Iraqis brandish a poster of singer Shatha Hassun as they celebrate her winning the pan-Arab Star Academy reality-TV contest in 2007. (Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images)

In case you hadn’t noticed, Survivor is currently in its 16th season on CBS — this time, the battle is taking place in Micronesia. The show has floated all manner of gimmicks in order to reverse flagging interest. This one has been dubbed an epic contest between “fans and faves,” pitting popular past contestants against regular folk. Sure, 15 million or so viewers are still tuning in, but that’s a long way off from the summer of 2000, when host Jeff Probst and company spurred a veritable revolution in North American television. At the culmination of Survivor’s first season, when the clothing-averse Richard Hatch finally connived his way to a million bucks, almost 52 million people were watching.

Reality television has existed in some form or other since the early days of the medium — variety shows were TV’s biggest hits in the ’50s. A year before Survivor exploded, the ABC network revived the quiz-show format with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Survivor itself is based on an established Dutch franchise. In the late ’90s, Big Brother was a huge success in the U.K. Production companies like Endemol (developers of the aforementioned Big Brother, Fear Factor and many more of your favourites) were trawling international television markets, selling their proprietary show concepts, finding willing buyers everywhere. But they hit a snag when they approached acquisitions departments in the 250-million-person Arab market.

Arab satellite television hit its stride in the mid-’90s, with the success of the Saudi-backed Middle East Broadcast Company (MBC) and the fragmentation of the Lebanese television playing field. Beirut is a traditional Arab entertainment production centre. After the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), billionaire Rafik Hariri (who would twice became Lebanon’s prime minister, and was assassinated in 2005) financed the up-market Future Television, which competed with the Christian-owned Lebanese Broadcast Company (LBC) and other sectarian mouthpieces, like Hezbollah’s Al Minar TV network. Because LBC is not held to the same standards of probity as Muslim Arab stations (Future is Sunni, MBC ostensibly Wahabbist Sunni), they were able to cast a hungry eye at the lucrative reality-TV feeding frenzy.

The population of Lebanon is approximately one-third Christian; traditionally, this cohort has fewer moral strictures than its Muslim counterparts. Thus, any Arabic entertainment product with a hint of prurience is developed in Lebanon. Enter Beiruti event/marketing guru Ronny Jazzar, who in the ’90s held the rights to the Miss Lebanon beauty competition.

Iraqi Shatha Hassun holds up her national flag after winning the 2007 Star Academy competition in Lebanon. (Anwar Amro/AFP/Getty Images)

I recently met Jazzar in his office in Beirut’s upscale Achrifeyeh neighbourhood. He has a bullet-shaped head, wears dark shades and never made eye contact once during our conversation. “We wanted to do something different,” he told me of Miss Lebanon, the TV show. “To have the girls living together in a loft, filming them 24 hours a day, to show the people the whole preparation of a pageant show, to know the insights, the way they live together, the stories. It was the first reality show in the Middle East.”

It was also controversial. Produced by LBC, Miss Lebanon met social opprobrium for inviting cameras into the living spaces of Muslim women. The show broke a number of taboos but proved to be enormously popular, prompting LBC’s competitors to consider developing their own reality shows.

A natural next step was Big Brother, which was massively successful almost everywhere but in the U.S. and Canada. (It was undercut in North America by MTV’s The Real World, which debuted in the early ’90s and went a long way in paving the way for the reality-TV revolution.)

Big Brother Bahrain was an unequivocal disaster. MBC assumed that filming the show in the Persian Gulf’s most liberal — some might say debauched — sheikhdom would alleviate the following problem: a raging crowd pouring forth from a large mosque, inflamed by an imam’s passionate speech, converging on a television studio, looking to increase ratings for all the wrong reasons.

“It didn’t matter that women and men were in different dormitories [on the show],” says Badih Fattouh, head of acquisitions and drama commissioner for MBC. “It just mattered that young women and men were free in that way. We say fine – for the safety of the people, and for the safety of Bahrain – we lose $9 million. So, we bear the loss.”

Saudi performer Hisham Abdulrahman, winner of the 2005 Star Academy, displays his trophy. (Anwar Amro/AFP/Getty Images)

The safety of Bahrain? “Oh yes,” says Fattouh. “In the majlis [parliament], they were questioning the [country’s] minister of information, querying how he could have allowed such a thing. It was a huge problem.”

Ronny Jazzar, working out of Beirut, enjoyed marginally more social freedom. But his next project looked like a nuclear explosion in waiting. American Idol was setting unprecedented ratings records in the States; first season winner Kelly Clarkson was an international superstar. Talent shows have a storied history in the Arab world, and Jazzar wanted to jump from the Miss Lebanon model to produce an Endemol-developed Idol/Big Brother hybrid called Star Academy. The idea was to bring together young, beautiful guys and dolls from different regions of the Arab world to live in a compound called the “Academy” and make sweet pop music for a grand prize.

This meant all sorts of potential cultural snafus. “We were a little bit scared,” deadpans Jazzar. But LBC could get away with things that MBC could not.

Debuting in 2003, Star Academy became, arguably, the most successful Arab television show in recent history. (There are no reliable rating systems for television satellite stations in the developing world.) The show’s brilliance lay in its pan-Arabism, its adaptation of text messaging to communicate with its audience and its careful management of male/female interaction — the men and women stayed in separate dormitories and held to strict codes of conduct. Star Academy, which is still going strong, never strained to break cultural barriers. It slid along on glittered wheels, selling wholesome, pan-regional entertainment to maybe the most circumspect audience in the world.

That’s not to say there weren’t hitches. Authorities in ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia shut down cellular services on Star Academy voting nights; kids worked around the networks, sending in their votes by texting from their computers. Given this level of popular support in the Kingdom, it was no surprise that a Saudi named Hisham Abdulrahman won the second season. I have seen Star Academy paraphernalia in Palestinian refugee camps in northern Lebanon; in limousines in Doha, Qatar; in malls in Dubai; and at a house party in Damascus, Syria. It’s a regional phenomenon.

Controversial Lebanese pop star Haifa Wehbe has hosted a reality-TV series in the Middle East. (Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/ Getty Images)

And so, reality television established itself in the Arab world. Super Star, a pan-Arab Idol; The Farm, an Endemol product hosted by Haifa, the inimitable video-clip vixen; and, recently, The Perfect Bride — they have all had varying degrees of controversy and success. Jazzar’s current babies are Mission Fashion II and Extreme Makeover. (Says Jazzar: “We are treating people who are really [having] problems living in society with their physical abilities. We don’t do only beauty – nose or ears or eyes. We are doing really extreme makeovers.”)

Most recently, the Abu Dhabi-financed, Egyptian-produced Millions Poet — in which contestants battle out their Nabati poetry skills — made it to the front page of The Globe and Mail: “In the Arab world's answer to American Idol, the contestants carry prayer beads, the judges are tenured academics and the hostess wears a fuchsia abaya.” Hmm.

As a cultural phenomenon, reality television has not only incited social discomfort, but also political unease. The elites are nervous that text-message voting could encourage youngsters to demand the same level of individual agency in the political realm that they get from their entertainment. Whether or not reality TV shows influence voting patterns has yet to be determined. (How many American Idol voters ticked a ballot box in the 2004 American presidential elections?)

But what shows like Star Academy have prompted in the Middle East is a sense of individual aspiration: anybody can rise from obscurity to be a star. It’s a revolutionary idea in cultures where social behaviour is highly regulated.

In distant Micronesia, another Survivor cast member is in the process of getting voted off the island. But in the Middle East, a show of that nature would be too far ahead of the cultural curve. “Same rooms for males and females is still a problem,” says Jazzar. “We don’t need that. It could happen, but it’s not anymore a big issue – as long as they don’t do flirting, it’s not a big thing. It is going to happen, yes, but not for now.”

And in 10 years?

“I don’t know. It is getting harder and harder to capture the audience. You have to be more and more shocking. But from time to time, it goes more conservative. I don’t know what we’ll do in two years, never mind 10 years. Even in the States, they go back to The Price Is Right or Wheel of Fortune.”

For now, an Arabic Bachelorette seems unlikely.

Richard Poplak is a Toronto-based writer. He is currently working on a book called The Sheikh’s Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World.