True Lies: The Art of Reality Television

When Survivor premiered on CBS in the early summer of 2000, it seemed like a cut-and-dry novelty: interesting, and immensely popular, but almost certainly doomed to be short-lived.

It’s not just that Survivor is still, 25 years later, on the air, pulling in huge ratings across its now 50 seasons. Reality television has transitioned from a widely derided flash in the pan to a fully legitimized medium enjoyed by millions of households across a huge variety of formats. From the observational d...