- Joined
- Feb 4, 2013
Most reality TV is as unscripted as a coronation.
That view is actually as incorrect as the people who think it's all spontaneous. Reality shows will stage scenes of things that happened off camera so they can film it, they will research people's buttons so they can press them, they will deliberately find the most insane people possible to include and then coach them to be more insane, they will create a contrived and artificial set of circumstances (like Survivor or The Batchelor), but they don't script things. The stir the pot and film the results, it's not any more complicated than that. Paying people to write stuff is expensive, and if someone is saying lines they're an actor and have to be paid as one and have to belong to the acting union or you have to get a special exemption that costs money; if they were doing all this it would defeat the purpose of making a cheap reality show. Instead they have a bunch of guys, probably with producer titles, who sit around and think of dumb errands to send insane people on that will likely cause emotional outbursts. If you want to call that "scripted" you're wearing the term down to a nub.
Now obviously none of this applies to TruTV, which is doing scripted television in emulation of the style of reality shows, but what most people are talking about when they say reality show, those things are unscripted. They're contrived as all fuck, but they're absolutely unscripted.