Two decades ago, MTV executives threw out the script and trained the camera on a bunch of California high-schoolers. ‘Structured reality’ was born, and television hasn’t been the same since

However you feel about reality TV, there’s a subgenre so ubiquitous it’s impossible not to cross paths with it. Rolling on for season after season, these shows follow the lives of real people like soaps, stretching the definition of “reality” to its limit. Take Made in Chelsea, which documents love triangles among the upper classes in west London; The Only Way Is Essex, the Brentwood-set show that introduced us to Gemma Collins and Joey Essex; or Keeping Up With the Kardashians, the series Kim Kardashian used to turn herself from “the daughter of OJ Simpson’s lawyer” into a global celebrity and billionaire. Love them or hate them, all have become behemoths. And all of them have one show to thank for their success: Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County.

The 2004 MTV reality series followed a group of telegenic, sunkissed 16- to 18-year-olds living among the mini-mansions and surf shops of Orange County, the affluent Californian coastal neighbourhood that inspired Josh Schwartz’s teen drama The OC. At its centre were three friends caught in a love triangle: quiet Lauren Conrad, raucous Kristin Cavallari and surfer Stephen Colletti, their lives an endless cycle of beach bonfires, costume parties and time spent staring moodily into the distance. It was glossy, aspirational and heavily edited – a world away from the fly-on-the-wall documentaries and rough-and-ready social experiments, such as The Osbournes and Big Brother, that defined the era. But when it first hit screens 20 years ago? It looked as if it was going to flop.