Unscripted television takes things to the extreme.

The Voice is based on a cynical premise. It posits that traditional television singing competitions like American Idol, The X Factor, and America’s Got Talent are infected with human biases that exclude people who look a certain way from succeeding in the competition. Judges like Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul, and Randy Jackson, The Voice suggests, are deaf to true musical talent because they have a narrow image of what true talent looks like: beautiful, skinny, square-jawed, amazing teeth, and perhaps a dash of smalltown America (but not too much[1]!). But while other shows are tainted by the judges’ preferences in a future celebrity, The Voice welcomes all comers. The Voice has “blind auditions,” you see, in which the judges can’t see who they’re letting onto the show. Pretty awesome, right? Now anyone can win!

Well, that’s the show’s premise in theory. After an initial crop of contestants make it through The Voice’s blind auditions, it plays out pretty much like every other competition show, with judges who can see everything and hear everything and make all kinds of decisions based on things other than musical ability. But look, this is unscripted television. Commitment to the gimmick isn’t the name of the game here. The name of the game here is salesmanship, and The Voice makes a hell of a pitch for itself, even if its foundation is shaky at best.

All reality television begins with two promises. Each unscripted show has a different external promise—we’re here to find the next American Idol, we’re here to find the best home cook, we’re here to watch two people fall in love—but each has the same internal promise: What you’re about to see is real. You’ll notice this essay is already using two words interchangeably to describe this mode of entertainment: “Reality television” is how shows like The Voice brand themselves to the public, while “unscripted television” is how these shows are talked about in the industry. They mean the same thing; one has more of a wink behind it.

The Voice’s external promise was responsive to the dominant singing competition shows of the 2000s. It’s no secret that American Idol was a cultural powerhouse in its heyday, gifting the world legitimate stars like Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Jordin Sparks, Clay Aiken, and Phillip Phillips[2], but since 2008 or so, the program has gone from legitimate mover and shaker in the music world to a weeknight time suck.

It’s sort of a nebulous question why some Idol stars broke out and others didn’t[3], but regardless, singing competitions weren’t producing viable talent at the start of the 2010s, and they were struggling to retain viewers. The Voice arrived in 2011 as a proposed solution, promising to save the day for reality TV by bucking the music-competition formula cemented by Idol, eschewing stunt auditions—sorry, no more people in bunny suits dry-humping Simon Cowell—and focusing on legitimate talent. The worst contestants on The Voice would be better than average and the best people would be considered as such because they had been through a process that evaluated them solely on their (all together now!) voice alone. American Idol and its imitators had become about drama. The Voice would bring it back to music. That was the promise, in theory.

But that promise isn’t why The Voice took off. This is an intuitive point, but the appeal of any music competition is actually the judges, and while other shows leaned on industry players like Cowell and Jackson to give themselves legitimacy, The Voice leaned on celebrities. The first season combined Maroon 5 front man Adam Levine, country star Blake Shelton, (former) pop diva Christina Aguilera, and esoteric rapper/singer CeeLo Green as a panel of judges/coaches who would recruit contestants, mentor them as prospective stars, and pit them against each other[4] [5].

The Voice’s judging quartet wasn’t exactly lacking in authority, but on paper, it still doesn’t make much sense why audiences would trust someone like Blake Shelton over someone like Simon Cowell when the latter had an entire pre-Idol career devoted to discovering talent. But since The Voice is secretly more about succeeding as a TV show than about finding the next Carrie Underwood, that logical gap didn’t matter, because a lot of people like Blake Shelton’s music[6] and want to watch him on TV for a couple hours. Shelton’s legitimacy comes from his fame, and the same goes for every other judge who has graced The Voice, even though some of them have plenty of non-fame reasons to be respected as coaches and taken seriously as mentors[7].

Substituting celebrity for authority (or disguising celebrity as authority) paid dividends for The Voice right away. The first season premiered at almost 12 million viewers, and ratings for the show actually increased as the year went along. In the 15 additional seasons since (!), premiere viewership hasn’t dipped below 9.5 million, and average viewership has always been above 11 million. The highest-rated episode of The Voice aired on Super Bowl Sunday in 2012 and drew 37 million pairs of eyeballs. That season averaged almost 16 million viewers per episode.

And as The Voice established itself, its competitors began to sink. American Idol went from averaging over 25 million viewers per episode in 2011 to a relatively puny 8 million in 2019. Simon Cowell’s Idol follow-up, The X Factor, debuted an American iteration opposite The Voice in 2011 to a solid 12.5 million rating, but its third and final season in 2013 struggled to pull more than 5 million.

More compelling than The Voice’s assertion as the new standard in popular music competitions is how it continued to stave off imitators even as those imitators became more and more Voice-like. In 2011, American Idol shifted from its producer-centric judging panel of Cowell, Jackson, and Abdul-replacement Kara DioGuardi to a revolving door of popular musicians, including Nicki Minaj, Mariah Carey, Keith Urban, Jennifer Lopez, and ABC’s trio of Luke Bryan, Katy Perry, and Lionel Richie[8]. At the same time, The X Factor moved from Cowell, Abdul, L.A. Reid, and Nicole Scherzinger[9] in season one to Demi Lovato and Britney Mothereffing Spears in season two. The key to winning the singing category of unscripted TV, conventional wisdom said, was pulling the biggest names to appear behind the judges’ table. You were only as good as your stars were famous.

This celebritization, if you will, of unscripted TV has extended now to the point where the most popular shows feature celebrity contestants in addition to celebrity hosts and judges. The most-watched new show of the 2018-19 season was The Masked Singer, a South Korean import that put celebrities in disguises and had them stage an anonymous singing competition until someone was eliminated, when they were forced to remove their mask and reveal their identity (the winner of season one was rapper T-Pain; the first contestant eliminated was NFL star Antonio Brown).

And now, when shows don’t have outright celebrity cast members to draw viewers in, they try to structure themselves to produce celebrities. Reality franchises like Real Housewives, The Bachelor, and Vanderpump Rules create their own micro-ecosystems in which contestants and cast members can come onto the show as “normal people,” go through a few weeks of social media engagement and glowing up in Los Angeles, then emerge as more beautified, more media-trained, more sponsored influencers who can then defuse attention from themselves back to the show that birthed them. Just as Hollywood movies are aiming to create cinematic universes, unscripted TV shows are learning to build a similar kind of self-sustainability. That starts with how brands like The Voice promote their celebrity talent.

But if a show doesn’t have the money or influence to attract a major name, it has to rely instead on the external promise that helped it through the executive pitch room, and that’s how less star-studded shows become rife with gimmicks. The Voice’s A-list talent meant it could skate by on its tame blind audition wrinkle, but less privileged shows have had to try to capture attention through sheer insanity.

The original American Idol had a simple construct: Contestants audition for a panel of judges, and if they impress those judges, they advance to later rounds where they compete for votes by the American people. If they receive the highest number of votes, they win. It’s an election.

These days, American Idol’s fall from grace has forced it to integrate some truly wacky changeups. Now, the show has “celebrity duet rounds” and “wildcard rounds” and a judges’ save and a save for fans (who per the show’s voting system, would’ve just voted to eliminate that same contestant) and all kinds of other high jinks. America’s Got Talent added a golden buzzer because its traditional red ones weren’t exciting enough. The Voice pitted a pair of singers against one another in “battle rounds,” incorporated a Twitter-based “instant save” feature, and factored in the sales of each contestant’s iTunes performances as part of the voting. We’re a long way from tickets to Hollywood and call-here-to-vote instructions from Ryan Seacrest[10].

Away from the music world, the rising extremes of reality TV are even more pronounced. Food TV went from Iron Chef America and Chopped, which determined winners based on expected things like taste and presentation, to the rules-laden whiz-bang carnival acts of Cutthroat Kitchen and Guy’s Grocery Games, which often find their sweaty, foul-mouthed, haggard contestants forcing each other to cook with Easy Bake Ovens or finding a way to make a dessert from cactus pear, bull testicles, the water from the top of a Greek yogurt cup and a George Foreman grill.

Dating shows, meanwhile, devolved from The Bachelor’s traditional (okay, fine—“traditional”) love-story format to things like 90-Day Fiancé, Dating Naked, Married at First Sight, and The Proposal[11]. The less said about that hot mess of a world, the better.

But even as unscripted television strains to capture your attention with those outlandish external promises, it’s that consistent internal promise—that what you’re seeing is authentic, true, and Real with a capital R—that is stretched the most. Modern reality TV is barely clinging to the idea that what you’re seeing isn’t staged. Bachelor contestants talk on camera about going on the show to promote their brand instead of finding love, game shows are rigged more and more toward the house[12], and everything on TLC contrives drama instead of waits for it to occur naturally.

It’s almost too academic to say unscripted television became post-modern in the 2010s, but even so, the self-awareness with which these shows operate makes their relationship with viewers fundamentally different than the Survivors, Real Worlds, and Extreme Makeover: Home Editions of yesteryear. Reality television doesn’t need to promise “reality” anymore, it just needs to promise pretty people and lowbrow entertainment. It doesn’t matter if The Voice doesn’t deliver a future music star[13], it just matters that it gives you something to cheer for, cringe at, or criticize.

Modern reality TV doesn’t sell a storyline, it sells an inside joke. You know the Bachelor isn’t going to find love, but isn’t it hilarious to watch them try? You know the winner of the Voice isn’t going to become famous, but isn’t it inspiring they had the chance to follow their dreams? You know each adrenaline-high contestant on Deal or No Deal is doomed to make terrible financial decisions no matter their winnings, but isn’t it fun to cackle at their foolish gambles? Reality TV may be flashier and more extreme than ever, but its ultimate sell in the 2010s might have been a feeling of superiority for the viewers.

The Voice positions you as a judge, The Bachelor positions you as a matchmaker, and Deal or No Deal makes you think you’d take the first offer and run. Of all the promises of unscripted TV—dubious premises, authoritative celebrities, exotic locales, expensive prizes—the most important one is self-affirmation. These shows say you’re doing alright. They say you have it figured out (at least, more figured out than those people). This past decade, with its confused identities and shifting dialogues and WTF world events, that sense of self-security had more value than ever. On reality TV, it came at a low cost. All you had to do was buy in.

[1] Shoutout Taylor Hicks. His name was Hicks, for crying out loud!

[2] Kidding about that last one. Wanted to make sure you were paying attention. He did have that one Mumford-and-Sons-sounding hit that was everywhere, though.

[3] One highbrow theory: Some Idol winners sucked and others didn’t.

[4] The Voice’s debut roster is impressive. Shelton was a huge star; Adam Levine was transitioning Maroon 5 from a funk-adjacent rock band to a more generic, more lucrative pop group (Maroon 5 had three Top 10 singles before 2011, they’ve had 10 since); Christina Aguilera had long been considered one of the best singers in pop-music history; and CeeLo…actually, let’s give CeeLo his own footnote.

[5] CeeLo Green’s career has birthed a ton of quality stuff and brushed against a ton of uber-talented people. In the 1990s, CeeLo was in the ahead-of-their-time southern hip hop group Goodie Mob before he went solo in the 2000s to collaborate with people like T.I. and Pharrell Williams. In 2006, CeeLo hit the mainstream when he and producer Danger Mouse created Gnarls Barkley, who became responsible for one of the most beloved songs of the generation: “Crazy.” Just before The Voice, CeeLo went solo again and put out “Fuck You,” one of the most ubiquitous, radio-friendly, crowd-pleasing songs of the past decade. All this is to say that when CeeLo Green came on The Voice, he was both a sneaky huge deal because of his pre-“Fuck You” career and an actual huge deal because of “Fuck You” on its own. CeeLo was essential to The Voice itself, too, balancing the vanilla cool-guy schticks of Shelton and Levine while bringing a pensiveness that counteracted Aguilera’s primpy posh-ness. He was like a black Buddha in a Bono costume. He ruled.

[6] A lot of people. The man has 24 No. 1 singles in his career.

[7] A quick ranking of The Voice judges, from “Woah, they landed them?!” to “Bebe Rexha”: Pharrell Williams (the sheer amount of gold this guy has created in his career blows everyone else on the list out of the water—he’s legit a musical genius), Shakira (the biggest name, full-stop), John Legend (Chrissy Teigen would’ve topped this list), Usher (Yeah!), Kelly Clarkson (perfect), CeeLo Green,  Gwen Stefani (not as forthcoming with her know-how as you’d hope, but her career is so diverse it makes up for it) Alicia Keys (super weird but everything she says sounds like it should be written in calligraphy), Christina Aguilera (the real Voice), Blake Shelton, Adam Levine, Miley Cyrus (should be way higher, but she’s a little too Miley Cyrus, you know what I’m saying?), Jennifer Hudson, Kelsea Ballerini (had to google her), Bebe Rexha.

[8] Some of these names are pretty strong (Mariah?? J-Lo??), but the early slate of guest judges American Idol deployed back in the day is even wilder. The early seasons featured guest judges like LL Cool J, Shania Twain, Jewel, Olivia Newton-John, and bizarrely, Quentin Tarantino.

[9] Don’t know who Nicole Scherzinger is? That’s okay. America didn’t either.

[10] Still the best reality competition host we have. Contenders include Alton Brown on Iron Chef America and Padma Lakshmi on Top Chef. The worst? Cat Deeley’s uncommanding facilitation of So You Think You Can Dance. The most underrated? The dude who drives the Cash Cab.

[11] On The Proposal, an anonymous suitor whittles down a pool of contestants through a series of question-and-answer sessions. At the end of the hour, the suitor reveals themselves and asks for the “winner’s” hand in marriage. It’s like The Bachelor on cocaine.

[12] We sort of kept game shows at arm’s length in this chapter to avoid being bogged down in the minutiae, but the two trends we’re discussing—celebritization and extremification—still apply here. New game shows either operate on a celebrity-centric premise, like Ellen [DeGeneres]’ Game of Games or The Rock’s Titan Games, or they lean on a gimmick so nutso you can’t help but tune in to see WTF kind of insanity goes down, like Spin the Wheel (in which contestants spin a 40-foot tall wheel for a chance to win up to $23 million), Million Dollar Mile (complete an obstacle course for cash while a bunch of star athletes try to stop you), or Mental Samurai (contestants answer trivia questions while being flung around by a giant robotic arm).

[13] And let’s be clear, it hasn’t.