Survivor, American Idol, The Biggest Loser, and more. Reality TV has been a part of our lives since 1992 when MTV premiered The Real World. Now while MTV may like to brag that they birthed reality TV with the show that follows seven different people each year from different backgrounds and ethnicity, by putting them all together in a different city every season, they were not the first reality TV show to air.
What? You gotta be kidding me!
It’s true. I mean, if you want to get technical, you can trace reality TV all the way back to the radio, with programs like Candid Microphone back in 1947. Then Candid Camera on the small screen in 1948. Today’s definition of Reality TV differs from back then, though. We think of reality TV as a show that follows around real people, from the real world, doing real things. A voyeurs dream, if you will. Game shows and documentaries generally don’t fall in to the reality TV category as we know it today, so we can rule those out altogether.
Since its modern-day creation, reality TV has been big business, especially for product placement. The Biggest Loser tops the list with more than 6,200 brand names shown, followed by American Idol with more than 4,600 products placed in plain sight of the viewer. You know companies are paying bucks for that, too. While the genre has come under scrutiny for humiliating the average Joe, and making instant celebrities out of people like Omarosa (The Apprentice) and Richard Hatch (Survivor), there’s no denying its appeal to folks like you and me, and the millions of other people who watch Reality TV on a nightly basis.
The fact is, though, that people have been watching reality TV since 1973, when PBS aired the first ever modern-day reality TV show, An American Family. Edited down from over 300 hours of footage, the show was 12 episodes long, and followed the Louds from Santa Barbara, California. An American Family chronicled the seven members of the family during the separation of parents Bill and Pat, after Pat filed for divorce, and how it affected them all.
So while MTV may have bragging rights to what we now know as reality TV, take a second to remember what really got it started. A family going through a divorce on PBS. How touching.
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