MBC Blog Posts

Candid Camera and the Dawn of Reality TV
July 2010 -- Robert Thompson, Syracuse University

Ten years ago we were right in the middle of the first summer of Survivor. Inspiring controversy and even outrage before its debut in May, this curious oddment was on its way to gathering an audience that, by the final episode, would exceed 50 million. Its colossal success marked the beginning of a massive generic overhaul of American television. The Age of Reality had begun.

"Reality TV" is used to describe a wide variety of programming forms, including game shows (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Deal or No Deal), talent competitions (American Idol, America's Got Talent), and documentaries (An American Family, Cops). All of these genres have been around for a long time, though.

Survivor was something different. In a way it was an old-fashioned documentary; but it was a documentary about a completely artificial and contrived set of circumstances. A group of people who never otherwise would have been together were carefully selected and put on an island they never otherwise would have visited and asked to perform tasks they never otherwise would have performed, according to very specific rules. Then the producers turned on the cameras and waited to see what would happen ---drama as chemistry experiment. This was a serious narrative innovation; a truly new way to tell a story to which anyone interested in the history of Western dramaturgy ought to pay close attention.

Many people have pointed to An American Family (PBS, 1973) as the start of reality TV, but that series was really nothing more than a standard documentary. The filmmakers followed the Loud family around with cameras just like Robert Flaherty followed Nanook and his family around when he was filming Nanook of the North in the early 1920s. Survivor and its CBS sibling, Big Brother, on the other hand, created an artificial family and forced the drama with artificial sources of conflict. Both of these shows owed a lot to The Real World, of course, which really got the idea started when it debuted on MTV in 1992. Long before The Real World, however----way back during the Truman administration, in fact--- Allen Funt was already sowing the seeds of modern reality television.

Funt's creation, Candid Microphone, had started on radio in 1947. In August of the following year, it moved to ABC television, then jumped to NBC later that season with a new title: "Candid Camera." It would continue, with interruptions and on and off different networks and in syndication, until 2005.

Funt understood the deliciously voyeuristic possibilities of the new medium of television, but he also knew that just watching regular people doing regular things wasn't that compelling. It was lots more fun to watch them encounter things that weren't at all regular. Let the paparazzi follow around famous people and wait for them to do something interesting: Funt would follow the un-famous and force them to do something interesting. Mailboxes and vending machines would engage passers-by in conversation; doors labeled "Rest Room" would lead to coat closets; cars without engines would show up at the local garage; and hidden cameras would capture it all.

Documenting regular folks with cameras was not a new idea in the 1940s. Nineteenth-century motion picture photographers gravitated toward things like workers leaving factories and crowds moving through train stations. What was new and remarkable about Candid Camera was that the "real people" it showed us were reacting to totally artificial situations that had been contrived in advance by the producers. As such, Candid Camera had invented the most important element of what would later emerge as reality TV. It would be 44 years before the idea would be embellished and refined by the creators of The Real World, and over half-a-century before it would really take off in shows like Survivor.

From the Archives:

Candid Camera premiere episode (May 1949)

Candid Camera episode (1950)

Robert Thompson
Syracuse University