But with reality television dominating screens since the 90s, have Kiwis reached peak reality television saturation?
Katherine Sender, a professor of media, film and television at the University of Auckland, says no.
Though New Zealand screens are overrun with reality television series covering diverse subjects from food to fat and from celebrities to cats, she says the genre will continue to morph and adapt.
"The industry capitalises on successes," she said, adding that when successful reality television shows were made on a certain subject, the genre would then "go through the roof".
Professor Sender said the popularity of reality television could be attributed to the fact that it was cheap to make and therefore there was a lot of it about, but it also appealed to viewers who empathised and identified with its characters.
"We want to see people like ourselves," she said.
"Reality television has been quite good at offering much more diverse representations of people than fictional shows that tend to typecast people in much narrower ways.
"What's really interesting about the New Zealand reality shows is how they've adapted some of the international formats and made them really Kiwi," she said, using Maori Television's Marae Kai Masters - a spin on MasterChef - as an example.
Professor Sender said the genre allowed New Zealand values to be reworked into popular television reasonably cheaply.
TVNZ executive Andrew Shaw said reality TV was less expensive to make than drama and had the benefit of enabling channels to get a loyal audience that would watch for a substantial number of weeks and nights per-week.
"We are not reducing our commitment to drama or documentary or comedy just because we're in the multi-night reality market," he added.
The question of why reality television was popular was a circular one, he said. "It's popular because it's popular. It gets made because it gets watched and it gets watched because it gets made."
Mr Shaw said it was a phenomenon that was particular for its significance in New Zealand and Australia being greater than in the US and the UK.
He said the genre would remain and would continue to evolve, much like drama and comedy had continued to evolve, and TVNZ would keep making shows that it thought its audience wanted to watch.
Though both My Kitchen Rules and The Block have been made without taxpayer money, New Zealand On Air has, in the past, helped fund reality television series including X Factor and New Zealand's Got Talent.
The organisation's television manager, Glenn Usmar, said NZ On Air's purpose with funding was to ensure there was a range of diverse local programmes on screen.
"About 50 per cent of the content we fund is for special interest audiences, such as children and minorities that would not be served at all by mainstream broadcasters without taxpayer funding.
"The rest is spent getting local content into prime time, where the biggest audiences are, to provide a diversity of programme content that is too risky or too expensive to be supported by broadcasters on their own," he said.
He said shows like My Kitchen Rules and The Block weren't funded, because they were able to be made without public subsidy, though shows like X Factor and New Zealand's Got Talent were funded because they provided a vehicle for a variety of talented New Zealanders to be seen on prime time television that otherwise wouldn't be made.
