History

1940s–1950s

Precedents for television that portrayed people in unscripted situations began in the 1940s. Debuting in 1948, Allen Funt's Candid Camera, (based on his previous 1947 radio show, Candid Microphone), broadcast unsuspecting ordinary people reacting to pranks. It has been called the "granddaddy of the reality TV genre."^[1] Debuting in the 1950s, game shows Beat the Clock and Truth or Consequences involved contestants in wacky competitions, stunts, and practical jokes.

In 1948, talent search shows Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour and Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts featured amateur competitors and audience voting. The Miss America Pageant, first broadcast in 1954, was a competition where the winner achieved status as a national celebrity.^[2]

The radio series Nightwatch (1954-1955), which tape-recorded the daily activities of Culver City, California police officers, also helped pave the way for reality television. The series You Asked For It (1950-1959), in which viewer requests dictated content, was an antecedent of today's audience-participation reality TV elements, in which viewers cast votes to help determine the course of events.

1960s–1970s

First broadcast in the United Kingdom in 1964, the Granada Television series Seven Up!, broadcast interviews with a dozen ordinary seven-year olds from a broad cross section of society and inquired about their reactions to everyday life. Every seven years, a film documented the life of the same individuals in the intervening years, titled 7 Plus Seven, 21 Up, etc. The series was structured simply as a series of interviews with no element of plot. However, it did have the then-new effect of turning ordinary people into celebrities.

Andy Warhol's 1966 film Chelsea Girls showed various of Warhol's acquaintances being filmed by a camera with no direction given; the Radio Times Guide to Film 2007 stated that the film was "to blame for reality television."^[3]

The first reality show in the modern sense may have been the 12-part 1973 PBS series An American Family, which showed a nuclear family going through a divorce. In 1974 a counterpart program, The Family, was made in the UK, following the working class Wilkins family of Reading. Another forebear of modern reality television were the late 1970s productions of Chuck Barris: The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and The Gong Show, all of which featured participants who were eager to sacrifice some of their privacy and dignity in a televised competition. ^[4] One Man and His Dog was a British Television series which began in 1976 featuring the participants of sheepdog trials.

1980s–1990s

Reality television as it is currently understood can be directly linked to several television shows that began in the late 1980s and early 1990s. COPS, which first aired in the spring of 1989 and came about partly due to the need for new programming during the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike,^[5] showed police officers on duty apprehending criminals; it introduced the camcorder look and cinéma vérité feel of much of later reality television. The series Nummer 28, which aired on Dutch television in 1991, originated the concept of putting strangers together in the same environment for an extended period of time and recording the drama that ensued. Nummer 28 also pioneered many of the stylistic conventions that have since become standard in reality television shows, including a heavy use of soundtrack music and the interspersing of events on screen with after-the-fact "confessionals" recorded by cast members, that serve as narration. One year later, the same concept was used by MTV in their new series The Real World and Nummer 28 creator Erik Latour has long claimed that The Real World was directly inspired by his show.^[6] However, the producers of The Real World have stated that their direct inspiration was An American Family.^[7]

According to television commentator Charlie Brooker, this type of reality television was enabled by the advent of computer-based non-linear editing systems for video (such as those produced by Avid Technology) in 1989. These systems made it easy to quickly edit hours of video footage into a usable form, something that had been very difficult to do before. (Film, which was easy to edit, was too expensive to shoot enough hours of footage with on a regular basis.)^[8]

The Swedish TV show Expedition Robinson, created by TV producer Charlie Parsons, which first aired in 1997 (and was later produced in a large number of other countries as Survivor), added to the Nummer 28/Real World template the idea of competition and elimination, in which cast members/contestants battled against each other and were removed from the show until only one winner remained. (These shows are now sometimes called elimination shows.)

Changing Rooms, a British TV show that began in 1996, showed couples redecorating each others' houses, and was the first reality show^{[citation needed]} with a self-improvement or makeover theme.

2000s

Reality television saw an explosion of global popularity starting in the early 2000s. Two reality series - Survivor and American Idol - have been the top-rated series on American television for an entire season. Survivor led the ratings in 2001-02, and Idol has topped the ratings three consecutive years (2004-05, 2005-06, and 2006-07). The shows Survivor, the Idol series, the Top Model series, the Dancing With The Stars series, The Apprentice, "Fear Factor" and Big Brother have all had a global impact, having each been successfully syndicated in dozens of countries.

Currently there are at least two television channels devoted exclusively to reality television: Fox Reality in the United States, launched in 2005, and Zone Reality in the UK, launched in 2002. In addition, several other cable channels, such as Viacom's MTV and NBC's Bravo, feature original reality programming as a mainstay.^[9] Mike Darnell, head of reality TV for the US Fox network, says that the broadcast networks (NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox) "might as well plan three or four [reality shows] each season because we're going to have them, anyway."^[10]

During the early part of the 2000s, network executives expressed concern that reality-television programming was limited in its appeal for DVD reissue and syndication, but in fact DVDs for reality shows have sold briskly; Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, The Amazing Race, Project Runway, and America's Next Top Model have all ranked in the top DVDs sold on Amazon.com. DVDs of The Simple Life have outranked scripted shows like The O.C. and Desperate Housewives; additionally, many reality shows have been successfully syndicated, including Fear Factor, The Amazing Race, Survivor, Wife Swap and America's Next Top Model. COPS has had huge success in syndication, direct response sales and DVD. A FOX staple since 1989, COPS is, as of 2008, in its 21st season, having outlasted all competing scripted police shows.

In 2007, according to the Learning and Skills Council, one in seven UK teenagers hopes to gain fame by appearing on reality television.^[11]

In April 2008, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences announced it will give its very first Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Host for a Reality Show or Reality Competition on September 21. "Reality television has become such an integral part of television and our culture, so it only made sense for us to create this new highly competitive category," TV academy Chairmen and CEO John Shaffner said in the announcement.^{[citation needed]}

Pop culture references

Some scripted works have used reality television as a plot device:

• Real Life (1979) is a comedic film about the creation of a show similar to An American Family gone horribly wrong.
• Louis the 19th, King of the Airwaves (1994) ^[28] is a Québécois film about a man who signs up to star in a 24-hour-a-day reality TV show.
• The Truman Show (1998) is a film about a man (Jim Carrey) who discovers that his entire life is being staged and filmed for a 24-hour-a-day reality TV show.
• EDtv (1999) was a remake of Louis the 19th, King of the Airwaves.
• Series 7: The Contenders (2001) is a film about a reality show in which contestants have to kill each other to win.
• Dead Famous (2001) is a comedy/whodunit novel by Ben Elton in which a contestant is murdered while on a Big Brother-like show.
• "Helter Shelter" (2002) is an episode of The Simpsons in which the family become contestants in "The 1895 Challenge," living for several weeks in a Victorian style house with antique furniture and no electricity. To boost the ratings, they soon find themselves being abused and humiliated by the show's director, who states that he created the show "by watching Dutch television and tweaking the title." The Simpsons has also repeatedly spoofed reality TV and made reference to fictitious reality shows, with such titles as "Tied To A Bear," "Sucker Punch," "Mystery Injection," "Animal Survivor,", "No-Pants Island" and "Fart Date."
• Tomb of the Werewolf (2004) is a film about a man searching for treasure while being followed by a reality show film crew, who encounters a werewolf and a vampire instead.
• "Bad Wolf" (2005) is an episode of the TV show Doctor Who in which the characters find themselves trapped in various real-life reality television shows.
• The Comeback (2005) satirizes the indignity of reality TV by presenting itself as "raw footage" of a new reality show documenting the attempted comeback of has-been star Valerie Cherish.
• American Dreamz (2006) is a film set partially on an American Idol-like show.
• Chart Throb (2006) is a comic novel, also by Ben Elton, that parodies The X Factor and The Osbournes, among other reality shows.
• Total Drama Island (2007) is a Canadian animated series about teenagers on a Survivor-like show.
• Oryx and Crake (2003), a speculative fiction novel by Margaret Atwood, occasionally makes mentions of the protagonist and his friend entertaining themselves by watching reality TV shows of live executions, Noodie News (Naked News), frog squashing, graphic surgery, and child pornography.
• T-Pain has a song called "Reality Show" about several different ideas for a reality show.
• Hero Envy produced a two-part web-episode entitled "Realistically Speaking 1&2" (2007) which parodies the reality-show format. The episodes revolve around one of the main characters losing his job while another allows a reality-tv film crew to document the lives of them and their friends in an elimination-style game in return for money.

Other influences on popular culture

A number of scripted television shows have taken the form of documentary-type reality TV shows, in "mockumentary" style. The first such show was the BBC series Operation Good Guys, which premiered in 1997. Other examples include People Like Us, Trailer Park Boys, The Office, Drawn Together, Summer Heights High and Reno 911!.

Some feature films have been produced that use some of the conventions of reality television; such films are sometimes referred to as reality films, and sometimes simply as documentaries.^[29] Allen Funt's 1970 hidden camera movie What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? was based on his reality-television show Candid Camera. The TV show Jackass spawned three films: Jackass: The Movie in 2001, Jackass: Number Two in 2006, and Jackass 2.5 in late 2007. A similar Finnish show, Extreme Duudsonit, was adapted for the film The Dudesons Movie ^[30] in 2006. The producers of The Real World created The Real Cancun in 2003. Games People Play: New York ^[31] was released in 2004.

The mumblecore film genre, which began in the mid-2000s, and uses video cameras and relies heavily on improvisation and non-professional actors, has been described as influenced in part by what one critic called "the spring-break psychodrama of MTV's The Real World". Mumblecore director Joe Swanberg has said, "As annoying as reality TV is, it's been really good for filmmakers because it got mainstream audiences used to watching shaky camerawork and different kinds of situations."^[32]

See also

• List of reality television programs
• List of television show franchises
• Factual television
• Bunim/Murray Productions
• Endemol
• Matt Kunitz
• John Langley
• Mark Burnett

Further reading

• Reality TV: the Big Brother phenomenon by Colin Sparks, in International Socialism journal
• Hill, Annette (2005). Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-26152-X.
• Murray, Susan, and Laurie Ouellette, eds. (2004). Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture. New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-5688-3
• Nichols, Bill (1994). Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-34064-0.
• Godard, Ellis (2004). "Reel Life: The Social Geometry of Reality Shows". pages 73-96 in Survivor Lessons, edited by Matthew J. Smith and Andrew F. Wood. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc.
• Lord of the fly-on-the-walls - Observer article: Paul Watson's UK & Australian docusoaps
• Big Brother - Why Bother? - Graham Barnfield's Spiked commentary
• Zeven werklozen samen op zoek naar een baan by Raymond van den Boogaard, NRC Handelsblad, September 28, 1996 (Dutch) - about Nummer 28 being the inspiration for The Real World

References