alt Hacker News"Reality TV" as it is now was born from a writer's strike. Producers couldn't outright give the people scripts and written lines, but they could stand off camera and feed them lines off the cuff in the style of leading questions. If anyone thinks these shows are not intentionally pushed in the directions the producers want, then they just are not paying attention. Which is precisely what these producers want
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MTV's The Real World began in 1992. Did it inolve a writers' strike?
Edit: Looking at Wikipedia's account, there are many reality TV shows going back decades before that. Some are game shows and other things - t's hard to tell what matches the modern model.
I know many people who watch, I watch myself, and we all know it's semi scripted and that the overall arcs are decided in advance. The really interesting thing about reality tv is once you realise that this is happening, the "Reality" part really comes back into play even stronger because you can see how people react in such situations (the situation being them being part of a scripted reality tv show while wanting to increase their social media following etc). These days there's also the whole component of social media posts and real life events between the seasons that sometimes are more juicy than the show itself, but only get exposed because of the show.
It's just that most people who don't watch, or like to feel smarter than those who watch, think that you just sit there and suspend all belief instead of seeing it for what it is and acknowledging it's pretty interesting.
In my headcanon it was all born from an experimental show (Big Brother) in around 2000 - which was obviously and intentionally stage managed but otherwise largely genuine behaviours. It took them a couple of seasons to really optimise for the "right" contestants and how to maximise the drama etc etc.
The move to more and more of reality tv content is as much about budgets as anything else imo