Game Show vs Reality Show

Where is the line drawn between a show being a “game show” and being a “reality show?” It seems to be a pretty thin line since in essence, most game shows could be considered reality shows, and many reality shows are infact competitions (even if it comes down to winning money by being the most popular person). Yet the Emmys have separate categories for them:

(nominees in the last 5 years)
Game Shows:
Jeopardy
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
The Price is Right
Win Ben Stein’s Money
Wheel of Fortune
Pyramid
Hollywood Squares
History IQ

Reality-Competition:
The Amazing Race
American Idol
The Apprentice
Project Runway
Survivor
Last Comic Standing
100 Years of Hope and Humor
AFI’s 100 Years…100 Passions (how this is even a reality show at all is beyond me…)

if it weren’t for American Idol, I would have ruled it down to that a game show is in a studio, and a reality show is set in “reality” … I’d rule it down to saying that reality shows follow people over the course of a season, rather than new people every episode, but it seems like shows like Fear Factor and Dog Eat Dog (neither of which has never been nominated for an Emmy, but was in the reality show category at the Teen Choice Awards), which fit this criteria, are refered to left and right as reality shows.

In the case of the Amazing Race, which I am finally getting into thanks to reruns on the GAMESHOW network, it seems much more like a gameshow than a reality show, due to the constant competition aspect, and very little of the reality aspect (except for the obligutory divorce/separated couple).

Ok, I’ll be honest. the real reason I started this thread was to assure myself that I wasn’t getting hooked on a reality show :dubious:

Sorry – too late. Welcome to the dark side!

well, this thread got off to a great start.

I had a conversation with one of my friends about this same subject last night, and she made a really good point.

The one single requirement that classifies a show as “reality” is the retrospective commenting by the contestants…which I’m sorry to say, The Amazing Race has.

Wouldn’t that make The Weakest Link a reality show, then, in light of voted-off contestants being given a few seconds to kvetch after taking the Walk of Shame?

American Idol is in a studio, but the winner ends up being famous in reality, unlike the winner of say, Survivor, whose name gets mentioned less and less during the couple of weeks after the show ends.

In any case, it’s definitely a fine line, and I don’t know much about the differences.

I don’t know much more to say except the Potter Stewart test – I know it when I see it.

Incidentally, although Murray-Bunhim had been making reality shows for close to a decade prior, the reality boom that hit in the late ‘90’s and is still going strong is actually a game show offshoot – with the phenomenal (albeit rather short-lived) success of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, the networks were scrambling to find new game shows they could slot in prime time. In the crowd with Winning Lines, Weakest Link, Greed, and other fast-fizzling attempts, CBS imported a game show about a bunch of folks living on a tropical island from Europe (the Netherlands maybe?). This was Survivor, of course, and if you thought Millionaire pulled good numbers, you hadn’t seen nuthin’. The success of Survivor led to a million relaity copycats, many of which were more successful than all the game shows, and they’re still around today.

–Cliffy

IMO, “Reality Show” is almost always a misnomer. Most programs with the title would be better described as serialized game shows or even simply (in the case of Fear Factor and Dog Eat Dog) as game shows. My guess is that the networks call them “reality shows” because “game shows” are what people watch way back in the era of black and white TV.

A true reality TV show would be like a serialized documentary, or perhaps some sort of TV adaptation of a blog (I’m not sure about this last one as I don’t read any blogs). I never watched The Real World, so I can’t say whether it qualifies; my rule of thumb is that if the show includes a competition/prize, or voting off of participants, then it’s not a true reality show.

Is it true that game shows are subject to the “quiz show” laws against outcome fixing while reality shows are not? Anyone know?

Well, shows like “Showbiz Moms and Dads” (which traced five wouldbe child performers and their families), “Project Greenlight” (where an amateur director and screenwriter worked with Mirimax to make a movie), or “The Restaurant” (Chef Rocco diSpirito opens a restaurant in NYC, and the show is about his attempts to run the restaurant.)

Personally, I don’t bother with the artificial “line”. They’re all game shows to me.

A former “Survivor” contestant, Stacey Stillman, filed suit against the producers (and I think CBS) claiming that the anti-fixing laws did apply to “Survivor” and that the producers allegedly broke those laws by persuading several people to vote her off. I don’t watch the show, I don’t follow news about the show, so I don’t know what if anything became of the suit. There was some minor outcry about “Survivor” re-shooting segments of immunity challenges to get better coverage and multiple camera angles, but AFAIK no one’s suggested that the producers altered the outcome of any of the challenges with the additional footage.

More information about the Survivor suit.

I’d suggest that the difference is that a game show winner is determined by objective criteria defined in contractual rules, while a reality-show winner is determined by vote of the fellow contestants or audience.

CBS and Mark Burnett, incidentally, have been careful to call Survivor a “game drama”.

So would that make “Weakest Link,” which whittles the field to two by vote but awards the prize based on who answers the most questions correctly, be a game show or a reality show?

Another genre-bending example would be that condo renovation show that was on FOX a couple years back. Some Doper’s hot gay cousin and his partner were on it. Couples got evicted based on the judgment of realtors and designers, but the winner was determined by the objective criterion of which condo sold for the most money. And if you wanted to get excrutiatingly hair-splittingly fine about it (and who doesn’t?), “While You Were Out” would be a game show under that criterion, since the homeowners win prizes based on their ability to answer questions about the other partner.

I think I see the line now.

A TRUE reality show doesn’t have a prize. It just follows people’s lives - shows like The Real World, The Restaurant, Hooking Up, etc.

Most of the so-called reality shows, even the big wigs like Survivor and American Idol, are just competitions to win a prize. They don’t follow the traditional “answer questions, take the physical challenge, risk it all for the big prize” format, but they have the same point.

The Weakest Link is just a traditional gameshow that decided to throw in a splash of the reality format with the “last word” bits. I seem to recall NBC promoting it as “Millionaire - but better”. I always thought that Greed was the most interesting of the game show revival fad, since there was a lot more human psychology strategy than just the “eliminate the dumbest ones first, keep the dumbest ones last, and make sure you don’t get outnumbered by the opposite sex if you’re a guy” formula of Weakest Link.

In regard to the Emmys, when a show is entered, the producers pick which category it belongs in. So what constitutes a game show or reality show as far as the Emmys go, are up to the producers. Another version of this is “dramadies”. Desperate Housewives is the current example. It’s in the comedy categories because that’s what they ask for.