it is monday february 2nd 2026 and today we are
doing something well something a little dangerous
we are taking a genre that let's be honest Most
people dismiss as trash. You know, the guilty
pleasure, the background noise while you fold
laundry. Yeah, the stuff you don't admit to watching
at a dinner party. Exactly. And we're going to
argue that it is actually the most significant
cultural shift of the last 50 years. The bold
claim. I can already hear people rolling their
eyes thinking, oh great, an hour on people throwing
wine at each other. Right. But that's the thing.
But when you actually look at the stack of research
we have today, it's... It's a hard argument to
refute. We aren't just talking about entertainment
anymore. We're talking about a fundamental change
in how human beings perceive reality itself,
how we perceive truth. Exactly. We are diving
deep into reality television. And look, if you're
listening to this thinking, I don't watch The
Bachelor, I don't watch The Housewives, this
doesn't apply to me, you are wrong. You're absolutely
wrong. Because the mechanics invented by reality
TV, the confessionals, the editing of truth,
the commodification of the self, they've escaped
the television screen. Oh, they've completely
broken containment. They've run our social media
now. They're starting to run our politics. You
know, it's funny you put it that way. We've essentially
built a society that operates on the rules of
Survivor. It's true. Yes. The genre has moved
from being a fad, which is what everyone called
it in 2001, to being, well. the operating system
of modern culture. So our mission today is to
figure out how on earth that happened. We are
going to dig up the absolute roots of this, which
go back way, way further than the 1990s. Much
further. We're talking Nazi Germany. We're talking
the 1988 Writers Guild strike. We are going to
break down what the industry calls soft scripting.
And I think... We need to answer that really
big central question. Right. Did reality TV just
hold up a mirror and reflect who we were already?
Or did it actually train us? Or did it train
us to be who we are now? That's the real question.
OK, so let's start with the basics. Before we
get into the the wild history, we need a working
definition because reality TV is this. massive
umbrella that's huge it covers everything from
a singing competition to you know a documentary
about crab fishing and the Bering Sea right and
they're totally different experiences so if you
look at the academic definitions the thing they
all have in common is it boils down to a genre
of programming that documents purportedly unscripted
real life situations. Purportedly. Purportedly
is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
It's doing all the work. Starring ordinary people,
or at least they start as ordinary people rather
than professional actors. Okay, so. unscripted
and ordinary people. But that could also describe
a Ken Burns documentary. What's the difference?
Well, there are structural markers. Right. Things
that separate it. The biggest one is the confessional.
Right. The interview. The interview segments,
you know, where the action freezes and the cast
member sits down, looks just off camera and narrates
their inner monologue to us. I couldn't believe
she said that. It gives you the internal thoughts
that a documentary would usually just let you
infer. Exactly. It removes all subtext. Yeah.
Then you often have an elimination format, which
is key. Yeah. And probably the biggest thing
is a deliberate blurring of the line between
observing reality and creating entertainment.
A documentarian's goal is to observe. A reality
producer's goal is to make a good TV show. And
if reality is boring, you goose it a little bit.
You goose it. You produce it. That's the key.
Okay. So with that in mind, let's jump into the
history. Because the timeline in these notes,
it just blew my mind. I think most of us, myself
included, assume this all started with the real
world or maybe candid camera. That's the common
wisdom. But you found something much, much darker
and older. It is controversial and some media
historians debate it. But if we are looking for
the absolute first instance of observing ordinary
people in a domestic setting for... We have to
look at Germany. When? In the 1940s. Wow. During
the Nazi regime. Yes. There was a show called
Familienkroniken. It translates to A Night with
Hans and Jelly. And it featured a young couple.
Now, here's the thing. They weren't actors playing
a role. They were presented as themselves, acting
as model Aryans. So it was aspirational. This
is how you should live. It was pure propaganda.
They were presenting their everyday lives to
the camera. supposedly without a script, to show
the ideal German home life. That is absolutely
chilling. It's reality TV as a tool of the state.
From its very inception. It was heavily censored,
obviously, curated to present a very specific
image. But structurally, if you look at the core
components, it fits the definition. It's the
weaponization of the ordinary. Precisely. It
established from day one that this genre was
not about capturing truth. It was about manufacturing
a specific version of it. So from the very beginning,
the genre was about manipulation. That sets a
dark precedent. OK, so let's fast forward a bit.
Let's move into the post -war era. This is where
we get the stuff that looks a lot more familiar
to American audiences. Right. 1948. This is the
name everyone knows. Alan Funt. Candid Camera.
Candid Camera. This is the prototype for a huge
branch of the reality tree. He actually started
it on radio as The Candid Microphone, which is
a fascinating idea in itself. A prank show on
the radio. Yeah, but moving it to television
where you could see the faces, that changed the
game. It was pranks, sure. You know, the talking
mailbox, the car with no engine. But the core
appeal wasn't actually the prank itself. It was
the reaction. It was the reaction. It was watching
a normal person's face go from confusion to anger
to laughter when they realized what was happening.
It was the first time a mass audience was asked
to find entertainment in the raw, unpolished,
unscripted reactions of regular people. And that
hunger for realness just kept growing. I mean,
throughout the 50s, you had all these weird early
experiments. It was like Queen for a Day, which
was just brutal. Oh, that show was something
else. Women competing over who had the most tragic
life to win a washing machine. Exactly. Or Confession,
a show from 1958 where they just interviewed
criminals. Like a precursor to all the true crime
stuff we see now. So the seeds are there. But
the next major evolution, the shift from it being
a gimmick to something more like a documentary,
that happens across the pond. It happens in the
UK in 1964. This is the Up series. Seven Up.
A masterpiece. I mean, truly one of the greatest
achievements in television history, reality or
otherwise. Explain the concept for anyone who
hasn't seen it. So Granada Television, a British
network. They interviewed 14 seven -year -olds
from wildly different social backgrounds in the
UK. You had kids from the absolute upper crust,
you know, boarding schools, and kids from the
east end of London from poverty. And the premise
was based on that Jesuit motto, right? Exactly.
Give me a child until he's seven and I will give
you the man. The idea was to see if England's
rigid class structure in the 60s predetermined
their lives. A fascinating sociological experiment.
But the key is... They didn't stop. They didn't
stop. They went back every seven years, 14 up,
21 up, 28 up, all the way to 63 up a few years
ago. You watch these people live their entire
lives. You see them fall in love, get divorced,
have kids, face illnesses. And think about what
that did culturally. These weren't actors. They
were just regular kids who signed up for a documentary.
But through the simple act of sustained observation.
They became celebrities. They became celebrities.
The audience felt they knew them. We have a relationship
with Tony the cab driver or Neil the politician.
That is the direct ancestor of the parasocial
relationships we have with Instagram influencers
today. It's that same mechanism. It proved that
an ordinary life, if you zoom in close enough
and you stick with it, is incredibly compelling.
More compelling than fiction sometimes. So if
7 Up was the sort of highbrow, respectable documentary
ancestor. The 1970s gave us the messy, dramatic
soap opera Ancestors. Oh, yeah. An American Family,
1973, on PBS of all places. This show is legendary.
People still talk about it. It was a 12 -part
series. The filmmakers moved in with the Loud
family, a wealthy family in Santa Barbara, California.
It was intended to be, again, a serious anthropological
study of the American nuclear family at a time
of great change. But reality intervened. Reality
had other plans. During the filming, the parents,
Pat and Bill Loud, Their marriage just, it crumbled.
And they decided to divorce. On camera. Pat asks
Bill for a divorce on camera. It's an incredibly
raw, uncomfortable moment. I can't even imagine.
And that wasn't the only thing. Not at all. Yeah.
Their oldest son, Lance Loud, he came out as
gay. And in 1973, having an openly gay man on
television who wasn't a stereotype, who was just
living his life in New York's counterculture.
It was revolutionary. And the audience went absolutely
nuts. It got huge ratings for PBS. It was on
the cover of Newsweek. It had the slow observational
pacing of a documentary, but it had the plot
twists of a soap opera. Yeah. Divorce, betrayal,
a son breaking societal norms. That's the secret
sauce, isn't it? That's the secret sauce. The
producers of MTV's The Real World, the show we'll
get to, explicitly cited an American family as
their number one inspiration. They saw the formula.
They realized that if you just put cameras on
people long enough. The cracks will eventually
show. And the cracks are where the entertainment
is. Okay, so we're building the creative lineage
here. We have the pranks, the long -form documentary,
the family drama. But I want to pause on the
1980s. Because we often think about art and creativity
driving culture. But more often than not, it's
money. It's economics. Always. And in 1988, there
was a specific event that I think explains exactly
why reality TV took over the world. It wasn't
a show. You're talking about the Writers Guild
Strike of 88. The Writers Strike. This is such
a crucial piece of context that I think most
people miss. It's everything. You see this pattern
again and again. Reality TV thrives when scripted
TV is in crisis. Explain what happened. So the
writers go on strike. All the scripted shows,
your sitcoms, your dramas, they shut down production.
Right. And for the big networks, CBS, NBC, ABC,
it's a panic. They have empty slots in their
primetime schedule. No new scripts coming in
and ad revenue on the line. They're scrambling,
showing reruns. But there is a new player in
town. There's the new kid on the block, the Fox
Network. They were the scrappy upstart. They
needed content and crucially, they needed it
cheap. They couldn't afford a big Tom Selleck
drama. No way. So they looked at the strike not
as a crisis, but as an opportunity. Yeah. They
realized, wait a minute, if you just follow police
officers around with a camera. You don't need
a writer. You don't need a writer. You don't
need expensive actors. You don't need to build
sets. The street is your set. The cops are your
actors. The crime is your script. And Cop P .S.
premiered in 1989. Bad boys, bad boys, what is
he going to do? It wasn't just a creative choice.
It was a strike -breaking weapon. It was the
ultimate strike -proof format. And it introduced
that aesthetic, that shaky, handheld cinema verite
look that our brains now instantly associate
with truth and authenticity. Yes, but... And
this is the key insight from the research. The
real game changer copy S and the reality boom
that followed wouldn't have been sustainable
on a mass scale without a specific piece of technology
that arrived the very same year in 1989. You're
talking about avid the editing software. Avid
technology. I think for people who don't work
in media, it's hard to grasp why a piece of software
could change the content of television so dramatically.
Can you break that down? Why does this matter
so much? Okay, think about the logistics before
this. Before 1989, editing was linear. You were
either physically cutting and taping strips of
film together, or you were working with massive,
clunky tape decks. So if you wanted to move a
scene from the end of the show to the beginning,
it was a huge physical process. A nightmare.
You had to reassemble everything that came after
it. Now imagine you're making a reality show.
You shoot 100 hours of footage of a family just
living. Arguing, eating dinner, watching TV,
turning that mountain of tape into a watchable
22 -minute episode was an economic and logistical
impossibility. It would take forever. It would
cost a fortune. So you couldn't just let the
cameras roll 247. You couldn't. It was too much
raw material to handle. But Avid changed everything.
It was nonlinear digital editing. What does that
mean, nonlinear? It means you could digitize
all that footage, turn it into computer files,
then on a screen. You could just drag and drop
clips. You could take a reaction shot from Tuesday
and paste it onto a comment that was made on
Friday. You could try a thousand different versions
of a scene in an hour. So the technology allowed
the editors to become the primary storytellers.
They became the writers. They could construct
a narrative from thousands of hours of disconnected
moments. It made it financially viable to shoot
Turbo 477. It created the economic model. It
created the entire economic model that made the
genre explode. It suddenly made reality TV significantly
cheaper to produce than scripted TV. And in Hollywood,
cheaper always wins. So now we have the format,
we have the economic incentive from the strike,
and we have the technology to make it all work.
The perfect storm. And now we enter the 90s,
the explosion, and it all really kicks off with
this simple concept, strangers in a house. Which,
you know, we have to give credit where it's due.
It didn't start in America. How did it start?
It started in the Netherlands, a show called
Number 28 in 1991. Never heard of it. Most people
haven't. But it had all the elements. It put
a group of young strangers together in a house.
It used pop music on the soundtrack to heighten
emotion. And it pioneered the use of the confessional,
having the cast members look directly into a
camera in a separate room and spill their guts.
So MTV basically lifted the whole format. Well,
The Real World launched in 1992, and there's
a longstanding dispute. The creator of number
28 claims they ripped them off. The Real World
producers claim they were just inspired by an
American family. The truth is probably somewhere
in the middle. Probably. But the real world is
the one that codified the language in the United
States. This is the true story of seven strangers
picked to live in a house. And have their lives
taped. It became the template, the absolute blueprint.
But even with the real world on MTV, it was still
a niche youth culture thing. We needed a spark
to train the mass audience. And looking at the
timeline, the mid -90s gave us a reality show
that wasn't technically a show at all. You're
talking about the white bronco. I'm talking about
the O .J. Simpson trial. From 1994 to 1995. Reading
through the analysis on this, it really does
tick every single box of a modern reality franchise,
doesn't it? It's uncanny. You have a cast of
bizarre, memorable characters. You have Cato
Kaelin, the houseguest. You have the dream team
of lawyers, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Shapiro. You
have a central villain or hero, depending on
your perspective. You have the confessionals,
which were the daily press conferences on the
courthouse steps. And crucially. It disrupted
the broadcast schedule. That's the key part.
News networks preempted the daytime soap operas
to show the live trial coverage. And millions
of people who are used to watching actors pretend
to have drama on General Hospital suddenly realized.
This is better. This has real stakes, real people,
real life or death consequences. It completely
addicted the American public to serialized real
life drama. It was the nation's first big binge
watch. And the irony, of course, is the cast
list. It's almost too on the nose for a script
writer. Robert Kardashian, one of the key defense
attorneys. It's unbelievable. The defense attorney
for the original reality show fathered the family
that would come to define the entire genre a
decade later. It connects the dots perfectly
from the 90s to now. It absolutely primed the
pump. The audience was ready. They had the taste
for it. And then right at the turn of the millennium,
the genre went nuclear. It went global. Yeah.
And we got the competition format. Survivor.
Survivor changed everything. Full stop. Again,
it didn't start in the U .S. No, the format was
created in Sweden. It was called Expedition Robinson.
And it first aired in 1997. But when the U .S.
version, Survivor, hit the air in the summer
of 2000, it was a cultural atom bomb. Because
it added a game engine. It wasn't just observing
people coexisting. It was an elimination sport.
The tribe has spoken. That added a layer of strategy
and gameplay that was completely new. You weren't
just living. You were competing. And that brought
in the strategy element. Alliances, betrayal,
backstabbing. And crucially, it introduced the
immunity mechanic. Right. Which is a fascinating
concept. The idea that in a game of social elimination,
where it's all about being liked, you can perform
a purely physical or mental task that makes you
untouchable. It doesn't matter if everyone hates
you. If you win immunity, you're safe. That adds
a layer of game theory that separates it from
just a simple popularity contest. It made it
acceptable for smart people to watch and analyze
reality TV. It wasn't just drama. It was a sport.
And the ratings were astronomical. Then we had
American Idol launch in 2002, which dominated
U .S. television ratings for nearly a decade
straight. The genre was on top of the world.
Right. But there was a wobble, wasn't there?
The research mentions a dip around 9 -11. There
was. After the attacks in 2001, the mood of the
country shifted dramatically. People wanted comfort,
they wanted connection, or they wanted hard news.
And watching people scheme to win a million dollars
felt frivolous. It felt trivial. Interest in
shows like The Amazing Race and The Mole waned
for a bit. There was a moment where the industry
thought, OK, the fad is over. It was a fun ride,
but we're done with this. But the cable networks
had other ideas. The cable networks looked at
the numbers. The economics were just too good
to ignore. Networks like Bravo, AE, E. VH1. They
realized they could fill 24 hours of programming
for pennies on the dollar compared to producing
one episode of a scripted drama. And this is
where we get the celeb -reality era. Exactly.
The first big hit was The Osbournes on MTV in
2002, following a washed -up heavy metal star
and his family. It was hilarious and bizarre
and surprisingly heartfelt. And it led to this
flood of shows. The Anna Nicole Show, Flavor
of Love on VH1. They took the strangers in a
house format and applied it to D -list celebrity.
Which brings us to the absolute zoo of subgenres
we have today. It's not just one thing anymore.
I want to break these down because it really
shows how incredibly adaptable this format is.
Like a virus, it can mutate to fit any host environment.
Let's start with the direct descendant of the
real world, the docu -soap. Right, so the next
big evolution here was a show called Deguna Beach,
the real Orange County on MTV in 2004. I remember
this. It was positioned as the real version of
the hit scripted drama, The O .C. And it looked
like it. Unlike the gritty handheld look of copy
S or early real world, Laguna Beach was shot
beautifully. It had slow motion. It had a pop
punk soundtrack. It looked like a movie. And
it had no confessionals. No confessionals, which
blurred the lines even further. You watched it
and you thought, is this written? How did they
get that perfect shot of them looking sadly out
at the ocean? And that burst the hills, which
was even more polished. And eventually the 800
pound gorilla of the subgenre, the real housewife.
Which is just the daytime soap opera structure
alliances, rivalries, gossip applied to the lives
of wealthy women in different cities. It's all
about conflict, status, and lifestyle porn. Looking
at mansions you'll never afford. OK, so that's
one branch. What about the subculture shows?
This seems to be a huge category. It is. This
is the cultural tourism branch. You take a specific,
often misunderstood or isolated group. Like the
Guidos of Jersey Shore. Or the polygamists of
Sister Wives or the Amish kids on Breaking Amish
or the family on Duck Dynasty. Which became a
monster hit. In 2013, Duck Dynasty became the
most popular reality series in cable television
history. More people were watching that than
most scripted shows. It's fascinating because
it allows you as the viewer to sit on your couch
and get a window into a world that is completely
alien to your own. You can judge it, you can
admire it, but you get to observe it from a safe
distance. And you have the occupational shows,
Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, Axemen. High
stakes, blue collar, mostly male dominated jobs.
Right. Very different demographic. And then there's
a subcategory of that, the transactional shows.
Pawn Stars is the perfect example. That format
is genius. It's brilliant. Because every segment
has a self -contained story. Someone brings in
an item. You get a little history lesson about
the item. There's negotiation. A deal is made
or not made. It's clean. It's simple. And it
mixes history, finance, and character drama.
And we can't forget the social experiments. This
is where things get a little more high concept
and sometimes a little dark. Y -Swap is the classic
example of conflict engineering. The premise
is just built for fireworks. You take two families
with completely opposing values, a vegan, pacifist,
homeschooling family, and a hunting, military,
fast food eating family, and you swap the mothers
for two weeks. It is literally designed to create
friction. And we've seen this evolve into things
like The Traitors recently. Which is a brilliant
murder mystery format. But then you get the really
dark stuff from the 2000s. There was a UK show
called Shattered. where contestants competed
to see how long they could go without sleep.
That sounds like torture. They started hallucinating.
Or an American show called Solitary, where people
were put into solitary confinement pods and had
to endure these bizarre challenges. It gets pretty
dystopian pretty fast. It pushes the boundaries
of ethics, which is a theme we need to come back
to. But on the lighter side, you also have the
parodies and hoaxes. Yes, the self -aware shows.
The Joe Schmoe show was one of the first. They
took one regular guy and surrounded him with
actors playing every... reality tv archetype
the villain the dumb blonde the hero and he didn't
know Or I Want to Marry Harry, where a group
of American women were tricked into thinking
they were competing for the affections of Prince
Harry. He was just a random lookalike. Yeah.
And then you have the pinnacle of the form, which
is something like Nathan for You. I love Nathan
for You. It's brilliant because it uses the deadpan,
awkward language of reality TV, the long pauses,
the earnest voiceover, the staged scenarios to
create incredible comedy. It deconstructs the
genre while also being a perfect example of it.
So the format can be anything. It can be a family
soap, a game show, a workplace doc, a comedy.
Okay, so now let's bring it up to the present
day, the 2010s and 2020s. The biggest shift has
to be streaming. Without a doubt. Netflix entered
the game late, but they entered it aggressively.
With shows like Love is Blind. Love is Blind,
The Circle. Too hot to handle. And these shows
are designed differently. They're not made for
week -to -week viewing with a commercial break.
They're designed for the binge model. They have
cliffhangers at the end of every episode to keep
you clicking next. And streaming has globalized
the format even more, hasn't it? Completely.
The barrier to watching foreign language reality
TV has totally dropped. We're seeing this huge
influx from South Korea. The masked singer. The
Masked Singer started as a Korean show called
King of Masked Singer. They hit dating shows,
singles, Inferno. From Japan, you had Terrace
House, which was a much quieter, more observational
style. From India, Indian matchmaking. It's a
global conversation now. And we have to mention
the COVID -19 impact because when the world shut
down in 2020, scripted productions stopped on
a dime. Everything stopped. You couldn't have
100 people on a soundstage. But unscripted shows,
which often has smaller crews, were able to figure
out bubble productions much faster. So they were
the first ones back on the air. They filled the
gaps in the schedule, just like they did during
the writers' strike. And we also saw a rise in
what you might call cozy viewing. People were
stressed. They were scared. They didn't want
high -conflict drama. They wanted is it cake.
They wanted is it cake. They wanted the great
British bake -off. Just gentle, low -stakes,
comforting content to soothe our pandemic -addled
brains. Is it cake? The question that truly defined
a generation. But this brings us, this brings
us to the elephant in the room. We've been using
the word reality this whole time. And now we
need to talk about the lie in the title, the
reality problem. The big asterisk next to the
whole genre. Because as we get into the 2000s
and the era of the hills, the production gets
so much more sophisticated. And we see this term
in the notes that the industry uses, soft scripting.
It's a polite, corporate -friendly term for manipulation.
Walk us through how this actually works on a
practical level, because they're not handing
Lauren Conrad a script with her lines written
on it, right? That's not how it works. No, that
would be illegal under certain broadcast rules.
And besides, most of these people aren't good
enough actors to pull it off. Instead, you produce
the environment. You create the conditions for
drama to happen. Give me an example. OK, let's
say you're a producer on a Real Housewives show.
You know that cast member A is angry at cast
member B because of something that happened last
week. You don't write them a fight scene. You
just schedule a group dinner. At a restaurant
with lots of alcohol. With lots of free -flowing
alcohol. Yeah. You seat them directly opposite
each other. And then, maybe right before the
cameras start rolling, a producer casually goes
up to cast member A and whispers, Hey. Just so
you know, I heard Bea was talking about your
husband's business troubles earlier. You light
the fuse. You light the fuse, you step back,
you roll cameras, and you let the explosion happen.
You didn't make it happen. You just created the
perfect laboratory conditions for it. It's plausibly
deniable. And then there's the editing. We touched
on how Avid made it possible, but let's talk
about the specific techniques. Let's talk about
Frankenbiting. This is the one that really gives
me the chills. It's so common. And it's so deceptive.
What is it exactly? So it's an audio editing
technique. Let's say a cast member is in a confessional
interview. The producer asks, how was your vacation?
And they say, I really love going to the beach,
but I hate when it rains. And unfortunately,
it rained the whole time. A perfectly normal
sentence. But the editor needs them to sound
like they're angry at another person for a fight
they want to create in the episode. So they take
the audio of the words, I hate. From that sentence.
And they take a different interview where that
person says the name cast member B. Oh, no. And
they digitally stitch them together. So the audio
you hear in the show is I hate cast member B,
a sentence that was never, ever spoken. So they
literally construct sentences out of thin air.
Out of individual words. plucked from hours of
interviews. And because we don't see their mouth
moving when we hear this line, the editors will
cut away to a shot of a sunset or a dog or someone
else's reaction. We, the audience, just accept
it as truth. That is terrifying. It means you
can manufacture a villain out of a perfectly
nice person just by chopping up their words.
It happens all the time. And then you have shows
like Keeping Up with the Kardashians and The
Hills, which have faced numerous accusations,
and in some cases have even admitted to. Doing
full reshoots. Like, that scene wasn't dramatic
enough, let's do it again. Exactly. Hey, the
lighting wasn't very good when you had that emotional
breakup conversation. Can we just stage it again
over by the window? At that point, it's not reality,
it's just a performance of reality. Which raises
the massive ethical question. We are watching
real people, not actors, often in their most
vulnerable, painful, or humiliating moments.
And we are often watching people who are specifically
cast because they're unstable. There is a significant
and valid criticism that the genre actively exploits
mental health issues. If you have a cast member
who is volatile, who drinks too much, who has
anger management issues, in the real world, the
responsible thing to do is to get them help.
In reality TV. You give them a second season
and more screen time. Because they're good TV.
The shows are structured to reward the most disruptive,
chaotic, and often cruel behavior. It normalizes
cruelty. It makes it seem like screaming at your
friend over brunch is a normal way to resolve
conflict. It does. And there is a tragic and
well -documented pattern of cast members from
these shows leaving with severe trauma, depression,
and PTSD. They are chewed up by the machine and
then discarded the moment their ratings drop.
And yet, we watch. millions and millions of us.
What does that say about us as an audience? Well,
the psychology is pretty fascinating. There's
the obvious voyeurism, you know, the simple pleasure
of looking into someone else's life. But there
are darker forces at play, like schadenfreude,
a German word for taking pleasure in the misfortune
of others. We get a little thrill out of watching
someone else's perfect life fall apart. And then
there's social comparison. At least I'm not them.
At least my life isn't that much of a mess. We
watch an episode of Hoarders or a show about
a dysfunctional family, and we feel better about
our own, maybe slightly mediocre, lives in comparison.
A 2012 survey actually found that regular reality
viewers tended to be more extroverted, but also
more neurotic and have lower self -esteem. So
it's a form of self -soothing. Wow. Okay, I want
to pivot now to the final section, to the impact.
Because... You can dismiss reality TV as trash.
You can critique its ethics, but you absolutely
cannot ignore its power. You can't. Let's start
with the most obvious impact. The democratization
of fame. What do you mean by that? For most of
the 20th century, you had to have a talent to
be famous. You had to be a great actor, a great
singer, a great athlete. Reality TV threw that
out the window. It created the famous for being
famous category. The Z -list celebrity. the influencer
kim kardashian exactly people whose primary talent
is the performance of their own life and that
platform that fame it translates directly into
real world power which is where it gets really
interesting and really serious. We have to talk
about The Apprentice. We do, and we should be
clear, regardless of your personal politics,
you have to acknowledge the media mechanism that
was at work there. It's a fascinating case study.
The Apprentice ran for 14 seasons. Week after
week, it presented Donald Trump not as a complex
real estate developer with a mixed record of
bankruptcies and successes. No, it presented
him as a mythical authority figure. The decisive
boss in the high -backed chair in the boardroom.
The man with the catchphrase. You're fired. It
edited out all the nuance, all the failures,
and it created a television character of ultimate
competence and authority. And many, many political
analysts credit that show with reviving his public
image and paving the way for his 2016 presidential
run. The voters thought they were electing the
character from the boardroom. They were voting
for the TV show character. And he's not the only
one. This isn't an isolated incident. Sean Duffy
from The Real World. Boston, back in 1997, went
on to become a multi -term U .S. congressman.
Investors from Dragon's Den, which is the original
UK format that Shark Tank is based on, have gone
on to enter politics in countries like Denmark
and Israel. Kevin O 'Leary in Canada made a serious
run for the leadership of his party. So the skill
set required to be a successful reality PD star,
the ability to perform authenticity, to handle
manufactured conflict. to speak in memorable
sound bites, it translates perfectly to modern
politics. That's the exact same muscle. But the
impact goes even further, goes beyond just Western
politicians. In some authoritarian countries,
the simple act of voting on a reality show was
the first time citizens ever got to vote for
anything. Really? That's incredible. Look at
China in 2005. They had a show called Supergirl.
It was basically their version of American Idol.
It was a sensation. It drew 400 million viewers.
400 million? But the key was it was democratic.
The audience voted for the winner via text message.
They chose their champion. And the government
did not like that. The Chinese government freaked
out. They banned the show for being too democratic
and vulgar. They didn't like the idea of their
citizens getting used to the concept that their
collective voice could choose a winner. A singing
show was seen as a threat to the state. A profound
threat. Or take another example from the Middle
East, a show called Millions Poet. It's a poetry
competition. Huge in the Arab world. Okay. In
2010, a Saudi housewife named Hisa Hilal went
on the show. And she didn't just read nice poems
about flowers and love. She stood on that stage
and read poems that directly criticized extremist
Islamic clerics. On live television. In Saudi
Arabia. On live television broadcast across the
region. She received death threats. But she also
received a massive wave of public support. She
came in third. She used a reality competition
format to speak truth to power in a way that
was almost impossible for her to do otherwise.
That gives me chills. It shows that the format
itself is neutral. It's a tool. It can be used
for vanity and narcissism, but it can also be
used for voice and for change. Absolutely. In
Indonesia, there was a popular show called Jika
Aku Menjadi, which means if I were a middle class,
people would live the life of a poor person for
a week. It was credited with helping bridge the
understanding gap between economic classes. It's
not all just table flipping and drunken fights.
OK, so let's bring this all home. Let's try to
sum this up. We've gone from Nazi propaganda
to candid camera, from a writer's strike creating
copy S to the Kardashians completely dominating
the Internet. It's a genre that at its core fills
the gaps. it fills the gaps in broadcast schedules
when writers strike it fills the gaps in our
own lives our need for connection when we feel
lonely and it fills the gap between who we are
and the more interesting person we want to be
we've covered a lot of ground From the high -minded
sociology of 7 -Up to the glorious trash of The
Real Housewives. But I keep coming back to that
idea you mentioned at the beginning, the idea
of the mirror. The funhouse mirror. Right. It
reflects us, but it also distorts us. For 40
years now, we have been watching people perform
a version of authenticity. We've watched people
learn that flipping a table gets you more screen
time. We've watched people learn that betraying
your friends is a valid strategy to win immunity.
We've made a spectator sport out of the worst
aspects of human behavior. And the really scary
final... question isn't why do they do it the
scary question is have we started doing it too
has the audience started performing For the cameras
that are now everywhere. Exactly. Look at your
own Instagram stories. Look at how we argue on
Twitter or Facebook. We are all editing our own
lives now. We are all creating story arcs. We
are all performing for an invisible audience,
hoping to get the likes, hoping to not get voted
off the island. We are all cast members in our
own reality show now. That is something to chew
on the next time you're about to post. Thanks
for diving deep with us. My pleasure. See you
next time.