I get a number of "industry" related articles and I can't recall where I got one that recently stated that the entire reality TV thing can be traced back to OJ Simpson and his white Bronco car chase. When 95 million viewers sat glued to their sets for about 3 hours and all major networks including CNN (there wasn't much cable back then) decided to cover the chase live on TV (and NBC even put the game 5 of the world series in a little box and the chase in the big picture) ... and then we HAD to watch the trial... the networks took notice. They gave us what "we" wanted to watch and it was cheap to produce.