Thoughts on reality TV shows.

Gord.T

Gord.T

Still "Senior Member"
Off Topic. But since I found out that one person on Storage Wars (since been fired and is suing for 20 million) was getting 25K per episode, I assume all the rest are.

So what's a reality show? Repo men looks fake. Most of these shows look fake or set up. I mean, at 25K an episode, ...there's a bit of motivation there.

A lot of this crap is staged. And always the same formula. (They have the off-set interview slots with the characters saying what they think as if they are in real time)
The format is getting boring .

Storage Wars seeds the lockers. Repo Men basically pay people to sign off.
Every time I watch one of these shows, I have to remind myself that they are getting the going rate of 25K per episode. And that turns me off. All of those shows. Yukon Gold and the rest. A big turn off.

Rant over.

Any thoughts?
 
What's that show with the Property Management guys always evicting people? Same thing. They caught one guy with 3 sex dollls in various rooms and positions and then his wife walks in. C'mon. If the producers offer an out of work actor (or anyone) 10K for a scene? You know? It's staged. If there is money involved, it's staged to a point. Period. (Hey. It's 3am here. Just babbling)
 
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I got to work on a reality show. It was an overall good experience, I liked the people I was working with. However, yes, 80% of it was straight up staged. Gotta sell the drama to get the ratings, which basically means making stuff up to create conflict.
 
The only "Reality" show that I really liked was the first one, as far as I am concerned, and that is "Cops". Pure objective Cinema Verite,' with car chases, junkies, dogs and guns!! Everything else called "Reality TV" just seemed to me to be a new kind of game show or Drama Queen Central; for which I have absolutely no time!
 
Yeah, Cops is fun. The funniest things are the things they say off the cuff or when they frantically backpedal after realising they let their mouth run and crossed a line. You get to see racial profiling in action even as they specifically point out that isn't what they are doing. My favourite ones are the ones in the quiet neighbourhoods and towns where the young cop with a mo' drives round desperately trying to generate some crime to show the cameras, trying to make out his neighbourhood is hardcore. Arresting jaywalkers and stuff. On the crim side you get the ones that manage to bluff you and think the cops are just harrassing them and then boom! they empty their backpack weapons and drugs fall out. The best episode was the only one I've ever seen where they showed the car chase guy get away (although they mentioned they picked him up later). And the drunk drivers trying to convince them they haven't had anything to drink are always fun.

The best cops-type show is the kiwi one, because not only do you see people doing batshit crazy things on the road, they always let them off with a warning. For anything! Gotta move to new zealand!

Otherwise the only reality shows I've liked have been Dirty Jobs (I've done far too many of them but glad to see there's far worse out there), Meteorite Men (I'm sure it's fake and the two guys annoy the hell out of me so I don't know why I like it) and the various hoarder shows because it makes me feel better there's people out there worse than me! (although I'm catching up...).
 
You gotta remember, this "genre" was given a new and strong-running life with the writers' strike in 2007/2008.

In the grand scheme of things, it's pretty cheap to produce "reality" programming. You don't have to hire a writer (which is why this stuff really took off during the strike), and the Producer can "write" scenarios for the cast to mostly ad-lib without crossing union lines. There's not a whole lot of set design required on many of these shows. And $25k per episode? That's dirt-cheap compared to a drama/sit-com actor.

And then there's the kicker: viewership eats this crap up. The viewing public, or much of it, absolutely loves anything that glorifies the less savory side of humanity (see: Honey Boo Boo, Wife Swap). Where Jerry Springer left off, these shows pick up and run with it.

Low overhead plus an easy-to-sell program that will get viewers means huge profits.
 
Gord.T said:
Repo men looks fake.
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Repo men looks fake? That show is as fake as it gets! If Repo Men just showed two dudes drinking Starbucks... hook up a car... and drive off with it, then get a payment... well... you don't have a show.

When the people on Repo Men try to repo a car, and the delinquent owner just seems to accidentally catch them as she's coming out of a bar... and you can hear her just like you can hear everybody else... she's been miked. She's part of the production. Never mind the fact that in most of those reality shows the acting is horrible. The show's job is to create compelling content... that's it. There's no contract with the viewer.

I started to type a rant about Kobe jumping cars, Jeff Gordon endangering salesmen, little girls in Nike outfits kicking Nike soccer balls through donut signs, Bear Grylls in life and death situations or starving through fantastic camera work, the infamous "man overboard" episode of Deadliest Catch where we NEVER... EVER... see anyone actually IN the water (I went against everybody here, who probably still thinks that actually happened)...

"We"... on this site... should have a pretty good feel of what's staged or not... based on either safety, legal issues, or what's intentionally used or left out of, a production.

Hey... I'm just sayin'... it's "us" here. :)
 
Of course "reality" is not reality. Not even news channels regularly show anything real and unscripted.

The Doc Channel and The Weather Channel may be the only ones showing true "reality..." Sometimes...
 
The worst is Housewives of X. My wife watches it sometimes and I can't even be in the room when it's on. They just seem to pick narcisstic/sociopathic people to do these things and then encourage them to spew. It's just horrible. They just make me feel bad... that this is where we've come.
 
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The worst of it is we have lost such great channels to the tempting ratings of trashy TV.

Goodbye History Channel, TLC, MTV (awhile now), NatGeo/Discovery, and even AMC now, with that horrible show that comes on after Breaking Bad.... the one with the retarded security people.

It's a race to the bottom and I find myself instantly judging any girl I date if they like these shows. It's so disgusting to me it's almost a dealbreaker. A girl could be gorgeous and I'd likely end up not calling her back if she seriously enjoys something like 'Housewives of X'. Call me judgemental, but I can't understand how anyone can like that. We all know fast food tastes 'good' to some point, but that doens't mean we eat it regularly. I feel the same about trashy TV... and passionately so.

The film Idiocracy seems to be prophetic,

Next up!

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Idiocracy was dead-on, and like Natural Born Killers overused a cultural vice to criticize it...

...so now I'm thinking of a reality show about a reality show. Follow the crew around as they follow another crew around, seed petty interpersonal drama (never hard with creative types), have frequent unexplainable drop-by appearances by major mockumentry personalities (Christopher Guest, Eric Idle, Michael Moore, etc), and cap each episode off by three rounds of Bareknuckle boxing. I hope they spell my name right on my Emmy.
 
Yep, I've worked on reality shows several times, and its worse than your worst assumptions about how fake and staged it is.
 
David G. Smith said:
The only "Reality" show that I really liked was the first one, as far as I am concerned, and that is "Cops".
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It's funny... I would never lump "Cops" into the Reality TV genre. Ever. It's documentary. It may be entertainment in many ways, but it's documentary that is never produced.

If you want a "ground zero" for the Reality TV disaster, look no further than MTV (that's "Miscellaneous Television") and their "Real World" series.
 
Just like 'Network' predicted the de-evolution of network journalism (and everyone laughed about it at the time), reality TV was predicted in Altman's 'The Player' where the in a meeting with the Larry Levy character who is outlining his concept for getting rid of writers, Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) jokes "now if we could only figure out a way to get rid of the actors".
 
LyleGorch said:
Just like 'Network' predicted the de-evolution of network journalism (and everyone laughed about it at the time), reality TV was predicted in Altman's 'The Player' where the in a meeting with the Larry Levy character who is outlining his concept for getting rid of writers, Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) jokes "now if we could only figure out a way to get rid of the actors".
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Yup! +1
 
LyleGorch said:
Just like 'Network' predicted the de-evolution of network journalism (and everyone laughed about it at the time), reality TV was predicted in Altman's 'The Player' where the in a meeting with the Larry Levy character who is outlining his concept for getting rid of writers, Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) jokes "now if we could only figure out a way to get rid of the actors".
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It was predicted way earlier in the uncannily accurate Albert Brooks movie Real Life--
http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0079781/
 
It's tragic how the public buys this - at work here, several people are fans of Pawn Stars and when I tell them it's all staged, they don't believe me. Ugh. If you enjoy the fakery and know it's fake that's one thing, but to fool yourself that it's real is just sad. Also ditto on all the posts about how this is killing good TV - the more "reality" shows, the worse it is for actors, writers, even directors... not just because of employment issues, but because working on such shows is soul-killing... imagine as a writer you get a gig on a reality show (actually it's writer/producer since those are the guys who make it up, you can't even keep the work categories straight on these for guild/union purposes) - would you rather do real TV drama or this dreck? Horrible development and I see no end to it as long as the public is as clueless.
 
I think that a lot of those people, somewhere deep down, know that it's staged. But they pretend it isn't because it's easier and gives them cheap entertainment with the ability to turn off their brains for a while. Sometimes people ask me about them since they know I've worked on TV shows, but unless they ask I never try to tell them how fake things are. The public isn't clueless, necessarily, but they do define the market to suit their needs. That's the way it is. TV isn't made for those of us who make it.

I don't have a TV, instead I watch everything online and see only what appeals to me most. When I travel I watch TV sometime in hotel rooms, and I quickly find out that I'm not missing anything. Even if these reality shows were totally accurate, the formats are frustratingly bland and simply not entertaining. It's no more appealing than seeing people whine about first-world problems on Facebook before I block them because I don't want to see that crap. The lowest point for me was when I was browsing by genre for something to watch and found one under 'Documentary'. It looked like a really interesting one about people living in a remote part of Alaska, or something like that. Turns out it was another reality show. Meaning that these things are starting to be called 'documentaries', since not enough people were watching actual documentaries with serious in depth information. And so, as someone said, we lose all of my favorite channels and programs from the past.

I will say that contest style reality shows can be compelling and realistic at the same time. I've worked on a few of those that were absolutely real. On at least one I was upset to see that they edited the final product to seem much less intense than it was on set, so if anything it was more real than what you saw on the screen. But that's a small segment of the genre, and not the part that gets the ratings.
 
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