In 2000, reality television exploded.

The night Taylor Hicks, 29, emerged as the winner of American Idol’s fifth season, was the single biggest voting night in the history of the show – 63 million votes were cast. In the 1984 US Presidential election, Ronald Reagan received 54.5 million votes – the most votes obtained by a president.

And six months into the 2006-07 television season, reality television shows accounted for eight of the country’s 16 most-watched programs reports Mark Dawidziak, Plain Dealer Television Critic. That’s five of the top seven spots and all of the top four.

Rick Houlberg, a professor of Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts (BECA) at SF State says reality TV makes people feel superior to the people on the air. The viewers think they would be better people or wouldn’t be evil and manipulative.

“These people are all showing their worst sides,” Houlberg says. “We want them to fail.”

Although reality TV has always been around in some form or another since the beginning of television, the term “reality television” most commonly refers to the programs produced since 2000.

In the late 1940s, broadcasters were eager to get potential viewers to buy into the new and expensive medium explains Meredith Eliassen, Archives Specialist and curator of the J. Paul Leonard Library. They used reality television to fill time until network shows and microwave television was more accessible.

Allan Funt’s Candid Camera, which aired in 1948, is considered to be the granddaddy of reality television. Funt broadcast unsuspecting people reacting to pranks, not unlike Ashton Kutcher’s Punked today.

Reality television, as it is currently understood, can be traced to several television shows that began in the later 1980s and 1990s.

In 1988, a writers’ strike by the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) shut down Hollywood. For 22 weeks, writers didn’t write and television stopped. In the late ‘90s, network programmers, determined to avoid another similar impending disaster, ordered several non-scripted i.e. strike-proof shows.

When the writer’s strike was avoided, CBS decided to air Survivor and Big Brother as summer shows anyway. Both became hits.

COPS, first aired in the spring of 1989, showed police officers on duty apprehending criminals, introducing the camcorder feel of later reality television.

Nummer 28 aired on Dutch television in 1991. The show, reminiscent to MTV’s Road Rules, put seven students in a house in Amsterdam and chronicled their lives for several months. The show was the first to put strangers together in the same environment for an extended period of time while recording the drama that followed. It also pioneered many of the stylistic conventions that have since become standard in reality TV – the heavy use of soundtrack music and interspersing on-screen events with after-the-fact confessionals to serve as narration.

One year later, MTV aired Road Rules.

The Swedish TV Expedition created by TV producer Charlie Parsons first aired in 1997. It was produced in a large number of other countries as Survivor. It introduced the idea of competition and elimination, where cast contestants compete against each other until all are eliminated but one.

Reality TV shows now range from documentary, which include special living situations, celebrity reality and professional activities, to elimination and game shows, self-improvement and makeover shows, talk shows, dating shows, hidden cameras and hoaxes.

Whether the writers’ strike of 1988 spawned the boom of reality TV, the underlying popularity of reality TV for producers is linked to economics.

Simply put – reality TV is cheap. It eliminates huge above-the-line expenses, namely writers and actors. And according to Houlberg, people fight the good fight to get on TV. It reaffirms their worth and importance.

“We all want to see ourselves on TV. When most of our reality comes from the media, we are part of the greater thing when we appear on it,” Houlberg says.

Reality television may give the average person a chance to have their 15 minutes of fame, but those 15 minutes are also taken away from real actors.

Joe Toomey, an aspiring actor, doesn’t like reality TV for exactly that reason.

“It eliminates agents, actors, writers,” Toomey says. “You just need a couple people and at the end, one person wins a million dollars.”

The Screen Actors’ Guild (SAG) reported in 2005, there were 3,500 fewer roles for its members in 2004, while the number of reality TV shows rose by 46 percent.

“The statistics this year are disturbing and the industry must begin to address this downward trend,” SAG President Alan Rosenberg says in a press release. “The displacement of scripted series by reality programming continues to be a severe obstacle to a working actor’s ability to earn a living.”

Although Toomey dislikes reality TV, he admits to watching Overhaulin and Miami Ink for the finished look. It also hasn’t stopped him from taking a role as a production assistant and a carpenter for Home and Garden TV’s new reality series, Home Therapy, scheduled to air in September.

While reality TV may not be scripted, it doesn’t mean it’s any more real than its scripted counterpart.

“Reality TV is not reality,” Toomey says. “Being on the show made me realize that.”

But the average person can’t see behind the scenes, and Houlberg says viewers believe reality TV the same way they believe in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

“Most of what we know comes from mediated forms,” Houlberg says. “The more human you have, the more believable. We believe newspapers less than radio and radio less than TV. The only difference is how much human element is involved.”

Reality TV is highly edited. Producers screen for certain personality types, personality types that when put in the same room will cause certain situations. More so than real actors, the producers deliberately manipulate the individuals on reality TV in order to create conflict.

“You can do the same manipulation with reality TV as with narrative TV,” Houlberg says. “What we’re seeing is what the producers want us to see.”

Rachelle Rasmussen, 23, finds reality TV educational. It doesn’t matter that some of the shows she watches may be staged or scripted; reality TV intrigues her because she feels she’s learning something new.

“I am not really into fashion or runway but America’s Next Top Model lets you see what models have to do, what their work consists of,” Rasmussen says. “Little People, Big World gives me insight on how life is for a little person and they also have such a cool living situation.”

So whether reality TV is loved or hated, Richard Huff, author of Reality Television, says reality TV has clearly become America’s program of choice.

“And I don’t think this bubble is going to burst,” Huff says. “Reality TV is here to stay. There’s no doubt about it.”