I think there is a huge difference between reality shows and reality competition shows.
Survivor is not totally fake. As already stated, it is cut down to 45 minutes from days of footage, but what you see is not written or staged in the way I think the OP means.
Now, Pawn Stars and a lot of those kind of shows are definitely aided by the show’s producers.
It’s clearly written: someone has to come up with the challenges and stunts. It’s just that the participants aren’t told what to say.
I doubt Survivor has a script, but you won’t convince me there aren’t producers whispering in contestants’ ears to come up with better TeeVee.
“Psst … why do you and Fucky over there form an alliance?”
“Psst … Fucky and Dipshit are in an alliance against you …”
This is starting to get to the heart of the question that the OP was, I think, trying to ask. The OP mentioned that insurance was a huge part of the TV equation, and no one has really addressed that assertion. The OP essentially says that the whole show must, in fact, be very tightly scripted, organized and planned, or insurance is an impossibility. No insurance company will work with a show where there truly isn’t a script and the producers are simply hoping that their writers and editors can pull something together out of the hours of footage.
In essence, this is a question for GQ and not CS. Does anybody know if this is correct, this business about insurance being an absolute necessity, and no insurance company willing to work with an unscripted show? It’s a good question. I have no idea whether the OP is correct in this assertion.
I am shocked to hear that TV does not accurately reflect reality.
That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it. My other half watches those cooking shows, like Dinner: Impossible, or the other one where Gordon Ramsey goes into some poor hapless chef’s place and beats the crap out of him metaphorically for being a terrible chef. Of course they are scripted and everything is controlled. But they are still fun - to him, anyway. (I find them still boring, but I don’t like any reality TV I find.)
One thing that sometimes brings home the staged nature of some elements of these shows - think about the position of the camera.
For example - the host of the show makes a surprise doorstep call to someone. We see him standing in the front porch - then we see the subject open their front door,* but we see this, and the ensuing conversation, from a camera position inside the house, over the shoulder of the subject*.
No, he’s not. You can get insurance just fine, given that you’re professionals who know how to do this.
'Sides, the insurance company doesn’t give a shit if you have a good show, they care if you file a claim because Bob dropped another camera on his foot and delayed shooting for a day. If you do that too often, then yes, you might need to pay more in premiums or find another insurer, but insurance doesn’t insure content.
The OP might be thinking that the *producers *wouldn’t allow an unscripted show to be developed, but he’d still be wrong. The producers know how this stuff works, and if you can convince them that you can shoot enough footage and run it through good writers and editors, they’ll give you the cash.
Hell, in my experience, reality doesn’t accurately reflect reality.
Anyway, I too would like to hear from someone with actual knowledge concening the insurance issue. My guess is that the OP is misunderstanding the degree of ‘scripting’ needed. Does TV news reporting manage to have insurance for field crews covering live events? Are those ‘scripted’ in every cased as well?
Fear Factor is not faked.
Junkyard Wars did plant usable materials in the yard as i recall reading later on.
This is what I meant. It’s quite different from a “Pawn Shop” kind of show. It’s a game show, like Jeopardy. Jeopardy isn’t scripted in the same way as a sitcom, drama, or some reality shows. Neither is Survivor.
Probst tweets and makes videos about these kinds of things. I know he can not vouch for other shows, but Survivor does not do this. They have to follow strict game show rules so they don’t end up in hot water like the quiz shows in the 1950’s. This includes"
not doing what you just said
submitting all the challenges to the network in advance, so not to look like they are rigging challenges towards certain remaining players
I was watching an episode of Ice Road Truckers (or “IRT”, I guess) in which they were driving the mean roads of the Peruvian Andes. A truck broke down in the middle of nowhere and the drivers were forced to spend the night out in the hills of the Sechura desert. The announcer gravely told us that help might be a long time coming… if it could find them at all in the vast emptiness (hint: try following the road since they were in a truck).
I asked my wife: “Do you suppose the cameraman can throw them a sandwich or is this like the wildlife documentaries where you just have to watch the polar bear slowly starve to death rather than upset the balance of nature?”
It was painfully clear to me in some episodes. I’m thinking of the ones where they had to create hovercrafts and airplanes, for instance.
I love how on various shows that the host or participant being filmed is struggling to get to some point, or is shown finally arriving at a destination, and the person really trys to give the viewer the impression that they are the first one there, the only person to reach that point, or has ended up there by happenstance that no could have predicted - and yet - there seems to be a cameraman there already to film the momentous occasion.
All the dirty and difficult places that many reality show people go in the course of a TV show, the cameraman is always there before them, carrying 30-40 pounds of equipment.
I’ll give Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame credit for regularly hyping up his crew and admitting that for all the places he has to climb or squeeze into, some other poor guy just did the same thing with 40lbs of equipment.
Yeah, I love those. Or when they go to someone’s house to surprise them and we get a camera shot of the front door opening.. from inside the house?
Most of it I can put down to editing after-the-fact. But there are always little things…like Barry buying the locker with the shrunken head on the very day he brought along his performing psychics.
Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely love Barry…he’s my favorite. But that looked awfully fishy.
And they had to do it first. Although sometimes Mike does just put his little flipcam down in the hole and point it back at himself.
I suppose this is a thread-shit, but I don’t even get the premise to those shows. I’ve wandered past them a few times in my channel travels, but as far as I can tell, *Storage Wars *is basically … let’s buy up some crap that somebody abandoned in storage and see if there’s anything cool in there.
Is there more to them than that? What’s entertaining about finding some abandoned shit?
Real life is BORING. I knew a prison warder and he tells me how it is in jail. 99% of the time, it’s just prisoner sitting around being bored.
So that is why reality TV is fake, life, for the most part, IS boring