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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 ]

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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