What started the current wave of reality TV popularity?
I think the current wave of reality television came from two simultaneous forces. One was the wearing out of a lot of the scripted genres. The sitcom genre was the main dominating force in television in the seventies and eighties and even into the nineties, and it became tired. It was too predictable. The sofa, the wacky neighbor, the stairway in the back: every sitcom started to look the same, and started to use the same kind of platitudes, line sequences, and format. Every sitcom starts with the family in one place. They all go through something crazy and then by the end, they're all in exactly the same place they started. It just got tired. Force number one in the current wave of reality television was that the sitcom became very tired, and force number two was there was a real need for inexpensive programming. There were no longer just three networks with all the money. Suddenly there were cable channels who needed programming. There were satellite channels, and now there's the Internet. There are so many different ways to get television that the need arose for lots more of it. Because it started spreading out, television became more democratic, and there was a need for low cost programming. You basically saw what you saw when television was first born: a push towards, "Wow! If we can just build one set, and have one set of questions and one script that I can just fill in new trivia questions to, I can do five of those a day, and 65 of those in three weeks, and that's an efficient way to do television." So you saw a resurgence in game shows and a resurgence in these reality contests.
