Reality television and you

Organizations like Norfolk and Western Railways and Standard Oil of Southern California said that Americans needed to re-affirm, in concert with corporations, that the American free enterprise system was the most constructive way to advance through the marketplace toward a productive, prosperous life. Realty television, which ascended in the United States in the early 2000s, is a format that ostensibly shows viewers slices of unscripted, everyday life. With the fast-food arena revealing contentious relationships between workers and their employing corporations, the chapter examines episodes that, across the first four seasons of Undercover Boss , featured nine fast-food restaurants to see how their disguised executives interacted with employees and, in the process, highlighted and then rewarded worker self-governance. It shows that Undercover Boss offers, through the senior executives who interact with their company’s employees, representations of the corporate persona as a constructive, beneficent entity who shares the values of average Americans.