All featured products are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Vanity Fair may earn an affiliate commission.
Reality TV became a for-better-or-worse craze in the 2000s—a category best known for exploitative and voyeuristic shows that felt more like a cultural punishment than a TV genre. Sure, millions watched Laguna Beach, Survivor, and Big Brother—but did people really feel good about those viewing choices? Based on personal experience, no. (A reminder of the more offensive reality programs of the aughts: The Anna Nicole Show, Are You Hot? The Search for America’s Sexiest People, and The Swan, in which eight female “ugly ducklings” were transformed via cosmetic surgery.)
But as we exit the 2010s, it’s clear that the last decade saw the genre stretch beyond the voyeuristic train wrecks, brain-numbing competitions, and 30-minute makeovers—though those still amply exist—into series that genuinely empower and inspire audiences. Even some of the less lofty franchises have upped their games—leaning into the anthropological elements and relationship studies that captivate viewers and fan social media conversation. Ahead, a look back at the 10 standout series that defined reality TV, and helped it grow up.
The Great British Baking Show
The Great British Baking Show—which also made Vanity Fair’s Best TV Shows of the 2010s list—is a welcome respite from American competition series seemingly designed to maximize audience anxiety, with their formulaic, music-swelled buildups to commercial breaks and maddeningly long pauses before winners are declared. On TGBBS, the amateur bakers competing for the season’s title craft their trifles and lemon drizzle cakes from tents pitched in idyllic countrysides. The contestants are not the provocateurs and attention vampires found on other series, but the kind of mild-mannered mums and uncle-like figures you might expect to work with. Occasionally they’ll even pop over to help a fellow contestant—that is just how genial and cooperative the contestants on this program are. At its peak the show was event television: In 2014, 13.5 million viewers watched the season finale in the U.K. to see who won the show’s grand prize: a cake stand.
Sadly, the show’s winning recipe changed after its seventh season, when the production switched studios and drove away talent like beloved judge Mary Berry. But the original seasons of TGBBS—essentially television Xanax—remain preserved below for your streaming pleasure.
RuPaul’s Drag Race
Is there any other place on television where contestants are asked to lip-sync for their lives, prove their devotion to chosen icon Mariah Carey, and perform cheekily titled parodies of Oscar-nominated films like Why It Gotta Be Black, Panther? and Good God Girl, Get Out? No. All hail RuPaul’s Drag Race, the Emmy-winning series that ushered a niche art form into the mainstream and a form of cathartic artistic expression to generations of audiences grappling with their own otherness. Vanity Fair’s cover star headlines the intensely watchable competition series, which merges camp with creativity and the kind of catty bon mots that seem special-engineered for eternal GIF-dom. But beneath the custom-created costumes and delicious challenges is substance—as contestants educate audiences on issues like homophobia and transphobia, depression, and HIV/AIDS by sharing their personal stories.
90 Day Fiancé
So often the stakes are manufactured in reality series. But on TLC’s 90 Day Fiancé, which debuted in 2014, the stakes are incredibly real for the featured couples—all of which consist of an American citizen and a foreigner who has 90 days to marry said American (based on the K-1 visa process) or be deported. Many of the couples have spent minimal time together IRL after meeting on vacation or via online dating app—so when the couples reunite on U.S. soil and fast-track themselves into cohabitation, they are subjecting themselves to a kind of extreme social experiment. The series blends the romantic fantasy of marrying a sexy foreigner with buzzkill realities like culture shock, language barriers, judgmental family members, financial problems, and the growing disillusionment of a happily-ever-after that comes when you discover you are marching toward an altar with, essentially, a stranger. All this with a camera crew in tow.
Project Runway
Shortly before the last decade ended, Project Runway made reality-TV history by becoming the first series in the genre to win a Peabody Award—an honor that not only helped legitimize the fashion-design show, but the genre as a whole. Although the series, which debuted in 2004, is formatted like American Idol and its baser competition peers, it makes sure to highlight the creative process over its competitors’ clashing personalities and workroom crises.
The show has evolved admirably over its 17 seasons. In season 16, for example, the series began championing body diversity by including models of different sizes and types. And after nearly a decade at Lifetime, the series returned to Bravo—with Karlie Kloss taking over for Heidi Klum as host and designer Christian Siriano replacing Tim Gunn as mentor. Given Siriano’s own experience with the show—he won the series’ fourth season—the changeup has breathed new life and perspective into the series, as Siriano nudges the up-and-coming contestants to push the same boundaries he did.
Queer Eye
Netflix’s rebooted Queer Eye has been a surprisingly cathartic social salve since its 2018 premiere. Each episode the Fab Five—Karamo Brown, Bobby Berk, Antoni Porowski, Tan France, and Jonathan Van Ness—meet an unsuspecting “hero” in need of a full body-mind-and-wardrobe makeover and attempt to heal him/her in the span of 60 television minutes. Whereas the original show’s hosts were striving for “tolerance,” Queer Eye’s hosts are hoping to help lead audience members to acceptance. In three seasons the hosts have helped a gay man come out to his stepmother, a father grieve his late wife, and a MAGA-hat-owning policeman engage in a moving conversation about Black Lives Matter—amidst other tear-jerking moments.
Top Chef
There’s a reason why the Bravo competition series is approaching its 17th season. The Padma Lakshmi-hosted staple has managed to differentiate itself from other cuisine-based contest programs by rotating high-caliber judges and world-class chefs (like Tom Colicchio, Eric Ripert, and Graham Elliot) along with backdrops. As such, each season draws viewer attention to a different city, its culture, and its cuisine—along with occasional social causes—rather than condescend to audiences by depending on kitchen meltdowns to spice up the episodes. Producers also regularly find fresh challenges to push contestants; the show’s 16th iteration was based in Kentucky and kicked off with contestants planning a Kentucky Derby-inspired party.
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown
Granted both this (and the following) entry might qualify more in the adjacent nonfiction category, but let’s give a bit of love to late chef Anthony Bourdain’s 12-season triumph on CNN, which bridged many a cultural divide with the host’s fierce curiosity, sense of humor, and seriousness about food. As incredible as the Emmy and Peabody-winning show was for its lesser-known locations (everywhere from Myanmar to Madagascar), fearlessness (Bourdain talked Qaddafi with a former Libyan rebel over fried chicken and discussed Nigerian corruption with a journalist over pepper soup in Lagos), and cinematography, Parts Unknown was prime watching because of Bourdain’s empathy and perspective, which filled every frame of every episode.
Last Chance U
Like Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, Last Chance U veers more toward docuseries—but Netflix’s four-season real-life football drama is worth a seat at the decade-retrospective reality table. The show debuted in 2016, with the first two seasons tracking the real-life ups and downs of a community college football team in rural Mississippi. And the stakes for the team members were very real—their performances on the field (and in the classroom) meant the difference between recruitment by a Division 1 team, where they would potentially be on the radar of the NFL, or an anonymous fate in their tiny town. Seasons three and four shifted subjects—relocating to the Independence Community College Pirates in Kansas.
The Bachelor
There is more at stake for Bachelor contestants now than there was when the dating series debuted in 2002, 23 seasons and myriad spin-offs ago. The contestants are not just angling for a ring or tabloid infamy, but for the kind of social media launching pad for a lucrative influencer career that could easily outlast any Bachelor-brokered engagement. Audiences, meanwhile, are light-years savvier—having become experts in onscreen authenticity thanks to social media, and learned the kind of producer manipulation that goes into the show via programs like UnREAL and behind-the-scenes books on the subject. Both factors have strangely unlocked a new dimension of Bachelor enjoyment, even if the show’s concept—boy proposes to girl after knowing her in a preposterously controlled environment for a limited number of weeks—seems increasingly antiquated. Vanity Fair’s Laura Bradley was so struck by season 23’s surprisingly compelling story line that she even wrote a think piece, “Why Is Colton’s Bachelor Season So Good?”
Below Deck
Yes, there are entire Bravo franchises built around housewives in New Jersey, Beverly Hills, and New York City who throw lavish parties and have liquor-fueled meltdowns. But Bravo’s better-kept secret is Below Deck, the upstairs-downstairs-at-sea series that debuted in 2013 and introduced audiences to a wonderful professional world they likely had never considered before: that of working on a mega-yacht. Each season features Captain Lee Rosbach, chief stewardess Kate Chastain (since season two), and a different crew doing their best to survive a revolving door of high-maintenance charter guests. There are picturesque backdrops! Diva flare-ups! Ill-advised hookups between crew members who cannot escape each other in the ship’s tight quarters! A frightening incident last season proved just how dangerous yachting can be: Cameraman Brent Freeburg dropped his camera and sprung into action to free a towline around crew member Ashton Pienaar’s ankle. Had he not acted so quickly, Rosbach later explained in the most emotional moment of his Below Deck career, the line likely would have severed Pienaar’s foot and caused him to bleed to death within seconds.
—The 10 best movies of the decade, according to Richard Lawson
—Honest reckonings and joyful romps: the best TV shows of the 2010s
—K. Austin Collins picks the decade’s 30 best films
—Why the 2010s were a golden age for female rebels on television
Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hollywood newsletter and never miss a story.
