Dame Brian Moylan

My name is Dame Brian Moylan.

I am the president and founder of Vulture's Real Housewives Institute.

And I have been writing about TV and reality television specifically for a very long time.

There's kind of a couple starting points.

One of the biggest was An American Family, which was a PBS show in the 70s.

Which was a documentary just about a real life family, but it was more of a documentary than reality TV as we know it today.

The next big milestone was in 1991 when the real world started at MTV.

Find out what happens when people stop being polite.

What they invented that changed the genre was the confessional.

So not only were you seeing real people living their real lives, they were talking about how they were feeling about them in the moment, you know, and we were seeing them kind of in these confessional interviews.

The watershed moment was when Survivor became a huge hit in the summer of 2000.

And that really kicked off the reality TV arms race.

And so you had all of these different networks and channels looking for this new, hip, cheap way of making television.

And so there started to be all these experiments.

Everybody was trying to get their big reality hit.

50 women will compete to marry a mystery multimillionaire.

And that's when kind of Tyra came up with the idea for Top Model in the early aughts.

And it was kind of a combination of Survivor, like a elimination style show where everybody's living together.

as well as American Idol, which was a talent-based competition.

And so what Tyra was one of the first to do was combine those two things into something greater than the sum of its parts.