THAT REALITY TV SHOW ‘LOOK’

It’s EMMY TIME!!!  

So, the Primetime Emmy nominations came out yesterday, and as I scanned down to the Reality TV show sections, (to see which of my friends would be buying me drinks this week - and which shows I SHOULD have worked on),  my finger suddenly stopped dead on a strange section.  

“BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY IN A REALITY OR UNSCRIPTED TV SERIES” 

Now, like a lot of people in tv, I’m a filmmaker who has been strangely drawn to the fast turn-over world of TV – so, let me tell you something… there are FEW reality shows on TV to which the word ‘Cinematography’ should be applied.‘Lovely’, perhaps. ‘Generally in focus, and sometimes in the frame’, certainly’. ‘Somehow caught by a static night-vision camera’ – you betcha. But, ‘Cinematography’? I think not.

While stuck in a house in the wilds of middle-America some years ago, (shooting a well known series about the TV friendly form of swapping your wife), it struck me that what the show really needed was some decisions to overcome the inherent problem of these shows; that they all look the same, and worse - that ‘reality tv show look’ simply doesn’t tell the story well.

It was pretty much my first major show, after doing a lot of cable – so, this was a great time to shine in network primetime – and I felt it should look the part. The tv equivalent of putting on its Sunday-best.  So, I chatted with the Director of Photography. Now, he’d been flown into the country to shoot this, and he’d shot commercials and feature-films. It was clear the production company DID, at least, sort of care about how the show looked – so I wanted to use him as I would if I were shooting a drama.  We talked story, scenes, breakdowns of character arcs – mood, lighting. We walked the location every morning before the rest of the crew arrived – and we had secret signals to let each other know when to instigate a certain ‘special move’. Finally, if for no other reason than simply to ensure that each day’s filming looked different from the last, (to give the show a real visual progression over the hour), we came up with a system of shooting in different director’s styles each day.

Monday, first day of the shoot would be bright and fun – “John Hughes”, I’d whisper to the DoP as we prepped the day. He’d nod, and for the rest of the day the shots would be built up with centrally framed mostly three-shots or medium wides, so we could fully appreciate the group dynamic and the general fun reactions people were having.  By day three things had turned… “Polanski”, I coughed as the mood turned dark. Sure enough, the nervous, can’t-quite-see-round-the-door shots flowed – and the scenes looked AWESOME.  

By Friday things had calmed down, and the story turned to the kids, “Spielberg, (pre-Janusz-Kaminski… more like Allen Daviau)”, I winked at the DoP, (that wink was one of our ’secret signals’… We were particularly proud of that one). So, all the practical lamps we could find in the house were placed low down where we could, and we swapped out the bulbs to make them warmer. The kids looked angelic and the scenes were roundly applauded as ‘perfectly shot’. The point is we REALLY thought about how to shoot this show. But, this case, I assure you is VERY, VERY, VERY uncommon in reality tv.

I interviewed an assistant-producer this week who’d worked on an enormously successful show about ‘good-old blue-collar working folk doing a dangerous job’. He told me that not only do they not have a director or producer with the team, they have a ‘Cinematographer’ who shoots all sorts of pretty stuff, without much knowledge of the story, and the assistant-producer shot most of the show himself because with nobody else there, who’d shoot it?  

“It’s really just point it at the men and let them do their thing”, he told me “I shoot it mostly on auto”.

So, back to my finger stopped dead over the EMMY listings. This show got nominated for Best Cinematography.