Intimacy on Reality TV in the New Europe

This essay examines the love–hate relationship—overt hatred and secret love—that surrounds reality shows about Roma and other racialized celebrities in postsocialist New European nations. Taking the case study of the wildly popular yet universally despised Hungarian Gyõzike show and its national reception, it argues that the aversion to the cultural quality represented by reality TV and the aversion to the ethnoracial quality represented by the Roma and other minorities are thoroughly intertwined. Reality television has disclosed the unspoken role assigned to racial minorities to mark the whiteness of East European nations, a crucial but hardly discussed aspect of belonging to Europe. This study also demonstrates that understanding the role played by reality TV under the particular conditions of postsocialist nationalisms and media globalization requires expanding the focus of reality TV scholarship on post-welfare neoliberalism