SELLING REALITY TELEVISION

When all the hookers have failed to win the rapper’s heart and been booted from the house, the Celebrities have been voted out of the jungle or when D-list celebs have been cured of their addictions – every reality show, like all shows, must come to an end.

Oh good. Now it’s time for the next one.

So, another part of my job is creating new reality shows. If I don’t create new shows then audiences drop off, curiosity wanes and society, ultimately, collapses. Or so the voices tell me.

So, what makes a good reality show? Well, I could tell you, but you know what? You’re creative. You had that great idea for a show you pitched me at that dinner party, why don’t we work on one together? Let’s put one down on paper and pitch it. Right now, before the end of this blog.

Ok – this is exciting. We’ll both get rich. So, first, let’s decide what we’re going to make this show about. What always works in reality tv? Hmmm. Docusoaps – we’ll follow someone who says outrageous things to people, you just can’t stop them saying what’s on their mind. Like Dog the Bounty Hunter… you know, the guy with the Mullet and tattoos that America discovered to their horror is a terrible racist).

But if we could find someone who wasn’t Dog? That could work. They’re outrageous! Hilarious! And annoying and I personally find them REALLY repetitive – because those show’s secret is that they rely totally on an outrageous person doing the same thing, exactly the same thing, each week. And they make me want to kill myself – because the one thing audiences love about their shows is that they don’t change too much. So that’s a horrible curse for those shows, and the hosts and producers who work on them. Like they’re all trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare for 7 seasons and they’re still doing whatever it is they do, year after year in exactly the same way. Oh to be a Millionaire Matchmaker, a TV nanny or a Surprise Chef - for 200 episodes. Shoot me now. OK so let’s not do that.

What about one of those singing shows. Yes, people singing and being told they can’t sing! That is TV magic, right? In fact, terrible singing is even better. Ok, let’s have some singing. Oh, oh, oh! And some voting, some simple voting component ALWAYS works. It’s also going to have the marketing department at the network making noises like happy suckling piglets, (they make bank of those phone-ins). So, yes, let’s have some voting.

Ok, so we have a singing, competition show, where the audience phone in to vote for their favorite.

Personally, I think cooking shows are big right now – Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, Top Chef, America’s Next Iron Chef… chefs are big business right now. SO, anyone mind if I throw in some chefs? You cool with that?

They could always sing, too? Right?

In fact ‘Singing Chefs’ sounds cool I could see that in a line-up.

But, let’s consider the downsides while we’re here. OK – who cares about Singing Chefs? Well, if we get them from middle America, the everyman or woman in the street, then maybe lots of people. But, will they have the credibility of a real chef? I mean a big restaurant Chef. Probably not. So let’s have a mix, some from the city, some from the farms of Kentucky.

WHY are they singing and cooking? It’ll never work in the focus group that “they just want to win for the sake of the title”. (Focus groups are generally made up of ‘man-on-the-street’ people with little drive and few goals of their own – and they HATE people striving to be the best at things. They just don’t get it. “Why would they go to all that effort?”, they ask. “Why don’t they just stay home and eat a nice bag of Doritos?”). Ok. What might people ‘get’ as the stakes. Oh! Got it. Why not for a million dollars? That always seems to work. Network execs ‘get’ the stakes with ‘one million dollars’. Everybody understands that – what these chefs might do to one another to clinch it for themselves.

Or charity. Oprah’s Big Give is all about that… (Kinda. It’s a horrible mess of a new genre; The new ‘charity-philanthropy-make-over-vote off-celebrity judges-evil-doing-backstabbing’ genre. Very weird).

So why do these people from a Kentucky farm want to go on tv, cook, sing, get voted off, get voted on, win, lose, fight and bitch to win money for some charity?

I don’t know. Darn it. I don’t know. Maybe this isn’t going to work out between you and me – and besides I just don’t know what you’ve brought to the table anyway, to be honest.

Wait, wait, wait. I’ve got it. If this idea sounds stupid to us both now, I’ve got the magic bullet that will fix it all – and make it a no-brainer for the network execs.

Wow. This is good. This is definitely gonna sell.

Let’s make the chefs Celebrities. That seems to fix every sh*t idea.

THAT SPECIAL MOMENT…

Once in every 6.4 months a moment comes along in my job that is so special, so remarkably perfect that you scream like a schoolgirl who just caught her hangnail in a particularly salty car-door. Inside, of course, because unfortunately, in my job, this happens when I’m staring in the face of the last person on earth who should know I’m feeling this way.

In fact you must stay silent. Totally silent – because you’re standing on the set of a reality show, and a member of the public has just said something or done something you know is TV gold. Yes, I did once actually think ‘TV Gold’ for real. But the camera is rolling, and the scene must go on without the producer breaking into screaming schoolgirl sounds.

You know these moments – the crazy ‘god lady’ on Trading Spouses, a good old girl-fight on Survivor, or anything that happens on I Love New York. It’s a moment you know is going to be talked about in the edit suite, shown on the sales tape of the season, and in all the promos across the network. And, boy do these moments make you look great.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s every reason to admit feeling guilty in these moments, and probably a bit dirty. Sitting in the shower with your clothes on dirty. But seriously, dude, they’ve just given you a killer line, a trailer moment, a real humdinger. No. No. I’m on the subject of guilt now, can’t get carried away.

So why the guilt? Have I made the person do this thing? No. Not even a bit. Not exactly, anyway. Well, perhaps a little bit. Put it this way. I feel my job is to very carefully give everyone permission to do what comes naturally.  I’ve seen very bad producers actually telling people what to say… rarely, but I’ve seen it. But, I feel that so long as you’ve done your homework, understood the people you’re working with, and have a great deal of humility, you pretty much don’t have to do anything other than guide the show to be shot in certain locations at certain times, or help a specific two people to be in the same room together…. If you’ve done all that, you can pretty much step out of it and let the experience be real for the subjects. It’s only then, the magic happens.

But deep down. Deep deep down, I know that this person wouldn’t probably have said or done the thing they’re doing if it weren’t for me, the camera crew, or the show.

I guess ultimately, my guilt comes from the fact that in normal life, our there, in the real real world, when people you hang out act like a doofuss  - the last thing you’d do is stand by. In silence. Screaming on the inside like a schoolgirl.

Have I got a Reality TV show for you?!

So I was at this dinner party and among the guests sat a Bank Manager. As we swilled nice wine and nibbled cheese, the room went quiet, I saw my chance. “Hey”, I coughed in the direction of the Bank Manager through some crumbly Gouda, “I’ve got a great idea for a bank account”…

I bet he gets that all the time. I know I do, whenever I say the words… “I produce TV. Mostly reality”.

Yes. I’ve heard a lot of dinner-party pitches. Date My Fridge, (I won’t even break that one down for you – I think you get it), My Gran Can Dance! and any number of shows where the ‘surprise twist is that someone is going to win ONE MILLION DOLLARS’. Thank goodness for good wine and cheese.

Now, I’m not ragging on people having ideas. Keep ‘em coming, I do love to hear them. But, the problem is that it takes a lot of work to get even MY shows on air, let alone shows from someone I just met . And the truth of it is, when someone pitches an idea it just sounds like a lot of work to me – shooting pitch tapes, scouting for new on-screen talent, re-cutting the tape, convincing my agent this idea doesn’t suck as much as he thinks it does, putting up the cash to fly to the East Coast to meet the 28 year-old Executives who barely reach over their important-looking desk, and who aren’t important enough to even offer you coffee, let alone a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and who have to pitch this show they clearly don’t understand to their bosses at the Wednesday meeting. Then waiting for the inevitable rejections. And then doing it all again with the next idea I get pitched standing in the Gents in the Mondrian.

Yes. It’s a lot of work – regardless how mindless, shoddily shot, or how poorly constructed the shows that we yell at on TV might be – I guarantee you that a lot of work went into them. So it’s difficult to get overly excited when you hear yet another good idea you won’t have time in the world to sell as it needs to be sold.

But it’s more than that.

The really real reality of Reality TV is that not only have most of these shows already been pitched – a good lot of them have even already been made. Some have even been sold to Germany.

When I first started in TV back in the mid ‘90’s, one drunken evening my producing team came up with a game show featuring divorcing couples betting their contested household contents on general knowledge questions. Get more questions correct and you might end up with the TV, the Bert Bacharach collection and if you’re lucky, even the lawnmower. I think we called it ‘SPLITTERS’. We thought it was so horrible and cruel and outrageous that we could never pitch it. How we laughed. What a night.

Well, this morning they announced that show, pitched by someone I never met, just got picked up by a big network.

Call it ‘Zietgeist’, call it ‘a clever mix of two successful existing formats’, call it ‘thievery’ if you will. The simple truth of it is that the very thing that makes Reality TV a great industry to work in, that it’s fast and relatively cheap to produce, is exactly what is working against every one of us toiling hard to come up with shows. Reality TV has such a fast turnaround, and such an enormous rate of failure, that I can guarantee you that whatever genius idea you might have, I’m sorry to say, that unless you own the talent, the access or the network, someone better placed is already on it.

So, back to that dinner party – with me, finger pointing excitedly, and spouting my half knowledge about ISAs and high yield accounts. The Bank Manager nods politely. You see, what the Bank Manager is actually thinking is, “Mmmm. Nice Gouda”.

The Opening Tease. With boobies.

So, welcome to my blog.

I’ve been told, this first blog is usually the boring one, where I tell you things like… I got my first film camera when I was 9 years-old and shot my first Super8 films with my brother’s burning toys as props. Yep. This is the boring blog where you learn about my past as a documentary director and film producer from London who moved to LA five years ago after selling his first feature film to Warner Brothers, or I give you an endless list of credits and first gigs, and oh, those horrible bastard first bosses.

So, to avoid this being boring I’m not going to tell you any of that because that’s boring. And boring is bad. Boring is very, very bad.

Oh, there you go - the first tid-bit from inside Reality TV. And still within the first minute. Great work!

You see, I know why you’re here. You’re here because this is the sexy expose of the Reality TV producer. You want beans spilt and to hear some creepy stories about how things are really done. How we Tazer the kids, how we threaten the public with violence into acting stupid on national TV.

So stay tuned – because all that is coming up.

Possibly. Or maybe it isn’t. Because I can pretty much write anything up here at the front of the blog, and phrase it in any way just to keep you reading. There’s my second insider info from Reality TV. That’s what we call ‘the Tease’.

Because here’s that sentence in context. “Anyone who says horrible things, for instance, about how we tazer the kids, how we threaten the public with violence into acting stupid on TV is a loony”. But you see what I did? You’re a little disappointed, now you read that, but you’re also very excited to hear all about the possibility of some good sex in the next paragraph. You might even see some boobies.

Yes, welcome to Reality TV. Oh, sorry. No boobies in this paragraph – well, only that small reference to them. If you were expecting boobies – I’m afraid you’re not going to find them here. Nosireebob. No boobies. Yes, welcome to Reality TV.

You see, what you missed by not having all my back-story in the rush to get to the not-boobies, is the real meat of who I am and why I’m here blogging. The only thing you really needed to know about me up in minute-one is that I’m a Reality TV producer. That’s inside rule #3 – only deal in one-line archetypes – and establish very quickly what it is they need. So, I’m a reality TV producer and my only wish in the whole wide world is that you enjoy coming back and reading my blog.

The rest of what you need to know about me will be metered out in the coming weeks. Unless I don’t say the word boobies enough and this blog gets pulled after only one episode, like those idiots at the network did to that show I worked my ass off on last year. Anyway – so that’s the Tease. And always at the end of the act – comes another tease.

Coming up in next week’s blog…

an explosion, someone yells at me, I yell at someone.

Then… in the most sensational blog of the season, I reveal the biggest…. secret…. of my life.

Cut to commercial.

(Or one of those ads at the side of the screen - just to make that feel real).