The year was 1968. Legendary American artist Andy Warhol was preparing an exhibition in Sweden and decided to write the following sentence in the program: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”
For some people, the reality genre has its origins earlier than Warhol’s prophetic quote, as they consider Candid Camera to be the prototype of reality TV. The long-lived television show which sees practical jokes played on unsuspecting strangers while a camera documents their reactions actually started broadcasting in 1948.
Others claim the true predecessor of what we now have known as reality TV was the American documentary series An American Family, which viewers first watched in 1973. For twelve weeks, episodes documented the lives of a Santa Barbara family going through a divorce.
What we now know so well as reality television began in the late 1980s when we saw the first broadcast of American series COPS, which has been going strong for 28 seasons
Still, it was clearly the Netherlands – Tiësto’s birthplace with its thriving Electronic dance music (EDM) culture – that produced the first gem of pure reality TV, called Nummer 28. The series followed the lives of seven strangers, students sharing a house in Amsterdam.
Shortly after that, MTV cast seven strangers to spend three months in the same house and have their interactions broadcasted for the whole world to see. The show was, of course, The Real World and it has been attributed with helping break taboos and depicts contemporary reality in a brand-new way.
Nowadays, viewers are used to a number of different reality sub-genres. From courtrooms to tattoo parlours, reality TV offers us glimpses into the lives, skills, struggles, successes and (often epic) failures of hundreds of people who often got the 15 minutes of fame Warhol once promised.
All in all, recent decades have seen a major cultural shift towards the reality that extends far beyond the realm of our TV boxes. The trend for exposure and realism is permeating in a way that we sometimes fail to see. According to a 2012 Euromonitor consumer trend analysis, the popularity of social networks themselves is closely connected to this leaning, especially in terms of the ways in which the majority of users choose to narrate their lives on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and so on.
At the same time, audiences increasingly ask for less impersonal communications with services, products and businesses. That means everything from preferring to play online roulette to have the opportunity to chat in real-time with customer assistants on a website. In a way, even the tendency to turn to sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor to post and read online reviews of local restaurants is closely connected to the cultural shift towards reality – we’d rather see real people’s experience in an establishment than look at its website.
Reality TV can be polarizing – some hate it, others love it, and for many it’s a guilty pleasure. But the element of reality is obviously and certainly here to stay, in one form or another
THE FUTURE
In 1999, the film The Matrix explored the idea that perhaps the world we live in is not real but a virtual reality created by intelligent machines. That was the first time many people were introduced to the concept of virtual reality. Seventeen years later, in early 2016, consumers are able to buy the first mass-market virtual reality headsets, such as Oculus Rift and Sony’s PlayStation VR. This technological development marks an important change in the way we play videogames and even watch movies: The gaming experience is more real than ever, offering 360 degrees of movement using only your head.
In a similar fashion, YouTube has started offering 360-degree videos, which means that you don’t only see what the camera is pointing at but the entire world around it. As we embrace the reality-based culture, we also become more susceptible to it. Companies rushed to take advantage of this new technology, creating new-school, realer-than-ever ads for a series of products.
But there are even more ways in which we get our reality fix. Nowadays, more advertisements than ever before feature “real,” everyday people, who either lend their face and name to product campaigns, narrate their experiences with a service or become part of marketing in other ways
As for reality TV itself, it has been steadily popular: A 2015 survey in the US showed that reality TV programs are the fourth most popular genre of the TV show, with 34% of the audience watching. Last year, an exhaustive historical review of reality television counted 309 different programs in the US only.
Long-lived, then groundbreaking reality competition franchises began to pop-up on our television sets in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, took the entire globe by storm and still dominate ratings: Big Brother, American Idol, Survivor, America’s Got Talent and MasterChef were all exported from their original countries of creation for localized productions in different countries.
Yes, reality TV can be polarizing – some hate it, others love it, and for many, it’s a guilty pleasure. But the element of reality is obvious and certainly here to stay, in one form or another.