The Voice

The Voice as a Ritual

Written by Isabella Franco

One of my all time favorite TV shows ever is The Voice. It is an unscripted, reality show, singing competition. Contestants are selected through public auditions and trained by a panel of four coaches who guide and critique their performances in an attempt to discover America's next great voice. The fun thing is that the four coaches chosen each season are always four popular artists of the time (past seasons have included famous professionals such as Adam Levine, John Mayer, Joe Jonas and Miley Cyrus). 

Because the show is unscripted, these famous coaches are shown “as they are”: the audience gets to live their true personalities. The audience not only gets to perceive their real behaviors and essence, but in the last season of The Voice (S18) , was virtual due to the circumstances of 2020, and the artists were coaching from home. This increased the liveliness of the show in ways previous seasons ever could. The audience could now access the private lives of their idols and have the opportunity of seeing them as “ordinary people”. We could see their houses, family, pets, and even what they ate. We could also perceive them struggling with the pandemic as we all were, allowing the us, the audience, to connect with these celebrities, creating a sense of togetherness; as if we were "all in this together".

During quarantine, I definitely considered watching The Voice as a ritual. Every Wednesday, my family would cook dinner and later sit down in the living room to watch the show. Furthermore, after the show was over, we would later spend hours re-watching our favorite scenes and looking at the social media of both of the coaches and the contestant and I would spend the week listening the songs I heard in the past episodes. We were devoted to the lives of everyone in the show. After the season was over, I would still follow the lives and the new music of my favorite contestants. 

The Voice is proof of the veracity of The Myth of The Mediated Center; we are not the center that the media focuses on, but as Nick Couldry suggested, it works the other way around: we are actually living in a world where the media has become the center of our lives. We worship the media. Not the other way around.

References:

Couldry, N.A. (2003). Media Rituals: A Critical Approach.

The Voice. IMDb. (n.d.). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839337/.