I asked this question in the Pirate Master thread, but no reply, and I’m curious enough to give the question its own thread.
Do the laws that restrict “rigging” game shows apply at all to reality shows? After all, ones like Pirate Master have enough competition such that in the early days, I thought of the genre as just a spinoff of game shows. And if it’s illegal to give a contestant the answers to questions ahead of time, what’s the difference between that and scripting a reality show that presents itself as, by definition, unscripted, with an unknown outcome?
What they usually do is “script” it out of all the footage they shoot, so the “script” is written after the shooting. You many have ideas of how to create conflict from the start, or you manipulate events as they occur if you want to try and get something specific, but most of the plot is worked out after the fact. If you’re shooting a 10 day reality show, you have at minimum 240 hours of video (10 times as much in reality, as you’re shooting multiple contestants at once for different teams, interviews, etc.) that get edited into 14 hours (40 minutes per ep for a 21 ep run, I’m guessing). There’s lots of different stories you can make out of events and conversations - and even more when you have them taken out of context. Try to pay attention to the clothes they wear next time - I’ve seen shows where “arguments” were pieced from footage shot on different days as if they were sequential or concurrent conversations.
Much like working with infants, actually. Your best bet is to let the camera roll and catch the kid doing something cute.
This used to terrifically piss me off as an “art form”, until my brother likened it to writing. “It’s like they say when you write - write what you know. Take bits of your real life, and the lives of people you know, take real events and make them false to better your message. So we take the scenes that really happened, and we make the best story out of them we can.” That made me have a bit more respect for the artistry of reality moviemaking/television. (My brother’s in film, not television, but his whole “thing” is using real life footage for fictional films.) I still can’t watch it, but I respect it a bit more. I don’t respect the people who volunteer to appear in it any more, but I have more respect for the writers and editors as storytellers. They tell a great story. It just shouldn’t be confused with a true one.
Nice post, whynot, but I don’t think it answers the OP’s question. I think it’s more like (Survivor used as the example show):
In the event a tie appears likely, would it be illegal for the producers to get with a favored contestant and reveal the tie breaker questions and answers thus directly influencing the outcome (not just the perception of the outcome)?