Today’s media landscape is becoming increasingly appealing. It often evokes controversial feelings and reactions. The consumer gets irritated, shocked, furious, hyped, and confused on a daily basis. Different media notions that arouse feelings of disgust, even hatred gather huge attention among their audiences. It also seems that today’s linear television needs to be somewhat shocking in order to attract viewers. Television and the ways to enjoy it and to take part in it have been changing during the last years. Multiplatform phenomena have spread television consumption to several different devices and environments. However, instead of looking into the technological developments, it is intriguing to study the actual television content delivered via broadcast television. Television content has changed over the years more and more activating - especially with the premise that viewers need to be 'attracted'. The phenomenon of provocative television production simply refers to content that is in some way disturbing the common values, norms, and even morality. Provocative content can operate for example on exaggerated sexuality and promiscuity (e.g. Love Island, Temptation Island), morbidity (e.g. true crime formats), shaking of social institutions – marriage and family (e.g. Married at First Sight, Teen mom) and exploitation of abnormality, otherness (e.g. Body bizarre, Too ugly for love) and morbidity (e.g. true crime genre). The provocative television content is understood as diverse, culturally-driven phenomenon that describes the current state of popular culture in Finland. However, the phenomenon is global and not only limited to Finland, since the majority of the TV-contents are transnational formats.
The approach of the study is both multidisciplinary and intermedial. The study then focuses on the interfaces and interrelationships between different media in their social and cultural contexts. Due to this, the study also investigates the interactions between the different media, rather than focusing on just one medium. For this reason, also in addition to TV programs, also their websites/ social media and the material channel uses for marketing are being analyzed. As well as the media visibility of provocative TV-content in afternoon magazines etc. How the press deal with these controversial topics through the notion of advertising, especially when bearing in mind that there is indirect corporate influence when the newspapers and TV channels are from the same media corporation.
The presentation concentrates on the qualitative content analysis and close reading of provocative nature of reality TV-based TV programs (both national and transnational formats) aired on Finnish television, approx. within the last 5 years. It for example reflects with the theories of TV-documentary, affect, disgust, productional ecology and audio-visual storytelling. The material constitutes of selected television formats & multiplatform material and media observation from the press. The presentation will present how today's linear television content (including the paratexts online + media visibility) invites its audience to watch through the notion of provocativeness: what are the main tendencies of TV programs and what are the productional characteristics, conventions and premises TV programs operate on?