I just discovered ‘Parking Wars’. It’s like a soap opera I can’t stop watching. Little 22 minute chicken nuggets of reality.
Of course any reality show is going to be edited to make it more compelling, but ‘Parking Wars’ seems to rate most real.
I hated to see that show about discovering valuable items in houses about to be demolished was fake, because it had very interesting aspects. “Reunite the Band”, I was sad to see it was staged.
I suppose "Celebrity Mole’ could be called a reality show, that one was fun.
So what shows do you all thin are the ‘most real’?
“Alaska The Last Frontier” really builds up the survival aspect of the Kilchers’ lives–the show never mentions that they live a handful of miles from Homer, are not 100% subsistence, spend a lot of time touring with Atz and Jewel, and are USDA growing zone 5–the same as much of the Midwest.
However, I don’t think there are any made-up hijinks for the show. What’s filmed is, I think, all things that actually happened. The Kilchers don’t strike me as people who would act. Play up their rugged home-spunnedness, sure, but not be goofy like the Pawn Stars guys.
I watch very little “reality” tv, but the one show that I enjoyed and view as the most real was Insomniac with Dave Attell on Comedy Central. I know it was filmed over a couple of days and I’m sure heavily edited.
I liked his interactions with people and talks with working folks on the midnight shift. I just looked it up and am surprised the show ended in 2004.
It’s not staged, so there’s that going for it, but I doubt IRL cops waste that much time lecturing drunks and druggies and wife-beaters. At least I hope they don’t.
We just discovered The Legend of Mick Dodge, a “wild man” who hangs out in the Hoh Rain Forest in NW Washington State. He doesn’t live in the woods 24/7/365, of course, and yeah, he gets paid for giving people tours. But when he says that asphalt and artificial lighting annoys him, I believe it. There’s no artificial drama in his show. I like him.
Bourdaine, douchey as he is, prides himself on authenticity. Shark Tank makes might sift through its applicants for a good story but the investors are pretty direct and forthright in their assessments. Friday Night Tykes is brutally engaging and is too unflattering for all parties involved to be staged.
Not even close; where’s the footage of cops beating up minorities? Or shooting a dog in cold blood? I’ve even seen episodes where the cops (after a very convenient edit) suddenly discover hidden drugs in someone’s car which were obviously planted there.
As for shows that depict actual reality, I’d nominate The Deadliest Catch. There’s almost always one or two fatal shipwrecks every season, and the show never shies away from that.
I’ve heard that Project Runway is pretty true to reality. The one thing that doesn’t come across, however, is how much of it is an endurance challenge.
I came upon that “Myrtle Manor” the other day, which is about people living in a trailer park. Yeesh.
Now, I watch a lot of reality shows, mostly non-competition ones: Honey Boo Boo, Real Housewives, Duck Dynasty, Sister Wives. Even Pawn Stars. Clearly those are all staged with scripts and stuff. But at least their casts are who they purport themselves to be. The Boo Boo folks really are a family, the Duck people really do have a business, all the Real Housewives weirdos at least live in the towns they say and know each other.
But this Myrtle Manor I mean, the people aren’t even convincingly fake. They are all clearly [bad] actors who don’t live together. I mean, I realize that maybe The Office was supposed to run like a reality show with actors but this is no The Office. It’s meta. Meta craptacular.
Last I heard, Survivorman is pretty real, and he’s seemed upfront with what emergency bail-out options he does/doesn’t have in the episodes I’ve watched. But yeah, I don’t have any real evidence.
I have seen behind the scenes filming in person of this show in Homer and Dutch Harbor and have spent time on the Time Bandit on The Pribilof Islands with the film crews and after hours when they went to sleep. (Fun stories after the camera men go to sleep.) Although the flavor and spirit is somewhat captured clever editing creates scenes that are far far from reality.
Well, I was specifically referring to scenes from Season 1 Episodes 5-6, where the show’s style suddenly changed to genuine documentary footage of an ill-fated ship rescue. (Only one man survived out of six.)
As for “creative editing”, that goes hand-in-hand with so-called reality shows, doesn’t it?
Top Shot started out with a pretty standard reality game format, but with a few notable exceptions, the participants mostly turned out to be pretty resistant to drama and backstabby politics. So, in a move pretty rare for reality television, the most recent season they went with the flow and eliminated all of the drama and political elements - no dividing into teams, no voting people out of the house. It pretty much just was a group of folks competing straight up in the challenges. Granted, most of the challenges were pretty bananas and not something you’d encounter outside of that show. Also, many of the participants are known celebrity shooters, and their personalities were their real personalities.
I don’t know if it counts as the most real reality show, but it was interesting that they changed they format like they did, and made the show better for it (IMHO).