You are constantly reminded of what you only know because of earlier episodes, and how much goes unsaid.
It’s something only empathy can make sense of and it challenges the viewer to empathize across time and culture.
The class resonances mean it’s a different experience when watched as a British person too.
Somehow they managed to just create soap opera with bad actors instead.
The move to more and more of reality tv content is as much about budgets as anything else imo
It's just that most people who don't watch, or like to feel smarter than those who watch, think that you just sit there and suspend all belief instead of seeing it for what it is and acknowledging it's pretty interesting.
Edit: Looking at Wikipedia's account, there are many reality TV shows going back decades before that. Some are game shows and other things - t's hard to tell what matches the modern model.
Sometimes they vary the thing and do it overseas.
I've watched Old Enough! and got hooked on how unpretentious the idea and video editing feels compared to regular Western stuff.
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>>We get wise too late,
>>and old too soon.
>>–Danish proverb
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Everybody I've ever recommended the "7 Up" series to has thanked me. I rewatch them all, every few years – my first viewing was right before my own 21st birthday (decades ago).
He was a compulsive liar (judging from the rest of the wikipedia page), and one of the lies was that he was one of the kids interviewed. It was a lie that was easily disproven because we all can watch those videos.
It is also explained in the link fortran77 posted that got flagged to death.
I am more surprised they could only found 14 white kids even in 1964!
A show like this would be very different today.
...although there is no reason to want to know that. They are regular people like the neighbor and the mailmen. Gosh, the things TV make us want to do!
/s
My partner got me into The Challenge early in our relationship. There's a lot about it that I don't like, and it's pretty clear that the competition itself is steered by the production team in ways that aren't really natural, and the outcome week to week is often likely not what would happen if the cast members weren't interfered with. I'm not on social media and don't care what the cast is up to off-screen, and I never watch the "reunion" episode at the end of each season because it's just a bunch of big-personality drama and performances made for internet points. But the show itself can be fun to watch sometimes, and some of the challenges they have to complete are genuinely difficult and cool to watch.
[0] The "regular people" thing is also really blurry. Sure, most (all?) reality shows pull from people who aren't otherwise actors or famous, but being on a long-running reality TV show can create that fame and lead to other (no-reality-TV) acting gigs. (Arguably many of the long-time cast members of The Challenge are celebrities in their own right, with curated public presences, and some of them have since taken on regular non-reality acting roles.)
I would even go so far as to label only videos of an event itself, like security recordings, to be non fiction as re-enactments and whatnot can have a lot of extra information that was not there in real life.
The Senna documentary[1] is in the grey area. It's entirely composed of archival footage - no reconstructions, no talking heads, no voiceover. But the filmmaker has still chosen which footage to include and omit and in what order to construct a narrative. I don't think that neatly falls into fiction or non-fiction in your model.
You miss out on a lot with this way of thinking. The interesting stuff is in the middle.