Big Brother, Survivor, The Apprentice and The Bachelor: all these shows have one thing in common. They are classified as reality shows. This list is just a representative of the hundreds of reality programs that have eclipsed the television scene. Reality programs have become a popular genre today for two main reasons. First, they are much cheaper to produce because they don't require expensive actors like fictional drama series. The second and main reason is that they are believed to represent presumed or real reality, thus assuring the public that they see life as it is, without artifice and narrative skills. But how real are reality TV programs? How real is the reality they describe? This article argues that the authenticity of reality in Reality TV programs is questionable. Although examples of Reality TV can be found throughout the history of television, reality programs arrived en masse on peak-time television schedules during the 1990s. The first wave of reality programs built on the success of crime and emergency services reality shows, better known as infotainment, and traveled from America to Europe and beyond in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 90 (Hill 16). The second wave of reality shows built on the success of popular observational documentaries known as docu-soaps and lifestyle programs involving house and garden makeovers, and traveled from Britain to Europe and beyond in the 1990s to late 1990s (Hill 16). . The third wave was based on the popularity of social experiments that kept ordinary people in controlled environments for a long period of time, or reality shows, and moved from Northern Europe to Britain, America and other parts... middle of paper ......Works Cited Falzone, Diana. Real Housewives Reportedly Faked Scenes: Is There Any Reality in Reality TV? August 30, 2013. FoxNews.com.Web. December 4, 2013.Hill, Annette. Reality TV: Factual entertainment and television studies. Oxon: Routeldge, 2005. Print.Isenberg, Robert. How real is Reality TV? The ridiculously far-fetched, the totally sincere, and everything in between. MSN.com. 2013. Web. 4 December 2013. Jacobs, Tom. Reality television can distort viewers' perception of actual reality. Pacific Standard. September 13, 2013. Web. December 4, 2013. Ouellette, Laurie. Reality TV gives back: On the civic functions of reality entertainment. Journal of Popular Film and Television 2010: 67-73.Taylor, Jim. Reality television is not reality. Huffington Post.com. 2011. Network. 4 December 2013. Torre, Nestore. How real is reality television? 6 August 2013. Web. 4 December 2013