Cheaters

Abstract

This article explores the reality television show Cheaters as a parodic-pastiche genre featuring videotaped surveillance of the romantically unfaithful within a web of preexisting fictional and nonfictional forms, including, most prominently, melodrama and detective fiction. Cheaters' claim of promoting "temperance and virtue" within a legalistic ethos of one's "right to be informed" about infidelity allows the show to cast itself as "real reality" television, though its narrative structure goes well beyond simple documentation. Especially when considered in the supertextual context of sexually, egocentrically themed advertisements, Cheaters emerges as a parodic-pastiche narrative that easily intermingles moralistic and sensationalistic themes. I argue that the show's postmodern catch-all rhetoric borrows most centrally from fictional melodrama, and therefore Cheaters can be interpreted as melodramatic parody. It provides, on the surface, a moral framework that grants ideological cover for an otherwise salacious interest in visually documented infidelity.

This is Undignified! Comparing the Representation of Human Dignity on Cheaters and Uyajola 9/9

“…Much can be said about the formulaic production practices of reality television, including its borrowing from other more recognised formats (Deery 2015). This is the case with Cheaters and its South African version, Uyajola 9/9, which can be classified as formats that borrow from melodramatic parody (Harry 2008). In other words, the shows are media spectacles, or at least have that element as one of their essential elements.…”

“…The shows' focus on gaining justice for the wronged party through uncovering the "truth" of the partner's infidelity suggests a moralistic point of departure by the franchises. By claiming to uphold the values of self-control and faithfulness in romantic commitments, the shows situate themselves as promoting ethical conduct (Harry 2008). On closer inspection, a tension can be seen between how some production practices may be ethically questionable, while pursuing the ethical ideal of truth (White 2006).…”