Reality television is a genre of television programming that documents purportedly unscripted real-life situations, often starring ordinary people instead of professional actors. Reality television emerged as a distinct genre in the early 1990s with shows such as The Real World, then achieved prominence in the early 2000s with the success of the series Survivor, Idol, and Big Brother, all of which became global franchises. Reality television shows tend to be interspersed with "confessionals", short interview segments in which cast members reflect on or provide context for the events being depicted on-screen; this is most commonly seen in American reality television. Competition-based reality shows typically feature the gradual elimination of participants, either by a panel of judges, by the viewership of the show, or by the contestants themselves.
Documentaries, factual television, television news, sports television, talk shows, and traditional game shows are generally not classified as reality television. Some genres of television programming that predate the reality television boom have been retroactively classified as reality television, including hidden camera shows, talent-search shows, documentary series about ordinary people, high-concept game shows, home improvement shows, and court shows featuring real-life cases.
Reality television has faced significant criticism since its rise in popularity. Critics argue that by placing the participants in artificial situations, coaching them on behavior, generating storylines ahead of time, staging the scenes and editing footage in misleading ways, reality television shows do not accurately reflect reality. Some shows have been accused of rigging the favorite or underdog to win. Other criticisms of reality television shows include that they humiliate or exploit participants; that they make stars out of either untalented people or infamous figures or both; and that they glamorize vulgarity. This has been a recurring pattern in the reality TV world, especially when it comes to normalizing cruelty and violence. Reality TV has been known to favor disruptive behavior because it enhances the drama and entertainment factor of the show. This pattern often leaves cast members with many mental health issues, and personal self-esteem problems.
History Television formats portraying ordinary people in unscripted situations are almost as old as the television medium itself. Producer-host Allen Funt's Candid Camera, in which unsuspecting people were confronted with funny, unusual situations and filmed with hidden cameras, first aired in 1948. In the 21st century, the series is often considered a prototype of reality television programming.Clissold, B.(2004). "Candid Camera and the origins of reality TV: contextualizing a historical precedent". In Holmes, and Jermyn, D. (eds) Understanding Reality Television. London: Routledge, 33-53.McCarthy, A. (2009). "Stanley Milgram, Allen Funt and me: Postwar Social Science and the First Wave of Reality TV". In Ouellette, L., and Murray, S. (eds). Reality Television Culture. New York: NYU Press.
1940s–1950s In the early 1940s the German television station Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow had staged a show in which a young couple acted as model Aryans and presented their everyday lives without a script to the camera (). Even though it was clearly Nazi propaganda and the episodes were certainly affected by censorship, in recent years the show has been presented more frequently as the oldest reality TV show in the world.Adolf Hitler 'planned propaganda cable TV' The Daily Telegraph, vom 22 October 2008
Precedents for television that portrayed people in unscripted situations began in the late 1940s. Queen for a Day (1945–1964) was an early example of reality-based television. The 1946 television game show Cash and Carry sometimes featured contestants performing stunts. Debuting in 1948, Allen Funt's hidden camera show Candid Camera (based on his previous 1947 radio show, The Candid Microphone) broadcast unsuspecting ordinary people reacting to pranks. In 1948, talent search shows, such as Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour and Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts, featured amateur competitors and audience voting. In the 1950s, game shows Beat the Clock and Truth or Consequences involved contestants in wacky competitions, stunts, and practical jokes. Confession was a crime and police show that aired from June 1958 to January 1959, with interviewer Jack Wyatt questioning criminals from assorted backgrounds.Alex McNeil, Total Television (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), p. 178 The radio series Nightwatch (1951–1955) tape-recorded the daily activities of Culver City, California police officers. The series You Asked for It (1950–1959) incorporated audience involvement by basing episodes around requests sent in by postcard from viewers.
1960s–1970s First broadcast in the United Kingdom in 1964, the Granada Television documentary Seven Up! broadcast interviews with 14 ordinary 7-year-olds from a broad cross-section of society and inquired about their reactions to everyday life. Every seven years, the filmmaker Michael Apted created a new film documenting the lives of the same individuals during the intervening period. Titled the Up Series, episodes included "7 Plus Seven", "21 Up", etc.; it is still ongoing. Structured as a series of candid interviews with no scripted plot, the films chronicle how the participants navigated personal milestones such as education, career, marriage, and family. Over time, by virtue of the sustained public attention, the participants became notable figures in British culture, effectively turning ordinary people into a type of celebrity.
The series The American Sportsman, which ran from 1965 to 1986 on ABC in the United States, The Post-Standard newspaper, Syracuse, New York, December 21, 2012, by Tom Adessa. "As a teenager, I always looked forward to Sunday afternoons when I'd watch Curt Gowdy and his TV show, 'The American Sportsman.' Gowdy had a distinct, soft-spoken demeanor and the destinations of his hunts were in various parts of the world." The News and Courier newspaper, February 8, 1975, Charleston, South Carolina. Quote: "Peter Benchley's journey to the world of the White Shark is an evocative portrait of one of nature's extraordinary phenomena, the shark, and of one man's revealing transition from the world of fantasy to the world of underwater reality." would typically feature one or more celebrities, and sometimes their family members, being accompanied by a camera crew on an outdoor adventure, such as hunting, fishing, hiking, scuba diving, rock climbing, wildlife photography, horseback riding, race car driving, and the like, with most of the resulting action and dialogue being unscripted, except for the narration.
In the 1966 Direct Cinema film Chelsea Girls, Andy Warhol filmed various acquaintances with no direction given. The Radio Times Guide to Film 2007 said that the film was "to blame for reality television".
In 1969, the British rock group the Beatles were filmed for a month during the recording sessions which would become their album Let It Be and released the homonymous film the following year. In 2021, director Peter Jackson created an eight-hour, three-episode television series entitled The Beatles: Get Back.
The 12-part 1973 PBS series An American Family showed a nuclear family (filmed in 1971) going through a divorce; unlike many later reality shows, it was more or less documentary in purpose and style. In 1974 a counterpart program, The Family, was made in the UK, following the working-class Wilkins family of Reading. Other forerunners of modern reality television were the 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.
The 1976–1980 BBC series The Big Time featured a different amateur in some field (cooking, comedy, football, etc.) trying to succeed professionally in that field, with help from notable experts. The 15-episode series is credited with starting the career of Sheena Easton, who was selected to appear in the episode showing an aspiring pop singer trying to enter the music business.
In 1978, Living in the Past had amateurs participating in a re-enactment of life in an Iron Age English village.
1980s–1990s Producer George Schlatter capitalized on the advent of videotape to create Real People, a surprise hit for NBC, and it ran from 1979 to 1984. The success of Real People was quickly copied by the television company ABC with That's Incredible, a stunt show produced by Alan Landsburg and co-hosted by Fran Tarkenton; CBS's entry into the genre was That's My Line, a series hosted by Bob Barker. The Canadian series Thrill of a Lifetime, a fantasies-fulfilled reality show, originally ran from 1982 to 1988. It was revived from 2001 to 2003. In 1985, underwater cinematographer Al Giddings teamed with former Miss Universe Shawn Weatherly on the NBC series Oceanquest, which chronicled Weatherly's adventures scuba diving in various exotic locales. Weatherly was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in informational programming. COPS, which first aired in the spring of 1989 on Fox and was developed due to the need for new programming during the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike, showed police officers on duty apprehending criminals. It introduced the camcorder look and cinéma vérité feel of much of later reality television. The 1991 television documentary on "typical American high schoolers", Yearbook, focused on seniors attending Glenbard West High School, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois and broadcast prime-time on Fox.
The series Nummer 28, which aired on Dutch television in 1991, originated the concept of putting strangers together in a limited 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 extensive use of soundtrack music and the interspersing of events on screen with after-the-fact "confessionals" recorded by cast members, which serve as narration. Nummer 28 became the model for many later series of Big Brother and its clones, and Peter Weir's full-length film The Truman Show. One year later, the same concept was used by MTV in its new series The Real World. Nummer 28 creator Erik Latour has long claimed that The Real World was directly inspired by his show. But the producers of The Real World have said that their direct inspiration was An American Family. 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 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 use in shooting enough hours on a regular basis).
Sylvania Waters (1992) was an Australian show that depicted a family, similar in concept to An American Family.
The 1994–95 O. J. Simpson murder case, during which live network television followed suspect Simpson for 90 minutes being chased by police, has been described as a seminal moment in reality television. Networks interrupted their regular television programming for months for coverage of the trial and related events. Because of Simpson's status as a top athlete and celebrity, the brutal nature of the murders, and issues of race and class in Los Angeles celebrity culture, the sensational case dominated ratings and the public conversation.