The thing about reality television, whether you openly love it, loathe it, or consider it a kind of guilty pleasure you don't mention to your book club friends, its influence is undeniable. You don't need to have

watched a single minute of it to experience its influence in everything from hidden camera

and hidden microphone political revelations to online prank videos to classic TV comedies like The Office.

From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd. What showrunners prefer to call

unscripted programming is everywhere these days. And although the demise of the genre has been

predicted for something like 80 years now, this dirty documentary format is likely to be a

permanent fixture in our media landscape. Emily Nussbaum is

staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the book, Q The Sun, The Invention of Reality

TV. Emily, welcome to think. Thank you so much for having me. Before we get too deep into this,

we should talk about what counts as reality TV. Your treatment of this programming includes

like Real Housewives-style stuff where camera crews follow people around to capture their lives.

But it's not only that, right? Yes, absolutely. I mean, it is part of the project of doing the book

is to narrow it down a little bit. And the biggest surprise to me when I was working on this was that

I thought I was going to start with shows like the real world and Survivor and shows that I

think people think of as reality TV, including contemporary stuff like The Real Housewives.

And I ended up going all the way back to radio. So the way I defined it in the book, you mentioned

the term dirty documentary. And that's the term I use in the book.

What I see reality television as is the experiment where you take cinema verite techniques,

these sort of pure elevated discipline of just holding a camera and a microphone and capturing the truth.

And then you cut it with another format, something that puts pressure on the subject.

So I'm talking about like soap opera, game show, prank shows, different approaches to that.

And so it's that combination that I call reality programming.

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