In the 1950s, television in the USA experience a rapid rise. The successful medium offers its rapidly growing audience a new reception experience: Innovative entertainment and late-night shows create the illusion of maintaining a regularly occurring social relationship face-to-face with the person in the presenter’s role. This relationship can not only be long-term, but also take on aspects of a friendship. The sociologist R. Richard Wohl and the anthropologist Donald Horton dedicate an essay to this phenomenon they identified, which becomes a milestone in reception and impact research: Their essay Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction. Observations on Intimacy at a Distance (1956) establishes the now widely used terms para-social interaction (PSI) and para-social relationship (PSR). While the concept initially does not provoke a scientific echo, it begins to establish itself in the 1970s. Today, the topic raised by Horton and Wohl is more popular than ever. Their thoughts are now also applied to fictional characters as well as practically all conceivable media and formats. Even in the digital age, the theory has arrived and is successfully applied to communication in social networks as well as to avatars or influencers.