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The Emmys Need a Reality Check
In the 21 years the Outstanding Reality Competition category has existed, only five shows have ever won. There’s an easy fix for this broken race.
The Challenge has been similarly blanked, and its parent series, no less groundbreaking a show as The Real World, was only ever nominated for one Emmy, back in 2000 for Outstanding Picture Editing in a Non-Fiction Program, which it lost to PBS’s American Experience documentary on New York City. Alone enters its eleventh season this summer, but the show’s grand innovations and contributions to the reality genre have been present from the very beginning: a storytelling framework that relies on competitors documenting themselves, a robust production infrastructure, and total commitment to the hardcore nature of its premise. This premise seems a lot simpler than it is: As people of all kinds of backgrounds converge — professional athletes, military veterans, models, MMA fighters, firefighters — many competitors assume they’ll dominate based on how ripped they are or how sturdy or tall, and those expectations trickle down to viewers, too.
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