Why did reality TV get so popular.

[ultimatebob]

LOL instead of living your life, you can live it through the characters on TV. We would rather watch them living their lives.

I'll admit it... one of the reasons that I watch shows like Top Gear and Airplane Repo because their lives look WAY more interesting than mine does

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Oh I actually love me some Chopped. Again though, that's more of a game show than a pure reality show.

KT

Chopped is maybe the only cooking competition show I couldn't get into. Love Iron Chef America and Top Chef (and all the TC spin-offs) and even Masterchef is okay. But Chopped is just too damn strange. For me cooking shows have to be food I either want to eat or food I want to make, preferably both. The stuff on Chopped I most definitely don't want to cook and 99% of it I don't want to eat. The ingredients are too mismatched and the time limits too short, so the food is most unappetizing. It's never about who cooks something most delicious to win, it's about who fucks up the worst to lose.

 

[ultimatebob]

Chopped is maybe the only cooking competition show I couldn't get into. Love Iron Chef America and Top Chef (and all the TC spin-offs) and even Masterchef is okay. But Chopped is just too damn strange. For me cooking shows have to be food I either want to eat or food I want to make, preferably both. The stuff on Chopped I most definitely don't want to cook and 99% of it I don't want to eat. The ingredients are too mismatched and the time limits too short, so the food is most unappetizing. It's never about who cooks something most delicious to win, it's about who fucks up the worst to lose.

Even if you don't like Chopped, you should try watching Chopped After Hours on foodnetwork.com. You will be amazed at the awesome food the judges can come with those weird ingredients. There is a good reason why most of these people own top restaurants now.

 

[akahoovy]

Reality shows are scripted. It's just usually headed up by a producer or two who do what's called soft scripting. It's basically a few people doing like someone said above, aiming as low as possible to generate a revenue stream, and then trying to go as low as possible from there without causing problems.

Also, most reality TV shows are just production companies taking advantage of people who want to be on TV who don't care what their image is.

 

[AViking]

They're popular because they cater to the lowest common denominator.

 

[sportage]

Candid camera started it all, I think.
Petter Sellers summed it all up in the movie Being There, "I like to watch".

 

[Vdubchaos]

They are popular because people are so pathetic that they would rather watch other people live their lives vs live their own.

Networks also love them because they are cheap to make.

In most cases there is very little reality in reality TV. Most of the crap is scripted and they create some kind of drama that never really happens.

 

[Doppel]

Yeah but at least those are competitions so you can kind of root for teams, or individuals trying to win something. These other shows are just a bunch of morans doing nothing for an hour. I really do not understand, but all the women I know watch that crap religiously.

KT

Most of them, from honey boo boo to duck dynasty are just people laughing/mocking imbeciles doing imbecilic things. Most of them are also quite fake, full of multiple shoots and nonsense made up for TV. Proles don't care, though.

 

[CPA]

We're voyeuristic and narcissistic. We love to see the problems of other people to mitigate our own problems.

 

[Wreckem]

Why did redneck reality tv take off? Duck dynasty is a decent show, the eleventy billion redneck reality shows that have followed at all terrible. But really it's hard to call duck dynasty reality when it's one of if not the most scripted "reality" tv shows ever made.

 

[n7]

People are stupid.

Succinctly put.

And stupid people watch the most TV.

 

[sportage]

 

[Zee]

is game shows reality tv? chopped is a great show. so is shark tank and other such

 

[M0oG0oGaiPan]

started with this

Actually, almost forgot about the REal World.

 

[purbeast0]

i've seen every season of survivor and have applied to it. i'd love to be on that show. i also enjoy big brother a lot. i like watching the social experiments play out right infront of our eyes. and i like that it's a game and there are competitions, so you have people to root for and what not.

 

[KeithTalent]

Chopped is maybe the only cooking competition show I couldn't get into. Love Iron Chef America and Top Chef (and all the TC spin-offs) and even Masterchef is okay. But Chopped is just too damn strange. For me cooking shows have to be food I either want to eat or food I want to make, preferably both. The stuff on Chopped I most definitely don't want to cook and 99% of it I don't want to eat. The ingredients are too mismatched and the time limits too short, so the food is most unappetizing. It's never about who cooks something most delicious to win, it's about who fucks up the worst to lose.

I like seeing the creativity of what they can come up with and I've actually used some techniques/recipes that I've seen on the show. It does have some crap, for sure, but there are some very good chefs on the show and they make interesting things.

I can't watch the longer, drawn out shows. I find them too scripted. With Chopped they are just thrown in the fire and it's over in an hour. Love it.

KT

 

[Via]

Reality shows existed before the original Survivor, but the sensation that show created so many Summers ago took it to a whole new level. I remember all of my friends at the time were so into that show. It's all they talked about, and a few of them even tried to get on it.

I refused to watch a single episode, but then, sometime in the mid 2000s, a channel started showing Survivor seasons and I tivoed the first one. And I have to say - that first season was fascinating, primarily because they really did try to get a cross-section of society to see what would happen if they were all thrown into the wilderness together.

Watching a group of them form the first "alliance" (now a reality staple) while the others refused to acknowledge it was happening made you want to scream at your TV, but you couldn't turn away from it. Richard Hatch played that game beautifully.

I watched two more seasons before the channel stopped showing them (Africa and Australia), but by then contestants had already become pretentious and self-aware and some of the magic was lost. One of the shows had an idiot cowboy on it who's behavior became so ignorant it was hard to take.

I still would like to see Survivor:All Stars one day. Does anyone know if any service streams Survivor seasons?