A History of Reality Television Programming Before and After Satellite TV

If you’re thinking about reality television, you might be focused on people having to eat bugs to win cars or watching a lot of attractive and drunk co-eds falling all over each other during spring break. But the truth is that reality television has existed for a lot longer than people realize, albeit in a less Cinema Verite sense. Whether it’s looking back to the first shows of the 1940s and 1950s that were slightly more than your average game show production or simply examining other features of the 1970s and 1980s where the line between fact and fiction was blurred, it’s safe to say that some aspects of reality television have existed since the days of rabbit ears and BetaMax, long before satellite tv and high definition came on the scene.

The first round of “reality television” that was seen in the United States focused more on putting people in situations that were not scripted for those people, rather than a bunch of people who knew that they were in a realistic situation where they were being filmed. The most popular that managed to stick around for a long time was “Candid Camera,” and “Candid Camera” definitely saw more than its fair share of famous surprise guests, even though it was a reality program. One very famous episode from later on even featured Dolly Parton as a woman who needed assistance being helped across a supermarket parking lot. After “Candid Camera,” there were other shows such as “Beat the Clock” that also relied on things like weird situations and jokes or duress.

Today on satellite tv, this sort of hidden camera reality programming still has its place, with programs like “Punk’d,” where Ashton Kutcher gives celebrities their comeuppance with well-planned practical jokes, or even “Boiling Point” on MTV, where regular people are put in situations designed to frustrate them. If they make it until the end, they get money. If not, they still get to be on television.

Of course another popular trope in the world of reality television that still is going on satellite TV but that has been around for just about forever is the talent contest. Back in the beginning, this might have been “Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour” or “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.” Both of these programs featured on “regular” people who were members of the public auditioning to see if they could manage to grab fame and fortune. Another slightly more cynical and odder approach to this was “The Gong Show,” where you could either win 67.15 or get gonged offstage. Of course, today you can flip on your HDTV and see celebrities trying to dance, unknowns trying to get voted to the top on “American Idol” or even watch dance-offs between dance crews on all the different channels.

So if you thought that reality television was an invention of your lifetime and not something that had been around for a long while, looking back at history, you’d be hard-pressed not to change your mind. But it makes sense, seeing as people have always found “regular” people to be far more interesting than those others out there. So whether you’re checking out Nick at Nite for something old or Fox and NBC for something new, rest easy knowing that television, for all its changes, is also comfortingly the same.