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Reality TV Part Seven

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The Evolution of Reality TV

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[ dog barks ]

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Has reality TV evolved much since its beginning?

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Reality TV has been around a while.

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Candid Camera in the 40s,

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gameshows like Truth and Consequences

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and Beat the Clock in the 40s, 50s, 60s, et cetera.

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One show that I love to talk about is the show --

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I think it started in the late 40s called Queen for a Day.

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This is a great example of how reality TV

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has really not changed that much.

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This was a show where

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women and only women

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would come on and there would be

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a few women telling their stories.

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And they were always these terrible sob stories.

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So it would be like -

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Because my husband had two heart attacks

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he's not supposed to lift.

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See, this is not your season, Mrs. Burn.

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- It hasn't been for a while. - No.

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Mrs. Rogers, do you have a family and children?

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Five.

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Five! One husband. What's Mr. Rogers do?

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Well, he isn't employed now.

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And you've got shattered nerves.

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You're wrinkling your nice little handkerchief here.

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And they would just tell these stories.

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It was so demeaning and so depressing.

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Let's hear your applause for candidate number one.

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[ applause ]

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Time away. Number two.

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[ louder applause ]

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Number three.

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[ thunderous applause ]

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And then at the end of the show,

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one woman would be crowned queen for a day.

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She'd get a robe

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and a little crown and they'd give her the refrigerator.

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And then they'd also give her a vacation

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or something to treat her.

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But it's this exact same thing that happens now

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except that

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these people are demeaning themselves as opposed to producers demeaning them.

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These are the people who

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go on these competitive reality shows

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and tell their sob stories,

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as if their tragic history has anything to do

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with their cooking abilities.

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And, yes, I understand the, you know,

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let's say, "My mother passed away

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and she was the chef of the family

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and it really inspired me." Done.

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But these are sob stories --

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You see it a lot in the American Idol kind of shows.

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They just travel through the entire show.

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And that's what gets people to vote for you

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if it's an audience participation show,

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is telling these sob stories.

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So this is the kind of thing where

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when reality TV started, these folks

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knew that you wanted this sob story.

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That's been there from the beginning and that's still there now.

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[ pen writing ]

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Will the Hunger Games be the future of reality TV?

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If you talk to speculative fiction writers,

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they would say exactly that.

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I mean, we've all read The Hunger Games.

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You're gonna have children killing children on TV.

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If we keep going at the exact rate we are going,

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yes, that is going to happen.

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Unless we do somehow come into some dystopian future

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after the world ends,

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I don't think we're going to get to that level.

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It will have to plateau at some point.

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I think that's when reality TV dies

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and either we go back to scripted television

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or we come up with something new that we wouldn't have thought of.

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If in the 1940s, you presented the idea of

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The Bachelor to someone, they'd be like, "Hah!"

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So there might be some idea like that

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where you'd present it to us now and we'd be like,

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"That's not a thing."

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But 50 years from now, it might be.

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- But I think the Internet is where most of that is gonna live. - Yeah.

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Not prime time TV for sure.

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Where are the other areas? You know, each season

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we've seen bold new steps in different areas.

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So, my son and I watch Naked and Afraid

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and it is so not sexual.

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It is gross. There are people having to eat

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worms and snakes to stay alive.

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It's really cool to look at.

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The naked part has nothing to do with the show.

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And yet it's a great marketing hook for people to

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come and watch, I guess, and leave it to Discovery.

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But how does that work then in the next generation?

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Are we gonna have naked Shark Week

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where people jump in with hungry Great Whites

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- without their clothes on and we see them eaten? - Yep.

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Once a year, someone dies on camera.

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I mean, absolutely.

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What's happening with reality TV

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is that we're starting out with these base shows.

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And there's The Real World,

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and then there's Survivor.

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Combine them and you get Temptation Island.

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That's how reality TV works

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is you have these shows that don't seem that crazy on their own,

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and then some producer is like,

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"But what if we did both of them?"

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It's kind of like how in Silicon Valley,

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you have Twitter meets Yelp for old men.

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And here you have Survivor meets The Real World

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for 18-year-old girls.

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That's what happens

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is these producers take different

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reality shows, combine them --

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So, like you said, Shark Week dating.

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Yes, I honestly don't think that that's

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that far out of the question.

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I don't think we're gonna get that much more nudity

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and that much more violence, et cetera,

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but we're gonna get weirder and weirder combinations of stuff for sure.

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It's a great game show we also watch called Wipeout.

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Where people run through syrup and have like --

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It's just, for like, 300 dollars. That's what the winner wins.

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Meantime, they have broken bones and whatever.

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Yeah, that's like American Gladiators meets Nickelodeon

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- or something, yeah. - Exactly.

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There are so many combinations.

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So if you think of something like The Apprentice, right?

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This is a social experiment, absolutely,

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but it's also a game show.

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It's also a competition.

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So you get shows like this where

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you're combining so many different elements

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of so many different genres of reality shows

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that you create a new genre.

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And I don't know what I'd call The Apprentice.

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We'd have to come up with a totally new genre for it, right?

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And that's, again, how reality TV from the beginning has grown

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is that it starts with a game show and then you throw in

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a social experiment, put them together,

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you have a new genre. Then take that genre,

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add it to another one, you have a new one.

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And it kind of snowballs like that.

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[ pen writing ]

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Has the overall theme of reality TV changed?

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What do we expect the future of reality TV to be?

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Yeah, like, children killing children.

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