Top 10 Best Reality TV Shows

Keeping Up with the Kardashians ran for 20 seasons on E! between 2007 and 2021, following the Kardashian-Jenner family through Kim's rise, Kris Jenner's management of the family's businesses and Caitlyn Jenner's transition. The family moved to Hulu with a new series, The Kardashians, in 2022.

ABC's The Bachelor premiered in 2002 and built the rose-ceremony elimination format that a whole genre copied, spinning off The Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise. Its long record of casting almost exclusively white leads drew sustained criticism and produced the franchise's first Black Bachelor, Matt James, only in 2021.

MasterChef began on BBC in 1990 as a modest amateur cooking contest created by Franc Roddam, was relaunched in 2005 in the faster format now licensed around the world, and reached the US in 2010 with Gordon Ramsay fronting it. The premise has not changed in any territory: home cooks, not professionals, working to a brief under time pressure.

Big Brother was created by John de Mol for Endemol and first aired in the Netherlands in 1999, then licensed to more than fifty countries. Its distinguishing device is the round-the-clock live feed, which let viewers watch the house between edited episodes years before streaming was ordinary; the CBS version has now run more than twenty-five seasons in the US.

Love Island turned an ITV2 dating format into a summer fixture for young British viewers and a franchise exported to the US, Australia and beyond. Its structure — couples recoupling each week, late-arriving “bombshells”, and public votes deciding who stays — is what generates the drama, and the show has drawn sustained criticism and regulatory attention over its duty of care to contestants.

Shark Tank adapts the Dragons' Den format, itself descended from Japan's Money Tigers, putting entrepreneurs in front of a panel of investors who negotiate for equity on camera. It has run on ABC since 2009, with Mark Cuban, Barbara Corcoran, Kevin O'Leary, Daymond John, Robert Herjavec and Lori Greiner as the recurring investors, and has won multiple Primetime Emmys for Outstanding Structured Reality Program.

Netflix's 2018 revival sends the Fab Five — Antoni Porowski, Tan France, Karamo Brown, Bobby Berk and Jonathan Van Ness — to remake a nominee's home, wardrobe, grooming, cooking and outlook across a single episode, mostly filmed in the American South and Midwest. It has won multiple Emmys for Outstanding Structured Reality Program.