Comment by swanson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swanson | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is curious how to do this kind of hyper-niche techie reality show the right way, please do check out Penny Arcade's Strip Search: http://www.penny-arcade.com/strip-search

The premise is to get a bunch of comic strip artists together and compete to win a working space at Penny Arcade's office in Seattle and some cash (the idea being this would be used to launch their own comic strip).

Some things that really worked well:

* There was almost zero bullshit reality TV manufactured drama

* Everyone treated each other with respect and I think every artist gained something from being on the show (new fans, support for Kickstarter projects, etc)

* Focused on the work being produced, including plenty of links to scans of all the artwork on the show website

* Episodes released on YouTube (could use existing apps, infrastructure)

* Two episodes (15-25min) released each week (short enough to consume, frequent enough to keep you hooked)

* Enough production value for it to not be a distraction; obviously this isn't a major network TV show, but it wasn't some person's first production using iMovie

* The show didn't take itself too seriously. Watch the "elimination ceremonies" to see what I mean.

Definitely worth a watch, and worth learning from :)

I was thinking Amnesia Fortnight from 2 Player Productions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTzTjf-I-A8&index=2&list=PLI...

It’s not about a game jam (but it’s four team leads with four teams getting to make a prototype of their game idea in two weeks, so pretty similar) but it’s about game development.

Great productions values, all on YouTube, no manufactured drama, but still plenty of actual drama, tension and hilarious moments.

The idea behind this game jam is pretty awesome and deserves to be implemented the right way. It wouldn’t even have to be the more contemplative style of 2 Player Productions.

>I was thinking Amnesia Fortnight from 2 Player Productions:

Yeah these are fantastic. High recommended. Production quality is high enough they could air them on TV too.

I didn't feel like Strip Search was a particularly effective way of finding the best cartoonist in the group. Contrived challenges like copying Barack Obama's signature 10,000 times or setting up a convention booth really had nothing to do with drawing a comic. Even the comic-drawing elimination challenges seemed like a poor fit for some of the cartoonists due to the extreme time constraints.

Cons are where web comic artists make a LOT of their living. Setting up the convention booth so that you minimize theft and maximize sales is going to come in very handy later (and probably did this weekend, when some of the Strip Search contestants had a booth at Emerald City Comicon). The signature challenge was because you're asked to sign things many times in rapid succession at cons as well, but is probably less useful than learning how to set up your booth. The time constraints are relevant considering how hard it is to draw a comic strip on a regular schedule, but granted 90 minutes is pretty extreme.

I thought Strip Search was about the contestants learning about how to run a web-comic business, not necessarily learning to draw comics.

Exactly

  I didn't feel like Strip Search was a 
  particularly effective way of finding 
  the best cartoonist in the group.

Typically for reality competition shows the goal is to produce programming that draws in viewers, rather than to find the best competitor.

If 'survivor' wanted to make a show about survival skills they'd use a bunch of ex-marines, mountaineers and woodmen. If 'dancing with the stars' wanted to show the best dancing, they'd get rid of the celebrities and just have professionals. If 'the apprentice' wanted to find people with business skills they'd get candidates smart enough to realize infighting isn't a useful business skill.

I'm not saying I like it, but 'so you think you can dance' certainly has more viewers than the Prix de Lausanne youtube channel. And what's the point in making ideologically pure TV that no-one wants to watch?

It's still a competition to find the best candidate though. They said that over and over during the show.

Dancing with the Stars finds the best dancer out of the group, even if they're not pros. Survivor ostensibly finds the best survivor out of the group, even if they're not true outdoorsmen.

They say over and over in The Sopranos that Tony Soprano is a mobster. That doesn't make it so in reality - that's just the fiction presented to us for our entertainment. To maintain the fiction, the show doesn't wildly contradict it.

Reality TV is the same - except the fiction is the competition isn't rigged and its primary goal is to find the best candidate. The show doesn't wildly contradict it, it's just not true.

It's a competition to entertainingly find a best candidate. The core mechanic was the elimination round. Anyone who could consistently beat others given a random topic and limited time was likely to win regardless of what happened in the leading-up rounds.

Looking at the strips after the fact, Abby and Katie pretty obviously are writing the best strips. And sure, Abby's is the better of the two, but her concept is harder to distill down to its essence and present - Katie was the only one of the three finalists who was able to competently and interestingly introduce her new strip with just a few sample pages.

If you think they picked wrong, who should have won instead?

(Note that several of the other cartoonists have been hired by Penny Arcade for other tasks such as doing The Trenches and designing pins. So even if you ignore the publicity aspect there were still multiple winners.)

I didn't see enough of their work to judge the early eliminations. They could have been great, I don't know.

Of the last two, Abby should have won IMO.

I haven't had the time to watch this yet, but it seems like they wouldn't let anyone they didn't want to work with on their show.

I haven't watched So You Think You Can Dance for a few years now, but at least when I was watching on a regular basis (seasons 3-6 or so), they did exactly what you're proposing they do, e.g. select highly skilled dancers. There were no "This person is bad at dancing but it's funny to watch them be terrible" getting past more than a round or two at the tryouts, and all of the top 20 contenders each season were legitimately talented and hard working professional-quality dancers. SYTYCD gets their quality (or at least did; again, I haven't watched it for a while) by taking very skilled dancers and pushing them out of their comfort zone; you can be skilled at classical ballet, but can you adjust and pull off a hard-hitting hip hop routine? You can breakdance at BOTY, but can you learn to waltz?

That's a very different type of challenge from "You can't dance, and we want to see if you can learn to dance before you explode", and that's part of why SYTYCD is a good show. Obviously it's a reality show and SYTYCD is going to have some compromises (for example, you might argue that the judge selection is suspect, or that the styles and choreographer choices are limited) but it was honestly pretty close to ideologically pure as you could get; the people who succeeded were the people who were good at dancing, not the people who were good at ballet or contemporary or hip hop or ballroom.

I think that's partly because watching great dancers is a very entertaining thing by itself, even to the completely uninformed; the sizzle doesn't need to be manufactured. In fact, SYTYCD helped me learn a lot about the nuances of dance, something I'd been unaware of previously.

On the other hand, I can't see an ideologically pure version of 'So You Think You Can Code' any time soon.

> * There was almost zero bullshit reality TV manufactured drama

The bit in the article that astounded me was where he talked about sections of the contract everyone was expected to sign: "Another clause allowed for willful misrepresentation for the sake of drama..."

That's standard fare for "reality TV". Most of that kind of stuff is utterly fabricated.

Aka "We reserve the right to make a loser edit to drum up suspense". This was the least surprising part of it for me.

What we call bullshit is another way of saying, "in case you are supremely boring we reserve the right to make it seem like observing your day-to-day life is at the least enjoyable as a train-wreck." Maybe we are bullshitting by not living so well thats its more enjoyable than watching others live poorly.

Boring is safe. I wouldn't call being boring "living poorly."

According to Hacker News if you live a safe and "boring" life you're the worst kind of person out there

That's basically all of reality TV. There's hardly anything real about it. The scenarios are all scripted. The only thing that's sometimes real are the reactions of the 'stars'. And, even then, they're so re-edited and re-framed, that the end result doesn't have much in common with reality.

I had not heard of Strip Search - thank you for posting the link, girlfriend and I enjoyed the first 6 episodes this evening and definitely plan on finishing it up.

www.geekandsundry.com is also well done.

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