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This article aims to build a semiotic frame necessary for the analysis of television, in particular current formats of “reality” TV. First, it questions the concept of contract, which is the basis of many models of TV communication. As soon as one abandons the paradigm of textual immanence and adopts a more pragmatic perspective, this model loses power, develops cracks and fissures. Some examples show that it does not function for current TV programs in so far as TV formats such as Big Brother intentionally play on an ambiguity among three “worlds”, which are the interpretants of any TV genre: the real world, the world of fiction and the ludic world. Networks make promises as to the generic nature of a program and viewers are free to believe them or not. The author analyzes two programs the ambiguous anchorage of which in some world creates an opposition between those viewers who believe and those who do not, between the gullible and the incredulous. These programs displace content belonging to the domain of belief (or inversely to the domain of the “suspension of disbelief”) into the domain of knowledge. Such examples provide evidence that the notion of contract is epistemologically inadequate for the analysis of present-day media.

Abolishing Belief to Make Room for Knowledge: An Analysis of the “Contract” Underlying Reality TV