Reality TV? These Two Producers Wrote the Book

摘要

Jonathan Murray and Mary-Ellis Bunim should probably be called the grandparents of reality TV. After all, they launched the trend with MTV's Real World and Road Rules in the early 1990s, but when reality finally made the leap to prime time in 2000 it skipped a generation. Blockbuster shows emerged such as Mark Burnett's Survivor, Fre-mantle's American Idol and Mike Fleiss's The Bachelor, but Bunim and Murray had no big network prime time hit. Now the two think they have found their way into prime time's big time this fall with Fox's The Simple Life. The show features "celebutantes" Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie living on an Alabama farm and doing things the impossibly rich girls have never even imagined, like getting real jobs, punching a time clock, and hanging out at the local gas station. Fox liked the show so much they moved it out of the summer reality glut to a fall launch, where Bunim, Murray and Fox executives expect it to flourish. But Bunim and Murray's biggest challenge―and biggest risk―this fall is NBC Enterprises' Starting Over, the first new-generation reality show to hit daytime syndication. A group of women, each in the throes of a personal or professional crisis, are housed together and try to work out new lives for themselves.