Best of the 00s: Best Reality Shows

Recently, my mother asked me if I thought reality would decline as a television genre in the coming years. The long answer is: barring some sort of massive paradigm shift in the way that broadcast networks function and measure success, I think reality is too cheap to die. It often gets decried as television's wasteland, and sometimes that's certainly true. Here, though, are ten shows that, in my opinion, either epitomized all the potential for quality in reality programming or were so terrible or over-the-top that they went around bad and came back around to awesome:

The Amazing Race (CBS, 2001-present)

I feel like with CBS reality, you're either a Survivor person or an Amazing Race person. I watched all of Survivor's Australia season, and most of the first one, but otherwise it just never spoke to me. (I suppose there are probably also Big Brother people, but we won't get into that mess.) Survivor seems like it's tailored to a specific kind of personality, while The Amazing Race seems like with some luck and a decent teammate, anyone could compete. This travelogue-as-TV-competition has had a few missteps over its fifteen seasons (Family Edition, anyone?) but it remains one of TV's most consistent reality shows.

American Idol (Fox, 2002-present)

It seems hard to believe now, but Idol originated as somewhat of a sleeper hit, premiering in the "let's throw shows at the wall and see what sticks" environs of Fox summer programming. In the years since, Idol has become its own all-consuming cultural entity - one where people can become famous for giving a terrible, deluded audition performance; one that has produced Grammy winners, an Oscar winner, Tony nominees and a man who appears to have been banned from ever performing on ABC again; one that has turned Ryan Seacrest into Dick Clark's media-conglomerate-running heir apparent. Some people love the audition segment of the season, others the studio performances and audience voting - my personal favorite is the all-too-brief Hollywood week, where you get a glimpse of people's true (often egomaniacal) personalities before the gloss takes over. The Idol machine has a winning formula, at least in television viewership, and it's one that doesn't appear likely to slow down any time soon.

America's Next Top Model (UPN/The CW, 2003-present)

Tyra Banks may come off as crazy sometimes, but Top Model makes it clear that said crazy is of the "like-a-fox" variety. The drama created each cycle by the show's contestants has always managed to overshadow the fact that it ultimately operates in an entirely different sphere than America's actual top models. That Top Model continues to draw a contestant pool after a dozen cycles is a testament to the tenacity of American beauty myth culture: so many young women, it seems, want to "be on top."

I know that this kind of schadenfreude is unbecoming, but I've probably watched the Cycle 2 episode this moment is from about fifteen times:

Made (MTV, 2003-present)

MTV's shows featuring young people being totally awful are so dominant, it's easy for a show like Made to get lost in the shuffle. Each episode operates as its own self-contained Cinderella story, working to fulfill the transformative wish of a teenager. Before High School Musical found popularity in showcasing young people escaping clique boundaries, Made created an engaging formula for breaking out of a social box.

Making the Band (original incarnation, ABC/MTV, 2000-2002)

Before Diddy got involved, Making the Band presented itself as a kind of behind-the-scenes look at the boy band creation process of noted 90s pop Svengali Lou Pearlman. This is, of course, back when boy bands essentially were pop music, and when Pearlman only seemed creepy. In winnowing down auditionees to a five-man group, Making the Band served to level the reality TV playing field by showing that women were not the only reality contestants prone to catty infighting. I wish I could find a show clip of the contestants atonally rehearsing the song "All for Love," the introductory harmony of which was repeatedly mangled. We'll have to settle for O-Town's tragic first single, which is both weirdly gross for Top 40 and insanely catchy:

The Paper (MTV, 2008)

I don't know if I've ever mentioned here before that I worked on the newspaper at my high school, but I did. It was a uniquely stressful experience, a miniature pressure cooker within the already energy-draining confines of high school. The Paper, in only eight episodes, somehow captured all of the heightened emotion of that experience. The show focused on a Florida high school's newspaper, its endearingly geeky copy editor-turned-editor-in-chief Amanda Lorber, who has one of the kinds of personalities that pop so naturally that they make it obvious when other people are trying to make themselves the "personality" of a show (ahem, Suede from Project Runway season 5) and the other staff members who wanted her job. Here's the first episode, which lays out the terrible interpersonal relationships that would make the show so undeniably riveting:

Paradise Hotel (Fox, 2003)

I don't feel like I have sufficient adjectives to capture all that Paradise Hotel was. Some shows you watch because they're great, some shows you watch because their insane campiness makes them great. Paradise Hotel ran throughout the summer of 2003, with labyrinthine rules and a structure that seemed like it could enable the show to air indefinitely. The show was unique for cycling "hotel guests" in and out by taking new contestants from the viewing audience, whence came standout cast member Dave, who appears in the clip below. Paradise Hotel represents to me the best in the worst of reality television: the trainwreck that you can't peel your eyes away from, even as you hate yourself for watching. I couldn't have stopped watching this ever-stirring cauldron of drama even if I'd wanted to.

Project Runway (Bravo/Lifetime, 2004-present)

As soon as it premiered, Project Runway quickly established itself as one of TV's best artistic showcases. Featuring the behind-the-scenes work involved in fashion design, Runway brought some quality to a genre that had already become mired in tackiness. The interpersonal conflicts that inevitably rise when "real" people put themselves in a spotlight for fame, fortune or mere exposure, was tempered by the process of watching an outfit go from concept to design to execution. Add the unique presences of Tim Gunn, Michael Kors and Nina Garcia, and you've got a winner.

Runway is also noteworthy as the source of what is one of the best reality TV moments of the decade, if not of all time.

Real World/Road Rules Challenge (MTV, 1998-present)

At the beginning of this decade (you know, when they still had new seasons of Road Rules), the Real World/Road Rules Challenge was an entirely different show. The show as it originally functioned was more like Road Rules - two teams of six driving around the country in RVs and participating in competitions with each other. There was always drama, as castmates from the same RW or RR season would hash out old arguments and grudges (or create new ones, having watched said season unfold on television), but it all seemed relatively contained. Somewhere along the way, though, the producers decided to park the show in one tropical locale per season and shit got crazy. Each successive season becomes television's most reliable source of out-of-control drama, and these days features people who never even appeared on a season of The Real World or Road Rules, only challenges - it's become its own insane universe.

So You Think You Can Dance (Fox, 2005-present)

SYTYCD has an appeal similar to that of Project Runway, in that it showcases genuinely talented people and gives them an outlet to get recognized and rewarded for their craft. Unlike Idol, the partnership and group dance format of the show seems to foster strong relationships among the contestants - most seasons, they seem to genuinely like each other and get along as a group in a way that makes the show really charming. It also has one of television's best hosts in Cat Deeley. If all that wasn't enough, SYTYCD also gets points (at least from me, because I'm way cheesy in case you hadn't guessed already) for being one of the few reality shows conducive to the usually fiction-based overly-emotionally-invested fan project of shipping.

Here, from the second season, is a routine that remains one of my favorite. Enjoy it while it's here - 19 or Dick Clark or somebody is super-litigious about taking clips off of YouTube. (Dear Corporations, If you cooperated with new media instead of fighting it all the time, you could probably find a way to make it profitable and stop alienating the people you want to sell crap to. Cheers! - Liz)