Who are some of the most influential producers of reality TV?

Who are some of the most influential producers of reality TV?

The pioneers that I look at in the modern age of reality television are Bunim & Murray who created The Real World, which really was one of the first of these social experiment type reality shows. That was then taken a little farther by Mark Burnett, who I believe was the pioneer of the big competition show. He drew on what Bunim & Murray started, which was a social experiment idea. I can take real people, force them to live together, and get interesting television. But what if I made it worse for them - What if they were starving? What if they needed to rely on each other for food? What if they needed to rely on each other to compete with other tribes? He brought all that stuff into reality television. The other thing he brought to it, that he still does better than anyone else, is an epic feel, a cinematic feel to reality television: beautiful setting, beautiful photography, beautiful B-Roll, which is the little bits that we see in between the scenes. He photographs them gorgeously, with time-lapse photography, done on film - nature photography - and he throws that all into the soup, with the most basic of human conflict - man against nature, man against man, and created Survivor.