by Quill of the Night

Created on: July 10, 2008

Original concepts for reality TV are few and far between these days. The popularity of programs like "The Real World" and "Road Rules" is fading, and for good reason. These types of shows count on and play on people's fascination with controversy, mayhem, and general bad behavior. The proof of MTV's decline on the reality popularity scale is in the fact that they create the same program over and over again, merely changing the cast. MTV's "A Shot at Love" was obviously created to compete with VH1's "Rock of Love". So which one of them came up with the original idea? I admit, I'm a guilty watcher of "Rock of Love". However, by the second season, the show most certainly lost its luster!

Truth be told, the viewer wants more from reality TV nowadays. That fact is clearly evident by the way reality is evolving into something much more; the reality-documentary.

Viewers still want the disagreements, but now we want to learn as we're entertained. We love seeing the reality of fishermen risking their lives for their livelihood in "Deadliest Catch". We're eager to have our vote counted when a want-to-be star has a fantastic night on "American Idol". We watch in awe as brave truckers trek across a frozen ocean on "Ice Truckers". Our eyes bug when a logger is nearly killed by a falling tree on "Ax Men". When we watch these programs, we learn new terms for the featured industry and we get a "real" sense of how things are done.

Every channel is competing in this new type of reality. The Food Network is featuring programs on their next star, unusual dishes, and food creations from all over the world. HGTV shows you unique designs, house hunting, competitions, and remodeling secrets. Other channels grab our attention with top cooking competitions like "Hell's Kitchen" and the award-winning "Top Chef", where the stakes are high for the contestants and we learn cooking tips along their journey. "Dirtiest Jobs" demonstrates thankless jobs that most of us would never apply for unless we had to! These types of reality-documentary shows are popping out of the woodwork and we are eating them up as quickly as they release them.

So why settle for a show that centers purely on arguments alone? We now have more informative reality shows to sink our teeth in to - programs which have passionate contestants, unusual perspectives, and lessons to learn. Not to mention, these shows always include our beloved disagreements and mayhem along the way!

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