The year after the premiere of An American Family, the BBC launched its own experiment entitled The Family, that followed the lives of the Wilkins, a working-class family from Reading, which culminated after 12 episodes with the marriage of one of the daughters, which was riddled by paparazzi and fans of the show. The newlyweds’ fame attained such heights in the media at the time that they had to cut their honeymoon short and return to their hometown; a classic example of the instant, talent-free fame that characterizes the genre.
From then on, reality shows began to proliferate on both sides of the Atlantic: Living in the Past (UK, 1978), in which three couples volunteered to recreate an English Iron Age village; Real People (USA, 1979), a panel show in which “real” people were interviewed instead of celebrities; Thrill of a Lifetime (Canada, 1981), in which the dreams of ordinary people were fulfilled; COPS (USA, 1989), which initiated the reality police show and introduced the use of portable camcorders to the genre; Nummer 28 (The Netherlands, 1991) in which seven strangers, all students, were brought to live in a house for months to record the dramas that arose while living together. The format of this show was the origin of later programs such as MTV’s The Real World (1992) and the Big Brother franchise that originated in the Netherlands (1999). In addition, there are dozens of talkshows such as Jerry Springer, Ricky Lake and Laura in America, talent shows such as American Idol; survival, cooking, dancing and dysfunctional family shows, modelling and celebrities shows; as well as survival, cooking, dancing and dysfunctional family shows with celebrities.
But realism taken to the extreme is detrimental to imagination and to art as a representation, and a terrible barrenness afflicts these characters. Already by the late 19th century, Oscar Wilde had noticed this tendency in the English melodrama of his time:
The characters in these plays talk on the stage exactly as they would talk off it; they have neither aspirations nor aspirates; they are taken directly from life and reproduce its vulgarity down to the smallest detail; they present the gait, manner, costume, and accent of real people… And yet how wearisome the plays are!1
It is surprising, to say the least, that Wilde’s description fits the protagonists of reality television to the letter (9.7). Indeed, we live in an impressive and mediocre realist novel.
- Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” in Complete Works, 979. ↩︎
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