The Origin of Reality Television

Once there was a beautiful thing called television a small little box that enabled people to do and be anything that they wanted. There were princesses, and magic, and many second chances of life given while inside this little box. There was drama and animation and worlds beyond our own that people longed to experience but could not because at the end of the day everyone realized that everything on television mostly was purely fiction or so much fact (most people called these documentaries) until it was to the point of boredom. This was so until one day someone decided that television should have a gray area in between. The result was a mixture between pure fiction and absolute reality and thus reality television was born.

Reality television was real enough to relate to but still had a fictitious quality that still made this still television. It started at first with a little show called the “Real World”, a fitting title for something in this new genre. This show was about putting random people in a house together and seeing how long they will last getting along with each other. When that had reached success there were hundreds of them, spring up from seemingly out of nowhere and about every subject. These subjects ranged dating shows, to tours of celebrity homes, to things that cannot be described. That is not the only scary thing in this story. The most scary part of this story is that these shows became less and less real to make reality television what it is now, no different than television was before it came along.