The 15 Longest-Running Reality Shows Of All Time

Some of the longest-running TV shows in history have been reality shows. Whether structured or unstructured, in competition format or not, it seems that there's something near-inexhaustible about a strong reality TV formula. A reality show that finds success early on and plays its cards right could go on playing for so many years as to settle into the back of cultural view and become an intrinsic part of the entertainment landscape — something tens of millions of people are guaranteed to watch year in, year out, so long as the usual, familiar goods are provided.

You may have at some point asked yourself what the record-setting reality shows are, as far as longevity goes. To sate your curiosity, we've compiled a list of the 15 longest-running American reality series of all time. A few ground rules: This list is measured by number of years on air as opposed to the number of seasons (which in turn is used as a tie-breaking criterion), and court shows like "Judge Judy" and "Divorce Court" — which can technically count as "reality shows" but are really more of their own separate thing — are excluded. Read on to find out which reality shows have endured for literal decades.

It's not much of a surprise that a lot of cooking competition shows have managed to reach incredible longevity over the years, given the inherent tension and fascination of high-pressure culinary performance and the universal pleasure of salivating over creative, delicious-looking meals. The longest-running American cooking-based reality show, however, offers a little extra something beyond the standard cooking show entertainment value — in the form of a raging, performatively mean Gordon Ramsay bossing contestants around.

Premiering in 2005 with an 11-episode season, Fox's "Hell's Kitchen" typically depicts a group of chefs divided into two teams competing for a position as head chef at a restaurant chosen by Ramsay. With the exception of a hiatus in 2020 — understandable, given that the COVID-19 pandemic was hardly the most appropriate moment for the indoor dining that makes up the majority of weekly challenges — "Hell's Kitchen" has aired at least one season every year since its premiere. This brings its total run to 19 years, 23 seasons, and over 350 episodes, narrowly edging out "Top Chef" (which debuted in 2006 and has 21 seasons) for the title of longest-running American cooking competition show.

One of the longest-running reality TV shows is also maybe one of the most sensationalistic, having been accused for years by critics and health professionals of exploiting subjects and pushing its own "entertainment value" past the ethical tipping point. Even so, it has the ratings, and keeps churning out season after season. We're referring, of course, to A&E's "Intervention," a show that follows a different person or small group of people with substance dependence or addiction each week, charting the lead-up to an intervention meeting in which their family or friends, aided by a professional interventionist, demand that they check into drug or alcohol rehabilitation programs.

Despite the heavy criticism it has faced for manipulating addicts to depict them at their lowest, the show won the Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding reality program in 2009. "Intervention" has been airing every year since 2005 save for a hiatus in 2023, with some years having multiple seasons. This brings its total bow to 19 years on air, with 25 seasons and over 350 episodes. In that time, it has also inspired several spin-off shows.

The rare reality TV show that is actually real, Discovery Channel's "Deadliest Catch" has spent several years proving that hyper-specific work environments can, and do, make for strong human-interest TV. Arguably the original "extreme line of work" show before that was a whole reality TV niche, "Deadliest Catch" follows real-life fishermen working aboard crab fishing vessels in the Bering Sea, off the coast of Alaska. It documents the astoundingly dangerous, volatile, and physically draining conditions of their day-to-day work, giving viewers a glimpse into what it's like to make a living under such deadly conditions and offering some of the scariest moments on American TV.

The first season of "Deadliest Catch" aired in 2005 and had 10 episodes. Since then, the series has aired one season per year every single year, gradually increasing the episode count all the way up to the longest season yet in 2022 at 23 episodes. The show has now been running for 20 uninterrupted years, airing 20 seasons in that time, making it the 13th longest-running American reality series ever.

ABC's "The Bachelorette" is a spin-off of "The Bachelor" — which you will also find further down this list — that, much like its parent series, takes the form of a dating game show. The show hews closely to the format of "The Bachelor," with a gender-swapped twist: Every season, a bachelorette becomes acquainted with a pool of male suitors and then eliminates several of them from the competition each week, narrowing down the contestants until she's left to choose between two. Her final choice is often followed by a marriage proposal. The male cast typically comprises 25 contestants, and some seasons have featured two bachelorettes instead of one.

The American version of "The Bachelorette" — which was the first of its kind, followed by several international versions — began airing on ABC in 2003, but had a two-year hiatus between 2006 and 2007. Otherwise, it has aired at least one season every year since its premiere, totaling 20 years on air with 21 seasons and over 230 episodes.

One of the most successful reality TV franchises in the world is "Dancing with the Stars." It began with the British show "Strictly Come Dancing" in 2004 and has been licensed out to over 60 countries spanning every continent on Earth over the course of the past two decades. America's "Dancing with the Stars" was not the first to carry that title — that distinction belongs to the Australian version, which premiered in 2004 — but it's still one of the longest-running, having begun airing in 2005.

Each season, celebrities from various fields team up with professional dancers to face a series of dancing challenges as a duo, until one duo emerges as the winner. The show typically airs multiple seasons per year, and has been airing uninterrupted since 2005; in those 20 years, "Dancing with the Stars" U.S. has aired 33 seasons and over 500 episodes. Originally, it ran on ABC, then moved to Disney+ in 2022, and ultimately became a simultaneous Disney+ and ABC weekly airing from 2023 onward.

One of the shows that defined what people think of when they hear the words reality competition TV, "American Idol" began as a spin-off of the similarly-formatted British series "Pop Idol," bringing over its then-rising celebrity judge Simon Cowell. Since then, the show has established one of the best-known structures in American television, which consists of aspiring singers being selected from nationwide auditions by a panel of judges, then facing a series of rounds in which they must perform a variety of songs. The viewing audience then votes to eliminate contestants each week, leading to one competitor reigning supreme and winning a recording contract.

Although "American Idol" is widely considered one of the most successful and influential TV shows of all time, it at one point struggled in the ratings and was canceled by its original network, Fox, in 2016. Even so, it was soon revived by ABC and returned to TV screens in 2018. All told, the show has aired for 22 total years now, with as many seasons and over 650 episodes.

The flagship show that originated the massive, international "The Bachelor" franchise, ABC's "The Bachelor" has been one of the network's most reliable audience hits since its premiere. It follows the same overall format and structure as its aforementioned spin-off "The Bachelorette," only focusing on a male bachelor as each season's protagonist, with a pool of female suitors as the competitors. Like "The Bachelorette," the show usually culminates in a final choice between two suitors, and a marriage proposal.

"The Bachelor" began airing on ABC in 2002, at a time when dating reality competition shows — as opposed to the traditional, less storytelling-centric dating game shows — were still a relative novelty. The show has since aired 28 seasons across 23 uninterrupted years, with each of those seasons being relatively short in length at 7-13 episodes. Almost 300 episodes have been aired, in addition to a dozen one-off specials.

In the history of the Primetime Emmy Awards, no show has been nearly as dominant in its respective overall programming category as "The Amazing Race," which has taken home 15 Emmys and been nominated for a whopping 97 in total. It's no surprise, as the CBS series has been consistently well-received for its innovative sport-meets-travelogue format, in which multi-leg races are contested by two-person teams around the globe, with legs involving not only speed and endurance but logical reasoning, money and time management, and people skills, essentially turning the world into a scavenger hunt.

If we were going by total number of seasons, "The Amazing Race" would be up there as one of the most prolific reality shows of all time; after all, it has aired a whopping 36 seasons so far. Based on years on air, it still ranks high, having premiered in 2001 and aired at least one season — but more often two, and once as many as three — every year since, save for 2021. In other words, the show has been on for 23 total years, during which time it's aired over 400 episodes.

One of the longest-running American competition shows struck gold by de-emphasizing the competition aspect: The real point of interest here is merely watching humans interact. On CBS's "Big Brother," an American adaptation of the Dutch series of the same name that premiered in 1999, a group of contestants are confined in a large house, completely isolated from the outside world, and kept under 24/7 video surveillance. While most of the dynamic involves merely trying to build strong relationships, there are also periodic challenges and games, as well as eliminations (called "evictions") leading up to a three-person final in which the season's winner is determined by a jury made up of the season's evicted contestants.

The American "Big Brother" has been airing every year since its debut in 2000, totaling 26 seasons and over 930 episodes. This makes it the longest-running version of "Big Brother" — which is saying a lot for one of the most popular reality show formats on Earth.

Another show that has become synonymous with reality competition TV is CBS's "Survivor." The quintessential adventure game show follows a group of contestants who are marooned in a remote location somewhere in the world. At the beginning of each season, the players are divided into teams or "tribes." They proceed to compete in challenges for elimination and vote each other off (initially within their own tribes and then within the whole remaining contestant pool) until one contestant emerges as the winner. It's justifiably an iconic 21st-century TV institution; the best "Survivor" seasons ever are among the finest that reality TV has to offer.

In addition to its cultural impact, the show has one of the oldest conceptual genealogies in all ongoing reality television; the first version to be broadcast was Sweden's "Expedition Robinson" in 1997. As for the American version, it's been going since 2000, with 47 seasons aired so far across two-and-a-half decades on air.

The fifth-longest-running American reality series of all time combines the sensibilities of news, documentary, and reality television into a single package. "America's Most Wanted" endeavors to turn still-open manhunts into entertainment-slash-public service. Each episode is focused on one currently at-large fugitive wanted for major felonies (at the time of airing), recapping and re-enacting their crimes, providing further context via talking-head interviews, and encouraging viewers to provide information through a hotline.

Widely acknowledged as a show that changed the face of American law enforcement ("We have arrested so many heinous people and we've saved so many lives because of 'America's Most Wanted,'" Geoff Shank, assistant director of investigative operations for the U.S. Marshals Service, told Time), "America's Most Wanted" premiered on Fox in 1988. It aired yearly on its original network until 2011 — it was then canceled, briefly revived on Lifetime, and revived again on Fox in 2021. A second revival season dropped in 2024. In total, it has run for 26 non-consecutive years and 27 seasons.

If one were to point to a single show as the common forebear of all contemporary reality television, it would have to be "The Real World." True to its title, the legendary series purported nothing more than to give audiences access to the lives and behaviors of real people from various backgrounds, without a competition hook to keep things tense or volatile — all that was showcased was the living in itself. Each season, a group of castmates spent several months living together in a house peppered with round-the-clock cameras, leaving the premises only for sites that were pre-approved for filming.

Despite the waning authenticity and exploitative bent that the show accrued in later seasons, the fact that it ran for so long makes it a fascinating document of the social and cultural changes and hot-button issues that marked the United States at the turn of the 21st century — as well as the changes in the public perception of reality TV itself. "The Real World" began airing on MTV in 1992 and continued to air at least one season per year until 2017, at which point it was canceled. It was brought back for an additional season on Facebook Watch in 2019. Adding it all up, "The Real World" was on for 27 years, airing 33 seasons and 614 episodes in that time.

Loose in concept and format, "The Challenge" came into being because of "The Real World" and its RV-set sibling series "Road Rules." It was intended — down to its original titles, "Road Rules: All Stars" and later "Real World/Road Rules Challenge" — as a competition series pitting alumni of those two MTV flagships against each other. In each episode, contestants face extreme, usually adventure- and physicality-based challenges, eliminating each other until one team comes out on top.

The show that would later be known as "The Challenge" premiered on MTV in 1998, at which point "The Real World" and "Road Rules" had already aired several seasons. While both originating shows have since concluded, "The Challenge" has remained on air to this day, totaling 27 years, 40 seasons, and over 550 episodes — which makes it the longest-running American reality competition series ever. In all those years, "The Challenge" eventually went beyond its original brand-building premise and began to also feature alumni from various other non-MTV reality shows.

A common theme across this list is that the majority of the shows on it are massively popular with huge ratings and enormous pop culture presence. But a reality show doesn't have to be a ratings juggernaut or an oft-parodied pop sensation to be sustainable for years and years, and no show proves that more decisively than PBS's drama-light but highly educational "Antiques Roadshow."

The multi-Emmy-nominated series follows a team of professional antiques appraisers who set up camp in one particular taping location somewhere in the U.S. — be it a convention center, a hotel ballroom, a historical site, or something else entirely — and then welcome locals interested in receiving a thoughtful estimated valuation of antiques under their ownership. While providing appraisals, the experts walk owners — and viewers — through various passages of American history, and may ultimately conclude that a given item is highly valuable, virtually worthless, or anything in between.

A spin-off of the British show of the same name, "Antiques Roadshow" has been going strong since 1997 with 28 seasons having aired at the time of this writing — which seems like a lot until you learn that the British "Antiques Roadshow" has been airing uninterrupted since 1979.

The longest-running American reality series of all time is "Cops." As its title indicates, the show depicts the day-to-day work of police officers, sheriffs, and deputies, following patrols, stings, calls for service, the carrying out of search and arrest warrants, and other activities. To give viewers a greater sense of urgency and access, the show notably employs on-the-fly handheld photography, and no incidental music or narration whatsoever.

"Cops" premiered on Fox in 1989. It ran on its original network without any hiatuses until 2013; then, for its 26th season it moved to the basic cable channel Spike TV, which later became known as Paramount Network in 2018. Following the 2020 George Floyd protests, the show was canceled by Paramount Network, but the subscription VOD platform Fox Nation subsequently brought it back in 2021. In total, "Cops" has aired over 1200 episodes across 36 seasons, making it the king of American reality TV.