"Be Your Best Self"
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"Be Your Best Self"
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About this listen
You know that phrase, “Be your best self”? This episode rips it wide open: from its shiny, self-help packaging to the industrial shame complex underneath.
Erica and Erin are joined by media scholar Laurie Ouellette to break down how makeover reality shows (Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, The Biggest Loser, Wife Swap, etc.) didn’t just make for good TV; they quietly rewired our ideas about help, worthiness, and personal responsibility. What we mistake for glow-ups, might be about control.
Find out more about Laurie Ouellette…
Buy one of her books: https://bookshop.org/contributors/laurie-ouellette
- Viewers Like You?: How Public TV Failed the People (2002)
- Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship (2008)
- Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (2009)
- The Media Studies Reader (2012)
- A Companion to Reality Television (2014)
- Keywords for Media Studies (2017)
- Lifestyle TV (2016)
Read her work as Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal "Television and New Media:" https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/journal/television-new-media
Or as a Columnist at Film Quarterly: https://filmquarterly.org/tag/laurie-ouellette/