5 Secrets of Making Reality TV They Don't Want You to Know
Making a reality show isn't as simple as pointing a camera at a person and hoping he or she is horrible. There are a lot of tricks and manipulations that producers use to make douchebags and handbag design more compelling. There's an argument to be made that no one should think about reality shows-- either turn off your brain and enjoy them or brag about how you don't own a TV. Fair enough, but thinking too much about stupid shit is kind of my thing. I also like drinking with people who make reality shows and asking them questions about their job, so this article is much closer to journalism than the sarcastic philosophizing and absurdism you might be used to. Also, be warned: After you know about these techniques, you're going to see them everywhere.
Helping Reality Get Going in the Right Direction
Let's imagine for a second that reality shows were totally fake. Say you're a TV producer who wants to set up this elaborate lie to make a show for slightly less money. Not only is that needlessly complicated and unethical, but would you really put the Kardashians in charge of the grift? Between the three of them, or six if you count Khloe, they've brought the Armenian literacy rate down to 14 percent. If you handed them a stack of script pages, they'd probably ask you when they started making tampons that small.
Adding havoc to a person's life and hoping you get footage of them losing their mind isn't necessarily fake. It's more li-- actually, hold on. This concept ... it's everything my brain has ever wanted to think about:
Nudging Reality Around
After watching Top Chef: Just Desserts, I now know why gourmet cupcakes taste like gay people have been crying on them, but when I s-- OK, this is the last one, I promise:
What I was saying is that when you're done filming your reality stars, you're probably looking at 600 hours of uninteresting people doing uninteresting things. It might be unethical to start messing around with something marketed as "real," but if you put that boring footage on TV before it's been edited, you're the worst. That's why editors have devised a number of ways to nudge reality in the direction they need it to go.
One trick you may have seen a thousand times and never noticed is conversational audio cues. They're like a laugh track on a sitcom -- your brain is really only trained to notice them when they're not there. They can be anything from a cymbal tap to a record scratch to a swelling of music, and they're added later because no one in these scenes is a performer. Normal people don't always do a great job at delivering jokes or expressing emotions or transitioning between ideas. Little sound effects make the viewer subconsciously feel like he or she is seeing something they're supposed to, and not simply eavesdropping on a boring conversation. Take a look at all the clicks and beeps that have been added to this awful discussion on the show Wicked Fit:
Fake reaction shots are pretty easy to spot once you know what you're looking for. Did one person suddenly get blurry? That's because they had to digitally zoom the footage so you wouldn't see that it was taken from a different location or time of day. Are the store and street signs behind them backward? That's because they had to flip the frame so the person was gasping in the right direction. Or you can simply do the math. When the Wicked Fit lady was talking, did it cut to four different people and a group shot? And since it did, does six seem like a reasonable number of cameras to follow a fat chick around while she talks about fitness? Hell no. The catering budget alone would bankrupt the Style Network.
Coaching Reality
There are much more subtle ways in which reality stars are manipulated. If you've ever watched The Bachelor, you've probably seen a woman get eliminated, thank the man for the opportunity to compete for his dong and wave goodbye to everyone. Then, seconds later, she's screaming at a camera about how she can never love again and everyone is a slut. What happened? Is it really that big of a deal that a man wanted to sleep with someone more than her? Judging by most women on the Bachelor, that has to happen every time they stand near a 7, a funny 6 or a sure-thing 5.
Here's what happened to that woman: Between the time you saw her walk away from the house and the time she sobbed her manic goodbye, someone pulled her aside and took a psychological shit in her brain. There's a secret technique used by reality producers to turn a calm and reasonable woman into a wreck-- you act like the craziest plot twist in the world just happened and she needs to explain it to you. It goes something like this:
If you're making a reality show without the money shot of a woman being destroyed, you can help direct your stars toward disaster with something they call a "guided conversation." It's more or less what it sounds like. For instance, only a stupid camera crew hovers next to Chris Knight and Adrianne Curry all day and hopes they stop playing Facebook games. A smart one says, "Hey, I heard you guys are having trouble with your marriage. Let's sit you down over here and film you talking about it. That's right. Yes, fight for me. Wait, why are you stopping? Oh, it's because I'm masturbating?"
Producers aren't the only schemers, either. Almost every scene on Keeping Up with the Kardashians has been set up by the Kardashians themselves. If Kourtney is going to tell her father that pirates hijacked a shipment of their co-branded ovarian tanning spray, the first person she calls is the camera crew. Not only to be there for Bruce Jenner's reaction, but because it takes a team of workers two hours and a half mile of rigging to change the expression on the Olympic legend's face.
Keeping the Reality You Like
So how do they decide on who gets to be the bad guy? Well, sometimes it's as simple as picking the person who was the douchiest the most often. Other times you have to build a villain around an incredible event. For example, did a previously calm contestant throw a violent temper tantrum? Of course he did, so there's the show's bad guy. But wait ... you can't have his villainy come out of nowhere. If he was polite up until then, you have to go back and alter earlier footage so his dickishness builds to this. One of the main reasons reality shows seem fake is because writers went in and added an elegant narrative structure to them. We don't have those in the regular world, and if you find that you do, grab the nearest person by the neck until their human disguise fades and tell its lizard body you won't be fooled by this psychic Matrix bullshit.
I mentioned earlier how you can use audio cues and reaction shots to make someone look like a jerk. You can also splice in interview footage of someone talking trash about them. It's amazing how much your perception of a person can change when their life is being narrated by someone who hates them. Editors can take more drastic action, too -- they can and do change the words people say. Most reality show audio is made up of "Frankenbites," sound bites that have been patched together from the corpses of other sentences. Basically, any time the camera cuts away from a person's lips, there's a solid chance they're speaking ground English. The editors can even do it right in front of your face with a "waiter wipe," where a shadowy figure crosses the foreground to hide a jump cut. Here, I'll give you a for instance:
Straight Up Cheating
It's rare, but some reality shows are lying to viewers from beginning to end. Some of those "unexplainable" sounds that terrify ghost hunters really are interns hitting a wall with a pipe. Some of those sassy hairdressers really are actors. Even a lot of the music you hear in the background is fake. There's an entire industry of musicians and lawyers whose job is to make songs that sound as close to famous songs as copyright law allows. Speaking of music, I seriously cannot stop thinking about how great it would be if Hulk Hogan and chimpanzees got together.
