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Marii Rojas English 1103 Ms. Caruso October 21, 2012 Reality Television: The Lies about the Truth. Channel One: People eating roaches and drinking dirty water for a change to win a million dollars. Channel Two: Males competing for a chance to go on a date with whom they believe is the girl of their dreams. Channel Three: A group of friends at a club in Italy, drunk out of their minds and the guys start to fight. Channel Four: eight females in a house arguing over whose turn it is to clean, who used the others hair products, and who stole the others wine. Channel Five: Four sixteen year old girls with kids complaining about their lives. Lately that is all there ever is on television, reality television shows. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as television programming that features videos of actual occurrences, yet most of it does not seem real at all. In every reality television show the same language, behaviors, clothing (or lack thereof) is very consistent. The language in these shows put sailors to shame; every other word in the sentence is bleeped out, because all the actors do is curse. If they are not cursing, then they are making some kind of promiscuous innuendo or participating in some R-rated scene. The people on these shows usually cannot control their behaviors, under the influence or completely sober. The clothing is always the same; the shorts females wear are too short, and the tops are beyond revealing. But the apple does not fall too far from the tree; the guys usually have a great taste in

Comment [S1]: Sara Eckford

Comment [S2]: The channel one, two, three pattern seems somewhat confusing and dull, I think you should say like MTVs greatest television hit, The Jersey Shore depictssuch and such etc. Maybe it will make it more exaggerated.

Comment [S3]: Lately, could be changed to something more dramatic like in this day and age, or something along the sorts. (:

Comment [S4]: You can use an example of someone always seen like this.

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pants and shoes yet lack sufficient funds to wear shirts. Another thing that a majority of these reality television shows have in common is that they tend to lack the real aspect of reality. How does one try to produce reality, yet fall so far from actual reality? How does one take normal people and create a show that is so far from the norm? Is reality television scripted, in the sense that it tells its actors what to say? Is it severely edited, do they have amazing editors that completely change the situation? Is it staged, do the producers purposely put their actors in situations in which they know the craziest things are going to happen? Is it overly exaggerated? Does Hollywood take situations and exaggerate them to make them dramatic, or is that how some people in America truly act: completely and truly irrational? Although it seems as if everything on television is real because of its genre, reality television shows do tend to be scripted, edited, staged, and overly exaggerated. The idea for scripts being present in a reality television show does sound completely outrageous and they really are nonexistent. Producers do not tell their actors what to do or what to say; however, they are masters of manipulation. Winfred Fordham Metz explain in his article, How Reality TV Works that producers use what is called a shooting script or an outline that details parts of the television show. Shooting scripts are used primarily in shows like Survivor or The Real World in which they set up challenges or pair specific people and put them in a scenario in which they know drama will unfold. Not only are shooting scripts used, In extreme cases, a shooting script might include a storyboard -- a visual representation of the concept that physically illustrates what will occur in a scene (Metz 4). Producers use these aspects to create a nonrealistic reality television show.

Comment [S5]: I think this is really creative, ehem,.. Ronnie/Mike from Jersey Shore. Its T-shirt timmeee!

Comment [S6]: The colon.

Comment [S7]: It would be cool to almost map out a script as an example maybe? Comment [S8]: Set-up challenges arent considered the real world maybe incorporate the ironic TV show title with that.

Comment [S9]: I like it a lot. Comment [S10]: Try to add more examples and compare them to the questions you addressed. (: