Investigating cheaters

This article analyzes the American television program Cheaters. Cheaters advances itself as the most “realistic” of reality programs based on an ethnographic approach to the surveillance and exposure of infidelity. The program offers theoretical lessons in the vernacular of reality television, as it proliferates positions for the subjects in its narrative and raises questions about the relationship between seeing and believing. Every effort to show and tell more destabilizes the possibility of discerning the very truths it purports to uncover. In the process the program offers insights into the limits of reality television and into contemporary socio-cultural epistemology.