This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's Oct. 29 NBA Preview Issue. Subscribe today!
"I really feel like a zoo animal. That's where life's gone for me."
-- Odell Beckham Jr., to LeBron James, on "The Shop"
MEDIA EXECUTIVES DO not categorize sports as reality television, but this is a superficial favor to our pastimes. Sports loves to signal civic virtue; reality TV, meanwhile, can sound pejorative: Kardashian. And yet, which genres most formulaically engineer suspense for the audience? And thrive on human conflict? And pay their stars to risk on-camera humiliation?