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Reality TV: Reality vs. Scripted TV 270 Views
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Transcript
- 00:01
We speak student!
- 00:05
[ yodeling ]
- 00:07
Reality TV Part Three
- 00:09
Reality versus Scripted TV
- 00:13
[ dog barks ]
Full Transcript
- 00:14
Why has reality TV become so popular with networks?
- 00:18
I would say there are two answers to that. One is money.
- 00:22
It is so much cheaper
- 00:23
to produce a reality show for every reason.
- 00:26
- You don't -- - Talk about the economics...
- 00:27
You don't have to pay celebrities
- 00:29
a million dollars an episode like The Big Bang Theory guys just got.
- 00:33
Most reality shows don't have unions so you don't get strikes involved.
- 00:36
You don't need a set.
- 00:39
You just are in a house.
- 00:40
You don't need lots of props and all that jazz.
- 00:43
It's kind of like
- 00:43
put these people in a house and tape them and see what happens.
- 00:45
Essentially, if you can save six million dollars an episode
- 00:48
by not having these big Oscar-winning --
- 00:51
or, uh, Emmy-winning actors on it,
- 00:52
then you're gonna save a lot of money.
- 00:54
So, just to interrupt you.
- 00:55
So the framework on a series --
- 00:58
If you are producing scripted programming,
- 01:00
I think that today's budget
- 01:02
is about two million bucks an episode.
- 01:04
So you're gonna be thinking
- 01:05
44 million dollars plus development costs,
- 01:08
let's call it 50 million dollars
- 01:10
for that for a series.
- 01:12
I got to imagine a show like The Bachelor
- 01:15
- or a show which is the high end - Right.
- 01:18
can't cost more than
- 01:20
8 million, 10 million? You know what I mean?
- 01:22
It's a fraction.
- 01:23
But there's no back end or rerun
- 01:26
that you get.
- 01:27
How does that play into the economics of the business?
- 01:29
I mean, that's one of the things that I'm not sure
- 01:31
everyone's thinking forward about.
- 01:32
One of the questions
- 01:34
that people ask a lot is
- 01:35
does reality TV have lasting power?
- 01:37
And the answer is no.
- 01:38
You're answering this right now.
- 01:39
No one goes back and watches old seasons
- 01:41
of The Bachelor or old seasons of The Amazing Race.
- 01:43
You don't do that because you know the outcome,
- 01:44
you know where the fights are.
- 01:46
And you kind of get bored.
- 01:47
You've seen these people --
- 01:49
They're exciting maybe the first time you watch them
- 01:51
versus watching, as you said, I Love Lucy
- 01:53
or even more recent things like Friends.
- 01:55
These are characters that are
- 01:57
so compelling that you can watch them over and over again.
- 02:00
The Bachelor is never going to go into syndication.
- 02:02
I hadn't thought about it, but I guess, yes,
- 02:03
the economics of it in the end
- 02:05
will not pan out the way that people are thinking they will.
- 02:09
But cheap and now is the way that people wanna produce stuff.
- 02:13
Cheap and Now, that's a great subtitle for this course.
- 02:15
[ pen writing ]
- 02:16
Why is reality TV so popular with viewers?
- 02:20
I think at this point people will and do watch
- 02:24
literally anything.
- 02:26
We think of the time when you couldn't have
- 02:28
married couples sleeping in the same bed together.
- 02:29
- And now we -- - Mary Tyler Moore.
- 02:30
Right. And now we can watch, like you said,
- 02:32
Naked and Afraid.
- 02:33
People dropped in the middle of nowhere
- 02:36
literally completely naked.
- 02:37
So I do think that this --
- 02:39
We've just kind of lost our sense of shock value at that.
- 02:43
I don't think that that is unique to TV in any way.
- 02:45
It's the same way that
- 02:47
movies are more violence-packed and there's more nudity
- 02:50
and all that.
- 02:51
I don't think that's unique to reality TV,
- 02:52
but the fact that these are real people,
- 02:54
we're watching them, it does become kind of voyeuristic.
- 02:57
We usually reserve that term
- 03:00
to talk about watching people in sexy, intimate settings.
- 03:03
Sometimes it's broadened to just mean
- 03:05
watching people in their personal, intimate lives.
- 03:07
But it is voyeuristic.
- 03:09
We're literally watching people walk around naked.
- 03:11
We're watching people have incredibly intimate moments.
- 03:14
The Bachelor and Bachelorette, the light goes out.
- 03:17
- Yeah, honeymoon suite. - The fantasy... Yeah.
- 03:18
We know exactly what --
- 03:19
Sometimes the light goes out and the light comes back on
- 03:21
and then there's fireworks exploding --
- 03:23
It is -- The metaphors are thinly veiled.
- 03:25
So we know exactly what is happening
- 03:28
and no one seems to be
- 03:30
that upset about it.
- 03:32
Why isn't that shown?
- 03:33
So, take the honeymoon fantasy suite.
- 03:35
We show a lot of other things.
- 03:38
Do you not think that there's a competitor out there
- 03:41
to The Bachelor who's gonna wanna say
- 03:43
to the cast members or whoever they are,
- 03:45
"The camera's everywhere. No holds barred."
- 03:47
- It's a little bit like Big Brother, basically, - Right.
- 03:49
- except in the showers, I think, and nothing else. - Yeah.
- 03:50
Yeah. I think you would probably have to pay
- 03:52
your participants more to do that.
- 03:54
That would be my guess.
- 03:56
But there is still,
- 03:58
I guess, some sense of propriety?
- 04:01
On Andi's season of The Bachelorette,
- 04:04
after the final rose,
- 04:06
one of the guys confronted her and said,
- 04:08
"If you didn't love me, why did you make love to me?"
- 04:10
And she just -- Her jaw dropped
- 04:13
and she could not believe he had said this
- 04:15
on national television.
- 04:16
Meanwhile, we all know it happened.
- 04:18
No one is shocked
- 04:20
that the bachelorette is sleeping with all of the men.
- 04:22
But once it's spoken out loud,
- 04:24
it kind of breaks that barrier of
- 04:27
these are real people and these are their lives.
- 04:29
But they signed up for it.
- 04:31
[ pen writing ]
- 04:33
What are some reasons networks prefer reality TV?
- 04:37
What's a major difference between scripted and reality programing?
- 04:41
Why is reality TV so popular among viewers?
- 04:45
Was this just scripted or was that reality?
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