Casey sent me an interesting article today in which yet more Hollywood types excoriate so-called "reality TV" and try to paint the perpetrating producers as hulking cheats and liars with no goal in sight other than the duping of the American public.

I don't mean to whine, but frankly, this is frustrating. I'm sick and tired of being made to feel like I have to apologize for what I do. Being treated like I owe script-writers something because I've made their jobs harder to get. Being made to feel like I'm peddling sleaze and am responsible for the fact that fewer traditionally scripted shows are on the air � never mind the fact that tons of pilots get made every season, and although reality shows are competing for their time slots, these offerings have nothing to do with whether or not the sitcom and drama pilots are total crap. Write a sitcom or drama that's as well put-together and well-cast and full of tension as The Apprentice is at is best, and the networks will love you, because even if reality shows are cheap, they still want the gold rush of discovering the next successful ten-year smash comedy. It's not For Love Or Money's fault that the crop of comedies this year is small � NBC greenlit a bunch of pilots, and most of them reeked. Am I oversimplifying? Certainly no more than those who claim reality TV is solely, absolutely to blame for employment or development woes.

What irritates me most is that reality TV is being treated as if the genre rudely and misleadingly named itself. No one seems to consider this. The label under which it labors was coined long before the current boom of programming, back when The Real World and Road Rules were the primary offerings in this area and someone could christen it hastily and casually without considering that it might have consequences. Because frankly, no one was really paying attention to what those shows called themselves. And now the label's used to refer to everything from Extreme Makeover: The Home Edition to The Swan to The Residents, which followed around a handful of young doctors as they learned their trade. These shows couldn't be more different in tone, yet are being tarred by the same brush.

Now that networks have picked up on that style of programming, the genre is rightly subject to more rigorous analysis � but it's suffering from an archaic and outdated categorization that's being used against it by naysayers. Compounding this, the detractors in the article Casey sent me frustrated me by bandying about the word "scripted" in a completely and I think deliberately deceptive way. They make comments about how evil folks like me and my bosses want the public to think the shows are "unscripted," knowing full well that most readers would see that and think it refers to pre-writing and staging, and deem us all scum. When in fact they're saying "unscripted" as it refers to the story process in post-production � after all the footage is shot. And any executive producer will gladly cop to having a team of people charged with whittling two-hundred hours off footage down to one forty-two minute episode that's about two or three specific people. I've never seen any EP try to deny this. The language of the genre, then, is as confusing as its title, and in combination these things paint a much bleaker picture of both our intentions and our actions than actually exists.

"But reality TV is not REAL," critics crow. Of course it isn't. Try filming for nine weeks in a row, twenty-four hours a day at times, and gleaning thirteen episodes of totally uncut, real-time verit� that tell clear, cohesive stories and give you any idea who any of the people are. Even documentaries use selective editing, with interview bites placed carefully so as to give context to the raw footage. That's precisely what a lot of "reality shows" do, but because we're referred to as "reality," it becomes unacceptable to employ these standard storytelling and editing procedures. And gleefully, the critics throw around this convenient derision to paint all these producers as enemies, despite the fact that our objectivity is more firmly in place than many people trying to sell op-ed pieces as "documentaries."

As with anything, there are a few people in this genre that ruin it for everyone else. The Restaurant and The Casino are blatantly � and in the case of the former, openly, per some Mark Burnett interviews after the fact -- staged as they go along, at least to the point that characters and scenarios are set up in advance and the people are allowed to play it out as improvisation. Possibly, it goes further. And they use re-shoots to catch stuff that the cameras either missed the first time, or which needed some added punch. Mark Burnett's unapologetic approach to that tactic taints a lot of other shows that don't tinker with what's unfolding in front of their cameras. Complicating this are cast members who don't like what they see of themselves on camera and decide to blame it on the editing. Certainly, some personality traits will pop more than others in this process, but we can't invent raw footage. We can't animate you into vomiting on your dress. If you didn't do it, we can't pretend you did -- the Joe Millionaire/Sarah Kozer blow-job flap notwithstanding. I'd be willing to bet both parties were guiltier than either admitted, and the production company thoughtfully messed it up for the rest of us who don't deal in deceit.

I know I've been really lucky -- I've worked on shows that don't stand for dishonesty, and don't take themselves too seriously. I suppose in some ways we do trade on women's insecurities in our supermodel search, but that's about as close to "appealing to the lowest common denominator" that I think we come. We're not trying to change the world and we're not trying to claim a spot in the annals of television greatness. We're just having fun and trying to be entertaining, and yet more people than not react to what I do by saying, "That's weird. You seem nice and intelligent," or, "Don�t you want to be a real writer?" Or simply an eye roll and a, "Ha," or "Oh, God."

I wish other writers in this town didn't brush off every so-called reality show like it's trash. I wish they didn't act above the genre, because from where I sit, doing what I do, it's just a different form of storytelling. I don't consider myself beneath them, and I shouldn't, I don�t think, be sneered at for trying to make a living in a cutthroat industry by learning how to build a character arc from footage that was already shot, rather than filmed after I wrote dialogue. Indeed, it is just as hard as churning out an original plot � we don't get multiple takes, we can't design things around our desires, we don't know what we got or what we missed until weeks after the fact, and yet we can't hide behind that. There aren't easy fixes, and there aren't inventions. If a scene didn't happen, it didn't happen. We have what we shot, and we have to make it work.

It's hard for me to post this entry, because I know some people are going to hate it, or dislike me for it. I guess at the heart of this argument is the fact that I'm hurt that so many people don't seem willing to consider that what story departments do on these shows is a form of originality and does require creativity. I'm tired of having to explain away my line of work in order to earn someone's good opinion, and it's because I don't think it's fair that my line of work is universally written off just because it wasn�t written in advance and shot with consistently overpaid actors. Am I trying to justify myself, because I am secretly ashamed of what I do? No, actually. I've just seen and participated in enough total transformations of middling material and poor camera coverage into totally watchable, funny, coherent and cohesive half-hours and hours of television -- that don't falsify what actually happened and are true to the people on the show -- and I know that it's not monkey work, or jerks sitting in edit bays barfing up footage they can splice together.

I wish all the critics wouldn't so readily turn this whole thing into antagonism � one side against the other, non-fiction versus fiction, or whatever you want to dub both groups. I wish we could erase the "reality TV" label and come up with something that's not spelled with scarlet letters. Something more inclusive and on-point. I wish there was a way to form some mutual respect, acknowledging what's right about what some of our shows are doing and helping weed out the ones that are abusing the trade.

Pipe dreams.

Someone got here by searching for: "brittany murphy anorexic" -- at one point, the most frequent Google I got Watching: Celebrity Poker Showdown Wanting: to lick James Blake like a tender love popsicle. I loved him last year at the U.S. Open, and watching him do a tequila shot while being funny and articulate did it for me all over again.


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