Reality TV in Bulgaria RUNNING HEAD:REALITY TV IN BULGARIA You’ll See, You’ll Watch: The Success of Big Brother in Postcommunist Bulgaria by Maria Raicheva-Stover, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Mass Media Department Washburn University Henderson Learning Center #312 Topeka, KS 66621 Tel: (785) 670-1802 e-mail:
[email protected] Paper submitted to the International Division of the Broadcast Education Association Conference in Las Vegas, April 27-29, 2006 The paper was kindly provided by the author for publication on the CWSP website. Reality TV in Bulgaria 2 Abstract This paper explores the development and growth of the reality television genre in a postcommunist setting. It uses the first reality TV show in Bulgaria, Big Brother, as a case study to show how the reality television format has far reaching social, technological and economic ramifications for the media industry of that postcommunist country. The paper places special emphasis on examining reality television as a global hybrid format, which provides assurance of unprecedented success when introduced locally. Keywords: Reality television, Big Brother, Bulgaria The article was kindly provided by the authors for publication on the CWSP’s website. Reality TV in Bulgaria 3 All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exists and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII You’ll See, You’ll Watch: The Success of Big Brother in Postcommunist Bulgaria Up until recently, audiences in Bulgaria thought of Big Brother as the embodiment of a totalitarian government capable of subjecting everybody to an uninterrupted surveillance apparatus.