We’ve been wading into these uncomfortable waters all the way back to the forerunner of contemporary reality TV shows. Starting in the late 1940s, the pioneer of them all, Candid Camera, used early hidden-camera techniques to capture unguarded moments of ordinary people for mass entertainment.
Candid Camera creator Allen Funt saw himself as a “student of human nature.” Born in Brooklyn in 1914, he attended Cornell University where he briefly was a research assistant to the influential social psychologist Kurt Lewin. After graduation, he worked as an adman until he joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps, where he brought his fascination for human behavior to radio. But it was while he was recording GI life that he encountered an issue: The soldiers he interviewed tensed up when he started his recorder and only let their guard down when he stopped it. What, he wondered, would happen if they didn’t know they were being captured on tape?
Candid Camera was his answer. Starting as Candid Microphone on the ABC Radio Network in 1947, it moved to ABC Television a year later. Using recordings—first audio captured by hidden microphones, and later video by hidden cameras—the show sought to catch unsuspecting people “in the act of being themselves.”
From the start, Funt wanted to create the most realistic situation possible: “[A] good conceptual idea is only the start,” he would later write in an article for Psychology Today. “You have to make lots of adjustments to create viewer believability and really involve the subject. You need the right setting, one in which the whole scenario will fit and make sense to the audience even when it doesn’t to the actor.”
The setups were endless: Buster Keaton played a klutz at a lunch counter. Jayne Mansfield a damsel in distress on the way to the airport. Over several appearances, Muhammad Ali offered a range of performances, from pretending to be a messenger delivering packages to appearing on a schoolyard to surprise kids. The show revealed the gag at the end of each stunt, with its famous catchline: “Smile, You’re on Candid Camera.”
Audiences were enraptured, but critics called foul on the deceptive nature of the show. After all, when you broke it down, Funt was putting unsuspecting “marks” on national TV for entertainment. In Real People and the Rise of Reality Television, historian Michael McKenna writes that over the years Candid Camera was charged with being everything from “invasive,” “misrepresentative,” “exploitative,” to “cruel.”