The Kardashians,Live! Fabricating Liveness in the Sex-Tape-Derived Reality Series

The Kardashian Textual Triangle: Sex Tapes, Reality Television, and Live TV

By sex tape, I understand an offshoot of amateur pornography recorded by a couple and usually intended (in essence or appearance) for private consumptive pleasure. By reality television, I understand television programing across a diverse array of sub-genres and formats that claims to represent the everyday events of real people, however ordinary or famous, and however contrived the premise and environment. Of course, this definition could also describe genres, sub-genres, and formats as divergent as candid camera shows and family docs. Moreover, it simplifies, for practical reasons, reality TV’s diverse definitions in media studies, its complex historical changes over time, and its constitution by numerous distinct sub-genres. To facilitate some generalizations about the heterogeneous genre, I align my framework with Kavka’s (2012) third generation of reality TV, in which the emphasis shifts from the second-generation surveillance and competition series’ “documentation” of “ordinary life” to “manufacturing celebrity out of the everyday” (pp. 145–46). ²

Live TV is distinct from liveness. Live TV describes broadcasts that occur in “real time,” capturing and transmitting events as they happen. In the contemporary period, live television is typically associated with genres like news, sports, awards programs, and reality competitions. Alternatively, as we see in Keeping Up with the Kardashians’s intertextual employ of The Tyra Banks Show (Syndication and The CW 2005–2010), live TV can describe broadcasts that have real-time components: for example, daytime talk shows or sitcoms that are filmed in front of a studio audience, mixing the non-live (prerecorded) and live (watched in real time by physically present viewers). Of course, networks program delays in live broadcasts to catch errors or “obscene” content from being transmitted to viewers, undercutting the assignation of real-time. Explaining this qualified liveness, Marriott (2007) writes, “Considered from the point of view of the relationship between the event and its transmission, then, television can rarely be said to be fully live in anything other than a fragmentary way” (p. 49). However, networks continue to tout live television formats as live because that attribution supports industry strategies of programing distinction, ratings, and cultural legitimation (Levine 2008; van Es 2017a; Vogan 2018).

By contrast, from my perspective, liveness represents an affective urgency generated by industry institutions and their rhetorical strategies. The concept of affective urgency builds upon Doane’s (1990) three ways of understanding the temporality of the “event” in live TV: information, which relates to the continuous flow of events and details on television; crisis, a shocking event of short duration that “demands resolution”; and catastrophe, a similarly shocking event that happens “all at once,” in an instant (p. 223). Adapting Doane’s taxonomy of live TV, I introduce the concept of affective urgency to describe events of sufficient consequence to compel the viewer to pay attention to and feel something about a crisis, like Kim’s sex tape leak and the ongoing shame it could cause; or a catastrophe, like the live TV appearance as an opportunity for spontaneous fumbling and immediate embarrassment. Affective urgency in textual representation, then, is inseparable from the plot event and its capacity for narrative motivation—that is, the introduction of an event of significant enough dramatic disequilibrium among persons or characters that the resulting sequence of events is considered justified in its selection and ordering (Perry 1979).

Through these definitions, I align myself with media scholars interested in the rhetorical qualities of live TV and liveness (Boddy 2003; Caldwell 1995; Ellis 2000; Feuer 1983; Levine 2008; Vianello 1985; White 2004, 2006; Ytreberg 2009). van Es (2017b) explains that, for critics of liveness as a kind of rhetoric, “‘live’ construction” forms “part of a producer’s strategy” to distinguish a program from others (p. 11). In other words, rhetorical critics view liveness as an institutional product that serves industrial goals. Moreover, in contrast with the ontological perspective, which understands liveness as an essential quality afforded by television’s technical capabilities, the rhetorical framework proposes that industrial stakeholders construct liveness through discursive means. In the next section, I examine how prerecorded programs discursively construct liveness. In this case, reality series incorporate live TV as the supplement that might stand in for and fulfill the leaked sex tape’s deficient liveness.

Live TV in Keeping Up With the Kardashians and The Kardashians: The Sex Tape Supplement

As we see in the case of Kim, the sex tape supposedly mobilizes the production of reality TV celebrity and motivates reality TV narratives. Surprisingly, the series introduce live TV appearances to bolster the emotional and narrative stakes promised by the sex tape. The cable and streaming reality pilots utilize live TV and sex tapes in conjunction with one another. Ultimately, they mark live TV as a supplement that will compensate for the sex tape’s partial, incomplete liveness effect.

This claim about the Kardashian series engages two ideas in the extant media literature on liveness, reality TV, and amateur pornography (Alilunas 2016; Andrejevic 2004; Bourdon 2008; Dominguez 2015; Kavka 2008; Kavka and West 2004; Longstaff 2013; Patterson 2004). First, there is some analogy between the generic affordances and cultural logics of the sex tape and reality television. For example, Patrick (2022) argues that this culturally normalized connection between the sex tape and reality TV emerges in the context of historically specific changes in celebrity, conditioned by new digital technologies, especially social media. Patrick suggests that popular cultures perceive sex tapes as productive of reality TV celebrity, whether true or not, because of the “coordinated release” of sex tapes alongside the “launch” of reality series (p. 107). The second notion is that liveness defines this analogy between sex tapes and reality TV. Longstaff (2018) claims that the connection between the sex tape and reality TV stems from each genre’s similar temporal and experiential effects. Building on Kavka and West’s (2004) research on immediacy as the temporal norm of reality TV, Longstaff (2018) reasons that a “present-ist temporality” connects the sex tape and the “experience of watching reality TV.” Both employ the “temporal closeness” of artificially immediate transmission to produce an effect of “emotional closeness” or “intimacy” between spectator and reality participant: “a ‘zone of liveness’ [. . .] in which temporal immediacy allows the audience to participate in the affective illusion of ‘live’ intimacy” (p. 185).

The pilot of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, “I’m Watching You,” immediately frames the series in terms of the sex tape and live TV (E! 2007, episode no. 1). After making a sexualizing joke about Kim’s rear end, mother Kris Jenner announces that Tyra Banks has asked Kim to appear on The Tyra Banks Show, also known as Tyra, provided that Kim addresses her recently leaked sex tape (Sastre 2014, p. 126). A subsequent close-up of the cover of the tape, Kim Kardashian, Superstar (Vivid Entertainment 2007), subtitled “XXX Hardcore and Candid!” and depicting Kim in three distinct positions, presents the tape as not just verbally but also visually central to Keeping Up with the Kardashians’s framing (E! 2007, episode no. 1, 03:10–03:34). In this case, the sex tape forms a complicating proviso to Kim’s first live TV interview. Moreover, as we will see, the sex tape and live TV’s fusion in the interview will function as an absence around which Keeping Up with the Kardashians must work to fabricate liveness.

Jumpstarting the first season with a potential leak of additional sex tape footage, The Kardashians’s pilot, “Burn Them All to the F*cking Ground,” situates the series within the renewed urgency of the sex tape. The Kardashians pilot also confirms the integral nature of the sex tape to the reality series’ narrative justification (The Kardashians 2022a, episode no. 1). On the first day of filming the new series, at a family barbecue at her home, Kim learns of a new threat of additional sex tape footage via her son’s account on the online game platform Roblox (09:30). The episode transitions seamlessly from Kim learning about the threat of more leaked footage (sex tape) to the fourth-wall-breaking acknowledgment that this is their first day of filming (reality television) and immediately next to Kris and Kim’s announcement that Saturday Night Live creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels has asked Kim to host an episode (live TV) (11:40–12:05). Therefore, far from transcending the motor that was the sex tape for the original program, the premiere of the Kardashians’ new streaming series sustains this relation of narrative justification between the sex tape and reality series.

Moreover, like the original series, The Kardashians introduces live TV into the mix of reality television and sex tapes. Unlike Keeping Up with the Kardashians, however, the streaming pilot introduces live television last, after the sex tape and reality television. In this way, The Kardashians suggests from the outset that live television might constitute the final narrative word in relation to the sex tape and reality series. As we will see, The Kardashians confirms this initial foreshadowing when it makes live TV trump the reality series and sex tape in terms of plot significance. In the climax of The Kardashians’s opening narrative arc, live TV comes after the sex tape in the plot. By placing the term “live” in the climatic episode’s title, “Live from New York” (The Kardashians 2022b, episode no. 3), The Kardashians confirms that live TV’s plot posteriority in relation to the sex tape equates to a greater narrative consequence.

Although each series introduces the sex tape and live TV in different orders, both Keeping Up with the Kardashians and The Kardashians establish themselves around an initial narrative dilemma composed of the sex tape and live TV’s synthesis. Most important for my analysis, each series opens with a narrative problem about the sex tape and defines the sex tape as something to be overcome on live TV, whether the prerecorded talk show in front of a live audience (Tyra) or the live sketch comedy and variety series (Saturday Night Live). The subsequent analysis demonstrates several interdependent claims that Keeping Up with the Kardashians and The Kardashians pose about the generic and cultural-logical relationships between sex tapes and reality television in the rhetorical field of liveness.

Fabricating Liveness

Sex-taped-derived reality programs employ live TV formats to make up for the sex tape’s insufficient threshold of intertextual liveness. Moreover, including live TV appearances appears inadequate to fabricate liveness, as we see in rhetorical symptoms manifesting this lack. I identify two related categories of rhetorical symptoms—artifice and simulation—wherein Keeping Up with the Kardashians and The Kardashians discursively fabricate liveness to cover live TV’s only partial intertextual influence in the series. These are examples of Klein-Shagrir’s (2017) “liveness indicators,” textual and para-textual rhetorical forms through which prerecorded (i.e., “ontologically” non-live) series market themselves as live (p. 58). According to Klein-Shagrir, liveness indicators comprise devices used to infuse prerecorded programs that lack “ontological liveness” with an illusion of liveness—an impression of “simultaneous and immediate experience” when watched (p. 65, p. 59). Similar to liveness indicators, artificial liveness signifies the manufacture of liveness through esthetic sleights of hand, and simulated liveness points to the production of liveness through imitating or modeling live TV.

Artificial Liveness: Manufacturing Liveness through Esthetic Technique

Keeping Up with the Kardashians and The Kardashians artificially manufacture liveness as a sense of narrative and emotional urgency through editing and narration techniques. Specifically, the series fabricate affective urgency through the artifices of rapid cutting, temporal condensation, and meta-textual confessionals. This artificial production of liveness extends beyond the Kardashian programs and, according to multiple scholars, constitutes a significant esthetic convention in reality TV and sex tapes. Longstaff (2018) argues that genres and formats like amateur pornography, reality television, and webcam production instrumentalize the authenticating gestures of “purposefully amateurish” or lo-fi esthetics to fabricate a sense of spectatorial proximity to celebrities and a “live” or affectively present experience of their sexual desires (p. 187). ³ Dominguez (2015) argues that docusoaps like The Real Housewives (Bravo 2006–) employ another rhetorical gesture of affective urgency, the emotionally pornographic “money shot,” capitalizing on its paradoxically “predictable unpredictability” to “produc[e] the thrilling feeling of televisual liveness in the programs” (p. 163). Bourdon (2008) confirms the critical nature of editing in reality television’s artificial liveness. Bourdon (2008) argues that the rhetoric of liveness saturates reality programing, not because most coverage of reality participants is live and not because most viewers watch the limited live components (e.g., Big Brother’s live internet feeds of the game house), but because “careful editing” fabricates a sense of liveness (i.e., this is what is happening right now to these real people) (p. 68). Synthesizing Bourdon (2008) and Longstaff (2018), we observe that reality TV is often “carefully edited” to appear hasty and imitate the esthetic and emotional conventions of liveness.

The pilot of Keeping Up with the Kardashians utilizes formal artifices parallel to those outlined by Longstaff, Dominguez, and Bourdon. It exaggerates an urgent temporality as Kim prepares for her imminent appearance in front of a live TV audience on Tyra. Through the narrational artifice of meta-textual confessions and editorial artifices of fast cutting and temporal condensation, the pilot episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians heightens the sense of narrative anxiety and dynamism leading up to the live TV appearance. In this sense, the episode’s formal artifices exaggerate the affective urgency associated with performance anxiety before a live TV audience. The sequence moves from the scene of Kim’s hotel and her backstage preparations before the appearance, both in New York City, to a scene between Kris and Kourtney, back in California, and another backstage scene after the interview, also in New York City. Keeping Up with the Kardashians emphasizes Kim’s groundwork for the interview precisely because the interview is not shown. In other words, these artifices make up for the fact that the Keeping Up with the Kardashians pilot includes no footage from Kim’s interview with Tyra Banks. Therefore, artificial liveness compensates for this absence of live-televisual performance and the affective urgency its inclusion would guarantee.

Initially, the Keeping Up with the Kardashians pilot conveys a sense of urgency around Kim’s live TV interview through confessionals before her Tyra appearance. For example, Khloe Kardashian narrates her anxiety about the live-studio-audience interview: “I’m really scared for Kim to do The Tyra Show because her very first TV interview—she’s going to have to talk about the sex tape openly” (E! 2007, episode no. 1, 14:13). To these direct address disclosures, Keeping Up with the Kardashians adds the temporal artifice of rapid editing to heighten the sense of narrative urgency. The Tyra sequence begins by presenting Kim in her hotel room, frantically choosing an outfit for the appearance, followed by a confessional that depicts Kim telling the audience, “I’m just getting really nervous. You know, it’s my first interview with a live audience and on camera, so I don’t want to be nervous and say the wrong thing. I just want it to be perfect” (17:13). Through voiceover, the episode lays the latter end of this quote on top of a visual of Kim rushing from The Regency Hotel to the studio. The voiceover assists the episode in rapidly cutting between various visuals, maintaining a sense of coherence for the viewer through sound so that the frantic montage and mise-en-scène can enforce the narrative anxiety around Kim’s appearance without sacrificing intelligibility. After a second confessional of Kim’s anxiety, a producer for Tyra calls “five minute” to Kim, who is rushing to finish her hair and make-up. Within the scene, Kim exclaims in worry, “And I got to cut this tag out. I wish I had more time. I’m, like, freaking out that I’m not going to be ready.” The producer then asks, “Kim, if we can start walking? We’re going to mic you downstairs, okay?” (17:40). With Kim’s monologic confession of anxiety and the producer’s dialogic warning, we see that the narrational production of urgency extends beyond the confessionals’ meta-diegetic level to the diegetic sphere itself.

This entire sequence, which constitutes the pilot’s climax, lasts from beginning to end only a minute and a half, about seven percent of the length of the pilot (twenty-two minutes, excluding commercial breaks). Such a contraction of the pivotal moment in the episode strengthens the manufactured urgency introduced by confessional narration and rapid editing. Analyzing these formal methods as a combined strategy, we can see how the episode utilizes confessions of anxiety about Kim’s appearance before a live TV audience, an editorial emphasis on Kim’s franticness before her appearance, and a temporal contraction of the sequence to generate three different artificial effects of liveness. The artificial construction of liveness makes up for the sex tape’s incomplete narrative motivation and emotional consequence. The sex tape scandal promises to provide a narrative event full of emotional stakes for the scandalized family and its sympathetic viewer. Yet, as the intertextual use of live TV and the rhetorical production of liveness effects suggest, the sex tape fails to suffice. Furthermore, the artificial construction of liveness conceals the Tyra interview’s audiovisual absence within “I’m Watching You.”

The Kardashians’s initial narrative arc repeats the urgency that Kim’s rushed appearance on Tyra provided for Keeping Up with the Kardashians’s liveness effect. Kim calls a last-minute, emergency meeting with family and friends in her hotel room on the day of the Saturday Night Live taping (The Kardashians 2022b, episode no. 3, 09:57). In this way, The Kardashians repeats the editing techniques (rapid cutting) and mise-en-scène (hotel rooms, studio backstages) we observed in the moments leading up to Kim’s Tyra appearance. Kim announces to the intimate crowd gathered in her hotel suite that soon-to-be-ex-husband Kanye West has flown to Los Angeles in economy class and retrieved the computer and hard drive that house the digital records of Kim’s full sex tape (The Kardashians 2022b, episode no. 3, 11:42). The hotel scene pairs Kim’s cathartic overcoming of fourteen years of sex tape infamy with her anxiety about hosting a live variety series as a non-actor. Through this combination of sex-tape catharsis and live-TV anxiety, “Burn Them All to the F*cking Ground” exacerbates the sense of affective urgency in the episode. Furthermore, The Kardashians ends the sex tape plotline in its three-episode opening arc right before the segment that features Kim’s Saturday Night Live taping. Therefore, The Kardashians suggests that the sex tape scandal merely forms the penultimate step in its narrative incline toward the actual climax, live television production, subordinating the sex tape’s liveness effects to live TV.

Keeping Up with the Kardashians and The Kardashians employ narrative and editing techniques to fabricate artificial liveness. Keeping Up with the Kardashians does so because the live TV appearance it includes to overcome the sex tape’s insufficient urgency will not or cannot be shown. The Hulu series does include parts of the Saturday Night Live episode Kim hosts. Therefore, The Kardashians’s artifice completes the partial rather than absent affectivity urgency of Kim’s Saturday Night Live appearance.

Simulated Liveness: Performatively Modeling Live TV

In addition to the narration and editing artifices, Keeping Up with the Kardashians employs performance to manufacture a liveness effect. The pilot does so by simulating the interview that Kim will give Tyra Banks before a live audience, performatively modeling “the conditions or behavior of” live TV’s “situation” and “process” (Oxford English Dictionary 2023). Like in the case of artificial liveness, the episode’s failure to show Kim’s appearance on Tyra compels the simulation of live TV. Moreover, like artifice, multiple scholars propose simulated liveness as a critical esthetic convention in reality TV. The literature supports this claim regarding the role of simulation in Keeping Up with the Kardashians and The Kardashians’s fabricated liveness. Lunt (2004) suggests that reality television generally simulates rather than documents reality through affectations of televisual liveness. Kavka (2008) and Kavka and West (2004) assert that reality television’s unique use of and relationship to time fulfill the promise of television’s ostensibly ontological liveness. According to Kavka and West, reality TV employs categories of “unlocated” time, like hours, minutes, and seconds, which are abstractable from a historical moment or duration. These categories of unlocated time, a part of reality programing’s “verbal and visual rhetoric of liveness” (Kavka and West 2004, p. 139), fabricate a sense of temporal immediacy despite the delay between transmission and capture. In this way, reality programing “simulates” the temporality of live TV (Kavka 2008, p. 19).

In the Keeping Up with the Kardashians pilot, Kim and Kourtney roleplay Kim’s impending live-studio-audience interview with Banks, with Kourtney assuming the role of Banks. Responding to Kourtney/Banks’s question about the motive behind the sex tape, Kim asserts that she made the sex tape “because [she] was horny and [she] felt like it” (E! 2007, episode no. 1, 04:22). In this simulation, Kim appears more genuine than a canned response on a daytime television talk show ever could be. At the same time, Kim’s impromptu claim to sexual desire as the motive of the sex tape’s creation suppresses another widely believed explanation for its production: the facilitation of reality TV narrative and celebrity. In this way, even the “liveness” of Kim’s sexual desire and pleasure on the tape might be insufficiently live. This is because the way Kim characterizes the tape in her simulated interview with Kourtney obscures the “live” desire for reality celebrity that popularly frames Kim’s motivations for making the tape. As Patrick (2022) explains, regardless of its accuracy, the prominent notion that sex tapes are coordinated with reality television and other media productions “does important cultural work” in celebrity culture (p. 107). Therefore, this discursive frame around Kim will suggest to the public that the desire to produce reality TV celebrity through the scandal of leaked sex—a way of manufacturing liveness—precedes and mediates sexual desire within the sex tape. ⁴ In this way, Kim’s description of the sex tape’s motive appears to betray desire within the tape as itself a simulated liveness.

In playacting the interview, Kim and Kourtney/Banks betray the simulated nature of the reality show’s liveness (E! 2007, episode no. 1). Given the textual absence of Kim’s Tyra interview, Keeping Up with the Kardashians must performatively model the interview through the sisters’ roleplay, an illusory measure similar to the use of formal artifice above. Moreover, the roleplay’s simulation of liveness implies the virtual nature of the sex tape and reality TV’s liveness. The sex tape and reality TV can only mimic live TV’s affective urgency and narrative motivation. Finally, Kim and Kourtney’s imitative performance reveals another simulation. The public might understand Kim’s erotic rationale for the tape’s creation as masking a more fundamental desire for reality TV celebrity. Therefore, Kim’s claim that “feeling horny” was the (narrative) motivation for the tape will read as another simulation of liveness’s affective urgency, this time of sexual liveness.

Saturday Night Live on Live TV as a Medium for Liveness

Keeping Up with the Kardashians and The Kardashians implement live TV to supplement the sex tape in producing the affective urgency of liveness. At the same time, one of their intertexts betrays live TV’s problematic liveness in the contemporary period. The episode of Saturday Night Live that Kim hosts, “Kim Kardashian West/Halsey” (Saturday Night Live 2021, episode no. 911), reveals a hesitancy about live TV’s primacy as the medium for liveness (van Es 2017a).

This episode of Saturday Night Live consistently undercuts live TV’s authoritative position in producing the affective and narrative stakes associated with liveness. First, the episode disputes the experiential value of live TV with a parodic sketch of the Facebook whistleblower’s senate hearing broadcast on C-SPAN (Saturday Night Live 2021, episode no. 911, 00:02). This sketch equates the tedious detail of live televising with the dullness of congressional procedure. In this way, the Saturday Night Live episode reproduces the method Netflix Live (Netflix 2017) uses to devalue live TV. Netflix released Netflix Live as an April Fool’s joke, spoofing the tedium of temporally immediate television in a self-interested move to invalidate network and cable television in the streaming age (van Es and Keilbach 2018). Through this method, Saturday Night Live picks up on a vein of liveness understudied in dominant accounts, which focus on its exceptionality rather than mundaneness. White (2004) describes this mundane vein as liveness’s banal mode, in which the simultaneous capture and transmission of everyday, uneventful matters articulates an excess of uninteresting details and trivial meanings.

The episode also undermines the cultural influence of live TV. In her opening monolog, Kim disses the minor scale of Saturday Night Live viewership compared with her social following, 10 million live viewers versus 360 million social followers (NBC 2021, episode no. 911, 14:25). Therefore, Kim’s Saturday Night Live monolog asserts the waning power of live TV to manipulate popular attention in the age of social media, media equally capable of simultaneous production and transmission in “real time.”

Another parody, this time of a local news sequence, calls live TV’s esthetic quality into question. In the sketch, the anchors cannot agree on the program’s tagline, the sports correspondent does not know any scores, and the lottery announcers present non-numerical, and therefore unsuitable, winning values (Saturday Night Live 2021, episode no. 911, 33:25). This sketch demonstrates the importance of disruption (van Es and Keilbach 2018) and “unexpected events” (Bourdon 2000) to the production of liveness, yet implies that incompetence rather than skill yields such disruptions: a failure to manufacture narrative and emotional consequence through production techniques.

In summary, Saturday Night Live delegitimizes live TV’s experiential value, cultural influence, and esthetic quality. These multiple instances of questioning live TV as a vehicle for liveness detract from the esthetic and emotional potential Keeping Up with the Kardashians and The Kardashians aim to exploit by including live TV (or its immediate context, as in the case of Tyra) in their series framing. Therefore, on the one hand, we observe that Keeping Up with the Kardashians and The Kardashians document live TV formats and employ other formal means, artificial and simulated, to make up for the reality series and sex tape’s deficiency of liveness affects and effects. On the other hand, the live broadcast of Saturday Night Live, portions of which we see on The Kardashians, disappoints live TV’s promise to imbue the reality series with a sense of liveness. In doing so, Saturday Night Live suggests the tenuous status of live TV’s claim to priority as the medium for liveness. Consequently, the deflationary character of Saturday Night Live’s reflexive, live broadcast points to some historically, culturally, and economically specific changes in industrial and popular thought about live TV as a vehicle for liveness.

The Implications of Intertextual Liveness

In this article, I demonstrate that liveness as an institutionally motivated rhetoric practiced by and associated with live TV maintains a hold on the contemporary definition of television categories (genres, distribution formats) and their interrelations, even as its meanings and applications in a post-network age have transformed substantially. Live TV still appears to hold the discursive power to fulfill the esthetic and affective contracts of other TV/video genres and sub-genres, which they inherently (in themselves) cannot uphold. Liveness’s intertextual and intergeneric affordances add to its medial affordances, “preserving” television’s “social and temporal relevance in the digital mediascape” (Klein-Shagrir 2017, p. 73). At the same time, I identify a reflexive hesitancy about the institutionally constructed “value of live experience” (Auslander et al. 2019, p. 286, his emphasis) within live TV itself. By turning to Kim’s live episode of Saturday Night Live, which parodies live TV within the industry’s legitimate means, the concluding section of the analysis identifies an instability that characterizes the contemporary, evaluative privilege of live TV to formalize and distribute the esthetics and experience of liveness.

Reality series and sex tapes may be counterintuitive places where the resurgent value of live TV lends its legitimating force. In this way, one fascinating effect of this essay’s discovery, the rhetorical employ of live TV in the sex-tape-derived reality series, is that it expands our understanding of unforeseen areas in which the “live” and “liveness” are practiced and toward which television studies might turn its attention. In this regard, I see the Kardashian case study as especially instructive because of the singular generic constellation the family produces in their flagship series’ pilot episodes and opening arcs. The pilots frame the reality television programs around the emotional and narrative urgency of a sex tape scandal, which will be addressed on or near a live television appearance. By contrast, the reality series of comparable figures who achieved celebrity in correlation with (but not necessarily as a cause of) a sex tape, like Paris Hilton’s The Simple Life (Fox and E! 2003–2007), do not thematize the affective and narrative influence of live TV and the sex tape on reality programing in a substantive manner.

However, despite the edifying nature of the Kardashian case, this study is still restricted to one example, requiring additional inquiry to confirm or qualify how other contemporary reality programs might exploit the narrative benefits of intertextual live television. My project forms a jumping-off place from which scholars can begin investigating the contemporary use of live TV and liveness in other prerecorded (sub)genres, whether fictional or not. What purpose does the reflexive use of live TV serve in different media, whether film, television, video, or social and other computational media? How do liveness’s capacities to define and imbue emotional and narrative consequence differ when employed in distinct distribution models (network, basic cable, premium cable, or streaming television) and genres (comedy, drama, reality, or hybrid)? In this way, the intertextual study of live TV in other generic domains provokes two interventions in television studies. This mode of inquiry elucidates the importance of live rhetoric to a new area of focus: live TV in sex-tape-derived reality series. This expanded view extends our understanding of liveness’s complex meanings and applications today—specifically, live TV’s changing status as an institutional vehicle for liveness.