Where it started
Reality television is older than most people think. In 1973 an American public broadcaster showed An American Family, twelve episodes following a real family in California through a difficult year, and viewers were gripped. The big boom came in the late 1990s. BIG BROTHER began in the Netherlands in 1999, with ten strangers living together in a house full of cameras, cut off from the world, while viewers voted to remove them one by one. Its name comes from George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which a government watches everyone through screens.
SURVIVOR followed in America in 2000, stranding contestants on an island, and AMERICAN IDOL began in 2002; its first winner, Kelly Clarkson, became a pop star. Many reality formats are sold around the world and remade in dozens of countries. SHARK TANK, for example, where inventors pitch their ideas to rich investors, is based on a Japanese show and is known in Britain as Dragons' Den.
A tent in a field
The Great British BAKE OFF began in 2010 and turned baking into a national obsession. Its contestants work in a white marquee in the grounds of a country house, and its phrases, such as a soggy bottom for an underbaked pastry base, slipped into everyday speech. Unlike many competitions, it is known for contestants helping each other and hugging when someone leaves. It has been remade in more than twenty countries. Our baking page covers the science of why cakes rise.
Food shows are a whole branch of their own: MASTERCHEF, TOP CHEF and NAILED IT, where amateur bakers try to copy elaborate cakes and usually fail spectacularly, which is the point.
Stars made on screen
Talent shows have launched some of the biggest pop careers. In 2010, five boys who had entered The X Factor in Britain as solo singers were grouped together by the judges into a band. They came third, and as One Direction they went on to sell tens of millions of records. In 2009 a woman from a small Scottish village, Susan Boyle, walked onto the stage of Britain's Got Talent to smirks from the audience, then sang so well that the clip was watched hundreds of millions of times online, and her first album became one of the fastest-selling ever.
AMERICAN IDOL did the same in the United States; its fourth winner, Carrie Underwood, became one of the most successful country singers of her generation.
How real is reality TV?
Reality shows are not scripted like a drama, but they are carefully shaped. Producers choose people who are likely to clash, set up challenges, and ask contestants leading questions in private interviews. Editors can cut conversations together from different moments to create a storyline, a practice nicknamed frankenbiting. Many contestants have said the version of themselves they saw on screen was not quite who they were.
The word CATFISH, for someone who pretends to be somebody else online, comes from a 2010 documentary that later became a series. THE VOICE lets judges hear singers before they see them, turning their chairs only if they like the voice. LOVE ISLAND, The APPRENTICE, The AMAZING RACE, the KARDASHIANS, JERSEY SHORE, the BACHELOR, QUEER EYE, DRAG RACE, TEMPTATION Island, the HOUSEWIVES and WIPEOUT complete the grid. Several are made for adults, but the cooking and obstacle shows are fun for the whole family.