I was just at a friend’s house. She insisted we watch this GREAT new program, Big Brother. After watching the close-up shots and listening to the predictable situations, I told her that she was watching a staged soap opera.
You would have thought her I just murdered one of her children from the reaction. She is abolutely certain that these people are sequestered from the rest of the world and are completely ad-libbing the entire show, from where they stand and sit to what they say and do.
I don’t believe it. I know what the publicity people say, but I’m not buying it. There are live cameramen, sound men, lighting grips and all the rest of a TV production, right on that set…And it IS a set.
And I have never watched ‘Survivor’ either, but I suspect it is the same show on another set.
AND THE QUESTION, PLEASE!
What’s up with these shows? Are we really supposed to believe that in a setting like that, if it were real, the lighting, camera angles and sound will always be perfect? That only one person talks at a time and there just happen to be cameras which can do close-ups of whichever people are talking? That no one ever walks or stand in front of one of the ‘hidden cameras’? That only one cuss word is allowed to be ‘bleeped’ per episode? That someone who stands to win .5 mil by getting rid of all the others is REALLY concerned with the feelings of the people she just voted out?
OK, you may answer that the editor cuts out all of the imperfect takes. Of course he does. But the Director runs the set.
The fact that the show is on a Hollywood sound stage and NOT a real house pretty much ruins it from the start. I cannot believe someone would watch this. How boring. At least MTV’s Real World was in a real house.
CBS is just doing what http://www.voyeurdorm.com has been doing on the internet for a few years now. A group of college girls in Tampa have agreed to live in a house with a bunch of video cameras everywhere.
I have no idea what is up with all these crappy new shows out. I think on survivor, they should not vote people off the island. They should award the money to whoever stays on the island the longest.
Thank god I do not have much time lately to watch tv. And thank god that when I do, I have 300 channels so I can avoid such crap.
I’ve seen bits of The Real World & Survivor (but not Big Brother), and here’s my take on what happens :
What actually happened on the island/in the house is not a soap opera, or staged with takes. But the end product (what we see) obviously is a dramatized show. With any of these shows, there’s thousands of hours of tape, and the directors go through and pick out what they want to fit.
In other words, these shows are highly edited real life. There’s no obligation for a shot that follows another to have even been remotely close in real time. The Survivor shows have titles, even. The people become characterizations; they’re most likely chosen for the role they can fulfill, whether they are consciously acting it or not. The important thing is that they don’t need to act it; it’s extremely easy to form a caricature from a few out-of-context phrases. Thus there is one woman on Survivor who was made out as the “feminist man-hating bitch”, a man made out as a “fun-loving philanderer”, and the “cute nymphomaniac” he falls in with. While a very little bit of the person’s actual character might be shown, you really can never know; you may as well be watching actors. I think there’s little difference between this and, say, “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?”
My friends get confused or upset when I mention the script for these shows. “I don’t think they use scripts,” they’ll say. If there’s titles and themes by week, there’s going to be scripts. The fact that the lines weren’t set up before hand is acceptable; it’s like news journalism, which does the exact sort of thing with many stories (if not all).
I don’t know why I’m admitting this, but I watched the first (intro) episode of Big Brother, where they showed off the house and how it works. There are cameras all over, hung from the ceilings. There are hallways going all around the outer edges of the rooms where cameramen can shoot through one-way glass. At night, when the lights are out, they use special lights/film so they can film in the dark.
Unlike The Real World (I’ve seen a couple random episodes over the years) where they do seem to have camera and lighting operators following them around, the Big Brother set is designed so that the occupants can be filmed from behind the scenes.
Of course, it is still a staged show in that the thousands of hours of tape are edited for entertainment purposes. So it isn’t anything like an accurate depiction of what life would be like in these circumstances. I continue to be amazed at what people will do to get themselves on television.
Bear, Panama and Robin, thank you for the information. The measure of a person’s intelligence in how closely they agree with you and you three are pretty darn intelligent.
I apologize, Handy. I did a search for related threads and didn’t see any, but it was late and I was pretty tired. I have no problem with moving the thread. Your call Manny.
I’d still like to see some other information on this subject, though.
