Reality TV: An Insider's Guide to TV's Hottest Market (7 page)
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Authors: Troy DeVolld
Editor Karen Snyder places interview bites into a rough cut. Like most good editors, she is experienced at editing many different kinds of Reality. (photo by the author)
Notes:
1.
Punk’d,
which ran on MTV from 2003 to 2007, is but one of many contemporary examples of the revisited
Candid Camera
format.
2. Interesting side note: Albert Fisher, quoted in this chapter, holds the remarkable distinction of having produced for both
Candid Camera
and
The Original Amateur Hour
.
3. In 2004, the show’s format was resurrected as
Strictly Come Dancing
, calling on celebrity competitors to punish the parquet. That version was soon after retooled by BBC Worldwide for ABC as
Dancing With the Stars
.
4. To those who would argue
Wild Kingdom
’s “reality” label, I ask this — aside from the fact that antelopes don’t have to sign appearance releases afterward, what’s the difference between hiding behind a tree and filming an antelope and hiding behind a tree and filming some hapless secretary on a lunch break for a
Candid Camera
stunt? None!
5. An interesting side note: Lance Loud had been a resident of the Chelsea Hotel, the residents of which were featured in Warhol’s groundbreaking
Chelsea Girls
five years earlier.
6.
TV Guide
quote referenced in
Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon
by Nancy C. Lutkehaus.
7. April 20, 2004 interview by Ken Paulson on
Speaking Freely
.
8. It’s debated that
Real World
’s confessional device may have been borrowed from a Dutch series of the same era called
Nummer 28
.
9. Numbers according to Nielsen Media Research.
10. 54% in 2009, claims
Locations
magazine.
11. Numbers according to Nielsen Media Research.
12. From a 2010 appearance on Showtime’s
The Green Room With Paul Provenza
.
13. Excerpted from transcripts of the October 2005 MIT panel discussion “Is Popular Culture Good for You?”
14. Placement is when you see a name brand soda on the table. Integration is when the name brand soda’s not only on the table, it’s part of the storyline.
15. Noted actor Charles Nelson Reilly recounted just such an early network experience in his one-man show,
Save It For The Stage
, later memorialized in the doc film
The Life of Reilly.
The Seven
(or Seventy, or Seven Hundred)
Kinds of Reality Shows
W
e live now in what I like to call “The Age of Lists.” Every week there’s a new countdown show detailing the top ten celebrity meltdowns, a magazine article giving you the top fifty new stars to watch out for, or a blog entry recounting the last hundred things Nicolas Cage has had for breakfast.
Okay, I made the last one up. But mark my words, one day you’ll be reading the Nicolas Cage breakfast blog and thinking, “That DeVolld guy was right on the money.”
As lists go, one of the most elusive is any sort of
official
list categorizing Reality shows by subgenre. You want one, right? So do we all out here in television land. It would make things so much easier!
Well, no matter what you’ve heard or read, even here, there isn’t one.
I’ve been actively pitching original series for the last few years of my career, and while this book will get into the particulars of that process much later on, the one thing I’ll tell you about it now is that the execs you meet with always want to know what Reality subgenre the show falls under before they hear anything else. A top Reality Producer a couple of years back called something I’d come in the door with a “Supernatural Reality-Competition Docu-Series with a strong Travel element.” I was pretty sure all I’d come in with was a Reality-Competition show about ghost hunting. After the meeting, I conceded to myself that everyone’s perception of what something is is a little different and that we were
both
right. The producer just saw my idea as a stew instead of a single carrot. In subsequent pitches elsewhere, his description of my idea might not sit well with someone who just wants the straight, short dope in a word or three as I’d originally conceived it.
Depending on what you’ve read elsewhere and who you’ve spoken to, you might hear that there are twelve or fifteen (or heck,
thirty
) kinds of Reality programs. But I’ve come away from years of reading and conversation that tells me the confusion stems from one thing: hybridization.
If a viewer of traditionally scripted entertainment leans toward comedies, they can page through their cable guide and find themselves a horror comedy, a romantic comedy, a sci-fi comedy, or a dramedy. They’re all comedies, but they’re something else, too.
Applied to Reality Television, the situation’s pretty much the same. In categorizing
The Contender,
Mark Burnett’s show about boxers competing for a shot at greatness, you’re not talking about a Sports subgenre, you’re talking about a Reality-Competition show that happens to be centered in the world of sports. If you’re categorizing
Flavor of Love
or
I Love New York
, in which eligible singles compete for the love of a unique individual, you’re not watching something in the Romance subgenre, you’re watching, again, a Reality-Competition series with a Romance and/or Celebrity Reality twist.
With this in mind, it came to pass during the writing of this book that some Reality professional pals of mine and I spent a few lunches volleying show titles and trying to distill their essence down to the broadest labels we could. Here’s what we all came up with:
1
Documentary / Docu-Series
Reality-Competition: Elimination
Makeover / Renovation
Dating
Hidden Camera / Surveillance / Amateur Content
Supernatural
Travel / Aspirational
Let’s look at these one at a time.
Documentary / Docu-Series
The Documentary/Docu-Series category is probably the broadest of the mix. Whether you’re getting a tour of Mariah Carey’s pad on
Cribs
or watching police officers pull a suspect out from under a backyard kiddie pool on
COPS
, this is the umbrella that covers them both. Heck, it even covers most “house reality” shows like
The Real World.
So what differentiates the Documentary from the Docu-Series? Well, while Documentary shows are comprised of self-contained single episodes like MTV’s
Made
, Docu-Series like
The Real World
play out more like a traditional soap opera, following action involving the same cast over a series arc.
There’s been a great deal of controversy surrounding some of the more successful Docu-Series
2
as to just how “real” their content may be. In recent years, MTV’s
Laguna Beach
and its spinoff,
The Hills
, followed the lives of a gaggle of young, good-looking (if seemingly dense) characters, drawing fire from critics and fans alike over scenework that often read as poor long-form improvisation hung on a rickety framework. You can’t shoot perfectly framed, beautifully lit material on the fly forever… so if a Docu-Series looks too good to be true, it just might be.
3
The Hills
is a prime example. One of the show’s stars, Lauren Conrad, spilled the beans in a June 2009 guest appearance on the ABC talk show
The View
when she responded to a question about a phone call seen on the show with the statement: “To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t on the other line of that call. That was filmed and I wasn’t on the other end… So I didn’t even know about it.”
4
While I’ll make no ruling here on the authenticity of
Laguna Beach
or
The Hills,
it should be noted that when working in the Docu-Series format, your every misstep in story producing and editing registers tenfold in comparison to other Reality programs. Clumsy Docu-Series work, to seasoned Reality fans, yields a viewing experience akin to riding a rocket-powered church pew down a potholed road, every bump unbelievably jarring.
I’d also lump under this banner most of the “social experiment” shows, where groups of people are brought together for the primary purpose of seeing them react in an environment, immune from challenges or elimination. A recent example would be R.J. Cutler and Ice Cube’s 2006 FX series
Black. White.,
in which a white family and a black family traded places (with the help of a Hollywood makeup team) to experience prejudice and cultural differences firsthand. The show was greeted by a hailstorm of criticism, mostly from critics who felt it cheaply played the “race card,” but ultimately Cutler and Cube’s show was validated with an NAACP Image Award in 2007.
Reality-Competition / Elimination
The gladiators of ancient Rome have been replaced in modern entertainment by bug-eating backstabbers vying to keep themselves from being voted off of an island. At least that’s the simplistic impression a Martian might get from watching Reality-Competition shows.
All Reality-Competition programs feature some sort of prize and the hopefuls vying to claim it, whether that prize is honor, cash, a unique opportunity, or all three. Their exploits can span full seasons, as with
Survivor, American Idol
, or
Dancing With the Stars
, just as easily as they can be completely self-contained on individual episodes, as with shows like Thom Beers’
Monster Garage
, where each episode challenged a team of builders to complete an unusual project in a specified time frame.
Reality-Competition participants can compete directly against either each other or, very often, a more abstract antagonist like time itself… like when an individual or team must beat the clock in order to win.
The elimination mechanisms are always clearly established on these programs, as you can’t arbitrarily drop participants, and viewers will tune out quickly if they can’t follow the logic behind who stays and who gets sent home.
The trick is in ensuring that the suspense lasts right up to the last moment… if one player suffers a major setback, you can’t telegraph that they’re the only one likely to be eliminated or viewers will skip the end of the episode. This is why you so often find that extra round where two or three castmembers are singled out for possible elimination before someone’s head finally rolls.
The classic
Survivor
has its own brilliant failsafe built in, as players compete in each episode first for immunity, then in an elimination round where all participants cast ballots to see who will next be “voted off the island.” You have to watch all the way to the end, as nothing can be taken for granted until the final vote.
There are many elements of the Docu-Series at play in Reality-Competition shows, notably the idea of players living together in a confined space (a home, a campsite, etc.) and interacting on a human level between challenges, deepening your investment in the success or failure of participants you feel that you’ve come to know by allowing you to see them as people in addition to players.
Makeover / Renovation
Whether the subject is a face or a place and whether the tools of choice are scalpels, makeup kits or box shrubs, makeover and renovation shows are all about one thing: transformation.
Popular examples of this kind of Reality show include
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,
in which deserving recipients have their dilapidated homes renovated into tailor-made showplaces, and
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
, a show that rescued dumpy subjects by revamping their wardrobe, look, and living spaces with the help of a small army of hip, cultured gay advisors.
Wilder examples include the original
Extreme Makeover
, a 2002 show in which participants were given complex physical makeovers, including plastic surgery and extensive dental work. To see how easily the lines between Makeover/Renovation and Reality-Competition can be blurred, one need look no further than
The Swan
, which made its debut in 2004. The ultra-controversial FOX series took a group of women with low self-esteem, granted them plastic surgery and dental makeovers as with ABC’s
Extreme Makeover,
but then had them compete against each other in a beauty pageant.