This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Now reality

television has often gotten a bad rap. Well it's funny because I when I originally thought about writing this book in 2003, at that time I had watched the show The Real World on MTV, and at the time I was caught up in watching this weird show Big Brother that had just started in the United States.

And I suggested writing a book about this to a friend of mine and he said, well, you better write that fast, because it just seemed like a tacky trend.

That's Emily Nauspam, a staff writer at the New Yorker, formerly our television critic.

Twenty years later reality television is definitely here to stay and Emily has published a new book

a history of reality TV called Kew the Sun. If you assume that reality TV was born with

Survivor or the real world she's going to surprise you. I asked Emily to share

three key reality shows and she started at the birth of television or even before that on radio.

I mean I think most people know the show Candid Camera.

It lasted quite a while.

People are very nostalgic about it.

But the original version of that was Alan Fund's Candid Microphone, which was an audience

participation show, the first stunt show, incredibly important and influential, and kind of an

edgy, dark, indie version of the audience participation shows.

The American Broadcasting Company presents the candid microphone, the program that brings

through the secretly recorded reactions of ordinary people to all kinds of situations.

No one ever knows when he's talking into the Candid Microphone.

I feel like Candid Microphone, even before Cand before candid camera is in many ways the origin of the whole

genre because nothing would exist without the innovations, some of them dark innovations that

Alan Funt came up with.

Give me an example, since this is the Ur reality show on television,

...