Up to this point, we have focused on long-standing TV program trends, but many other genres have played major roles in TV’s history, both inside and outside prime time. Talk shows like the Tonight Show (1954– ) have fed our curiosity about celebrities and politicians, and offered satire on politics and business. Game shows like Jeopardy! (which has been around in some version since 1964) have provided families with easy-to-digest current events and historical trivia. Variety programs like the Ed Sullivan Show (1948–1971) took center stage in Americans’ cultural lives by introducing new comics, opera divas, and popular musical phenomena like Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Newsmagazines like 60 Minutes (1968– ) shed light on major events from the Watergate scandal in the 1970s to the reelection of President Obama in 2012. And all kinds of sporting events—from boxing and wrestling to the Olympics and the Super Bowl—have allowed us to follow our favorite teams and athletes.

Reality-based programs are the newest significant trend; they include everything from The Voice and The Deadliest Catch to Top Chef and Teen Mom. One reason for their popularity is that these shows introduce us to characters and people who seem more like us and less like celebrities. Additionally, these programs have helped the networks and cable providers deal with the high cost of programming. Featuring nonactors, cheap sets, and no extensive scripts, reality shows are much less expensive to produce than sitcoms and dramas. While reality-based programs have played a major role in network prime time since the late 1990s, the genre was actually inspired by cable’s The Real World (1992– ), the longest-running program on MTV. Changing locations and casts from season to season, The Real World follows a group of strangers who live and work together for a few months and records their interpersonal entanglements and up-and-down relationships. The Real World has significantly influenced the structure of today’s reality TV programs, including Survivor, Project Runway, Jersey Shore, and Dancing with the Stars. (See “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: TV and the State of Storytelling” on this page.)

Another growing trend is Spanish-language television like Univision and Telemundo. For the 2012–13 TV season, the popular network Univision reached about 3.7 million viewers in prime time each day (compared with 1.9 million for the CW or 11.9 million for CBS, the top-rated network). The first foreign-language U.S. network began in 1961 when the owners of the nation’s first Spanish-language TV station in San Antonio acquired a TV station in Los Angeles, setting up what was then called the Spanish International Network. It officially became Univision in 1986 and has built audiences in major urban areas with large Hispanic populations through its popular talk-variety programs and telenovelas (Spanish-language soap operas, mostly produced in Mexico), which air each weekday evening. Today, Univision Communications owns and operates more than sixty TV stations in the United States. Its Univision Network, carried by seventeen hundred cable affiliates, reaches almost all U.S. Hispanic households.