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In this paper I draw on insights from my ethnographic work on daytime talk shows and reality programming to explore the meaning of "ordinary celebrity" as it unfolds in the reality television context. I characterize reality programming as a form of "self-service television" in which producers construct the necessary conditions of performance and real-people participants serve themselves (more or less successfully) to these performances. The result is ordinary -- or self-serve -- celebrity. My aim here is to use the concept of ordinary celebrity to consider what media exposure means to, and how it operates for, so-called ordinary people, with an eye to its gendered, classed, and racialized dimensions. Inspired by but not limited to ethnographic evidence, I explore the cultural work being done by self-service television and the implications of this work for rethinking the connection between "celebrity" and the performance of everyday life, as well as the place of ordinary celebrity in American popular culture.
