How reality TV perpetuates the myth of the American dream

A new book looks at how shows like Shark Tank convince viewers that upward mobility is possible—despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary

Eunji Kim is the first to admit that her scholarly interest in popular culture—especially reality TV—makes her a bit of an oddball in her circle of social scientists.

“Their instinct is, ‘Of course, people watch C-SPAN all the time, and listen to The Daily and read The New York Times every single morning.’ And I'm like, ‘Sir, have you talked to any real people on the street?’” says Kim, an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University. “I think a lot about how what we watch affects our perceptions about the world and our political attitudes.”

She found that her peers were more willing to take her seriously after Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016. “People were like, ‘Wait, the horrible host of The Apprentice is now our president? Maybe reality TV is very important.’ When lots of people watch something, it matters.”

In her book The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy, Kim zeroes in on an enduringly popular reality subgenre: competitive shows like American Idol, Shark Tank, and America’s Got Talent which feature everyday people competing for lucrative and potentially life-changing prizes.

These shows have proliferated across TV for the last two decades, in countless incarnations. They cater to every niche interest and specialized vocation, from sword-making to stand-up comedy. But they tend to follow the same basic formula.

In The American Mirage, Kim argues that Americans, who as a whole do not read or watch the news, instead absorb political messages through the supposedly apolitical entertainment they do consume. Competition reality programs, which emphasize rags-to-riches narratives about hard-working individuals triumphing over adversity, are a huge reason why Americans continue to believe in the possibility of upward economic mobility despite growing wealth inequality.

While many cultural critics and academics have written about the cultural influence of reality TV, Kim sought to quantify the effects using empirical data. This required some ingenuity. At one point, she drove a truck outfitted with a makeshift screening room to survey people at a blueberry festival in a Pennsylvania swing district.

She found that just five minutes of reality TV was enough to bolster someone’s belief in the American dream.

“In the real world, economic mobility has been declining,” Kim says. “More and more politicians have talked about the fading American dream. So in theory, that should make us more pessimistic about the prospect of the American dream. But because we watch so much entertainment media, it's producing this upward mobility bias perception.”

Kim recently spoke to The Contrarian about her research—and what it means for policy. The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Was the 2016 election the incident that made you want to research this subject?

Even before the 2016 election, I was really interested in why Americans were perfectly okay with the rising income inequality. A lot of sociologists will say it's because we believe in the American dream. And I thought, “But where does belief in American dream come from?”

I happened to be looking at the most popular TV show across every year for the past 40 years. 60 Minutes was the nation's most popular TV show in 1991 and for decades [it was usually] in the top 10. Then, in 2000, it started to change. It was Survivor, American Idol, and the golden age of reality TV.

Suddenly there were hundreds of reality TV shows. Part of it because it was so cheap to produce compared to high-quality scripted shows. But that was also at the time that Americans were opting out of the news. It's never been easier to not watch the news, because at any given time, there are hundreds of new shows on Netflix and HBO.

And yet, as you argue, people are still absorbing political messages through the media they consume.

Yes, and that’s the problem. I'm a believer that entertainment media can be really useful for making social change.

Forcing people to watch the news is incredibly hard, so we’ve got to lean on the content that people actually spend a lot of time watching and embed messages in it. When you're watching political messaging, all of your biases kick in. If you're watching MSNBC or Fox News, you have a visceral reaction, because you probably already have thoughts about Biden or Trump.

But when you're watching a reality TV show on Saturday night on the couch, you're not thinking about politics. There’s more room for persuasion, because you're not really counteracting or resisting the messages.You're very relaxed. You're drinking a glass of wine, and the subtle messages are kicking in.

Tell me about your research. Did you watch countless hours of competition shows?

I had to watch a lot of reality TV. One of my favorite reality TV shows is something that you probably haven't heard about, called The Great Christmas Light Fight. There are just so many random talents that you can compete in, like pumpkin-carving and glass-blowing. There was one person who approached me saying he wants to create a reality TV show about journalists—like America's Got Talent, the journalist version. He thought that a reality TV show might restore our faith in journalism.

Business owners pitch their ideas on Shark Tank (Disney/Christopher Willard)

It’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard. So what kind of narratives did you see emerging in these shows?

Most of them emphasize ordinary people, not celebrities—ordinary Americans with random talents. There are very specific financial incentives for the winners, and also a huge narrative emphasis on hard work. Episode after episode, there is a featured contestant. They narrate all the hardships that they went through in life. They had cancer, their parents passed away when they were young—all sorts of lemons that life can throw at us. There’s sentimental music in the background. Then they say, “I'm here. This is my American dream. I'm here singing. I never gave up.” They highlight the hardship to emphasize how deserving they are.

Tell me about your research in Pennsylvania.

I drove this truck to a blueberry festival and a farmers market in Pennsylvania. You can imagine when a young Asian woman shows up in rural Pennsylvania with a truck, asking people, "Would you mind hopping in to my truck and being part of my study?" It sounds weird. Eventually, I befriended many of the food truck owners next to me, They convinced their customers, "Help that lady. She's not kidnapping you."

I couldn't really force people to watch an hour-long episode of American Idol. So I edited four TV shows [including] Shark Tank and America's Got Talent. into a five-minute trailer that really highlighted the narrative arc of “rags-to-riches”. The respondents were invited to my truck, and were randomly assigned. Half of the people watched a reality TV show, Cesar 911, that didn’t have a rags-to-riches narrative. The other half watched the shows with the rags-to-riches narratives. The people who were assigned to that treatment group were more likely to believe in the American dream by seven to eight percentage points.

That's huge, because they only watched five minutes of TV. In real life, people selected to watch these shows every week for years and years. What I've done is a miniature version of it, but you can only imagine the accumulated effects of these TV shows.

So much analysis of The Apprentice focuses on how it portrayed Trump as a business man and personality. What about the ideas you’re stalking about, like American identity and economic opportunity?

If you look at the transcripts from The Apprentice, there are many references to the American dream, and how Trump is the one who can make the American dream possible. He's the one who will give us all the chances to go ahead in life and succeed.

The Apprentice was much more popular than the NBC Nightly News for like 10 years. Politics is downstream of culture. I think we have to pay much more attention to the cultural undercurrents of our society, because this is what people do every day. Non-political actors are shaping American politics, ranging from Joe Rogan to social media influencers.

One of my favorite anecdotes that I share is that I've been riding the New York subway almost every day for the past year. I always observe what people do with their phone. In that year, I've only seen two people who were reading the news.

[One of] the most popular websites in America is pornhub.com. Data tells us that most people are interested in sports, entertainment, travel, and cooking. Politics is never a priority. Less than 4% of internet traffic goes to political news. We are not grappling with the naked reality that most people don't really read the news. Maybe it's time to really pay attention to what people actually do in culture.

Speaking of those downstream effects of culture, how does this belief in meritocracy affect policy?

One of the clear downstream effects is that if you think anyone can get ahead by working hard, that changes the way you think about who's deserving of our welfare policies and redistributive benefits. It didn't necessarily change how people thought about the poor, but what I found in my book is that it has more pronounced effects on attitudes toward the rich. Should we increase tax rates on wealthy Americans? No, because you think that anyone can get ahead if they work hard, and it's a legitimate, deserving thing. People become less supportive of policies that target the rich.

How do you see this playing out now that a reality TV president is back in the White House? He has a cabinet full of billionaires and is using the world’s richest person to cut spending.

One thing I spend a lot of time thinking is how our admiration toward rich people is very high. I think about all the fans of Elon Musk, the young men out there who admire him as a legend.

If you compare news coverage of Elon Musk to Elon Musk [coverage] on YouTube, you really see a completely different narrative about him and other tech entrepreneurs. There is a lot of negative media coverage about Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos. But many of the YouTube videos about these tech billionaires are about how cool they are.

There are areas where news and entertainment portray completely different realities, and because most people have an outsized consumption of entertainment media, the narratives have much more power. We have to pay much more attention to what's coming from non-political content.

In 2024, the Trump campaign seemed to understand that.

I think they did a way better job at understanding how to grab people's attention in this high-choice media environment.

How would you go about getting different messages out there about the American dream and the economy, in order to counteract this myth of meritocracy?

That's a dilemma that I had when I was writing this. First of all, what is the optimal level of belief in upward mobility? My book makes the point that it is too high and too distorted. But when it's too low, it's also bad. There are countries with decent mobility rates, but people are much more pessimistic, and that also causes problems.

I wish that I knew the solution to make people learn about the actual realities of the fading American dream. I would say it’s news and documentaries, but people are not really consuming them. And no one wants to make a reality TV show about people losing or failing in life.

I also think shows like Shark Tank can be appealing to those who are skeptical about the possibility of the American dream. It’s refreshing to see it realized on TV when you don’t see it in real life.

There are actually some academic papers about how watching Shark Tank made people apply for more patents. There is a self-empowering element to rags-to-riches reality TV. For instance, whenever I watched American Idol, I found myself practicing the piano more, not because I want to be on American Idol. But somehow it's inspiring.

I'm not saying reality TV is inherently bad for American society. I think it can be empowering at the individual level, but at the collective level, it has an unexpected conservative influence on how we think about redistribution.

Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian