True Lies

A provocative, eye-opening look at a genre long dismissed as trash television. Featuring interviews with dozens of reality hosts and stars, including Jeff Probst and Gordon Ramsay, and with insights into its history, production, and ethics, True Lies will change the way you look at reality television forever.

When Survivor premiered on CBS in the early summer of 2000, it seemed like a cut-and-dry novelty: interesting, and immensely popular, but almost certainly doomed to be short-lived.

It’s not just that Survivor is still, 25 years later, on the air, pulling in huge ratings across its now 50 seasons. Reality television has transitioned from a widely derided flash in the pan to a fully legitimised medium enjoyed by millions of households across a huge variety of formats. From the observational drama of Keeping Up with the Kardashians to competitive cooking shows like Top Chef and Hell’s Kitchen, it’s clear that reality isn’t going anywhere — it’s even made the leap to streaming, with shows like Love Is Blind proving that reality is here to stay.

True Lies: The Art of Reality Television, from New York Times reporter Calum Marsh, is about the history, the present, and the future of reality television — what it means, how it happened, and where it’s taking us. Featuring revealing long-form interviews with the stars, producers, and hosts of some of the most popular reality shows, including Jeff Probst and Gordon Ramsay, as well as deep writing on reality TV’s psychological and sociological dimensions, this book takes a hard look at a much-maligned genre from its origins in scientific experimentation to its decades-long evolution into what it is today.

From the game show cheating scandals of the 1960s to the phenomena of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and Survivor, from network hits like The Amazing Race and Big Brother to modern streaming classics like Chef’s Table and Last One Laughing, True Lies is a comprehensive study of the format that leaves no stone unturned.