On the occasion of reality TV’s 10th anniversary on broadcast TV, the Kansas City Star’s Aaron Barnhart has produced a tremendous package of stories that are “about the decade’s most influential, most prolific, most dynamic cultural product.” From behind the scenes of shows such as The Biggest Loser, Mythbusters , and The Real Housewives of Orange County , and interviews with Bethenny Frankel and Ken Burns, he covers a lot of ground. In the first part, “How reality TV took over prime-time,” he traces the history of unscripted entertainment, finding that “classic documentary movies, in fact, were masterpieces of manipulation,” but also finds that “even on reality shows where producers do relatively little gaming, the reality format has a built-in unpredictability that sets it apart from scripted TV shows.” (Check out this great infographic [PDF] of key moments.) We don’t always agree on the exact definition of reality TV—I’d leave out Dateline, for example—and some of this may be fa...