Reality TV. Troy DeVolld
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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 week9 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 residuals11 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 material13 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