You needed a prison warden to tell you that prison is massively boring? I thought that was rather obvious. However, if you do want to get that sense from “reality” TV, watch Morgan Spurlock’s 30 days episode where he spent a little over 3 weeks in prison. He said the boredom was really one of the worst things about prison. Totally nothing going on…ever.
There’s something about auctions, especially blind auctions. It IS interesting to see what they’ll find in the lockers. Maybe I’m just sensitized to it because my dad used to go to auctions and buy boxes of things (he was more of a Barry than a Dave…a collector/specialist than a wholesaler) and we used to bring them home and spend evenings finding out what we had.
Are we to believe the Pawn Stars guy is a walking Wikipedia who can pull up detailed random ancient history from memory the moment someone happens through the front door?
The homeowners “surprise” visit from the cast, shot from inside the house, is annoying.
I also hate the ones where they show a family doing something together (e.g., happily cooking in the kitchen), Leave It to Beaver style, while all dressed up, trying to have a natural conversation. So awkward. “See how happy we all get along, have joyful conversations, and do things together for the 5 minutes the cameras are here?”
And that the experts just happen to know everything about whatever the person has brought in that day. Of course Rick tells them what the item is purported to be in advance so they can do some research. Of course Rick looks up information. The show is for entertainment, after all.
I look at just about every one of these shows as “a re-creation,” as opposed to “reality.”
Many “reality” shows feature “man versus man” or “man versus nature” conflict as a huge component of the show; this makes them painful for me to watch, since so much of that conflict is very obviously staged.
I’ve enjoyed Deadliest Catch for a long time, in spite of occasional bouts of clearly staged interpersonal conflict. The “man versus nature” conflict that’s going on there is real, and for me that makes it worth putting up with the staged stuff: these guys aren’t in some contrived situation, they’re doing the job they’ve done all their lives, and it’s hard. Long hours, sleep deprivation, heavy lifting, bitter cold, mortal peril. There’s nothing fake when one of these guys goes overboard into icy water, or gets his nose broken by a wildly flailing lift hook.
Same conversation over and over in many shows:
Q: How much do you want for it?
A: $x
Q: (Hems and haws) That’s too high. I can give you $x/3.
A: Wow, no thanks. How about $x/1.5?
Q: $x/2 and no more.
A: (hesitant) OK, it’s a deal!
I hate the one where they lay the cash on the table during negotiation. “There’s $800 cash on the table. (Dramatically lays another bill down) How about $805?”
In contest-type reality shows such as Survivor and Big Brother, contestants may ramp up the drama to increase their screen time and fame. Many of the contestants are trying to get into showbiz and look at the show as a way to get screen time. Producers don’t typically tell the contestants what to do directly. Rather, they may subtly prod contestants to ramp up the drama during their private interviews. I’ve heard that some producers will ask pointed questions like “Suzie, what would you do if you found out that Dan and Carol were scheming to vote you out?”
In casted reality shows like Pawn Stars, Storage Wars, etc., the cast may increase the drama to ensure the show gets bigger ratings so it lasts longer and they get paid more. The people you see on screen are getting paid for their appearance. It is in their financial interest to do stuff that keeps viewers interested. The producers are more involved in these shows and may work to setup scenes that they want to show.
Back in the mid '00s, there was Jesse James and his Monster Garage series(I think there were 80 episodes, the final episode of which Jesse himself did NOT show up for, but which Scottie Chapman of then Mythbusters fame did). The idea was for build teams to create funky vehicle contraptions (although the middle shows did shift a while torward customizing cars) like Mustang lawnmowers and PT Cruiser log splitters and Rolls-Royce honey wagons and such within 6 days and under a given budget - as the show progressed, during filming sometime the builds clearly would not be finished in time (the Hearse Grave Digger being the first, but also others like the DeLorean Hovercraft and Soup-up Peel racer), and so the team for those builds were informed that they lost, and the offending creation destroyed in a spectacular fashion (blown up, crushed by a LAV, shot full of holes etc). The Producers and Jesse thought this looked a lot better (and cooler) than just extending the build time or giving the build team more resources, and in retrospect it did.
I’ve really hated the tendency of every single reality show to be Springerfied (as in Jerry Springer). Every idea or concept for a show eventually devolves into having the people overdramatically get into it with eachother in a manner fit for an episode of The Jerry Springer Show.
A documentary style show on the inner business workings of a tattoo parlor and what type of people get tattoos? Nah, lets have a couple of employees threaten to throw down cause one got dissed.
A cooking competition that shows real life kitchen situations and actual talent? Nah, let’s have the head chef be a prick and a couple of the contestants threaten to throw down cause one got dissed.
A documentary style show about building custom motorcyles and what goes into it? Nah, lets have the father & son threaten to throw down cause one got dissed.
It the vein of using the phrase “jump the shark” for sitcoms, I’d like to hearby coin the phrase “pop a Springer” for reality shows when they lower themselves to this point.
I’m waiting for something like this to evetually happen on shows I like. One of these days two opposing teams are going to threaten to throw down cause one got dissed on Pumpkin Chunkin.
When the legal notice for the auction is placed in the paper, the serious bidders do some research on the person who rented the unit. For instance, the art dealer. A lot of “luck” is good research.
Also, showing all the crap units would not make an interesting show.
That is why I like Survivorman. It’s only him. If you see a long shot of him trekking across some inhospitable terrain it’s because he did it first to set up the camera, went back and did it again for the shot.
Storage Wars I enjoy. I get the feeling that it’s heavily edited and of course they are playing for the cameras but I don’t mind. That other storage show, the one with the bald guy with the tattoo on his head is completely fake. If you read fast enough there is a disclaimer saying its a portrayal of the best finds of their career. In other words a recreation.
A lot of the tru tv ripoffs of other shows take something that is real at least by reality tv standards and makes them totally fake. Pawn Stars is of course set up. But the people are real. You don’t just go up to the counter and get on tv, there are screeners that check for cool stuff coming in. I’m sure some of the cool stuff comes in when they are not filming and they are all asked to come back on another day.The place is huge and only a small portion is shown. But the Detroit pawn show is so totally fake and contrived its unwatchable. I would rather watch a real soap opera than that badly done soap opera.
I’ve never watched them, but the Real Housewives and the Kardashians are heavily edited and semi-scripted (and someone to come up with ideas: ‘you and so-and-so disagree over the dinner party, so maybe you can ramp it up into a screeching cat fight for the camera’). Nobody’s lives are that interesting or eventful. (I don’t know what happened with that poor guy who committed suicide - I don’t think THAT was in the script. :()
I was on a reality show back in 2008. Nothing seemed fake about it, and it didn’t appear to have been a union shop. I know I only got paid $8/hour for two eight-hour days (that were closer to 12 hours long), and the third day they never paid me for at all.
Well, on one of those Storage Forage whatever shows, two “stars” got in a fight because one had apparently slashed the other’s tires outside one auction so they couldn’t get to a second auction in time. Y’can’t tell me that if that was anything other than staged, they wouldn’t have been thrown off the property and the cops called, instead of gently pulled apart like a buttermilk biscuit and given a talking-to by a couple of security guys; all calmly caught on camera with nobody yelling “Turn that (*&# thing off!” And incidentally, I think that fulfills** Hampshire**'s pop-a-Springer qualifications. Can we get these absurd shows off the air now so sweetie will quit watching them?
IIRC, the fake/cheating aspect of that show was that, yes, they had a budget, but it was quite common that as soon as the given budget started to get a little tight, they would conveniently receive thousands of dollars worth of stuff as “freebies”.
What’s funny about that is that while Hardcore Pawn is heavily contrived, it is one of TruTV’s *less *contrived reality shows. I find it funny that the fakest of the fake reality shows are found on a channel called “TruTV” whose slogan is “It’s not reality, it’s actuality”. . . Ever catch a few minutes of one of those towing shows? Who watches that crap? Does anybody really think that shit is even remotely real?
What channel had that automobile repossession show where all the episodes were actually just dramatizations of previous events?
That’s the show on TruTV I was talking about, don’t remember the name, though. Something with “Repo” in the name, I think.
I think I first noticed the fakeness way back during Pimp My Ride, when Xzibit would ring the doorbell and the person would open the door and would jump up and down all surprised and excited b/c Xzibit was at the door to pimp their ride…and they had a visible battery pack from a radio mic on their back.
Oh my christ I hate this. It’s one thing if the nature of the thing invites drama (I expect to see it on, say, Hoarders) but when a show is about a certain craft (like tattooing), THAT is what I want to see. If it’s something major (like, say, one cast member having an actual heart attack), that’s one thing. And if someone is frustrated over something, fine, no one can be perfectly composed all the time.
But when the show devolves entirely into “will host A and character B get in a fistfight over a minor disagreement?!?!”
Hey guys. Guess what. I don’t give a shit. That’s not why I watch these shows.
The First 48 is really good about this sort of thing. These are real cases, after all, and so of course that has to be the main focus. Every once in awhile a detective will have issues at home (I remember an older episode where one’s fiancee ended up leaving him), but the distinction here is that these are BACKGROUND events. We get enough of a taste of what these folks are like so that we know they’re human and can sympathize with them, but they’re real detectives solving real homicides, so that’s what the show has to be about.
Survivor is not a game show, it’s an entertainment show. There are no guidelines of any kind that bind them, much less strict ones. They are free to cheat and manipulate the outcome to their heart’s content and the FCC wouldn’t care in the least.
By contrast, Jeopardy is a game show, and they do have to follow strict guidelines or find themselves in hot water.