The Scripted Dialogue on Pawn Stars | Hacker News Reader

The Scripted Dialogue on Pawn Stars

looper.com

It helps when everyone knows the script already by heart from repetition. For example, on the "got talent" shows it goes like this: young man was living out of a dumpster, gets asked to try out for the show, doesn't look like much, then opens his mouth to sing and has the most beautiful singing voice ever heard. People swoon and claps their hands over their mouths. Everyone pretends they are witnessing a miracle. A miracle that happens reliably over and over again. I'm not even going to go into the way to act on Pawn Stars because you already know the script if you've ever watched the show.

“Reality” it ain’t. It’s crafted, exploited, tweaked, being steered, engineered, if anything it’s a long way from reality. Reality is boring, tedious in comparison and doesn’t keep the eyeballs watching for those ad dollars.

That said, it really does seem more of US thing to make things larger than life, for instance I see some BBC reality portrayals (just watch their daytime program for some examples) that does seem closer to reality, and less flashy shiny scripted stuff.

So I wonder if it is a culture thing.

> For example, on the "got talent" shows it goes like this: young man was living out of a dumpster, gets asked to try out for the show, doesn't look like much, then opens his mouth to sing and has the most beautiful singing voice ever heard. People swoon and claps their hands over their mouths. Everyone pretends they are witnessing a miracle. A miracle that happens reliably over and over again.

Wait a second. Assume someone made a completely legitimate "got talent" show. Wouldn't the outcome be the same?

Those "got talent" shows usually involve multiple rounds of auditions, starting with open auditions held in many locations where each act only gets something like 90 seconds. The big name judges you see on TV are not involved in the earliest rounds.

By the time acts are actually in front of the big name TV judges, the herd has been heavily culled.

Reality shows took off when the writers went on strike so the scripted television shows went on hiatus. The producers of the reality tv shows got into some hot water with the writer's guild as it was clear they were scripting the shows even if there was no writer credited with the show or a printed script. Once the strike ended, the popularity of the reality tv genre stayed, but the reigns were removed to allow the production to be totally controlled like a scripted show. Messed up the delivery? We'll go again.

I seriously question the people that watch these shows. Talking about dumbing down the masses. Gotta get back to my Keeping up with the WHO GIVES A F**K

>And who can argue with the show's runaway success? It's a tactic that seems to be working.

By no mentioned metrics. In fact, several of the links are seven or fourteen years old interviews. Maybe it worked when it was in the news being hyped up.

Probably just one more reason to stay away from all the "reality" shows. Stuff is trash.

If you want to learn more about how reality TV works, you could do worse than watching a couple episodes of UnREAL, an American TV show from 2015 developed by a former writer for The Bachelor.

So there are people thinking that the show is not scripted? :O

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