Audience

Mob Wives reaches out to teenage girls of the age 18 all the way to mothers of the age 50.  The show focuses on the lives of four women and therefore, women are the targeted audience because they can relate the most to the show.  However, even though the targeted audience is women, it is not uncommon for men to also be watching Mob Wives with their girlfriend or wife even though they watch it differently than women.  “One result of gender roles within the family is that adult men and women watch television very differently.  Men indicate that either they are very attentive when they watch or they don’t watch at all. Women, on the other hand, see television viewing as a social act that is accompanied by conversation and other household activities.  Men and women generally view the same programs because they watch television together in the evening, but they do not view them with the same attentiveness.  In short, our interpretations of television programs are connected to our engagement with the program” (Croteau, Hoynes, and Milan 2012, 275).

After doing more research on exactly who Mob Wives attracts as viewers, I found a blog written by a man named Ken Tucker who comments, “As someone who’s watched at least a few episodes of every version of the Real Housewives franchise and feels a bit nauseous about it, I didn’t come to Mob Wives with high hopes. But this floridly funny, vicariously vicious reality series exerts a vulgar charm. It’s like watching a cross between The Sopranos and The Real Housewives of New Jersey.” Even though men and women watch television shows different, this shows that there are men who do enjoy watching Mob Wives out there.

In regards to the first reason, Nielsen Ratings said Mob Wives lured in 1.4 million viewers for its 8 p.m. premiere with a 0.9 rating in the adults 18-49 demographic, up 92 percent versus the network’s average. Combined with the encore episode at 10 p.m., Mob Wives attracted more than 2.2 million viewers. The premiere was the No. 1 non-sports cable program in its 8 p.m. time slot in women 18-49 and women 18-34, garnering a 1.5 in the latter demo. The second season is averaging a 1.2 P18-49 rating (up +50% from season 1) and 1.9 million Total Viewers (up +46% from season 1) across seven premieres. The series drove VH1 to win the P18-49 Sunday 8pm time period across all of cable thus far in first quarter 2012. According to Perez Hilton, the VH1  reality series had its second season premiere Sunday night, and pulled in a total of 2.4 million viewers, which, combined with its 9pm encore, totaled to around 3.5 million, averaging a 1.4 in the Adult 18-40 demographic, which was a +56% increase of the first season premiere!

I think a specific audience that Mob Wives could be reaching out to are single moms. They can relate to their lifestyle in having to raise a family without a male figure. A news article, on the website “Mail Online” states, “VH1’s new reality series, Mob Wives, follows four Staten Island women as they cope while their husbands are serving time in jail. They dress in furs, drip with gold and look every inch the gangster’s moll – but series creator Jennifer Graziano, herself the daughter of an alleged Mafia consigliere, said their lives are anything but glamorous. She told the New York Post: ‘It’s not all fancy clothes and cars. These are women who are now single moms trying to make it on their own.”

Regardless of the intended audience of Mob Wives and who actually watches it, producer, Jennifer Graziano may not of had the intention of giving the community of people who live in Staten Island a bad reputation.  Unfortunately, for the producer, it is the audience’s interpretation of the show along with the characters’ actions and message portrayal that the audience takes from it.  “The first kind of audience activity is interpretive.  The meanings of media messages are not fixed; they are constructed by audience members…This interpretive activity is crucial because it is in the process of audience reception that media texts take on meaning. Producers construct complex media texts, often with a very clear idea of what they intend to say, but this intended message is not simply dumped into the minds of passive audiences.  Instead, audiences interpret the message, assigning meanings to its various components” (Croteau,  Hoynes, Milan 2012, 256).

In a posting titled “Staten Island star of ‘Mob Wives’ Silences Critics”, Renee Graziano isn’t too concerned about how her reality show reflects on the borough where most of it takes place. She states, “I don’t think this is a show about Staten Island,I think this is a show about four women that happen to live on Staten Island. Staten Island was what it is before Mob Wives.”  It is a controversial VH1 reality show starring Ms. Graziano and three other local women. “Are there people that have negative views? Yeah,” Ms. Graziano said. “Sometimes I even look at my own life in a negative light.” But she’s been trying to learn from her own mistakes, she said, and she hopes people will learn her heart is as big as anybody else’s. Island politicians, business leaders, Italian-Americans, however, have complained about the way the show portrays Staten Island. In one episode the borough was called a “breeding ground” for the Mafia. Linda Baran, chair and CEO of the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce, said the many positive things about Staten Island are not portrayed in shows like Mob Wives. “When you meet people from other areas, they ask if everybody on Staten Island is like that,” Ms. Baran said. “Everybody is not like that.” Ms. Baran said she watched just a little bit of the first episode, and said the language and activities do not give a good impression of Staten Island. “It’s unfortunate that that’s the perception that off-Islanders have about of Staten Island people,” she said.

At this blog , fans of Mob Wives can post videos, comments and picture on the most recent episode or get caught up on the most recent gossip.  On this site, fans can post their opinions on the characters as well as make predictions about upcoming episodes.  The most recent post is by a fan who wants to promote Renee Graziano being featured on the show “Dancing with the Stars.”   This fan by the name of Chiara Soprano says, “When my favorite Mob Wife makes a wish, I’d love to make it come true.  But I am just a blogger and can only do so much from my computer.  For now I am campaigning and spread the word in hopes that the work makes it to the powers that be at Dancing with the Stars.  Renee Graziano loves to dance and would like to be invited to be on the show.  Mob Wives fans everywhere would tune in to watch Renee and her favorite dance partner, Maksim, dance their way to the top and win next season.”  As someone viewing this blog, I can tweet it, facebook it or give my reaction to it on weather I like it or not.

This YouTube clip is a directly intended for the audience to watch in that the women on the show speak frankly to a camera on what they hope everyone, regardless of age, gender and race will take away from their show.

To conclude,  “Audiences may not know the implicit references, they may draw on a different interpretive framework, or they may focus on different components of the message than the producer had planned.  Audiences, then may not construct the meaning intended by the producer, nor will all audience members construct the same meaning from the same media text” (Croteau,  Hoynes, Milan 2012, 258). The audience of reality television plays a major role in the social media.  We watch what we see  and we make our own conclusions and opinions about what is happening, whether they’re good or bad perceptions.  Reality television has become a part of daily conversation in our lives and it doesn’t appear to be stopping any time soon.

 

Croteau, David, William Hoynes, and Stefania Milan. “Active Audiences and the Construction of Meaning.” Media/Society: Industries, Images and Audiences. California: Thousand Oaks, 2012. 255-84. Print.