Doesn’t really seem like they have to do a lot of “playing up” the situations on Dr. K: Exotic Animal ER. They just follow a vet around as she treats freaky problems with a variety of non-cat-and-dog animals.
As far as “reality competition” shows go, I rather liked Solitary. Talk about a show that pushed you to your limits…
Do you guys remember a show called “The Week The Women Went”? It was about this little town in Alberta and the producers sent all the women to a spa and the men had to stay home and look after their kids, houses etc. on their own. It was priceless. One woman stayed back to look after her son, who was a grown-ass fully functioning (ie. not disabled or anything) middle-aged man, which I thought was sad.
I figured it HAD to be exaggerated for TV. These guys had no clue. One guy poured dish soap onto the trampoline, turned the garden hose on it and got his kids to jump around as their “bath”.
I vote for COPS, seconded by Alaska State Troopers.
I’m not sure quite what qualifies as a reality show these days but here’s my take:
Grand Designs is excellent.
Wife Swop UK seemed real and less contrived than the US version. Both were entertaining in a train crash sort of way.
Embarrassing Bodies (UK). Excellent. I avoided this for a long time thinking it was a tedious side-show of exaggerated conditions but not so. Indeed it is a television series which is compassionate and informative with lots of different medical conditions and no overblown drama.
For example last night one lady had a vagina which had closed up. The camera very explicitly showed the doctor’s examination and later the operation to repair this. The lady herself talked openly about how awful she felt - no hiding who she was.
An older man had a hideously bulbous nose which kept growing and meant he’d hardly gone out in public in recent years. Poor guy. The nose was sliced and reshaped and the honest relief of this man was heart-warming.
The power of such a television series is that it gives courage to people with hidden awkward problems who can see others suffer the same, and that there are remedies.
I note it won a BAFTA.
I adored Parking Wars and watched every episode of every season. It made me want to be a parking enforcement officer!
I don’t think we should really call the obviously cooked reality shows “scripted”. They aren’t scripted, they’re improvised. No producer is going to waste time writing out a script for the cast members to act out. Instead they just say “Lashawnda called you a whore. What are you going to do about that?” and roll the cameras. Other common tactics are inserting fake reaction shots. Somebody says something, and the editors take a reaction shot from something completely different and insert it in. Or they’ll create whole dialogs by stitching together clips from different times.
But this still doesn’t make the show “scripted”, even if the cast members are literally actors. They aren’t handed a script, instead they create a character and improvise the scenes and then the footage is edited together to make a storyline. Maybe this is a pedantic objection, but there are nuances about exactly what sort of fakery is going on.