Reality television has spent the last few decades finding increasingly elaborate reasons for us to watch other people. Lock them in a house. Drop celebrities in a jungle. Send teams racing around the world completing challenges. Put a group of attractive single people in a villa and wait for somebody to fancy the wrong person.
The formats are different, but much of the appeal is remarkably similar. Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, The Amazing Race and Love Island all give us people to watch and then create situations that might produce an interesting reaction.
Sometimes they don’t even need much of a situation.
The People Became the Entertainment
Traditional television generally gave people a reason to be on screen. Actors acted, singers sang, comedians told jokes and presenters presented things.
Reality TV loosened that requirement. A person could be entertaining because they were funny, argumentative, attractive, annoying, charming or simply capable of having an unusually dramatic disagreement over something completely unimportant.
Essex has some experience here. The Only Way Is Essex turned relationships, friendships, nights out and arguments into television. Viewers weren’t tuning in to watch people demonstrate a particular talent. The personalities and what happened between them were the programme.
Reality television also discovered that ordinary moments could become interesting once viewers knew the people involved. Watching a stranger make breakfast isn’t particularly exciting. Watching someone you’ve followed for six weeks make breakfast while refusing to speak to the person they argued with the previous night is different.
Context makes mundane things watchable.
We Like Seeing How People React
The situations created by reality shows vary enormously, but many of them are really machines for producing reactions.
Take away someone’s comfortable bed and food in the jungle. Give a couple a new romantic temptation on Love Island. Make teams find their way through an unfamiliar country on The Amazing Race. Put a group of strangers together in Big Brother and give them far too much time to irritate one another.
Producers can create the circumstances, but they can’t completely control what people will do with them. That’s where much of the fun comes from.
Even heavily produced reality television depends on viewers believing there is at least some possibility of surprise. If every argument, romance and ridiculous decision felt completely predetermined, there wouldn’t be much reason to keep watching.
Then Everyone Got Their Own Channel
The internet took the idea of watching real people and removed the requirement to get cast on television.
YouTube let people broadcast their lives from bedrooms, kitchens and cars. Social media made following strangers an everyday habit. People began watching morning routines, shopping trips, holidays, meals and conversations that would once have seemed far too ordinary to put on television.
Some became enormous celebrities without ever needing a traditional TV programme.
Livestreaming pushed things another step further. Instead of watching something somebody recorded yesterday and edited before uploading, viewers could watch while it was actually happening.
That brought back something television had always been particularly good at: the feeling that anything could happen next.
Watching Became Participating
There is one important difference between most reality television and livestreaming.
You can shout advice at somebody on Love Island as much as you like. Unless they have developed extraordinary hearing, they’re not going to respond.
Livestreaming changed that relationship. Viewers could comment, ask questions, make requests and occasionally alter what the person on screen did next. The audience was no longer completely outside what it was watching.
You can see that across gaming streams, social media lives and adult entertainment. Babestation is one example, where adult live cam performers can talk directly with viewers rather than simply appearing in something prerecorded. The attraction isn’t only seeing another person. It’s knowing that person is there at the same time as you and can respond.
That is a fairly significant change from the relationship television gave us.
Maybe We Were Always Watching the People
Technology has changed enormously since the early reality-TV boom, but our interest in other people hasn’t gone anywhere.
Television producers once needed a format to justify putting ordinary people on screen. They gave them houses, jungles, villas, races, dates, challenges and occasionally a large cash prize.
The internet discovered that the format wasn’t always necessary. Sometimes a person with a camera, an interesting personality and an audience willing to stick around was enough.
Reality TV let us watch real people. Livestreaming eventually let us talk to them.
