What were the first reality shows?
From the very earliest days of television, the object was to get a lot of programming for not much money. That's true today now on cable television, but in the very early days of broadcast television, they were under the same problem, that they weren't making a lot of money on advertising, so they had to generate programming at a low dollar. In general, the most efficient way to make television is through reality television, through putting a real person into a situation and seeing what happens, because it's a good way to get something interesting without having to plan it all out and make props, and hire script writers and directors and things. So, the earliest forms of television were reality concepts, and they were talk shows, game shows, hidden camera shows, and, very quickly, very clever people found ways to make interesting little games or formats where you could repeat the same set-up over and over again, but plug in new people and get a whole different show, and that became extremely popular. That's where game shows came from, because you could set it up once, you could build one set, you could have one set of rules, one basic script with little holes in it for where you put the questions, and you could do that show over and over again, but every time you put a new contestant in the chair, you would have a completely different show. That became a very efficient form of television and really took over in the early days.
