The decades-long creation of possibly the most controversial form of entertainment: reality television. How does it shape our world and why–love it or hate it–you should probably understand it.
This is 99% invisible.
I'm Roman Mars.
Back in 2003, Emily Nussbaum developed a covert guilty pleasure.
I had a bad habit of watching the streaming 24 hour feeds of the first season of Big Brother in the US which is something that I was doing pretty much every day and talking to nobody about because it was extremely embarrassing.
Big Brother is a reality television show that debuted in the US in the year 2000.
If you've never seen it, the show is basically about a group of people who are isolated in a house that's under constant surveillance, and one contestant gets voted out each week.
For Emily, it was a sort of comfort watch.
They just showed the people in this house in California 24 7.
And so I would put them in the corner of my screen.
I would wake up in New York and I'd watch them sleeping out in California.
In the early 2000s, reality shows like Big Brother and Survivor were beginning to conquer network and cable television.
Emily was one of millions of Americans submitting to the the unscripted TV takeover.
It's interesting to see regular people, it's interesting to see authentic behavior by real people put under pressure.
I think this is a universal appeal of all of these shows, however you define them.
And people can criticize that and say that that's cruel and voyeuristic to want to watch regular people under pressure.
But I also think it is human nature.
At the time, Emily was a freelance writer in search of a book idea.
And she had the thought that maybe she could turn her slightly cringey habit into a book about reality tv.
And I said this to this friend of mine, and he said, well, you better write that fast.
And his idea was, this is a gimmick, this is a trend, and it's gonna die within a very short time.