Composition on Television reality show how real are they?
Answers
Answer:
The short answer is that a vast majority of reality television shows are not 100 percent real, as there is a high degree of manipulation in order to achieve sustained audience attention.
But this is too simplistic of an answer and, to be fair, every show has to be analyzed to understand the motivations behind those manipulations.
In my opinion, misleading the audience should not be allowed and some kind of regulation should be in place, but I know for a fact that networks are not willing to self-regulate and be honest with their audience, much less allow governmental oversee. Only when you, as a creator, have enough creative rights, then I believe you should disclose the level of manipulation that the show has or not.
Reality television was a happy accident in my career, I never liked it but my prior experience in news-gathering primed me for this genre. One day we pitched an innovative idea to a network and two weeks later we were drafting agreements. That has been the fastest I had sold I show, and that was a problem, because I had no idea how to approach it — but that's what makes my job so fun.
I tried to do the real thing, but pretty soon we discovered a lot of legal and safety hurdles. Just alone, looking for insurance proved futile: only one broker was willing to bond coverage, imposing a $1M premium and conditioning us to have an attorney on site for each and every scenario.
The network was looking for the authenticity but was not happy with the costs or risks of pursuing the real thing, as such, they were not convinced so they asked us to produce a pilot before committing to a whole season. At that point, I came up with a plan: recreations loosly based on real experiences from the team we had in place; these guys were real professionals in their field with no acting experience, so we created scenarios with actors in (somewhat) controlled locations where they would perform their everyday tasks without any rehearsals or knowledge of what was going to happen.
Not only did the network thought it was real, but their legal department fell for it as well. Everybody was happy at that point and they were ready to move forward but then I demanded one condition: to have a disclaimer at the beginning of each episode. We had a big argument, but I stood firm and, after explaining the legal and ethical reasons for having one, we agreed on the language of it and began producing it.
The show ran for more than 7 years, crossed over from Spanish to English (at that point I had to fight for the disclaimer … again), and we delivered more than 600 episodes.
The irony of it: to this day people keep calling the show fake … and every time I get confronted with this, I ask a simple question: “have you read the disclaimer at the top of the show?” — their faces tell me everything, and usually they stop ranting.
So, even after self-regulating by disclosing that the show was a recreation loosely based on real experiences, people still want to believe whatever they want to believe.
Answer:
they are not real they are reel