I read it in a magazine. There was a report of people phoning a radio show saying they were paid to be on the show. It was part of a larger article on reality shows, that had e.g the contracts from Survivor and other backstage stuff. It seemed well-researched, and this wasn’t People mag, ya know.
I’m skeptical of this. All you’re really seeing is how people respond to others who are being monumental assholes.
Take the first example, the driver is asked to judge the size of her own car to determine whether or not it’s safe to drive in a garage, instead of the garage attendant? And then they yell and scream at her for not judging it right. I don’t see a reason to be nice to them, they’re the ones going nutso over an accident.
The second example is some “friend” staggering backward from a playful punch and knocking over a bunch of shelves, then trying to pin the blame on me. I wouldn’t think I caused the accident either, my friend completely overreacting to the punch was what caused the accident.
The third example has one jerkoff driver refusing to move her car and a parking attendant suggesting a solution that ends in disaster. I don’t know that I’d own up to being in the wrong, being surrounded by jerks makes me want to tell them all to fuck off and let my lawyer sort it out.
Not to mention that celebrities have money (or are thought to have money) so there’s always the prospect that someone wants to pin the blame on them for a big payday.
Resolved: No six-minute(tops) television segment can be considered a fair measure of character.
If you think what you see on the screen or a stage, even in “reality” shows, is “fairly” applicable to those people off-camera/stage then you need to re-examine your assumptions. Believing what you see in a segment of Punk’d is a fair representation of a person’s character is no different from believing accidental decompression in an airplane in flight can rip seats from the floor and suck people in them out a door.
It’s Hollywood, and on the RARE occasion they even TRY to be accurate, they sure as hell shouldn’t be considered “fair.”
Enjoy,
Steven
I think this is the key thing the OP ignores: because they are celebrities, showing “character” (owning up, taking responsibility, admitting blame) have enormous repercussions beyond what a normal person would have to face. I’m sure there are plenty of Real Life incidents where celebrities were falsely accused by ordinary people of harming/injuring/insulting them and as a celebrity, I would assume it’s very easy to assume a defensive position when you have tabloids/lawsuits/paparazzi to worry about.
I know that if one of these situations happened to me, I would not want to discuss the matter with someone behaving irrationally (yelling, accusing, being confrontational, refusing to listen), let alone admit any level of responsibility. I would want to wait until saner heads (management/police/etc.) appeared. If that means backing away from admitting guilt in the heat of the moment, that’s fine with me if that also means I avoid the danger of having the bulk of liability dumped on me unfairly as well.
A true friend wouldn’t let you get “Punk’d”. A true friend would tell you it’s going to happen so when it does you can freak out and “Punk” the “Punkers” by doing something that scares them.
If only the OP had thought to address this point.
Post #30 would have been an excellent place to do so.
To respond in more detail: I agree that refusing to be drawn into an admission of liability is perfectly acceptable. But actively lying, or trying to simply dodge any responsibility, is another story.
Consider Elijah Wood. He and a “friend” are manuevered next to what appears to be a trash bin, and Wood tosses in a soda can that’s been used as an ashtray by his friend. Moments later, an explosion appears to come from the bin, send flames shooting up and knocking over a scaffolding, which falls on top of an expensive-looking SUV.
Elijah’s first words past the normal what’s-happening, I-can’t believe-it, are: “Keep driving, let’s get out of here.”
THAT is a lack of character.
:dubious:
Really? Not just “understandably human,” but acceptable and a mark of good character?
I was raised on “tell the truth, period.” Not that I’ve always done it, but I’ve always felt I should have (and felt it a mark of deficient character when I didn’t).
Hmmm… I recall this episode. Charlies Angels director McG was trying to goad Katie into lying for him and I thought Katie did a good job resisting. The right thing to do was to not get in the middle. She didn’t lie for McG and she didn’t rat him out to the girlfriend. Perhaps it was edited for the response you saw, but I thought Katie handled herself well and intelligently in that situation.
Sorry if I was unclear; I agree completely with your take on that segment, and didn’t intend to color her reaction negatively. Sometimes, “deer in the headlights” is the proper reaction to a bizarre scenario.
“Character” is too complex to be determined by a single incident. Although it would appear that Elijah Wood has not character by his choice to shirk responsibility, who knows what he would have done on another day? Who knows what his impulses would be in an emergency situation?
I agree with you about remaining ethical under stress, but not about remaining polite. Sometimes remaining polite is inappropriate.
Also, there are people who break under stress more easily because they have endured great suffering in their lives. That does not mean that they are lacking in character – only that their endurance is vulnerable.
And, of course, low seratonin levels are not an indicator of character, but they do make a person more likely to experience confusion, a lack of concentration, feelings of hopelessness, a lack of energy, and problems regulation sleep – all of which make that person more vulnerable to stress but indicate nothing of his character.
No offense, but it does contradict your earlier assumption that the segments are not edited to any significant degree. I would assume almost automatically that they are, and the fact that the shows targets celebrities means that the editors can go a lot further than they could with an average citizen. Aren’t the standards for defamation different for those in the public eye?
If the show happened live, and was not edited, and the producers didn’t get to select which segments to air and which to bury as uninteresting, and we got an accurate idea of the context in which the prank was set up and brought off, it might be a better demonstration of character. As it stands (AFAIK), it’s basically the producers of the show trying to make their victims look bad, and not being at all up front about the steps they have taken to make this happen.
Regards,
Shodan
(IANAL, and I have never seen the show.)
I don’t agree. Sometimes remaining silent, or kowtowing or being a doormat is inappropriate, but one can be assertive or remove oneself from the situation while remaining polite.
“I’m sorry this happened, I need to speak with my lawyer before saying anything else.”
“I am not liable for this accident. If you wish to restrain me, you will call the police now, or I will call them and press charges of unlawful restraint.”
“We are done here, I am leaving now.”
I’ve never seen a single unpleasant incident that improved by people being rude.
Assuming that I have an accurate understanding based on your description, I’ll have to own up to the same lack of character. If I threw a relatively innocuous item into a trash can and it exploded, my first reaction would be to not wait around and see what else might explode. Get the hell away and call the cops would be my plan, but I can certainly see focusing on the “get the hell away” part in the heat of the moment.
Once they got Scott Evil at an illegal gambling site, the cops told him to leave as the place was about to be busted. Scott thanked the cop for letting him leave and either left or started to leave. After the cops busted in and all Scott revealed to AK that he was given a heads up by the cops, and AK was asking him “dude we’re friends, why didn’t you tell me the were gonna raid the place in 30 minutes” implying Scott Evil was only concerned with saving his own ass and not caring about AK, as long as he was not arrested, which made for an interesting point about Scott Evil’s self centeredness or something.
I agree. Punk’d is a fair measure of character. For example, you can learn a lot about people who watch a show about celebrities in unusual and stressful situations just so they can make snap judgments about their characters.
I disagree with the OP.
Punk’d shows you how a person might behave in a stressful situation in which the entire world is in actuality conspiring against him or her.
The situations on Punk’d are far from what might happen in reality. In fact, they turn reality on its head. In the examples in the OP, the physical nature of reality is manipulated in order to hinder the unsuspecting. A vehicle with enough clearance “running into” hanging pipes. A “reserved for” sign appearing precisely where a person has already parked. A small punch resulting in a person knocking down multiple shelving units in a store. This is not reality, and so I don’t think it can tell me a lot about how a person would react in a ‘real world’ situation.
In the real world, Pink’s boyfriend (and the police) would not have been lying to her, nor would many of the people on the show do or say the things they do.
When the rules of the game of life are changed as drastically as tehy are by the producers of the show, anything that anyone unaware of what’s going on does cannot be reasonably used as a basis for character judgment.
And this differs from reality in what way?
Regards,
Shodan