ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how the historical poetics of these programs interact with larger social issues to open urban space. Reality television's precursors appeared sporadically on television schedules in the twentieth century. Space is a defining feature of Candid Camera. Each episode involves show creator Allen Funt and a cohost and sometimes the prank actors introducing the sketches to a studio audience. The on-location shooting used an aesthetic that made space generic. In 'The Talking Mailbox' sketch, Funt places a microphone in a New York City mailbox. The Real World held on to dated views of urban space partly because MTV branded itself against the political regime that helped to deregulate the economy and transform cities into homes for the elite. COPS shows reality television coming to terms with the policed spaces of social expulsions, but reality television's need to police the closed spaces of contemporary cities would be short lived.
