This is 99% invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

Back in 2003, Emily Nussbaum developed a covert guilty pleasure.

I had a bad habit of watching the streaming 24-hour feeds of the first season of Big Brother in the U.S.

Which is something that I was doing pretty much every day and talking to nobody about because it was extremely embarrassing.

Big Brother is a reality television show that debuted in the U.S. in the year 2000.

If you've never seen it, the show is basically about a group of people who are isolated in a house that's under constant surveillance

and one contestant gets voted out each week.

For Emily, it was a sort of comfort watch.

They just showed the people in this house in California 24-7 and so I would put them in the corner of my

screen.

I would wake up in New York and I'd watch them sleeping out in California.

In the early 2000ss reality shows like Big Brother

and Survivor were beginning to conquer network and cable television. Emily was one of

millions of Americans submitting to the unscripted TV takeover.

It's interesting to see regular people.

It's interesting to see authentic behavior

by real people put under pressure.

I think this is a universal appeal of all of these shows,

however you define them.

And people can criticize that and say that that's cruel and voyeuristic

to want to watch regular people under pressure, but I also think it is human nature.

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