Reality TV: An Insider's Guide to TV's Hottest Market (5 page)

Second,
stories in Reality Television arc in exactly the same way as stories in fully scripted movies or television shows.
“A” happens, “B” happens, “C” happens. Set up a problem, build stakes, resolve. Every action must have a consequence, whether realized immediately or later in the episode or series overall. Each episode has its own problems to deal with and escalates the stakes surrounding the season’s bigger issues on the way to the season finale, where everything must be somehow resolved. If you’re just “cutting for noise” — a mistake novices often make in which big scenes (like fights) become more important than character development or a calculated ramping-up of story — you’ll bore your audience silly. Your viewers want to follow a story, not just have their eyeballs and ear-holes assaulted for half an hour, an hour, or even two hours.

The more you know about story, the more you know about story. Period. I don’t care if you’re writing movies or comic books or Reality Television shows, the basics always apply.

Now, I don’t aim to give you the idea that Reality Television writing and producing doesn’t present its own unique set of challenges. Putting good stories together from bits and scraps is one of the toughest and least understood jobs in the entertainment industry, and just as most novice screenwriters read a lot of scripts and see plenty of movies before setting out on their journey, anyone wanting to tell stories in the Reality genre is wise to get hip to the formats and devices that have been successful in the past.

Which brings us to….

America’s Funniest Home Videos
Executive Producer Vin Di Bona in
a camera meeting prior to taping. (photo by Alan Weissman)

Notes:

1. “Conjecture and aberration!” as one of my Editor friends summarizes the process, usually at the top of his lungs when something isn’t working in the edit bay

2.
Imitation of Life
was the working title of this book until reality writer Eduardo Penna jokingly asked me if such a pretentious title would be sold with a free wheel of brie cheese attached.
Touché
, Mister Penna.
Touché
.

3. “Stakes” is a term generally used to define what’s at risk for participants of a program. No stakes, no drama. No drama, no show.

4. This probably happens just before an act break.

5. This also probably happens just before an act break.

6. Story Producers, Story Editors, and their support staff.

7. Remind me to thank myself for asking it.

8. Except when they aren’t for some arbitrary reason.

9.
http://www.wga.org/uploadedfiles/news_and_events/press_release/harsh_reality.pdf

10. Don’t give up yet! The good news is that employment in traditionally scripted television is seasonal, but reality production continues year-round. I often do as many as three shows in a year.

11. Residuals are payments for reuse of work when shows re-air over and over again.

12. I’ve seen work I did near the start of my career repeating on cable as recently as the day before writing this chapter.

13. Videotaped content in its rough form, as shot.

14. Which is not to say there aren’t a few dimwitted Uncle Barrys working in Reality TV.

15. If you ever call a Reality producer on this kind of manipulation, you’ll likely get a phony baloney reaction similar to that of Captain Renault in
Casablanca
during the raid on the back room at Rick’s Café Americain: “I am shocked,
shocked
, to find gambling going on in this establishment!”

16. The process of editing individual words or phrases within sentences together to simulate a new thought or statement. Some companies try hard to avoid these.

17. 2005 Associated Press /
TV Guide
poll.

Before we dive into the particulars of how Reality shows are written, it’s good to know a bit about how they came to be in the first place.

Let’s be clear — this is by no means a
complete
history of Reality Television, as that would easily make for its own book. But here’s an overview to help you get an idea of how the genre evolved into a staple of our television diet.

Origins and Pioneers

Long ago and far away, in a galaxy broadcast in black-and-white, dinosaurs like the Milton Berleasaurus and the mighty Ed Sullivanadactyl ruled the airwaves.

Texaco Star Theater
,
The Ed Sullivan Show
, and even the venerable
CBS Evening News
made their debuts between May and August of 1948, but one curiosity among that pack of summer shows really stood out. Alan Funt’s
Candid Camera
featured the jovial Funt playing hidden-camera gags on unsuspecting marks, working them into a befuddled lather before finally letting them off the hook with his signature phrase, “Smile, you’re on
Candid Camera
!” The adaptation of
Candid Microphone
, Funt’s radio show, to television successfully added a new dimension to the formerly audio-only hijinks while giving the world what may have been its first “reality” program.

Yes, Reality TV may well have started with a prank show. Even in the late 1940s, you weren’t safe from getting
Punk’d.
¹

While media scholars generally agree that
Candid Camera
was the first Reality show, one could certainly argue by today’s all-encompassing definition of “reality” that Ted Mack’s
The Original Amateur Hour
, a talent-search program, may actually own the title. It had premiered on the DuMont network months before, on January 18 of the same year.
²

No matter who got there first, the ball was rolling by the end of the summer of 1948. Networks caught on that viewers loved being able to see themselves, if only vicariously, on television. Whether they felt represented by the everyman conned into participating in one of Funt’s crazy schemes or by a gifted nobody in search of fame and fortune on
The Original Amateur Hour
, people tuned in in droves.

Across the pond the following year in 1949, The British Broadcasting Company’s
Come Dancing,
a ballroom dancing series that encouraged countless Britons to take to the dance floor, waltzed into view. Early on,
Come Dancing
was broadcast from amateur dance events held around the country and was largely about teaching viewers how to dance. By 1953, however, the Eric Morley-created program had evolved into a competition, remaining so until it departed the airwaves for good in 1998, making it one of the longest running shows in history.
³

Animals even got in on the Reality boom with
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,
a heavily narrated nature show that first aired in 1963 and ran until 1988. While host Marlon Perkins’ high-school-filmstrip narrative style may have been a bit stilted, it laid the foundation for much of the narrative-driven nature programming you see today on Reality networks like Animal Planet and Discovery.
⁴

The American audience’s taste for Reality shows continued to grow, but well into the mid-‘60s, the setups had always been far removed from the living room. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Andy Warhol’s 1966 film
Chelsea Girls
turned reality sideways when it knocked on a few doors in a legendary New York hotel/apartment house.

The movie was comprised of a number of vignettes featuring Warhol’s acquaintances, many of whom resided at the Chelsea Hotel, made famous over time as a haven for countless young artists, writers, actors, and musicians like Arthur C. Clarke, Bob Dylan, Sid Vicious, Robert Mapplethorpe and Janis Joplin. While
Chelsea Girls
purported itself to be a documentary, its content was clearly manipulated, creatively whittled down from many hours of source material and possessing a more than slight aroma of premeditated staginess. The split-screen experimental film clocked in at over three hours, and to say that critical opinion of it varied slightly would be a gross understatement.

No matter how the film was received,
Chelsea Girls
had gotten the wheels turning on the idea of following subjects through their everyday lives. While not a television show, it begged the next-stage question of the Reality genre, “What would happen if cameras could settle in to a home environment for an extended shoot?” Producers began to wonder if it would it be possible for subjects to relax enough before the cameras to yield something that felt as gritty as
Chelsea Girls
over a season or more on the tube.

Seven years later, in 1973,
An American Family
found out when it brought to PBS the true-life trials and tribulations of the Loud family, sewn together from seven months of documentary-style coverage shot in 1971. The twelve-episode series pulled few punches, even as parents Bill and Pat Loud separated and filed for divorce, and son Lance “came out” as one of the first openly gay “characters” ever featured on television.
⁵

The show was a phenomenon, airing to an audience of some ten million viewers and landing the Louds on the cover of
Newsweek
. American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote in
TV Guide
that
An American Family
’s “reality” format was “as new and significant as the invention of the drama or the novel — a new way in which people can learn to look at life, by seeing the real life of others interpreted by the camera.”
⁶

Reality Television continued to develop and proliferate over the next decade and a half with a number of breakout hits, one of the most notable being
Real People.
Premiering in 1979,
Real People
was a segment show that dropped in each week on ordinary people with extraordinary stories and abilities… folks like Captain Sticky, a flamboyant self-styled hero who championed consumer rights, Ron “Typewriter” Mingo, the world’s fastest typist, or gymnastic instructor Joel Hale, who performed backflips for a quarter each in order to raise money to take his students to the Olympics. According to
Real People
Executive Producer George Schlatter, much of the show’s appeal was in the lack of manipulation and staginess in the remotely produced segments. In a 2004 interview, Schlatter stated, “We would do the research, and we would show up, and whatever happened, that was what was going to happen, you know?”
⁷