Lifestyle TV

Lifestyle TV will present students with an accessible critical introduction to the fastest growing sector of television programming today: non-scripted lifestyle programming. From The Rachel Zoe Project to How to Look Good Nakes, Ouellette examines the myriad cooking and home decorating tutorials, health and fitness programs, self-help interventions, finance and budgeting advice programs, property makeovers, fashion, style and body makeovers, and diet and fitness programs that teach people specific techniques for achieving a good (successful, aesthetically pleasing, healthy, solvent) life. The book analyzes the characteristics and conventions of burgeoning array of lifestyle formats on network and cable channels and situates the prolifeeration of these formats historically, arguing that the life-stylization of television ultimately signals more than the television industry's turn to cost-cutting formats, niche markets, and specialized demographics. Rather, Ouellette argues that the surge of reality programming devoted to the achievment and display of particular (desirable) lifestyle practices and choices must also be situated within broader socio-historical changes in capitalist democracies.

Laurie Ouellette has published widely on television and media culture and is an internationally recognized expert on reality TV. Her first book,Viewers Like You? How Public TV Failed the People (Columbia University Press, 2002) traced the history of U.S. public broadcasting, situating controversies over PBS within contradictory assumptions about culture, citizenship, taste, geography and public service. Her anthology (co-edited with Susan Murray) Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (New York University Press, 2004 and 2009) was one of the first scholarly investigations of reality TV. A 2^nd edition was published, and the book remains widely used and cited. Her book Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship (co-authored with James Hay, Blackwell-Wiley, 2008) developed a new conceptual lens for situating the rise of reality programming within changing circuits of welfare reform, neoliberalism, citizenship formation and governmentality. The book established a critical perspective that is widely cited and used by other scholars; reprinted once, it continues to sell well. Ouellette is also the editor of The Media Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012) and A Companion to Reality Television (Blackwell-Wiley, 2013). Her essays have appeared in a wide range of journals includingCultural Studies, Television and New Media, Media, Culture and Society,Cinema Journal, and Continuum, and in many anthologies including most recentlyCommodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (NYU Press), How to Watch TV (NYU Press), Reality Gendervision (Duke University Press), andBeyond Primetime (Routledge). She is active in the International Communication Association and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and regularly presents invited lectures on college campuses in the United States and internationally.