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Comment by poppup | Hacker News Reader

I worked on Shark Tank. It is a lie (but not unlike almost every other TV show) with just enough truth to keep "suspension of disbelief" aloft. It was designed that way from the beginning. Almost all TV shows are designed this way. The "lie" is called entertainment. The subject of "high stakes" investing is ready-made for TV, but no investor can adequately research a business in the 15 minutes it takes to shoot each pitch.

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Is Mark Cuban's claim that he funds approximately half of the deals he makes on the show in the ballpark? I also remember him saying something about the each pitch actually taking up to an hour, that is then cut down for TV. But you're saying it takes 15 minutes to shoot each. Which is it?

The edited pitches they show on TV are way too long to only have 15 mins of raw footage. Surely the actual pitches are much longer than that.

That's my take as well (plus Mark Cuban actually said it takes much longer than you see on air). I don't want to call anyone a liar, which is why I asked the questions I did. For all I know he did work there. But it was certainly a suspect comment.

Between pitches, production takes long breaks where Mark Cuban and the other talent have nothing to do, but sit and wait.

TV production is not very exciting. Post-production even less so. A lot of sitting and waiting. A lot of looking through useless footage to try to find the juice.

I have worked in TV for over a decade. I am leaving Santa Monica to move to Mission Bay in San Francisco in November. I hope not to work on another TV show for the rest of my life, but God laughs when we make plans.

The pitches can be shot between 15-60 minutes each. These are ballpark figures, keep in mind, and I am sure that some pitches have taken longer. The point is, there's not enough time to make an informed decision.

Production wants to shoot them as quickly as possible, as they are renting very expensive studio space and paying the talent for every shoot day.

Shark Tank is very efficient as far as TV shows go. Some shows, like Big Brother, shoot 100 minutes for every 1 minute aired. Shark Tank is probably closer to 3-5 minutes shot for every 1 minute aired. It's more like a scripted show in that regard. Certainly, all the pitches are memorized and practiced well in advance.

Someone asked my credentials. I worked on Shark Tank for one season as an editor. I have add'l credits on The Voice and Sarah Palin's Alaska for Mark Burnett Productions. I also worked for 10 other production companies on about 25-30 shows for ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and SHOWTIME. Some of them I don't remember. Some of them I would like to forget, for example, Famous in 12: http://www.tmz.com/category/famous-in-12/

> Sarah Palin's Alaska

Any comments on that one in particular? I wasn't a fan of Palin politically but I saw a bit of the show and she did seem to genuinely love Alaska and want to share it.

I case you missed it, he wrote a response to this question in reply to the parent comment.

SPA is a show that I had a lot of influence over. My editing work on the first show was mentioned in a New York Times.

Sarah was very protective of her family's image as it was airing close to the time when one of her daughter's was having or had just had a child out of wedlock.

She had good reason to be protective, but this made it difficult to produce an entertaining TV show. So, the show wasn't really a show until it got to post. The executive producers were really worried.

I remember, one of my fellow editors became frustrated with his supervising producer. He threw a stack of papers into the air and slammed the door in his face.

Also, there was a scene where Sarah'a other daughter had a boyfriend over. The boyfriend wanted to go upstairs to her bedroom. Sarah wouldn't allow it, and she demanded he come back down. We edited it so that he never came back down and that she was calling her daughter's name... as if they were up there naked or something... That is where the "lie" is most evident. When there is a clear departure from the truth, but all of TV is a lie, based on excluding the boring parts. Do I feel bad that we changed what really happened? No. That was probably the most memorable moment of the entire season and drove viewership way up for the entire season, resulting in a more satisfying product for viewers.

Also, once Sarah saw the show, she got it. She had the ability to tell us to change anything she didn't like. She didn't want to change that scene or many others. It was gold.

She does love Alaska. Todd, her husband, seems like an awesome guy. They are a pretty normal family, thrown into the limelight by John McCain.

When I was on Shark Tank our pitch took a little over an hour. Granted we had a complicated audio requirements that took a while to set up, but the pitch lasted a long time.

The beginning 1-minute pitch is memorized, but everything after that when sharks are asking questions is totally free-for-all.

I was surprised and impressed by the professionalism and the speed of the production team. They had it down to almost an assembly-line.

What product did you pitch? Scripted or not, it must have been a cool experience. Did you get funded?

Speaking of sharks that tanked, were you lucky enough to work on a reality show called "Love is in the Heir" [1], about a self proclaimed princess of the Pahlavi dynasty in exile?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Is_in_the_Heir

The only thing that takes 15 minutes in television is airing 15 minutes of television. A rule of thumb is that each minute of edited television takes about nine minutes of shot footage if you're in a hurry. I'm suspicious, but not overly so.

Source: Former ENG photographer, production intern, technical director, occasional live broadcast director with an emphasis on sports. (Just tossing it out since people are demanding credentials; I'm not bothered if you believe me or not.)

Edit: Since the guy showed up and backed himself up and I immediately got downvoted, it's worth pointing out that I was actually somewhat standing up for the person and not accusing him of lying unlike the other commenters in this thread. I was suspicious, but not enough to question someone's integrity like other folks in this thread.

I can imagine that only Mark Cuban has access to that information as they are private companies. Mark definitely seems to have the entrepreneurs interests more in mind, but they are all "sharks."

Do you trust a "shark" who claims to have your best interests in mind? If they are good at what they do, yes. All the way up to the time they don't have your best interests in mind.

I met a writer a decade + ago who wrote for two of the most popular "reality" shows at the time. This individual confided in me everything on the shows was scripted and rehearsed. Everything. The NDA's prevent contestants and workers from disclosing such information, apparently. Studios loved them because, back in the day, they didn't have to pay "scale" to these people who weren't actors at all.

edit: no names

It was messed up that the show would take 2% whether or not you made a deal, and half the deals fell through.

But 2% dilution aint THAT bad.

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