This is ruining our lives. This is not what we bargained for.
For his first feature after cutting his teeth on a series of short films for the debut season of Saturday Night Live, comedian Albert Brooks set his sights on satirizing the 1973 PBS series An American Family, one of the forerunners of the modern strain of reality television. The result was 1979's Real Life, which Brooks starred in (as himself) and co-wrote with Monica Johnson and Harry Shearer. Eager to make a big splash (early in the process he talks about the possibility of winning both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for his film), Brooks gets a major studio and the prestigious National Institute of Human Behavior behind him, and once he's chosen the ideal family (headed by mild-manner veterinarian Charles Grodin and his wife Frances Lee McCain), he sets about filming their lives for an entire year, ostensibly as unobtrusively as possible, but reality proves to be harder to capture than he initially anticipated.
For starters, Brooks's psychological consultants (Matthew Tobin and J.A. Preston) tell him that Grodin is coming off unsympathetically (which Brooks flat out refuses to believe) and that McCain is developing an unhealthy attachment to him (which would be easier to manage if Brooks didn't live across the street from the family). The situation deteriorates further when Grodin loses a patient on camera and McCain's grandmother dies, sending them both into a funk, but things temporarily pick up when Preston -- the main voice of dissent -- leaves the project and Brooks is given freer reign with them. (His solution is to give them a big-screen TV and film them on stimulating family outings.) In the end, though, the plug is pulled by the Institute (which comes to the conclusion that Brooks is having a negative impact on the family), the movie studio (which can't fathom why they're sinking so much money into a project without any stars) and the family itself, with Brooks left to commiserate with one of his cameramen (played by Shearer) and devise a dramatic conclusion to his movie. Little did he know that he was providing an example that many reality show producers would unwittingly follow in the decades to come.