Investigating Cheaters

Abstract

This article analyzes the American television program Cheaters. Cheaters advances itself as the most “realistic” of reality programs based on an ethnographic approach to the surveillance and exposure of infidelity. The program offers theoretical lessons in the vernacular of reality television, as it proliferates positions for the subjects in its narrative and raises questions about the relationship between seeing and believing. Every effort to show and tell more destabilizes the possibility of discerning the very truths it purports to uncover. In the process the program offers insights into the limits of reality television and into contemporary socio-cultural epistemology.

Notes

1. When I showed the program in a graduate seminar, one of my students characterized erstwhile host Tommy Grand, who was also the program's co-producer, as “the Devil incarnate.” However, most of the students in the class claimed that they were looking forward to watching the show on television, now that they had been introduced to it.

2. The program also has some international distribution.

3. Indeed, the website for the marketing company that represents the program emphasizes these connections between Cheaters and mainstream television journalism. “Inspired by the well established investigative reporting of prime time magazine programs such as 60 Minutes, 20/20, Primetime Live, and the highly rated news segments Fox Undercover, Cheaters incorporates the most compelling elements of on-camera investigations and delivers them to your audience each week” (www.saveontv.com).

4. The question may resonate even further, as hearing the question “How could you do this?” in the context of the program's content also echoes with other tacit reservations and concerns of a viewer: How could you—producer Bobby Goldstein and host Tommy Habeeb or Joey Greco—produce this show? How could you—the local television station—air this show? If the question is linguistically posed to reproach a second person, it may also be turned around again, this time to address oneself: How could anyone (even I) watch this show?

Montgomery, E. (1997) Talkshow performance practices and the display of identity. Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.