To cope with the stressors of life, people have long turned to entertainment for distraction, release, and sheer fun, especially during times of intense social and political conflict, as we are currently experiencing. Yet, as Eunji Kim forcefully argues and empirically demonstrates in The American Mirage, the entertainment we turn to for avoidance and escape may nonetheless have serious political consequences, although we are likely unaware of the influence happening below the surface of our favorite programs. Whether you view this conclusion as surprising, given the presumptively apolitical nature of entertainment, or unsurprising, given the social and political meanings often attached to entertainment, two things are clear from this book. First, mainstream political science has neglected this question. Second, the findings persuasively demonstrate that entertainment matters in political life.

As such, much of this book focuses on persuading political scientists that entertainment media should be treated as politically relevant, and that entertainment is at least as important as news media for understanding public opinion. For this purpose, Kim makes use of many historical anecdotes of entertainment media’s intersection with politics, points to the simple fact that Americans consume far more entertainment than news, and presents prior empirical evidence showing that seemingly apolitical events such as shark attacks and sporting events can influence political attitudes. She also points out that researchers in other social science disciplines such as communication, public health, and social psychology have long demonstrated effects of exposure to entertainment media on socially and politically relevant outcomes.

For political scientists who need further convincing, Kim suggests that standard models of public opinion formation accord with the proposition that entertainment media matter. Zaller’s classic receive-accept-sample model, which has been widely used to understand the role of elite influence and news media in shaping public opinion, supports the plausibility of entertainment media also playing an important role. Americans certainly receive plenty of entertainment content via hours of daily exposure; they are prone to accept many narratives without much, if any, partisan resistance because entertainment is typically perceived as apolitical; and the repetitive narratives embedded in serialized entertainment are liable to be top-of-mind and thus available to sample in the expression of a range of politically relevant opinions.

Looking to entertainment media can also help to explain trends in public opinion that do not correlate with the usual suspects (i.e., elite influence and news coverage). Kim identifies just such a case in American politics, where the seeming paradox of rising inequality and reduced economic mobility, on the one hand, contradicts the continued belief in upward economic mobility and opposition to redistributive policies, on the other. She confirms with a sentiment analysis of the New York Times that mainstream news coverage about economic mobility has been overwhelmingly negative for many years, which should have undercut Americans’ belief that hard work will catapult them up the economic ladder. What explains this disconnect between individuals’ personal experience, news coverage, and public opinion? Kim takes a creative leap and points to a long-neglected (and derided) source of economic information: reality television shows.

As it turns out, reality television does not just provide escapist fun for me and millions of Americans but also presents an important meta-message that may reinforce belief in the American Dream: that everyday folks who work hard will be rewarded with significant, and often life changing, economic benefits. Kim demonstrates that since the early 2000s competition and game shows like American Idol, Survivor, Shark Tank, The Voice, America’s Got Talent, Top Chef, and so forth became a substantial share of the overall television landscape. A detailed content analysis shows that many popular programs feature “rags-to-riches” narratives portraying everyday Americans working hard and achieving financial success. Taken together, Kim’s analyses of entertainment media content strongly indicate the presence of politically relevant narratives about economic opportunity.

To test the impact of rags-to-riches narratives on beliefs in economic mobility, Kim employs multiple methods, starting with two randomized experiments—one with a large convenience sample recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk and a lab-in-the-field experiment in which she drove a truck around Pennsylvania to recruit politically diverse samples. In both experiments, watching a video segment from a rags-to-riches program increased belief in upward economic mobility. Next, she takes advantage of a natural experiment in audience engagement with American Idol and finds that living in the hometowns of the top 40 Idol contestants correlated with stronger beliefs in upward economic mobility. A final demonstration comes from a national survey in which viewing more rags-to-riches programs correlated with increased beliefs in upward economic mobility, controlling for individual and contextual factors. These many analyses provide consistent evidence that watching reality television modestly impacts viewers’ economic perceptions and optimism about their chances to “make it” in a society structured to benefit the already well-off.

The downstream consequences of rags-to-riches reality TV for policy preferences are less clear but nonetheless suggestive of a link between TV exposure and views about how the government should engage with issues of economic inequality. Across analyses of the national survey, another lab-in-the-field experiment, and a survey experiment with a national sample, the book shows that exposure to rags-to-riches reality TV exhibited significant correlations with support for various redistributive policies, but the strength and direction of the correlations varied quite a bit. These inconsistencies may be due to the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects, whether due to individual differences in sample composition across analyses or subtle distinctions in media portrayals across programs. Also, multiple theoretical pathways could be further developed and tested. For instance, Kim’s theory points to a mediation process whereby TV exposure increases belief in upward economic mobility, which then decreases support for redistributive policies.

Ultimately, The American Mirage succeeds because Kim marshals a huge amount of empirical evidence from an array of methods to demonstrate that entertainment media is, in fact, politically consequential. This book is unique in systematically identifying a pattern of political narratives in entertainment media and rigorously evaluating the effects of exposure to those narratives on public opinion. The implications of these findings are various but significant, and the book presses political science to reckon with the influence of entertainment media on social and political beliefs, policy views, and election outcomes. Some next steps could include, among other things, mapping the content of entertainment media narratives in other issue areas, evaluating theories about the psychological mechanisms shaping entertainment’s influence, assessing the role of prior attitudes and partisanship as moderating factors, and considering how people actively use entertainment media in a polarized political environment in which traditional distinctions between information and entertainment may no longer apply.