubjectivity embedded in their narratives. Brennan (2004) has argued that “the projection or introjection of a judgement is the moment transmission (of affect) takes place”, which exactly explains why the act of observation matters here. (p. 5) More crucially, given the setup of double spaces within the format, a relationship built between gazing and being gazed at manages to produce additional affective flows between the two spaces on screen. That is to say, there is a dual process of transmission of affect embedded in the multi-layered relationships among the observed objects, the observers and the audience, in which one is able to facilitate or reaffirm the other. To be clearer, I would like to draw on what Brennan (2004) theorizes about the transmission of affect, that is “social in origin but biological and physical in effect”. (p. 3) In other words, as rephrased by Kavka (2008), the affect can be “both qualitatively transformed and materially transported from one body to another”. (p. 33) The material that takes objects and produces affect also becomes an affective material itself. Further elucidated by Kavka, because “an object is the object of other’s feelings, too, we are always responding not just to a sensate 43 object but also to others’ feelings lodged in it”, which indicates the significance of sociality or the relation to others in generating affect. (p. 34) To apply to the observation programs, when the observers and the audience are watching the documentary clips of the observed, they both enable the transmission of affect independently through their own direct relations to the object. Then after, when the observers express their feelings towards the observed within the program, they themselves become another part of the affective material that serves to further strengthen and reaffirm the audience’s feelings. Simply put, the audience of this program can not only feel the affective material itself but also see how other people feel the same material, which forms a dual relationship between the audience and the material, an overlapping contact point of the self with objects. And it is this dual process that underlines the affective productivity of the observation format. Arguably, these programs have been intentionally designed to be affectively productive in order to depict the cultural anxieties and mediate the social reality. The problems and conflicts are not directly pointed out in these shows but rather articulated through various affects. Moreover, these affects are able to decide what is favorable and what is not so that a coherent discourse gets settled down. The two groups of programs — one juxtaposes My Little Old Boy (Korea) and My Little One (China) while the other juxtaposes Same Bed, Different Dreams 2 (Korea) and Mr. & Mrs. (China) — each focusing on one type of family relationships, are each dominated by one specific kind of affects that is used to build its discourse. I will elaborate on them respectively as follows. 44 2.3.1 The Feeling of Shame and the Unmarried Children It is impressive that My Little Old Boy and My Little One share the same topic at their opening, that is the parents’ expectation for their celebrity children to get married, indicated by the overt titles “Get married, son!” (“아들아, 장가 좀 가자”/ “ 成家吧！儿子”). The pilot episode of My Little Old Boy (air date: July 20, 2016) starts with a clip of celebrity mothers’ self-introductions and messages for their sons, in which their worries towards children’s single lives are repeatedly mentioned. The Chinese version My Little One presents its main topic in a more direct way by asking the parents whether they are worried or even anxious about their children’s current state of being “old” and unmarried. Setting their concern as the starting point, both programs claim to provide an opportunity for parents to uncover their grown-up children’s unknown private single lives and a platform for them to communicate with their children. From their manifest reaction and attitude, I suggest, a feeling of shame stands out in the parents’ expressing worry and concern towards their children, and also the children’s display of depression and helplessness as well. Shame, as labeled by Taylor (1985), is an “emotion of self-assessment” that often arises from one’s recognition that he/she fails to achieve a self-ideal. (p. 1) It is widely recognized as a self-conscious affect in which the agent takes the self as the object and bears a cognitive antecedent that is a belief or a judgement about the self. However, typically there is a heteronomous nature embedded in shame with an involvement of “the other”. Despite being a result of self-assessment, shame presupposes an “ideal” that is usually associated with standards or norms that are regarded as right, appropriate and desirable by a group, or a general idea of the public. In other words, the agent is very likely to maintain an awareness of a present observer who is watching and judging his/her actions, and get ready to accept the judgements. And it is this orientation to others that has 45 been indicated to distinguish shame and guilt, another self-assessing emotion that frequently causes confusion. Some researchers have argued that shame often involves being negatively evaluated by others while guilt by oneself. (Smith, Webster, Parrott, & Eyre, 2002) Here a presence of “the other” plays a significant role in forming the feeling of shame by introducing an idea of comparison. In one episode of My Little One (air date: July 7, 2018), Qian’s mother expresses her concern about her son’s marriage by saying “all friends at his age already have kids who go to first grade, and only he even does not have a girlfriend yet!”. And almost all parents who participate in both programs have delivered the similar message by comparing their children with so-called “others”, reflecting a compelling concept of group identification that has been structured under specific cultural context. According to traditional Confucian ideologies, marriage is a general expectation for all young adults, and particularly, it is central to the notion of filial piety. From the perspective of the parents, their children’s marriage denotes the continuity of the family line and is thus related to the family honor. That is to say, getting married at a certain age becomes a cultural norm that parents expect their children to comply to for the sake of the whole family. If one fails to meet the demands, his/her families would inevitably fall under a specific minority group confronted by negative cultural images, which is suggested by Kaufman (1996) as a typical scene of shame. In his words, because of “the fundamental equation of difference with shame”, minorities typically experience inferiority and inner deficiency in comparison to members of the majority cultures. (pp. 273-74) Notably, in such scenes, the negative judgement or blame is not necessarily pinned by an actual other but more as a conceptual imagination by the agent self. Williams (1993) points out in Shame and Necessity that even if shame and its motivation always involve “an idea of the gaze of another”, it is important that “for many of its operations the 46 imagined gaze of an imagined other will do”. (p. 82) And faced with the imagined gaze, shame can also serve the function of self-protection to avoid the possible condemnation. (Taylor, 1985; Williams, 1993) It can be found in the two reality programs that though without the outspoken blame, the parents tend to express a feeling of shame when being asked about their children’s state of being unmarried, which can be in some case regarded as a (sub)conscious defense mechanism to protect themselves from the possible cultural blame. Comparatively speaking, the feeling of shame is even more discernible in the Chinese version than in the Korean version. In addition to the parents’ negative self-assessment of the family, some of the celebrity children have also internalized such judgement and reproduced shame, which can eventuate in other psychological states or emotions such as depression. (Kaufman, 1996, p. 135) One episode of My Little One (air date: January 5, 2019) shows Wu Xin, a Chinese host and actress, revealing her own depressive thoughts about the little possibility for her to find an “appropriate” husband and live up to the family and social expectation. She describes herself as a “leftover” woman (sheng nü, 剩女), a term used in China to classify women who remain unmarried in their late twenties and beyond, which carries a derogatory meaning that describes them as “undesirable” and suggests them to be the object of social shame. Lewis (1979) points out that people who are simultaneously experiencing emotions of shame and depression display two main characteristics, that are, “hatred of the (deficient) self” and “the helplessness of the self to change the vicarious experience of the ‘other’s’ feeling”. (p. 388) Besides depression, a feeling of fear can also be detected, as a response to “prospective shame”. (Williams, 1993, p. 79) More than one participants who are being observed in the show have confessed their fear about being pressured by the family and the society to get married. These shows gather information from 47 both the observed objects and the parent observers together on the screen, and therefore enhance the feeling of shame that is delivered to the audience. From the point of program design, both shows have provided an initial ground for the participants to produce those negative feelings. As mentioned, gaze from others, no matter real or imagined, is a decisive power in forming the affect of shame. With the emphasis on the act of observation, two shows intentionally establish the relations of seeing and being seen, and thus create a “legitimate” environment for people to practice gaze. Most importantly, the vehicle of gaze in both shows is not simply a generalized group of “others”, but instead specified as one special group who own a same identity of parents. An online review attempts to compare I Live Alone and My Little Old Boy by saying that though both programs show people’s single life, the latter is more emotional because of the mothers’ participation in the observing process. (Yang, 2016) For example, there is one scene when Kim Jae-dong is singing while having meal in kitchen alone, and the review comments that it could have been interpreted as a fun scene by other observers, but with the presence of Kim’s mother, her bitter reaction turns the scene into a pathetic picture of a lonely, unmarried middle-aged man who cannot enjoy a chippap (home-cooked meals that are usually enjoyed together with the family). However, generally speaking, negative emotions in the Korean version are treated relatively lightly due to its stronger focus on entertaining purpose, whereas the Chinese version tends to take the observers’ opinions more seriously. As a result, in the Chinese version, the parents’ strong beliefs revealed in the discussion render their “gaze” more intrusive and representative for an ideological power. Accordingly, their feelings of shame function to unfold a socially dominant attitude on the marriage issue of the younger generation. 48 Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that both programs demonstrate a will to deal with the negative effects of shame by providing the parents with opportunities to learn different perspectives from other observers and showing audience its inclusiveness for diverse opinions. In episode 7 of My Little One (air date: February 16, 2019), one observer Yi Lijing, a female journalist, proposed her opinion that “marriage is an option, not a duty” and then stirred a debate with the fathers on site. Though her opinions were not fully accepted by the fathers in the show, their debate has drawn huge public response online and received comments from the official media CRJ online saying it “demonstrates a good example for intergenerational talks”. (CRJ Online 国际在线, 2019) Likewise, the Korean version also allows different voices on the traditional view of marriage and family, echoing with the changing life values in contemporary Korean society. Despite the varying degrees of shame being articulated in the two versions, this affect speaks to the simultaneous conflicts in two countries between the traditional family value in East Asian cultures and the evolving attitudes among new generations who promote individualism and freedom, which facilitates the transnational consumption of this format. 2.3.2 The Feeling of Envy and Desirable Conjugal Relationships In Same Bed, Different Dreams 2, the MCs open the show by saying a slogan “watching men from the perspective of women, watching women from the perspective of men” (“남자의 시선으로 본 여자, 여자의 시선으로 본 남자”). A clear line has been drawn that separates the male and the female into two camps, and both are encouraged to project themselves into the subject of their same sex and keep self-reflexive at the same time. In other words, observing the behaviors of your opposite sex in heterosexual relationships becomes a main purpose in this program. All observers sitting in the studio (including the observed objects themselves) would spontaneously 49 react to and make judgements on the performance of their opposite sex in a marital relationship. In the Chinese version Mr. & Mrs., parents also join the panel to observe and evaluate the performance of their children and children-in-law. All of those people (plus the producers) are legitimate expressers of affects. And notably, the feeling of “envy” becomes one of the most frequent in both shows. The feeling of envy is displayed through various forms including the explicit subtitles on screen, the spoken words and sometimes visual metaphors. For example, in the first episode of Same Bed (air date: July 10, 2017), the observation video shows the daily routine of the politician Lee Jae-myung and his wife Kim Hye-kyung. When it comes to the part of Kim preparing a full home-cooked meal for Lee, the subtitle shows “ the ‘wife’s dishes’ (red-colored) that the two divorced men (MC) feel most envious of” (돌싱 MC들이 가장 부러운 “아내의 밥상”). The expression of “wife’s dishes” instead of simply “dishes” implies the envied object is in fact the “husband” Lee Jae-myung. Such message can be further elucidated under the discourse of chippap (home-cooked meals) in South Korean society. Chippap is frequently referred as a symbol or even a criterion of a married men’s life, which implies the wife’s responsibility of cooking and taking care of their husband’s health. (Rhee, 2019, p. 57) Therefore, here a feeling of envy is constructed between men with their desire to enjoy chippap and being taken care of the wives. To give another example, in a recent episode (air date: October 21, 2019), actress Ha Hee-ra claims in the interview VCR that she feels being envied by all women around her when hearing they say “you really are the happiest woman in the world” (emphasized in subtitle as “세상에서 제일 행복한 여자”) after they watched the show. Her statement is followed by a short clip that shows how she is being taken care of by her husband, actor Choi Soo-jong, with the subtitle “whenever Hee-ra wants something, 50 being the obedient Soo-jong (희라가 원아다면 언제나 순종 수종)”. At the same time, the VCR of their slice of life is filled with the “evidences” that construct a narrative of the “obedient” husband. A message can be extracted from such arrangement that women are envious of Hee-ra having an obedient husband. In the Chinese version, the subtitles are the major medium to display the feeling of envy by employing various kinds of expressions and metaphors or directly just typing the word “xianmu” (envy, 羡慕) on the screen. What’s noteworthy is that these subtitles are in most cases added to describe female observers’ feelings even sometimes without their uttering any words, (Figure 8) and the objects they “feel” envious of are usually some romantic gestures and other details that can prove a gentle, caring husband. Here the articulation of envy is so gendered that it can be discerned that program itself is consciously attempting to construct the image of a desired husband. Before I cut into the analysis of this gendered envy, I would like to first elucidate what I mean by envy here, considering the frequent confusion between envy and jealousy in daily use and the long-lasting debate on the psycho-sociological implication of both words. As Crabb (1945) notes in English Synonyms, “jealousy fears to lose what it has; envy is pained at seeing another have that which it wants for itself....”. To extend from that, my interpretation of envy places an Figure 8 Screenshots of Mr. & Mrs. 51 emphasis on the preexisting process of comparing the self with the other and making a personal judgement about what is desirable and what is not. In Spillius’ words (1993), envy tends to be experienced “when the individual compares himself with someone superior in happiness, reputation, or in the possession of anything desirable”. (p. 1203) Though involving a process of comparison as well, jealousy is notably different for its implication of a competitive relationship with a third party. As illustrated in romantic relationships by Ben-Ze’ev (2010), in contrast to envy, which is “essentially a two-party relationship”, jealousy is “basically a three-party relationship” with one’s concern towards another person who “may threaten one’s favorable and exclusive relationship with one’s partner”. (p. 41) It should be noted that this competitive concern in jealousy does not “refer to social comparison regarding a higher or lower status” but rather “presupposes personal rivalry”, like a zero-sum game. But in envy, the other’s status, either loss or gain, would not directly change the subject’s situation. The two words are used with overlapping meaning in everyday language to a great extent because they can in many circumstances derive similar emotional attitudes such as anger, hatred, shame and sadness. Yet what concerns me here is the distinct psychological attitudes associated with the use of two words — envy implies a wish to obtain while jealousy a fear of losing. In Klein’s (1985) essay, she also provides some clinical examples and suggestions about defending against envy. Idealization is the first defense mechanism she proposes by saying “strongly exalting the object and its gifts is an attempt to diminish envy”. (p. 216) Remarkably in both versions of the show, the female group have been portrayed as the main subjects of envy feeling and the idealization of a favored husband image. To illustrate, I would like to introduce a “signature couple” in the original Korean version. When the program was first launched, there is one among all participating couples having contributed largely to the success of the program, who 52 are the “Choo-Yu couple” (“추우커플”) with the Korean actress Choo Ja-hyun and Chinese actor Yu Xiaoguang. Many of the episodes featuring their stories hit the highest ratings and refreshed the records of the whole program. (Kim, 2019) Their popularity has further attracted more media’s attention, as shown in many online news reports with titles such as “‘Same Bed, Different Dreams 2’ Yu Xiaoguang, the most ideal husband” (Kwon, 2019) and “exploded public interest about ‘Yu Lovely’” (Dispatch, 2017). The narrative focus of the media mostly lies on portraying how Yu can be recognized as a role model for husbands and how he became a most craved husband figure for single female audiences. As the organizer of the show, the production team is also actively engaged in constructing the image of a desired husband. In a special episode for “Choo-Yu couple” (air date: August 19, 2017), they show a short clip that features a promotion video style to introduce Yu with descriptions like “aegyo nam” (a man acting cute, “애교남”), “a man inducing your desire to get married” (“결훈욕구유발자”), and “a man loving his wife like a fool” (“아내 바보”). The clip is followed by the reaction from one of the female observers in studio, saying “My mouth’s even watering!” to show how she is drooling over such a husband, accompanied by the subtitle on the screen as “She feels so envious that even her mouth waters” (“넘나 부럽/ 침이 다 나오네”). It can be told that Yu has been portrayed as an ideal husband who most women wish to have while Choo becomes the object that woman would feel envious about. Despite the purpose of the observation program is claimed to learn how celebrity couples deal with their relationships, the narrative focus towards this couple has been mostly put on the husband, which reveals a gendered perspective embedded in this TV program. 53 Overall, the two programs themed with the celebrity couple stories have actively produced the feeling of envy as an affective medium to idealize the celebrity participants’ marital life and especially a caring, obedient husband figure. It is interesting that in the Chinese reproduction, there is another popular couple consisting of Chinese actress Qi Wei and Korean-American actor Lee Seung-hyun, who is portrayed as an obedient husband as well. A shared keyword that has been tagged onto the two husbands is “aegyo nam” (애교남) or “sajiao nan” ( 撒娇男), a catchword that was originally invented in Korean and then received in Chinese. It is generally used to describe a cute and sweet speech/behavioral style that corresponds to the “soft masculinity” fashion, a term referred by Jung (2010) as “a hybrid product constructed through the transcultural amalgamation of South Korea’s traditional seonbi masculinity (which is heavily influenced by Chinese Confucian wen masculinity), Japan’s bishõnen (pretty boy) masculinity, and global metrosexual masculinity.” (p. 39) In other words, it is a transcultural notion that can fit perfectly in the transnational consumption of popular cultural products, specifically between China and Korea. To delve into this notion, it is an idealized image of masculinity that is typically adopted to satisfy the imagination of female audience under patriarchal systems. In another Korean reality television show called The Return of Superman, that contains the similar discourses about masculinity, the fathers who take care of housework have also aroused a hot discussion among female viewers as “it defies South Korean’s traditional assumptions about fatherhood and masculinity”. (Moon & Shin, 2018, p. 181) Kim (2014) argues that these television shows manage to “create a new type of masculinity by centering the narratives on the traditionally female roles” and recreating a “non- authoritative” father figure. (p. 88) In Rhee’s (2019) investigation of gender politics in South Korean cooking shows, she proposes a similar idea about the “softened Korean masculinity” that she specifically terms as “culinary masculinity” being represented to challenge the existing gender 54 hierarchy associated with cooking. (p. 63) All those narratives about men as husband and/or father being willing to participate in domestic labor and emotionally soft strike a chord in female viewers’ expectation for a new type of masculinity against being authoritative and dominant, but more attentive, considerate and docile, which implies women’s longing for escaping the patriarchal control and having a more balanced gender power relation. In addition to the identical criteria of a desirable husband, the arrangement of a Korean- Chinese couple model in two programs, as far as I see, is hardly a coincidence, but instead a marketing strategy reacting to the transnational cultural flow between two countries. K-pop idol groups, as pioneering contributors in globalizing Korean Wave, often comprise members “of different ethnic origins, with diverse linguistic capabilities, to enhance exportability”. (as cited in Fedorenko, 2017, p. 502) After Korean diasporic, Chinese nationals are the second most prevalent among foreign members in K-pop groups, especially for top entertainment groups like SM and JYP that have bigger ambitions for overseas markets. Inspired by the success of K-pop group in China and considering its “replicability”, several Chinese leading entertainment companies such as EE-Media and Yuehua started to promote K-pop style idol groups formed by Chinese and Korean members (such as Top Combine, UNIQ and Everglow). Their strategy can be read as a statement of the “Korean-ness” in their pop cultural commodity with the purpose of sharing a piece of the lucrative K-pop market and also building connections with the domestic consumers in Korea as a form of, I call, “reversed cultural export”. Similar practices have been adopted in the two reality programs I discuss. And in this case, it can go beyond a simple duplicate of an external cultural commodity and become a dialogue between two different societies that share cultural values. 55 Chapter 3 Audience Receptions and the Politics of Consumption After articulating the empathetic affects in the context of Confucianism as the main contributor of the transnational consumption of the observation programs, I seek to further evaluate the affective appeal of this format by investigating the audience motives in this chapter. Consumption, as Douglas and Isherwood have argued, is a “general process of the construction of meaning”. (as cited in Morley, 1992, p. 200) The study of viewership is helpful for us to decode the meanings of the observation format from the perspective of popular media consumption. What specifically intrigues me in this format is its overlapping viewing experience with another global video phenomenon, that is, Internet reaction videos, in which people watch someone react to something else. To continue explore the connection between the affective appeal and the transnational consumption of the observation format, I compare it with the proximate Internet reaction videos while asking two general questions: why do people watch observation shows? Is the effect of viewing observation reality format similar to reaction videos? As the last chapter has discussed, one significant foundation for the transnational consumption of the observation programs is the shared cultural contexts and value systems among the observed, the observers and the audience, which is not necessarily the case in the consumption of Internet reaction videos. Therefore, this comparison brings out a following question: what can audience achieve in watching other people watching other people when they share the cultural value systems? This chapter is based on interviews with 12 individuals who are of different ages, genders family backgrounds and all with the experiences of watching Chinese/Korean observation shows. Due to the limited scope of this audience survey, I mainly focus on the Chinese audience group in this research. Through asking questions about their interests, impressions, focus, etc., I attempt to 56 figure out the audience motives and also spot the possible differences in their viewing experiences of original Korean shows and the Chinese remakes, in order to further examine the relation between the affective appeal and the transnational content in the observation format. According to my findings, I propose that empathetic identification as well as the positive affective values are the two main audience expectations in consuming observation shows. Particularly, there is a compelling notion I call “a sense of distance” that plays a profound role in transnational media consumption. One of my Chinese respondents indicated that the Korean version is more “comfortable” to watch than the Chinese version because the former is “more remote” and “less intrusive”. An appropriate distance between the audience and the media content can ensure the psychological safety of the audience and mediate the negative affective power of the media content, which also reveals the subtlety in balancing the entertainment and educational functions of reality television. As postmodern scholars started to underlie the importance of consumption and pleasure in audience researches, a newly-emerged paradigm named Spectacle/Performance Paradigm (SPP) has been proposed by Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) that puts more focus on the active audience activities in everyday life and sees audience as both consumers and producers of texts and performances. In the second section of this chapter, I draw on the approach of uses and gratifications theory (UGT theory) to assess what the narratives on familial relationships and ordinary lives essentially mean to the audience. I also take advantage of the available online resources from social media platforms and video streaming sites to collect evidences of how the messages conveyed in the shows are decoded by the Chinese audience. Through my analysis on the construction of virtual audience communities and the repeated discourses on self-reflection, I again stress on the educational nature of the observation format, that can be further enhanced via 57 the audience activities in the cyberspace. Bringing together the audience’s expectation of empathetic identification and their participation in online community, I argue that there is a need of para-social interactions and community attachment lying in people’s consumption of popular media products, that as a result urges people to spontaneously evaluate their own performance as a part of the wider community and accept the “education” from these media contents. 3.1 Observation Reality Format V.S. Internet Reaction Videos Reaction videos are a special video genre that first appeared and proliferated on YouTube, a worldwide online video-sharing platform. As a form of public commentary, it generally has a low barrier to entry in terms of the video-making techniques and its reachability to people. Though belonging to two distinct media genres, the reaction videos and observation reality programs are sharing a look-alike feature, that is, documenting people’s reactions to other people/events. Inspired by the popularity of reaction videos, I attempt to grasp the meaning behind the consumption of the observation format by comparing the viewing experiences of the similar “reaction” design in the two types of video production. The first concept I look at is authenticity. As I have discussed in the first chapter, creating a sense of authenticity is a significant part in the programming design of the observation format, let alone the fact that it has long been placed at the heart of the debate about the reality television genre. In terms of the cinematography, the reaction videos basically feature a fly-on-the-wall aesthetic with a home space setting in the display of people’s reactions. The usually bad lighting and unstable camera create a sense of roughness, that is typically used to “guarantee total authenticity”. (Ward, 2000, p. 143) In contrast, though similar technique is used in the recording of the observed objects, the observers in observation shows are set in a well-crafted, formal studio 58 space. The staging of people’s reaction is very likely to undermine its believability considering the impact of camera awareness on people’s behavioral patterns. Also, the sophisticated camerawork is able to direct viewer’s attention to specific, disconnected information of reactions by closing up to someone’s facial expressions or body languages and elaborately arranging the sequence of images. What’s more, according to one of my interviewees Zhang (female, 27), who choose to watch simply because her favorite actor participated, the authenticity of reactions in observation shows might be “pointless” since the observed part already fails to be convincing. What again has been stressed here is the relationship between the observed objects and the observers. The organization of a reaction video is in most cases random, which means the reacted and the reactor are independent from each other. However, in the observation shows, the presentations of observing and being observed are based on an integrated procedure of media production, which means the observed objects are aware of the upcoming commentary while each observer has an assigned role when demonstrating their reactions. To summarize, the pre-determined connectivity between two spaces in the observation shows and the technical maturity in television production are considered as fundamental interfering factors in its exhibition of authenticity when compared to the online unprompted, home-made videos. However, we have to recognize that authenticity is always a problematic concept in all media genres. No matter how new a genre is, as the familiarity with its producing convention increases, any styling strategy can become an intervening force in retaining its realness. What really matters here is how important the audience’s perception of authenticity is when they consume a particular media text, which in the case of watching reactions, is more dependent on their personal purposes of viewing. 59 The purposes of watching reaction videos are relatively consistent and explicit. One typical type of watching is based on a feeling of co-existence, which posits participation and intersubjectivity through the presentation of others’ reactions. To be more specific, people who consume this type of reaction videos are usually already familiar with the embedded materials, so their consumption is more aimed at a sense of togetherness. It then is described by Anderson (2011) as “a way of vicariously recapturing primary experience”. (p. 62) Watching such reactions videos enables people to reaffirm their own feeling and allow them to experience the “comforting universality of human nature” in a globally connected world where cultural differences are more perceived. And this demand for “universality” is especially prominent within fan communities of popular cultural products, for example, K-pop music. In Cho’s study (2017) on K-pop reaction videos, she brings up with an idea of “cosmopolitan fantasy” that is originated from the transnational and transcultural consumption of K-pop culture and then reiterated in spectator reactions. In other words, K-pop reaction videos function to hold intersubjective dialogues among fan communities and assist individual viewers to obtain community identification in the background of a global Hallyu phenomenon. This genre can therefore be regarded as a kind of audience production that is referred in the Spectacle/Performance Paradigm. Above all, affectivity becomes a fundamental component of these reaction videos because it carries the major information that people expect to see, and principally, it offers a moving, intimate, familiar and identifiable experience than can across all geographical, cultural, and language boundaries. The main attractions of these reaction videos lie in their ability to capture the “ostensibly unmediated affective response”, as well as the likeness or “commonality” between different people’s reactions, which as I find out, is not quite the same thing that people seek in observation reality programs. 60 First of all, despite the fact that both genres produce vicarious experience when watching, unlike the viewers of reaction videos who tend to empathize with the reactor role only, the audience of observation shows can flexibly switch their shared roles as either observers and the observed, depending on their actual roles in real life. A couple of my interviewees, who are mother (Zhang, 54) and son (Ge, 26), responded that when they watch My Little Old Boy together they would respectively take on the roles of on-screen observing mothers and observed sons, and harbor the same goal of exploring the thoughts of their opposite sides. They also have extracted the idea of observation from the TV show and imagined themselves being in this activity by asking the other questions like “what happens if you are watching a video of me doing this?”. What they pay attention to is neither the observers nor the observed objects but instead the experience itself of both watching and being watched. Significantly, all of the 12 interviewees gave a positive reply to the question that if they have attempted to empathize with the people on screen (no matter they are observers or being observed) who play the same family/social roles with themselves. Also, what differs from the consumption of fan-produced K-pop reaction videos is that there is no premised group identification between the reactors in observation shows and the audiences, so the vicarious experiences are rather indeterminate and reliant on the level of the empathetic feelings that the audience can possibly produce. When it comes to the audience expectation towards the on-screen reactions, “commonality” is not necessarily the case in consuming observation TV shows. Distinguished from the individual commentary in reaction videos, the observation shows hold group discussions among different types of observers, in which diversity and inclusiveness become two important factors according to the interviews. Ge (male, 26) responded that he preferred to hear different opinions from different observers so that he can “learn more about other perspectives”. Mao (female, 31) 61 mentioned that it is more interesting to watch people have debates than to see people celebrate an “authoritative view”, and then she can pick a side and perhaps develop her own arguments. It is possible that some expect divergence merely because it can create tension on the screen. But it is also notable in this particular case that the diversified opinions in the observation part can open up more spaces for public discussions and encourage wider audience participation in the observing activity. For example, in social media platforms like Weibo, people express their own supports for a specific observer’s opinion and comment to each other by either agreeing or refuting so that an inclusive virtual “public sphere” can be built. Borrowing concepts from Habermas’s term, such discussions are able to problematize the status quo and make progress towards new public consensus that is more adapted to the current situation. That is to say, some audience are not expecting presupposed agreement in the television discussions but rather the introduction of problems for them to voluntarily seek agreements with each other. But still, there are four of my respondents admitting that they have at least once skipped the observation part because they felt “uncomfortable” about listening to the opinions that conflicted with their own. For them, watching observation shows is more out of a need to find identification instead of learning diverse opinions. Moreover, in contrast to the primary focus on people’s reaction in watching reaction videos, there are 10 among my total 12 interviewees responding that they in fact focused more on the documentary clips than the observers’ reactions while actually watching. When asked about the reasons, two of them said that they “just don’t care much about how other people think about it”; three have mentioned that sometimes it doesn’t feel good “seeing people make judgements on other’s private lives”; and fully nine of them have mentioned that the observers’ comments can be rather meaningless or “cannot be taken seriously of” because “it is hard to tell whether these words are sincere in front of the stage camera”, along with the fact that some of the observers themselves 62 are also celebrities so they are very likely to “act up to protect their own images”. These feedbacks then lead us back to the question of affective appeal in the observation shows. Anderson (2011) indicates that an important source of the reaction videos’ appeal is its “genuine surprise” that turns the involuntary reactions into events. In comparison, the affects in observation shows have in many ways been mediated. The two spaces are not co-presented through the whole show but constantly switched to each other or sharing unequal proportions on the screen as in picture-in-picture or side- by-side image structures. As a result, the reliability of the affects produced in the observation parts is to some extent negotiated by the discontinuity of reactions and the manipulation of post- production techniques. In addition, it should be noted that people’s consumptions of affective images are usually for a purpose of entertainment. They are relatively light and burden-less in terms of digesting meanings since they can penetrate into your sensations even without your own consciousness. And it is also part of the fun in watching reaction videos through decoding meanings by the appearance of others’ bodily sensations. However, in observation shows there are not only simple output of facial or body expressions but exchanges of words and thoughts, which may seem rigid and invasive from the standpoint of an audience. Lu (male, 28) expressed his resistant feelings in the interview by saying “it is fine if only watching people’s emotional expressions since people’s facial expressions are usually honest and can sometimes seem hilarious, but if they act too seriously in discussion and focus more on expressing their opinions, the video would become much less entertaining to me”. Wang (female, 25) also explained that it is the light, entertaining affective messages instead of serious discussions that draws her more to the Korean version of My Little Old Boy than the Chinese version. Their feedback proves the weaker affective appeal of the observation shows than Internet reaction videos while further point out the importance of positive affective values in entertainment reality programming. 63 Speaking of the entertainment programming, there is another interesting factor that I find juxtaposing the two genres, which I call a sense of distance. By illustrating the one-time popularity of reaction videos to a Brazilian fetish-porn clip, Anderson (2011) proposes another typical function of this genre as a “proxy” for people to “experience its dangerous thrill without having to encounter it directly”. In these videos, people can vicariously view unwatchable and “taboo things” in a way that their “psychological schism” can be overcome by the intervention of mediated seeing. This idea has further been drawn by Cho (2017) in her research of K-pop reaction videos to, in her words, inflect the purpose and function of these videos by “revealing the genre’s over-determined heritage of colonial visual politics”. (p. 249) She specifically poses this argument on the case of the western people’s reaction videos to PSY’s Gangnam Style by suggesting that the people’s interests lie in the onscreen viewers’ unexpected encounter with an exotic object and their projection of a Western imaginary into an actual Korean visual text. Both their arguments point out a sense of “remote distance”, no matter geographically, psychologically or culturally, that is established between the reacted materials and the onscreen reactors (or offscreen viewers). People’s sense of such distance, as far as I see, is key to the entertainment values of reaction videos. To be clearer, the exoticism and unfamiliarity of the reacted materials enables the reactors to keep a safe distance with the material contexts, in which their shift from being ignorant to knowing is very likely to be deemed as a positive learning process towards cosmopolitan recognitions. Their watching and reading of these texts are rarely intrusive considering their own status of being “outsiders” or “onlookers”. However, it can be a different story in observation shows. The observers and the observed objects are situated in the same social and cultural context, and most importantly, there are hierarchies between them in terms of various aspects such as age and social status. Particularly in a Confucian society, the elders are endowed with an authority that the 64 youngers are usually educated to respect and obey, which can result in a special viewing experience of observation shows especially for young audiences. One of my respondents Ding (female, 25) has specifically described her feeling of, more than being watched, but “being supervised” and “under surveillance” when seeing a Chinese female celebrity at her age is being observed by a group of seniors (zhangbei,长辈 ) in the program My Little One. There are two kinds of relationships reflected in her viewing activity: one is between the onscreen observer and the observed object, which is a hierarchical relationship; the other is between the observed object and the viewer, which is an identifying relationship. And both of them embeds a “close distance” between each other in all geographical, psychological and cultural dimensions. This closeness can be intrusive when imposed with an act of gazing. As an audience of both Korean and Chinese versions of My Little Old Boy, Ding further spoke of an interesting point that, the Korean version is more relaxing to watch because the people on screen are speaking a different language and living on a different land. She felt that her uneasiness could be mediated due to the farther physical distance (or perhaps her imagined distance) with these people, even if they are in similar cultural environments. Her response speaks to the subtlety in the sense of distance when watching others watching others, which nevertheless, can be an influential factor in the consumption of both reaction videos and observation shows. Through a comparative analysis, it can be argued that the observation shows are not analogous to the reaction videos in many ways such as viewing experiences, purposes and functions, despite their similar designs of watching others’ reactions. Following this finding, I seek to figure out the possible viewing motives and achievements of the observation show audience by 65 the approach of uses and gratifications theory, and to further examine the audience performance drawing on the Spectacle/Performance Paradigm. 3.2 On the UGT Theory: Motives and Performance Firstly, to clarify, my question of audience motives is not aimed for the whole reality television genre but specifically for the observation format, as paralleled with other reality formats. Also, although reality television has been traditionally regarded as a product of mass media, which owns a dominant and penetrating power on the public, this newly-emerged format I look at was born and developed at the times of media divergence and convergence, which means the audience’s options are diversifying and the previous media effects theory becomes inadequate. Therefore, I prefer to apply the uses and gratifications theory to my research by regarding the consumption of observation reality shows as an active practice and investigating the specific audience needs that have been satisfied. To approach the potential answers, I would like to start with a small survey I conducted for the 12 respondents, in which I listed the four major “selling points” of this format (as advertised by the program producers) and asked the question “which one(s) of them attracted you to watch the shows at the very beginning?”. The results are shown in table 1 11 . Keywords Respondents Everyday Life (richang) Familial Relationships Observation Celebrities Yu (female, 19) P P Zhang (female, 27) P Zhu (female, 22) P P P Mao (female, 31) P P P 11 This survey is conducted in Chinese. 66 Zhang (female, 54) P P P Ding (female, 25) P P Wang (female, 25) P P P Xu (female, 59) P P P Tang (female, 27) P P P P Zhang (male, 25) P P Lu (male, 28) P P Ge (male, 26) P P P P Table 1 It can be told from the table that the keyword “everyday life (richang)” has been most ticked. Zhang (female, 27), the only one who hasn’t ticked this box, stated that her only motive is to watch her favorite actor, and if one day he leaves this show she would immediately drop watching. Also, even as a big fan of this actor, she still didn’t believe he would demonstrate his actual private life on television. She further explained that, to her, this format is even less believable compared to the life experiment shows and gameshows, considering the fact that “the participants are familiar with their own everyday activities so they know what is presentable and what is not when being recorded”; therefore, to protect their public image and to “make sure the show is entertaining”, they are “very likely to redesign their personal lifestyle and deliberately make some scenes”. Supposedly, it is the lack of authenticity and realness that makes this format less attractive to her. However, for the remaining eleven people who have ticked the box, when I asked whether they are confident about the realness of daily life in this format, it is surprising that all of them expressed that they were never fully convinced of this televised reality. Yu (female, 19) said that it didn’t matter whether these participants were performing or not as long as she can see the real living space and real relationships of the celebrities she like. Except for Yu, all the other 67 nine have recognized that at least some parts are “familiar” and able to “resonate with”. Several of them also mentioned the word “comparable” (you ke bi xing, 有可比性), which reveals their consciousness of a self while watching and their perceived connection between the onscreen people and themselves. Then how exactly is this feeling of connection able to contribute? Or to say, what psychological needs can it satisfy? Reiss and Wiltz (2004) have similarly approached this question by investigating the audience’s consumption of “ordinariness” in reality shows. They conducted a survey of adult viewers that specifically focused on five reality shows including Survivor (Burnett, 2001), Big Brother (Eligdoloff, 2001), Temptation Island (Couan, 2001), The Mole (Gunzo Productions, 2001), and The Real World (Bunim/Murray Productions, 2001), that all feature the participation of ordinary people, the presentation of everyday life, and a gameshow format. They adopted a special approach of Reiss’s sensitivity theory by testing and ranking 16 “intrinsic” and “end” trait motives 12 in participants’ viewing behaviors. According to their results, status is the main motivational force that drives interest in watching these five shows. The “status” motive, named by Reiss, stands for a desire for prestige and attention. He also finds that people who are motivated by status have “an above-average need to feel self-important”. (Reiss & Wiltz, 2004, p. 373) When further discussing the reason why watching these shows can gratify this psychological need, he surmises that the viewers might feel that they have higher status than the ordinary people portrayed in the shows, which reflects their perception of onscreen characters as real people. This is an 12 According to Reiss, the 16 basic desires include power, independence, curiosity, acceptance, order, saving, honor, idealism, soc ial contact, family, status, vengeance, romance, eating, physical exercise, and tranquility. 68 interesting finding in the way that it reveals people’s recognition of realness and a psychology of superiority in their consumption of ordinary television. Inspired by this research, I asked my interviewees about their impressions or just overall feels about the celebrities’ daily life portrayed in observation shows, attempting to grasp psychological meanings from their answers. Zhang (female, 54) confessed that she felt “comforted” (an wei, 安慰) when she found that the celebrities’ parents are having same troubles as hers. Ge (male, 26) and Mao (female, 31) said the similar words that “it turns out those celebrities are not really living a better life than mine”, typically when they mentioned the celebrities’ negative emotions exposed in the shows. It might be risky to assert that there is a superior psychology similar as Reiss and Wiltz’s finding, or simply a feeling of identifying and belonging. But it can be discerned that all the three have adopted a mindset of comparison while watching other’s everyday lives. In addition, several other respondents have mentioned that they would normally watch these shows when they are having meals alone. Wang (female, 25) also specifically mentioned Internet Mukbang or vlog videos as alternatives. With a similar focus on everyday life, these videos can to some extent provide similar viewing experiences. As Donnar (2017) argues in her article on Korean Mukbang culture, for viewers who live alone, Mukbang “functions as a sort of ‘eating with’ that disrupts loneliness and alienation”. (p. 125) That is to say, people can obtain a feeling of being companioned when seeing the onscreen people are doing something “together” with themselves, such as eating and doing housework. There are also some respondents who put emphasis on the “fun” provided in the shows and described these shows could be funnier than comedy shows because the people are “natural” and “relaxed”. Their words reveal the possible 69 outcome of watching observation shows as a feeling of attachment and pleasure, though the cases can vary by person. Another significant finding shown in the table is the concurrence of “familial relationships” and “observation” in people’s choices. Among the seven people who ticked both two keywords, five have mentioned in their interviews that they have encountered the similar problems or situations in dealing with familial relationships as people in the shows. Mao (female, 31) explained that one of her reasons for watching is to “draw lessons from the show” (jie jian, 借鉴) because others’ experiences and the observers’ advices might be helpful to solve her own problems. Tang (female, 27) told me that her first watching was when she was newly married, in order to collect some tips and advices on marriage life. Ge (male, 26) said that he invited his mother to watch together with a purpose of using the examples in the shows as a “channel” to communicate with his mother and promote their own relationships. It is effective when the observers and the subtitles are pointing out the problems or raising critical questions related to parent-child relationship, and it is moderate because their direct objects are these celebrities in the show instead of the audiences. The other two respondents Ding (female, 25) and Xu (female, 59) expressed a different opinion by emphasizing on the difference between the celebrities’ lives and their own lives. Xu (female, 59) described these shows as “a real version of television drama” because they show the lives that she cannot have. She particularly illustrated Choo-Yu couple as an example for ideal conjugal relationships that are “far away from her own marriage life”. Though Ding (female, 25) did not claim these celebrities’ lives as ideal or desirable, she also stressed on the feeling of distance by describing their lifestyles as “eye-opening” (zhang jian shi, 长见识) and “unapproachable” (peng bu dao, 碰不到). While Both of them described the life realities on screen as distant from their 70 own realities, they remarked on the observers’ reactions as able to reaffirm their feelings and prove that they are “not the only person who think this way”. Whereas the theories on audience’s active consumption of media texts are often regarded as contrast to the traditional Effects theory, some scholars such as Jenny Kitzinger (1999) have argued that an active audience does not mean the media effect is impossible. Drawing on this idea, I suggest that the audience members of the observation format, exemplified by the 12 people I interviewed, could fall under the influence of these media texts in a specific manner. Their ideas of “drawing lessons”, asking for advice and assisting communication can all be interpreted as a consciousness of self-improvement through referring to people appearing on popular media. By recognizing the legitimacy of these media messages, they have also subconsciously located themselves within the same ideological context and attempted to seek identity conflation with the media figures. The role of media products then, as a result, is no longer a mere commodity but also a functional tool to manipulate public opinions and social cognition. With a proposal of “cultural citizenship”, Miller (1998) has posited popular media as tied to “a complex relationship of consumption and citizenship” through “centering the population as desiring, producing, and committed subjects that manifest contradictions”. (p. 17) In mapping his idea, Miller has specifically drawn attention to the domain of nonfiction popular television and its significance in shaping a regulated citizenship. Further focusing on the “reality-citizenship”, Kavka (2012) examined the concept of “self-hood” in reality television and argued that it has been understood as “a condition of citizenship” and “productive membership of a group”. (p. 135) Though her research objects are mainly those involve direct life interventions like makeover shows, the idea of “self-management” in these shows are in some way analogous to the “self-improvement” in observation shows, only that the latter is sensuously less explicit and interfering. Through putting 71 personal issues on the discussion table and addressing them as universal topics, the observation format has similarly risen the everyday life problems onto a level of community and performed its pedagogical function. Nevertheless, from the perspective of uses and gratifications, this connection between the individuals and the community is not solely a result of media influence but also an initial need of the public for what has been called as “para-social relationships”, a type of social relationship that is cultivated through the psychological attachments of media users. The audience’s quest for “para-social interactions” is also evident in the case of the observation format. Particularly targeting at a Chinese audience group, I surveyed about the media platforms people use when watching observation shows. Notably, except for the two respondents above 50, the rest respondents who belong to Generation Y all chose online platforms like Bilibili and Mango TV, that are all equipped with a system called barrage or “bullet screen” (dan mu, 弹幕). This relatively new system is significant in its effect on audience interaction in a para-social manner. By definition, barrage is an interactive commenting system attached on the screen of online videos, featuring short, synchronous and fast-moving comments that scroll across the screen. It is specifically featured by the high synchrony between the literal comments and the visual images, which means the audiences are able to communicate their feedbacks on every exact moment in the video via the constantly updated messages on the screen. (Figure 9) The numerous barrage texts on the screen demonstrate the audience’s enthusiam for online participation and interaction. No matter if every audience of observation shows has left their own comments on the screen, their seeing of others’ feedbacks is already able to build para-social relationships with people across a significant social distance. Besides the synchoronized interactions on video platforms, social media platforms such as Weibo and WeChat are also a main base for audience to 72 interact and seek a “structure of feeling” in a virtual community. Under the video clips of reality shows posted on social media platforms, people comment and repost to each other to form an environment of discussion. For example, the keywords associated with the stories in My Little One like “pressured to get married” (cui hun, 催婚) have become hot topics on Weibo, which reflects the passionte participation of audience members and further attracts more attention from outside the audience group to join the para-social relationship map. People’s exchanges of opinions on social media facilitates the development of audience performance by infusing these daily activities and additional information “into the fabric of ‘everyday life’”. (as cited in Atkinson, 2010, p. 27) The audience then become not only consumers but also content producers, according to Spectacle/Performance paradigm. The audience performance of discussing online is meaningful for the examination of the observation format in that it to some degree reflects the “discussability” of this format. The familiar everyday life and family-centered contents offer a groundwork for the public to approach and gather. The intensive information flows between the two spaces manage to produce additional affective and ideological messages for viewers to digest and reproduce. The multiperspectivity in the family narratives provides extended spaces for both inner and external dialogues, and the affective force produced through observation and post-production techniques promotes the Figure 9 Bullet-screen Comments 73 audience to connect, participate and produce their own meanings outside the programs and into their own lives. In general, it can be argued that people’s active consumption of this format is driven by a psychological need of being attached to the wider community, which in turn urges them to conduct self-reflection and self-improvement in order to fit more into the community. 74 Conclusion This thesis explores what I call the “observation format”, a reality television format that has received transnational popularity in South Korea and China over the past decade. Centering on the concept of “transnationality”, my argument is that the observation format is a carefully designed popular cultural product that aims for cross-border reception in the light of the New Korean Wave phenomenon, and meanwhile, a highly compatible format in post-THAAD Chinese broadcasting environment, which reveals the power of a potential “pan East Asian affectivity” and a presumable trend of “de-Koreanization” in future consumption/reproduction of Hallyu products in China and even other Asian countries. To specify this particular reality format, I have suggested the setup of double space within the screen and the carefully designed act of observation as its two most defining features. Involving three parties — the observed objects, the observers and the program producers — this format is able to incorporate a diversity of authorial, narratorial, and characterial voices together in the same visual text to create reality narratives that reach a new level of realness and interactivity within the reality television genre. This well-designed mechanism of “observation”, however, reveals the program’s intention to manipulate the representation of social realities and deliver educational messages to the general public. The dual process of the transmission of affect enabled by the double-space structure determines the affective productivity of this format, which functions to depict the contemporary cultural anxieties as well as guide the audience’s responses. Notably, there are three main themes in a typical narrative of the observation programs, that are Confucianism-based family values, urban middle-class lifestyles and celebrity-driven contents, greatly contributing to the transnational consumption and production of this format in an 75 East Asian cultural context. Through a comparative case study of two representative Korean observation shows and their Chinese remakes, it is argued that the transnational exchange of the observation format between South Korea and China to a large extent benefit from these three narrative themes that function to encourage the empathetic identification between two societies and call attention to the potential existence of a pan East Asian identity in popular culture consumption. Meanwhile, considering the particular broadcasting environment and political climate in China, the prevalence of the Chinese observation format remakes speaks to the tricky relationship between the transnational popular cultural commodity and the political power. Beyond the question of how transnational popular cultural products are likely to shape a potential pan East Asian identity, this case in turn leads us to think about the possible impact of a pan East Asian identity on the future development of Hallyu. The last part of this thesis involves an audience research that investigates the motives and performance of Chinese audience members of both Korean and Chinese observation shows. After comparing the possible consuming patterns of the observation shows with that of Internet reaction videos, another popular video genre that is featured by a viewing experience of “watching people watching people”, it again sheds light on the significance of the shared cultural anxieties in the transnational consumption of the observation format. An interesting finding is that, owing to the high degree of intimacy and intersubjectivity embedded in the format, the audience may find the local production “too intrusive” while a non-local production could be “more comfortable” to consume. There is what I call a “sense of distance” that plays a compelling role in mediating the uneasy feeling caused by the imposed gaze from a superior figure and providing a psychological security when confronted with a vicarious feeling of being surveilled. This finding also points out the subtlety of balancing the entertaining values and educational effects in reality programming. 76 In the evaluation of Chinese audience performance, the forming of virtual communities on social media platforms and interactive streaming sites manifests an audience need for para-social interactions when watching observation shows, which further highlights the intention of this format to attach the individuals to a wider social community. The ideas of comparing the self with the onscreen characters and “drawing lessons” unveil the concepts of self-evaluation and self- improvement implied in these shows. It again proves the pedagogic motif of this reality format that is able to shape what Kavka (2012) calls “reality-citizenship”, an identity constructed through the consumption of reality television that values self-management and posits “selfhood as a condition of citizenship”. (p. 135) This case analysis of the “observation format” explicitly puts the spotlight on the current situation of transnational Korean reality television in a Chinese context. The popularity of this imported format in China has revealed what is particularly valued when reproducing and adapting a foreign reality format under today’s Chinese political, social and cultural environments. An article published by Guangming Daily, a state-run Chinese newspaper, acknowledged the “positive social meaning” conveyed in the observation shows like My Little One by saying it is “helpful to build healthy mainstream values towards life, family and marriage among young people”. (Yu & Yang, 2019) This emphasis on the function of reality television to teach healthy or positive values leads us to reexamine the development of Korean cultural imports in Chinese market and its possible impact on the relationship between two countries. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract In the era of New Korean Wave, transnational reality television is calling increasing attention. Over the past decade, a fresh hybrid reality format that features a keyword of “observation” has prevailed in East Asian countries. Named as “kwan-ch'al ye-nŭng (관찰 예능)” in Korean and “guanchalei zhenrenxiu (观察类真人秀)” in Chinese, this particular format has derived its own category of reality programs and received widespread popularity in both South Korea and China, which speaks to the transnational consumption and production of East Asian popular culture products. ❧ This thesis offers an exploratory study of what I call the “observation format” with an analysis emphasis on the concept of “transnationality”. Drawing upon the literature review of reality television, media theory and affect theory, this thesis aims to dig into the underlying cultural and political meanings of this transnational reality format in Korean and Chinese contexts. By emphasizing on the three typical themes of this format, that are Confucian family values, ordinary lives and celebrities, this thesis points to the questions regarding the relationships among the televised reality, individual realities and a general idea of social reality.

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Creator Chen, Xinyuan (author)

Core Title An exploratory study of the “observation format” in transnational Korean and Chinese reality television

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program East Asian Area Studies

Publication Date 07/29/2020

Defense Date 07/28/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag affect theory,Chinese remake,East Asian identity,Korean Wave,media studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,reality television,transnationality

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Choe, Youngmin (committee chair), Bernards, Brian (committee member), Chio, Jenny (committee member)

Creator Email chen815@usc.edu,shcxyuan@126.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-348483

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