Page 447 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Real ty Telev s on

America’s Funniest Pets didn’t just portray everyday people—they relied on foot-
age supplied by them.
The 1973 PBS 12-episode series An American Family is also a significant
precursor, as it followed the lives of one family, the Louds, for seven months.
Candid Camera was a wildly popular program that can be seen as an ances-
tor to recent prank-oriented programs like Punk’d, SpyTV, Boiling Points, Girls
Behaving Badly, and Scare Tactics. Game shows have been a staple of television
since its inception, and find new formulations in reality programs called “gam-
edocs” (e.g., Big Brother, Survivor, The Bachelor/ette, The Apprentice, The Amaz-
ing Race, Treasure Hunters, Project Runway, and So You Think You Can Dance?).
One particular game show, Battle of the Network Stars, turned celebrities into
the contestants (in 2005 we saw a short-lived homage called Battle of the
Network Reality Stars). Shows like Cops, America’s Most Wanted, and People’s
Court can also be viewed as nascent reality TV, focusing on real people from
a law-and-order perspective and relying on a range of documentary, recreated,
and scripted footage.
Regardless of these various influences and precursors, it is generally agreed
that two programs signaled the rise of contemporary reality TV. The first is
MTV’s The Real World. Premiering in 1991, The Real World was an early “docu-
soap” following the lives of seven young house inhabitants cast by the network.
The Real World is one of MTV’s strongest franchises, and its producers, Bunim/
Murray, went on to create similar shows like Road Rules (the cast lives in an RV
and faces challenges) and the hybrid RW/RR Challenge.
The second major programming breakthrough was CBS’s Survivor, premier-
ing in 1999. Unlike The Real World’s cable status, Survivor demonstrated that
reality TV could be popular and profitable on a broadcast network. Created by
Mark Burnett, Survivor was a blockbuster gamedoc hit involving isolating con-
testants on an island and subjecting them to challenges. Each week, a contestant
was voted off by their tribe until the finale, where the last two contestants were
subjected to questioning and a vote from a jury comprised of the nine most
recently exiled cast members. Survivor’s massive popularity not only ensured
its return, but also opened the floodgates for a whole host of programming that
quickly changed the face of television.

endeMol
The Dutch production company Endemol is, along with Mark Burnett, the most successful
reality TV producer. A hybrid of its founders’ names (John de Mol and Joop ven den Ende),
the company is responsible for the first international reality hit, Big Brother. First premiering
in 1999 in the Netherlands, Big Brother eventually was adapted to 70 countries. Big Brother
encapsulates two characteristics that made Endemol such a media juggernaut. First is its
global outlook. Endemol recognized that it was preferable to make programming adapt-
able to many regions and cultures rather than sell the same show to a presumed monolithic
global audience. This allowed national markets to claim they were producing local program-
ming rather than importing foreign media products. Their second contribution is related