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A Brief History of Reality Television

Call me a sucker for classic television shows, but ever since I was old enough to reach the dial on my parents’ Zenith console set, I watched everything I could get my eyes on. One of my earliest TV memories is of my Dad catching me watching the racy ’70s sitcom Soap through the stair rail. The show wasn’t exactly ideal viewing for a seven-year-old, but even then I knew a good story when I saw one.

As I grew older and more interested in someday writing for television, I was fascinated to learn how traditionally scripted sitcoms and dramas evolved, each new round impacting the shows that came after them. I Love Lucy, aside from being one of the funniest and most durable situation comedies ever made, introduced the world to the three-camera, live studio audience sitcom setup that’s alive and well to this very day, while shows like All In The Family and Maude stretched the boundaries of what could be discussed on television in a manner that’s continued by current shows like South Park and Family Guy.

Just as traditionally scripted shows have evolved, however, Reality TV has also been a hotbed of technical and storytelling innovation during its lifetime… one that stretches back to the earliest days of television itself.

Before we dive into the particulars of how Reality shows are written, it’s good to know a bit about how they came to be in the first place.

Let’s be clear — this is by no means a complete history of Reality Television, as that would easily make for its own book. But here’s an overview to help you get an idea of how the genre evolved into a staple of our television diet.

“These early days of ‘reality’ television were innocent, truly human and lacked the hard edge and back-stabbing elements so prevalent in today’s programs. It was a softer and gentler era and one that deserves its own place in television history. I am proud to have been a part of it.” — Albert Fisher, President /CEO of Fisher Television Productions Inc.

Origins and Pioneers

Long ago and far away, in a galaxy broadcast in black-and-white, dinosaurs like the Milton Berleasaurus and the mighty Ed Sullivanadactyl ruled the airwaves.

Texaco Star Theater, The Ed Sullivan Show, and even the venerable CBS Evening News made their debuts between May and August of 1948, but one curiosity among that pack of summer shows really stood out. Alan Funt’s Candid Camera featured the jovial Funt playing hidden-camera gags on unsuspecting marks, working them into a befuddled lather before finally letting them off the hook with his signature phrase, “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!” The adaptation of Candid Microphone, Funt’s radio show, to television successfully added a new dimension to the formerly audio-only hijinks while giving the world what may have been its first “reality” program.

Yes, Reality TV may well have started with a prank show. Even in the late 1940s, you weren’t safe from getting Punk’d.¹

While media scholars generally agree that Candid Camera was the first Reality show, one could certainly argue by today’s all-encompassing definition of “reality” that Ted Mack’s The Original Amateur Hour, a talent-search program, may actually own the title. It had premiered on the DuMont network months before, on January 18 of the same year.²

No matter who got there first, the ball was rolling by the end of the summer of 1948. Networks caught on that viewers loved being able to see themselves, if only vicariously, on television. Whether they felt represented by the everyman conned into participating in one of Funt’s crazy schemes or by a gifted nobody in search of fame and fortune on The Original Amateur Hour, people tuned in in droves.

Across the pond the following year in 1949, The British Broadcasting Company’s Come Dancing, a ballroom dancing series that encouraged countless Britons to take to the dance floor, waltzed into view. Early on, Come Dancing was broadcast from amateur dance events held around the country and was largely about teaching viewers how to dance. By 1953, however, the Eric Morley-created program had evolved into a competition, remaining so until it departed the airwaves for good in 1998, making it one of the longest running shows in history.³

“The Original Amateur Hour was hosted by Ted Mack and was about as true to ‘Reality Television’ as you could get. Amateur performers (singers, dancers, musicians, novelty acts, comics, etc.) would perform before a live audience. Home viewers would cast their votes via telephone and/or postcard for their favorites. Winners would come back and try to become a three-time champion and go on to the finals held annually at New York’s Madison Square Garden. ‘Graduates’ from this classic series included Pat Boone, Ann-Margret, Gladys Knight, Robert Klein, and even the Reverend Louis Farrakhan.” — Albert Fisher, President/CEO of Fisher Television Productions Inc.

Animals even got in on the Reality boom with Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, a heavily narrated nature show that first aired in 1963 and ran until 1988. While host Marlon Perkins’ high-school-filmstrip narrative style may have been a bit stilted, it laid the foundation for much of the narrative-driven nature programming you see today on Reality networks like Animal Planet and Discovery.⁴

The American audience’s taste for Reality shows continued to grow, but well into the mid-‘60s, the setups had always been far removed from the living room. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Andy Warhol’s 1966 film Chelsea Girls turned reality sideways when it knocked on a few doors in a legendary New York hotel/apartment house.

The movie was comprised of a number of vignettes featuring Warhol’s acquaintances, many of whom resided at the Chelsea Hotel, made famous over time as a haven for countless young artists, writers, actors, and musicians like Arthur C. Clarke, Bob Dylan, Sid Vicious, Robert Mapplethorpe and Janis Joplin. While Chelsea Girls purported itself to be a documentary, its content was clearly manipulated, creatively whittled down from many hours of source material and possessing a more than slight aroma of premeditated staginess. The split-screen experimental film clocked in at over three hours, and to say that critical opinion of it varied slightly would be a gross understatement.

No matter how the film was received, Chelsea Girls had gotten the wheels turning on the idea of following subjects through their everyday lives. While not a television show, it begged the next-stage question of the Reality genre, “What would happen if cameras could settle in to a home environment for an extended shoot?” Producers began to wonder if it would it be possible for subjects to relax enough before the cameras to yield something that felt as gritty as Chelsea Girls over a season or more on the tube.

Seven years later, in 1973, An American Family found out when it brought to PBS the true-life trials and tribulations of the Loud family, sewn together from seven months of documentary-style coverage shot in 1971. The twelve-episode series pulled few punches, even as parents Bill and Pat Loud separated and filed for divorce, and son Lance “came out” as one of the first openly gay “characters” ever featured on television.⁵

The show was a phenomenon, airing to an audience of some ten million viewers and landing the Louds on the cover of Newsweek. American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote in TV Guide that An American Family’s “reality” format was “as new and significant as the invention of the drama or the novel — a new way in which people can learn to look at life, by seeing the real life of others interpreted by the camera.”⁶

Reality Television continued to develop and proliferate over the next decade and a half with a number of breakout hits, one of the most notable being Real People. Premiering in 1979, Real People was a segment show that dropped in each week on ordinary people with extraordinary stories and abilities… folks like Captain Sticky, a flamboyant self-styled hero who championed consumer rights, Ron “Typewriter” Mingo, the world’s fastest typist, or gymnastic instructor Joel Hale, who performed backflips for a quarter each in order to raise money to take his students to the Olympics. According to Real People Executive Producer George Schlatter, much of the show’s appeal was in the lack of manipulation and staginess in the remotely produced segments. In a 2004 interview, Schlatter stated, “We would do the research, and we would show up, and whatever happened, that was what was going to happen, you know?”⁷

Other hits like TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes, featuring film and television outtakes intermingled with elaborate Candid Camera-like pranks played on celebrities, came and went with great ratings success. Reality shows, it seemed, were everywhere, though no one could have foreseen just how much more saturated the market would soon become.

While Reality programming had certainly proven its popularity, there was nothing to prepare viewers or the entertainment industry itself for the boom triggered by the 1988 Writers’ Guild of America Strike, arguably ground zero for the explosion of Reality Television that still reverberates today.

At the time of the strike, Reality shows were the networks’ only option for getting fresh content on the air, generating demand for shows like John Langley and Malcolm Barbour’s gritty and long-running COPS, which made its debut in 1989. What could be more thrilling and less expensive to shoot than following cops and crooks around with a camera?

While COPS stormed the turf of traditionally scripted drama, America’s Funniest Home Videos made a comic splash when it blasted into living rooms the same year on the ABC network. America’s Funniest Home Videos, from Executive Producer Vin Di Bona, went a step further than COPS with an even bolder premise: Anyone with a video camera pointed on them in the right place at the right time could be a star, and a hilarious family-friendly comedy program could be constructed from viewer sub-missions alone.

Just think about that business model for a moment… an hour of primetime television comprised primarily of viewer-submitted material.

While the format was adapted from an existing show in Japan, Di Bona made it his own with the help of host Bob Saget, whose running commentary on the videos and in-studio audience interactions served to make the content even funnier.

Audiences went nuts for the new wave of Reality programming, even as the networks began to fall hard for the cheap fix Reality shows provided them. Even the biggest Reality shows of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s cost a fraction of what networks had spent on star-driven sitcoms and dramas. Reality show participants could be wrangled at a cost barely north of a baked potato and a handshake at a time when major stars could cost producers sixty, seventy, even a hundred thousand dollars an episode.

When Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray premiered their strangers in-a-house Reality series The Real World on MTV in 1992, they credited An American Family as their inspiration. The Real World, whose inaugural season filled a massive New York co-op apartment with young strangers, was a breakout smash. The opening narrative for the show spelled out its thesis: “This is the true story… of eight strangers… picked to live in a house… work together and have their lives taped… to find out what happens… when people stop being polite… and start getting real… The Real World.”

The Real World quickly became a touchstone for a generation of younger viewers who weren’t even a twinkle in their parents’ eyes when An American Family made its debut and who weren’t finding themselves represented accurately in most sitcoms or dramas of the era. The series was also credited with introducing the “confessional” device often seen thereafter in contemporary American Reality series.⁸ In confessionals, participants are encouraged to keep private video journals and self-document their thoughts and feelings on camera in a safe area, removed from cast mates and crew.

Concerns that the show could not be brought back for a second season due to the slim likelihood of retaining a cast of non-actors were met with an ingenious response from producers Bunim and Murray: A new cast in a new location each subsequent year would ensure that the drama would always remain fresh.

The Real World’s second season, set in Los Angeles, was arguably an even bigger hit with audiences, and by season three, when a San Francisco home was populated with castmembers like the irrepressible bike messenger Puck and HIV-positive gay activist Pedro Zamora, the show truly hit its stride as the new gold standard for youth-oriented Reality programming. As of this printing, the show has survived 24 seasons on MTV and has been renewed for two more, making it the longest-running program in the network’s history.

Niche-interest basic cable channels grew in number throughout the ‘90s and early ‘00s, buoyed substantially by lower-cost models with lifestyle and home improvement Reality shows that could be run repeatedly for weeks, months, even years at a time before going stale. Do-it-yourself home renovation shows, like the ones discussed at the top of this book, had a shelf life that stayed fresh as long as consumer taste in flooring and window treatments remained stable. If those didn’t change every few years, the shows could theoretically repeat over and over until someone came along and reinvented wood, glue and nails.

The big networks, rapidly losing market share to basic cable, joyously milked new cash cows like Survivor and The Amazing Race, shows that far outperformed much of their scripted competition while simultaneously relieving some of the financial strain the networks were feeling.

Contemporary Reality

Reality Television marches on, with scores of new titles cropping up every year. Scholars and critics are coming to grips with the fact that the medium isn’t about to fade away and is now worthy of critical discussion rather than simple dismissal. Yes, more than a half-century after Candid Camera, the genre has finally managed to establish itself as more than a fad to be endured. So pervasive is Reality Television in today’s broadcast universe that in 2003, Les Moonves, President of the CBS Network, informed the New York Times that “The world as we knew it is over.” He should know — he’s the executive who opened the door to Mark Burnett and Survivor.