Has Reality TV Run Its Course?
The reality TV genre has dominated viewership in the past 30 years, whether people like to admit it or not. It has proved to be one of the most influential mediums of our time; The Kardashians hold a multibillion-dollar empire, audiences formed a connection to what would later influence a presidential election that would win Donald Trump a spot as the former President of the United States through shows called The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice and it’s launched careers of those who are considered the most famous artists of our time, such as Cardi B.
Widely credited for the commencement of how we view reality TV today is An American Family, which first aired in 1973. But one of the most iconic reality TV shows that is more conventionally known as the birth of reality TV as we know it is The Real World. It’s been attributed to launching the popularity of the genre, given its intense drama in the earlier seasons, The Real World demonstrated that the genre can not only be entertaining for long season runs, but garner high ratings for networks. The Real World placed MTV on a reality genre throne for years to follow, but in more recent years the network along with the reality genre has taken a turn. The reality TV craze materialized fast, but not all good things last.
At it’s beginning, reality TV changed the course of how audiences viewed and connected to shows; the genre itself became a facet in which viewers could connect and relate to real people, rather than the scripted characters they were used to viewing on every channel. It was nonetheless refreshing amongst the sea of sitcoms and scripted shows at the time. Also, reality shows offered something scripted shows couldn’t, which was live social commentary. According to Statista, in the 2009-2010 season ending in May, around a third of average weekly top 50 viewership was taken by reality TV shows such as American Idol, Survivor, The Biggest Loser, and Hell's Kitchen. Fast forward 14 years later and only the first two of these programs have remained in the top 50 of America's most viewed TV shows. All in all, reality TV viewership among top 50 shows only made up around 12 percent of aggregate average weekly viewership in the last annual TV season, which ended May 2023.
I have a theory, (bear with me now), that Americans are experiencing reality TV fatigue. Once its popularity was recognized by networks, our TVs were (and still) inundated with reality shows. The transitions, drama, and grittiness of the 90s and 2000s landscapes are what made reality shows so good. Moreover, the overall cheesiness of reality shows, I’m thinking Keeping Up With the Kardashians and Jersey Shore, were so great because the camera quality was that of a digital camera the viewers themselves could possess and the ‘reality’ was on par with a soap opera. But, what we once loved in the 90s and early 2000s can’t be replicated today. Yet, networks are still trying.
It seems as though reality shows today are still trying to be reminiscent of the early 2000s aesthetic, but with the technology we now have it just looks bad. With that being said, the need for social commentary and seeing ‘real’ people on our screens isn’t a necessity nor a want any longer, with social platforms such as Tik Tok, Instagram, and Facebook, we’re already given more than a glimpse into regular people’s lives, every second of every day. With recent lower ratings and declines in viewership, reality shows are now seemingly trying to tap into our nostalgia for that early 2000s aesthetic that was once loved. Jersey Shore is now Jersey Shore Family Vacation and Keeping Up With the Kardashians is now The Kardashians. While there are no specific stats on how well The Kardashians performs, the series has consistently had low ratings on nearly every platform, from Google (2.6 stars) to Rotten Tomatoes (31%) to critic reviews blasting the series.
If the titans of the industry, the Kardashians, can’t even keep up, reality TV may become a thing of the past, and that’s okay. Like all things, it had a hell of a run.
