reality TV

reality TV, television genre encompassing a wide variety of purportedly unscripted programming. Because the genre is so heterogeneous, it can be difficult to fully define. In her book True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us (2022), American sociologist Danielle J. Lindemann defines reality TV as “a set of programs that feature non-actors (though they may also feature actors in reenactments) and make a claim to reality (whether or not there is any sort of “scripting” actually taking place) but are intended mainly to entertain rather than inform.” Although reality TV originated in the United States, it has broad-based appeal throughout the world, attracting younger viewers in particular.

Types of shows

“There are reality TV programmes about everything and anything, from healthcare to hairdressing, from people to pets,” writes British media scholar Annette Hill in her analysis of the genre, Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television (2005). Subgenres of reality TV include competition shows, dating shows, self-help or makeover shows, shows that purport to illuminate a particular subculture, those that focus on crime and punishment, shows that document celebrities’ daily lives, and versions of any of the preceding premises featuring celebrities instead of ordinary people.

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Television in the United States: Reality TV

Early reality TV shows

Although reality TV’s popularity exploded in the 21st century, the genre is nearly as old as television itself. The hidden-camera show Candid Camera, often identified as the first reality TV show, premiered on the ABC network in 1948 with the title Candid Microphone, reflecting the show’s roots as a radio program (various versions of the TV show aired from 1948 to 2014). Candid Camera surreptitiously filmed unsuspecting people reacting to elaborate practical jokes, such as a telephone booth that levitates during a call and a two-way mirror at a barbershop that surprises customers with startling images.

Other important mid-20th-century reality TV shows include Queen for a Day (1956–64), in which women compete for prizes by trying to tell the most compelling hard-luck stories about their lives; The Dating Game (1965–86), in which a contestant asks questions of three prospective dating partners (who are hidden from the contestant’s view) before selecting one to meet and go on a chaperoned date with; An American Family (1973), a TV documentary about the everyday life of the Louds, an upper middle-class family in Santa Barbara, California, that follows the family as the parents separate and later divorce; and Cops (1989–2023), which follows law enforcement officers as they work.

It was not until the 1990s that the characteristics that would come to be associated with 21st-century reality TV emerged—a house full of video cameras, a serial structure, “talking head” testimonial interviews, and casting intended to maximize conflict and dramatic potential—in MTV’s The Real World (1992– ), a show following a group of young adults selected to live together in a house where cameras document their behavior and interpersonal relationships. The Real World premiered to mostly unfavorable reviews but quickly transformed into a ratings powerhouse with a novel premise and relatively low production costs. Early seasons of the show are credited with frankly addressing some of the pressing social issues of the 1990s, including HIV/AIDS, abortion, and racism. A deluge of reality TV shows that remixed the core elements of The Real World followed.

Survivor and the reality TV boom

Although The Real World surfaced a winning formula to attract viewers, the premiere of Survivor (2000– ) is widely acknowledged as a turning point in the history of reality TV, a moment that catalyzed a marked increase in the genre’s production and consumption. In Survivor, contestants travel to a remote warm-weather location where they fend for themselves and compete in various team-based challenges. Every three days the contestants vote to send one of the losing team’s members home. The last person standing wins $1 million.

Survivor was an immediate success. In 2000 it was the top-rated prime-time network television series in the U.S., attracting an average of more than 28 million viewers per episode, with a record average of 52 million viewers tuning in for the first season’s finale. Only that year’s Super Bowl commanded a larger audience than the Survivor finale. The show’s relatively low production costs compared with standard prime-time fare meant that the cost of the show had already been recouped from advertising revenue before Survivor even aired. Beyond offering the example of a runaway hit series, Survivor is thought to have upped the expectations for reality programming, bringing a sense of intrigue and danger to the genre and raising the bar regarding what a show could do to shock an audience. Between the massive financial gains and the more permissive cultural landscape in which to make them, reality TV boomed in the 2000s, becoming a ubiquitous entertainment industry institution. A 2017 study found that reality TV shows made up 18 percent of that year’s 250 most popular shows. Some demographic research indicates that a majority of American households watch reality TV, which has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry.

Other catalysts for the proliferation of reality TV programming in the 2000s include the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike, changing economic conditions in the entertainment industry that made reality TV a cheaper alternative to scripted television (including the fact that the workers who make reality TV are less likely to be unionized than their scripted-TV peers), and the demise of financial interest and syndication rules in the 1990s, which had blocked networks from owning the shows they aired.

Critical assessment

Although many deride the genre as noxious, lacking in substance, exploitative, and undignified, others argue that reality TV offers insight into social values and norms. Lindemann argues that careful viewers can learn from reality TV how apt Westerners are to interpret the world “in narrow and unyielding ways,” adding:

For all of its carnivalesque aspects, the genre reflects how steadfastly we cling to simplistic, collective notions about who and what is legitimate and “real.” It spotlights the categories and meanings that we take for granted as essential, biological, and unshakable. But in doing so, it allows us to poke at these assumptions, revealing the socially constructed natures of what we consider to be “true,” “normal,” “healthy,” “legitimate,” and “good.”

Social impacts and criticism

There is similar disagreement regarding the social impacts of reality TV. Some research indicates that such programming may have a positive effect on adolescents’ self-esteem and self-assurance and that shows such as MTV’s Teen Mom: OG (2009– ) and 16 and Pregnant (2009– ) may have a positive impact when it comes to reducing teen pregnancies. Other research suggests that watching reality TV shows may contribute to negative body image, negative perceptions of exercise, and increased aggression.

Many argue that the behaviors depicted and rewarded by reality TV have had a negative effect on how Americans relate to one another. In 2022 Time magazine TV critic Judy Berman argued that, “to the extent that the U.S. has become a harsher, shallower, angrier, more divided place in the 21st century, reality TV—which has helped normalize cruelty, belligerence, superficiality, and disloyalty, and rewarded people who weaponize those traits—bears a share of the blame.”

Other cultural critics have assigned a significant role to reality TV in narratives describing the rise of former U.S. president Donald Trump, whose public persona experienced a significant boost from his business competition show, The Apprentice (2004–17), which aired its final season after its celebrity host moved into the White House.