The Best 20 Reality Shows of All Time, Ranked

Everything that any of us thinks we know about the business of modeling likely comes from Tyra Banks’ modeling competition, a show that was always as much of an exercise in ego as it was an earnest attempt to discover a new hot modeling talent. But that was also part of the fun. Whether Tyra was memorably losing her cool at a contestant who didn’t seem to care enough (Tiffany, we were all rooting for you) or dramatically pretending to faint in order to introduce an acting challenge, she — along with dozens of beautiful, dramatic women who hated pixie cuts and never seemed to know how to position at least one arm in a photo — made the show unmissable, at least during its peak years.

If you know, you know! Almost entirely forgotten 20 years later, “Bands on the Run” was a one-season reality competition wherein VH1 sent four unsigned bands out on the road to book gigs for themselves and sell their own merch. The bands included the boozy Flickerstick, the gothy Harlow, and the shamelessly self-promotional Soul Cracker, an admixture that proved to be satisfyingly bitchy, though the most intense conflicts occurred within the bands themselves. Part rocker soap opera and part “Road Rules,” the show struggled for attention in the summer of 2001 before Sept. 11 gave everyone an excuse to forget about it. But at least some of us remember those heady nights and hungover days with great fondness.

Given the exuberance of its adherents, it’s kind of insane that musical theater hasn’t been the basis of more reality TV shows. NBC gave it a try in early 2007 with “Grease: You’re the One That I Want!,” a show whose lasting legacy was giving us Laura Osnes, but MTV perfected the televised Broadway contestant search with “The Search for Elle Woods.” With DNA reminiscent of shows like “American Idol” (director Jerry Mitchell and casting director Bernie Telsey were among the Simons and Paulas) and “America’s Next Top Model” (the girls all lived in the same penthouse), the show was a musical theater “Hunger Games” that exposed every frayed nerve, every vocal run and every deeply earnest desire to embody the gumption and ideals of one Elle Woods.

Trash, sure, but trash with some admirable longevity. You have to admire a show for lasting 20 years with the same basic premise of throwing a bunch of poorly socialized people into a fake house for an entire summer and watching them vote each other out based on social politics and not much more. Over the years, the strategy of playing “Big Brother” has gotten more refined, giving the show a bit more respectability, attracting an avid online fandom that traffics in live feed updates as much as they do the show that airs on TV. This comes as the show has simultaneously gotten even more embarrassing via host Julie Chen defiantly adding “Moonves” to her professional name.

Originally merely a between-seasons brand extension of “The Real World” and its more outdoorsy cousin “Road Rules,” “The Challenge” evolved into one of TV’s best long-form serial dramas. While we all joked around about recurring cast members needing to get office jobs already, “Challenge” mainstays like Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio, Chris “CT” Tamburello, and Aneesa Ferreira were building careers out of returning to the show season after season to nurse grudges, develop intricate hierarchical social structures, and compete in ever-more-dangerous physical competitions. It’s a soap opera, it’s extreme sports, it’s a guilty pleasure, and it managed to outlive both of the shows that spawned it. It’s reality television’s illegitimate child that’s all grown up now.

Following in the footsteps of “American Idol,” Nigel Lythgoe’s dance competition series never reached the mainstream heights of its predecessor. But that only served to strengthen the niche appeal of “So You Think You Can Dance,” whose smaller but fervently dedicated audience invested their hearts and souls every summer into the physically gifted, deeply earnest, and breathtakingly graceful dancers. The judges (including the likes of Lythgoe, Mia Michaels, Adam Shankman, Debbie Allen and the bombastic Mary Murphy) were often outrageous, the choreographers were eccentric, and host Cat Deeley was impeccable, but it was the dancers themselves who sold this one, with a talent level that outpaced almost any other reality competition show in the game.

What began as throwaway “Apprentice” knockoff on ABC’s Friday night graveyard slowly but steadily gained an audience and a younger, more enthusiastic audience than anyone at the network could have hoped. Unless you secretly thought that Robert Herjavec and Barbara Corcoran were breakout TV stars in the making. And yet, it absolutely is the chemistry and personalities of the Sharks — contrasted with the often earnest, though sometimes too-slick contestants — that sells the show. Well, that and the irresistible armchair appeal of thinking you could absolutely come up with a dumb idea that Kevin O’Leary would offer to invest way too little in for way too much of a stake.

The rare reality TV show where the greatness of its premise is only proved by how impossible it’s been to get it right. The idea — pitched to HBO by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and their producing buddy Chris Moore — was essentially “Making a Movie: The Reality Show,” with the fringe benefit of getting HBO to finance a first-time filmmaker’s indie flick by letting them make a TV show about it. The inside look at scripting, casting and production was fascinating, with Moore in particular emerging as the show’s prickly-but-pragmatic centerpiece, even as the show produced an unbroken string of uninspired, mediocre movies.

The best season of “Project Greenlight” wasn’t actually “Project Greenlight” at all, but rather this little-watched Starz series that also was orchestrated by Chris Moore. Here, the process of making a movie was gamified even more, with two directors each tasked with filming the same script. One of those directors was the oft-disgraced YouTuber Shane Dawson, and whether or not watching him be an absolute monster (alienating, among others, producer Zachary Quinto) was a boon to the show or not is your own business, but contrasting his immature theatrics with beleaguered, workmanlike A.M. Lukas (then Anna Martemucci) made for insanely compelling TV.

Another single perfect season of television, this one from MTV in the aughts, “The Paper” followed the staff of a south Florida high school newspaper — an endeavor undertaken with varying degrees of seriousness. The show was an eight-episode unfolding PTSD attack for any viewer who had ever made an effort in high school, all centered around try-hard extraordinaire Amanda Lorber as the paper’s deeply dedicated (and thus openly resented) editor-in-chief. Lorber was the closest thing to “Election’s” Tracey Flick we’ve ever gotten on a reality show, and she deserves to be spoken of in the same hushed and reverent tones we use to discuss the likes of “American Idol”-era Kelly Clarkson and Parvati Shallow from “Survivor.”

The phrase “we don’t talk about [X] enough” should probably be banned from media, or at least from Twitter, where we quite simply do talk enough about literally everything, AND YET we honestly don’t talk enough about the contributions that “Taxicab Confessions” made to the reality TV genre. The simplicity of the premise — taxi-riding big-city revelers open up to friendly cab drivers and end up being shockingly candid (and often deeply funny) about sex and relationships — had reverberations for a generation or more in how reality stars offered themselves up for public consumption as if no one was watching.

Call this a cheat if you want to, but a) I’d rather not clog the list up with three or four different “Housewives” iterations, and b) ultimately the impact of “The Real Housewives” on the reality TV industry comes from the phenomenon as a whole. Look no further than this year’s Erika Jayne and Jen Shah scandals to see the way that Housewives has infiltrated television, news, social media, and the gossip industry. Back in the early 2010s when the soap operas began dying off, the Housewives were blamed for usurping their appeal for female-centered, wealth-signifying serial drama, and Bravo’s Andy Cohen will happily tell you that, for better or worse, Ramona Singer and Kyle Richards became our new Erika Kane and Katherine Chancellor.

When they introduced the Emmy Award for competition program, “The Amazing Race” was the first winner … and then it went on to win the award the next six years in a row, and nine of the category’s first 10 years, which gave the show an air of snobbery it’s never quite deserved. At its best, “The Amazing Race” can be as much an enriching travelogue as it is a competition, even as the American teams traipse through these gorgeous locales bitching at each other about not catching the fastest taxi or which one of them didn’t perform a local dance fast enough.

Pound-for-pound, there haven’t been many reality shows that have produced more iconic moments than the Bravo-turned-Lifetime-turned-Bravo-again fashion competition. From walk-offs to Wendy Pepper’s defaced photographs to shading Karlie Kloss about dinner with the Kushners, “Project Runway” has always had a flair for the dramatic. While its hosts and judging panel have evolved over the years, for better or worse, the optimum lineup — a playful Heidi Klum treating the runway like her own personal closet, Nina Garcia’s quizzical glances and declarations about taste level, Michael Kors delivering one-liners at a breakneck page and Tim Gunn’s kind-but-firm parenting of the designers — was a golden age that’s tough for any show to compete with.

From the beginning of the reality TV craze, the genre was saddled with a reputation for stupidity, and whether that was justified or not, “The Mole” was always the shining counter to that argument. “The Mole” was reality TV for smart people, which is probably why it didn’t last very long but exists as a fond memory for its fans, who felt like active participants in the hunt to ferret out the saboteur among the cast, all under the bookish, prematurely graying stewardship of host Anderson Cooper. Maybe reality TV wasn’t ever meant to be watched with such active, investigative detail, but think about the way “Housewives” fans watched the “Jen Shah gets arrested” episode of Salt Lake City looking for clues that Meredith Marks snitched and tell me that wasn’t pure “Mole” at work.

The phenomenon of “American Idol” was always as much of a draw as the show itself. The way it crossed the pond from its U.K. origins, announced itself with Simon Cowell’s withering disdain as a brand new paradigm for reality TV judging and produced a pop star as electric and enduring as Kelly Clarkson in its very first season, cemented “Idol” as not just reality TV excellence but the dominant TV show of its era. For five months out of every year, the show was what we were talking about. The success stories — Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Hudson — are what everyone points to when comparing it to a show like “The Voice,” which never produced any actual stars, but the enduring legacy of “Idol” is how deeply it made us care about the singers in 11th place and how 15 or so years later, you can hear names like Allison Iraheta or Josh Gracin or Trenyce and still be as ready to argue their merits as you were the morning after Barry Manilow night.

Few reality shows have evolved as well as “Top Chef” without ever changing the fundamentals of its competition. The basics of the show’s structure — the quickfire challenge, the elimination challenge, restaurant wars once a year — haven’t changed since its 2006 premiere, nor has the core of its judging panel in Tom Colicchio, Padma Lakshmi and Gail Simmons. But the show made smart adjustments to its competition (“Last Chance Kitchen” is the only buy-back gambit on reality TV that’s ever truly worked) and its overall tone (the combative, often toxic rivalries among chefs have given way to a more supportive, vibes-y atmosphere) that have kept the show at a level where it’s been able to produce two of its best seasons 15 years into its run.

Imagine telling anyone before 2009 that in a dozen years, the reality TV landscape would be dominated by RuPaul and an ecosystem of drag queens that spans five continents, multiple spinoffs, at least three streaming platforms and untold numbers of quotables and catch phrases. The vastness of RuPaul’s accomplishments shouldn’t get lost just because we’ve been simmering in them this whole time. And even as the franchise risks burnout with an ever-accelerating pace, it’s impossible to deny the show’s macro impact in bringing drag to the mainstream as well as the simple fact that it is, week to week, utterly riveting competition among some of the most creative and charismatic people ever to grace the genre.

Ask an older relative, they’ll tell you. To truly appreciate the impact that MTV’s “The Real World” had on the reality genre, you really did have to be there in the show’s first 10 seasons or so. The utter simplicity of the concept of throwing seven strangers into a hip downtown space, having them live together and filming them as their differing perspectives/life experiences/preconceptions begin to clash and combine was a deeply radical notion in the early ’90s, and while the show would end up devolving into over-complications and MTV’s descent into Spring Break culture, the ideal of “The Real World” remains as pristine as ever. And 30-plus years of reality TV that followed has only made the longing for the unadorned original seasons that much sharper.

“Survivor’s” place within pop culture has been fascinating to track over the 20-plus years since its debut. At first a TV phenomenon that captured a rubbernecking nation’s attention and had everybody gasping about voyeur TV and eating rats on a beach. Then an insurgent ratings force that threatened such TV institutions as “Friends.” Then a kind of shorthand for normcore TV viewing habits (what cool person would have admitted to being a “Survivor” fan in its middle years?). And now, after a pandemic year where seemingly everyone you know was distracting themselves from the world by marathoning the show’s 40 seasons, “Survivor” has emerged as one of TV’s great institutions — “60 Minutes” but with hidden immunity idols and Jeff Probst as a wild-eyed, ever-tinkering Mike Wallace. “Reality TV” as we know it became a genre underneath the umbrella of the “Survivor” phenomenon, and it stands today with “Survivor” still as its standard-bearer.