Reality TV: An Insider's Guide to TV's Hottest Market (4 page)

Amazing how the action across all those episodes falls into pretty much the same formatted pattern over the same number of acts every time, isn’t it? How fortuitous that every week something
naturally
goes horribly awry with a budget or deadline not once but
twice
, the second time always worse than the first! Well, gang, if every fix or remodel was that problematic, pretty soon no one on Earth would let those shows’ contractors and hosts anywhere near their gutted, run-down fixer-uppers. I know I wouldn’t.

In all fairness, a few things are bound to go a little haywire anytime you’re doing a project with unskilled labor. But as to whether or not an entire project could be jeopardized by someone’s wife leaving a hammer outside in the rain, well, our friends in the story department
⁶
are just the ones to blame for putting more than a little spin on that action.

How much spin?

Just look at how much interview and voice over drives the story along. Most of the heavy lifting in home improvement shows is done with those devices — voice over and interview. Sure, a little gab throughout helps you to interpret actions that might be confusing without a little explanation, but moreover, it’s that interview content and host copy that tells you
how you should feel
about what you’re looking at.

For example… you’ve got a shot of a guy looking at a section of rotted flooring. Think about how much differently you’d react to hearing the host or narrator deliver each of these lines in conjunction with the image:

•  “Ted sees this as a challenge. He’ll have to replace the entire floor, and he can’t wait to dig in with his new tools.”

•  “Termite damage means the cost of the project could triple. It’s the beginning of the end for Ted’s dream project.”

•  “The good news is, the termite damage is confined to a small area. Ted’s lucked out this time.”

Wait a minute… you mean you could be looking at something that happened naturally, but was narratively tailored to suit the broader storyline?

Eeyup.

Like I said… story is story, and story is written. Sort of.

So Why Don’t I See Writers Credited On Reality Shows?

Good question.
⁷

Some networks and producers like to pretend that their shows aren’t manipulated or scripted, not even a smidge, because they think it’ll spoil the illusion. Others obscure the process as part of an ongoing effort to stave off unionization of their corner of the industry, a battle that’s raged on for years.

One of the reasons it’s hard to figure out who does what in Reality TV is the fact that nonunion Reality shops don’t have universal guidelines in place to adhere to in defining writing and producing titles. The credit roll at the end of a show means nothing to the untrained observer who might be hunting for a “writer” credit, and what the heck do all those other weird titles mean?

Before graduating to the title of Supervising Producer, I always preferred to take variations on the “Story Producer” credit to the alternate “Story Editor” credit, even though they’re exactly the same gig nine times out of ten. It’s true!
⁸
On some programs, especially in the case of live shows with some produced-to-tape elements incorporated into the broadcast, story folks are even called “Segment Producers.”

In the odd case where you do see the title of “Writer” fly through the credits, it most often represents the person who authors the host’s on-camera patter and off-camera voice over… and even then, writing that host copy doesn’t ensure the credit. I’ve written thousands of lines of voice over and host content for shows and have yet to be afforded a “writer” credit. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. It’s just that if a “written by” or “writer” credit is important to you on some spiritual or ego-gratifying level, you’d be better off concentrating your energies on sitcoms and dramas.

According to a 2007 independent study conducted by Goodwin Simon Victoria Research at the request of the Writers Guild of America West, the average Story Producer in Reality Television earned $2,000 to $2,500 per week
⁹
compared to the WGA minimum rates of $3,600 to $3,800 per week commanded by lower-end sitcom staff writers. Figure in the pension and health benefits afforded to WGA members by mandatory contributions from signatory production companies and the pay chasm widens even further.
¹⁰
I don’t even want to discuss the residuals
¹¹
that Reality folks never see, because then I’ll start crying and you’ll have paid for a very short book that didn’t tell you very much.
¹²

Still interested in a career in Reality Television? Good. I knew you wouldn’t scare off that easily.

What Does A Story Producer Do, Exactly?

It’s been said that Ginger Rogers could do everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels. That’s exactly what Story Producers and their companion Editors do in comparison to their traditional comedy and drama counterparts. Instead of the writers’ room gang-scripting process employed by sitcom and drama scribes who furiously write and rewrite their material and that of their peers prior to and sometimes even during shooting, we’re often bound by the limitations of content returning from the field, performing much of our work well into the postproduction process using only limited source material.

Yeah, I know. It’s complicated. You should have seen my face when it was first explained to me.

One of my earliest Reality mentors,
Fear
’s Supervising Story Producer Kevin Thomas, used to tell me that Reality Television was just like traditional writing, except you had to tell your stories with refrigerator magnets. To clarify, if you’ve ever played with one of those refrigerator magnet poetry sets, you know that you have an extremely restricted vocabulary to draw from. In Reality Television, you have a finite amount of source material
¹³
to tinker with once you return from the field, and an awful lot of options to choose from when it comes to shuffling it into a story.

With fridge magnet poetry, there are millions of ways to arrange those tiny white words into coherent sentences — but in the end, you can’t write a story about a buffalo if you don’t have the word “buffalo” handy and you sure as heck can’t put that buffalo on roller skates if the words “roller skates” aren’t there either. Same deal with Reality TV — if something didn’t get shot, it’s as if it never happened. It’s possible to completely fabricate scenes from odds and ends when it’s called for, but it takes a lot of skill and extra effort to pull off.

How much skill?

Well, while your dimwitted Uncle Barry can spend twenty minutes coming up with the three-word magnetic poetry arrangement “two fingers tall” and be pleased with himself, your hipster roommate can take the same daunting wad of fragmented English and create a brilliant and moving haiku summarizing the human condition. Again, Reality’s the same way. It takes a while to develop your skill set, but once you know your way around the genre, your work can only get better.

In summation, good story producing is about finding the most effective ways to translate and arrange fragments of source material into a solid, engaging story.
¹⁴
You’re going to have to bend a whole lot of time and space to get there, though.

Timeline? What Timeline?

Earlier, I referred to the compression of time as part of the Story Producer’s job. Let’s take a deeper look, using a theoretical calendar day in the life of an imaginary Reality show subject, “Fred.”

In the first episode of his series, Fred wakes up to discover that he’s going to be evicted from his apartment if he can’t find a job. Luckily, there’s a message on his machine that says his dream employer has reviewed his resume and wants him to come in for an interview. Fred puts on a shirt. He gets in his car and goes to the interview. His interview goes well. He goes out to lunch with friends and worries aloud about what will happen to him if he doesn’t get the job. At the end of the lunch, he gets a call telling him that he landed the job he’s been dreaming about. His friends cheer! That night, Fred takes his friends out for a drink. His apartment and life are saved!

This would have been quite a day for Fred, except that the events above took place over three weeks, and were carefully assembled to get the viewer to buy into the illusion of it being a single, action-packed day. And that voice on the answering machine? Well, since Fred got the message late at night and then erased it, we had to record facsimile audio on a handheld microphone in the edit bay using a production assistant we thought had a nice voice, which we then put a “telephone” effect on and added over a pickup B-roll (supplementary footage) shot of Fred’s answering machine.
¹⁵

Scenes and elements (interviews, dialogue, interactions between characters) don’t always occur in the order you see in the final product. For all you know as a viewer, material that looks like a single day in someone’s life (like Fred’s above) could be culled from a month or more of shooting and edited to create wall-to-wall drama. Scenes and fragments A, B, and C could have taken place anytime, anywhere, and as for what you’re hearing people
say
, well, that’s a whole different can of worms. Statements can be handily sliced, diced, and reordered to say almost anything in a process we call “frankenbyting.”
¹⁶

Authenticity

No matter how much content gets swapped around, trimmed, or re-edited, the end result must comply with the one overarching, undeniable rule of Reality TV:
The integrity and perceived authenticity of story cannot be compromised.
Audiences are savvier than you think, and will turn on you if they feel they’re being outright bamboozled.

Leave too many seams showing in a hard-scrambled Frankenstein’s Monster of a show, and audience trust evaporates like a shallow puddle on a July afternoon. True, only 30% of viewers surveyed claim that it matters to them that the content of Reality shows is real,
¹⁷
but I dare say that the other 70% won’t long tolerate a show that doesn’t at least strive to make it appear so.

Back to the big metaphor here — just as you notice that a fridge magnet sentence like “Jane to the mall bought pants” is grammatically incorrect (thereby calling attention to itself), missing story points or unconvincing fabrications blow the illusion of reality by breaking the flow of information perceived to be authentic. Sure, you get what the shows are going for, just as you understand the fractured language of “Jane to the mall bought pants,” but because the viewing experience is compromised, you don’t buy the idea that what you’re seeing is real. The suspension of disbelief necessary for viewers to immerse and invest themselves in other types of TV shows still applies to Reality.

The following are a handful of examples of the kind of shoddy story work that can leave viewers scratching their heads:

•  Two characters haven’t been getting along for most of an episode, and now they’re in a scene together laughing it up like old friends. What happened? When did they resolve their differences?

•  Three characters are having a conversation in the middle of the day. A response edited into the action clearly shows that it’s dark outside, compromising the perceived continuity of action.

•  A character is speaking in interview, but his words are sliced and diced to say something else — and you can hear every wild change in pitch during the “frankenbyte.”

Like a pimple on the nose of a prom queen, even the smallest glitch creates a massive distraction from the whole picture. Distraction leads to disengagement, and disengagement leads to disaster.

So how do you keep an audience from detecting any lapses in authenticity once you start noodling around and shuffling your material to maximize content? By minding your continuity and following the rules of good storytelling.

Continuity And Story Basics

“Continuity is really a mixed bag. I try to address anything that seems blazingly obvious to me. Sometimes you have to cheat an angle or cut around something to make it work. Sometimes the Editor and I are privy to a thing or two that we just don’t point out to anyone else. Sometimes we play a kind of “Where’s Waldo” game to see who can spot the continuity gaffe.” —
Heather J. Miller, Supervising Producer

Remember: If it looks or sounds fishy to you, it’s going to look and sound fishy to the viewer. Continuity, defined by Wikipedia as “consistency of the characteristics of persons, plot, objects, places and events seen by the reader or viewer,” is of the utmost importance.

As a result, in order to
really
work for viewers, a Reality show must be laid out with the same care and craftsmanship that any other form of screen storytelling demands, complete with well-defined characters and story arcs, turning points and gratifying resolutions.

Break out your favorite screenplay books and read them again and again. Go read
Save The Cat!
or anything else you’ve been wanting to pull off the “Film/TV” shelf at your favorite bookstore but haven’t invested in. Watch a good traditionally scripted movie or TV show and think about what makes it work for you as a viewer. Watch a lousy one and ask yourself why it
doesn’t
work for you.

It’s okay. This book will be here when you get back.

You back already? Great. I presume you’re now chock full of knowledge and a deep, abiding desire to serve story and continuity above all else. Just in case you’re one of those impatient types who didn’t actually run off and read anything else on story first, let me just lay out some basic rules for you:

First,
the premise alone is not the show.
You can have the most brilliantly conceived show ever made, but it’ll die on its feet if you populate the show with shallow, interchangeable participants or fail to explore your characters. Why? Because engaging characters in Reality Television have backstories, opinions, and motivations for their actions. This is why it’s important that your cast has meaningful conversations and exchanges, or at the very least punctuate their actions with thoughtful interview content. You must be aware of what’s at risk for them
personally
— what the “stakes” are — to invest in them. If Player X wants to win a hundred thousand dollars, what differentiates him from anyone else on the show? If he needs that money to buy a bigger house for his expanding family or in order to take care of his ailing father, we can identify with and invest emotionally in his win. Character motivation makes the stakes, and it’s crucial that you compel your audience to care.