Reality TV that doesn't suck

For many years I lived with the misconception that all reality competition shows were completely unwatchable. Not a particularly crippling mistake to make, as these things go, but still a little embarrassing. The truth, I've come to discover, is a little more complex.

You see, where I had thought there was only one, there are actually two mostly distinct classes of reality gameshow.

The first type of reality gameshow is at least partially determined by public vote. This being the case, the progression of the show needs to closely follow the real time unfolding of the events in the contest. These shows usually go out live or aired with a short delay, though they also feature segments on tape that have been edited together before broadcast. The turnaround of the whole show, however, is necessarily rapid, so the videotaped footage is hastily assembled in an edit suite sometimes mere hours before the show is broadcast. Examples of these shows are Big Brother, I'm a Celebrity..., The X Factor, etc.

Reality shows of this class should never be watched on any grounds, up to and including winning one. They are typically hastily-produced exercises in profit-making involving premium rate phone lines and, at any rate, the public vote renders them simple popularity contests rather than competitions based on strategy, skill, or even play. They have as much merit as the viewing public has taste.

The second type of reality gameshow is filmed in its entirety months before broadcast (sometimes on videotape, sometimes on film), and the competition's outcome is dictated by the contestants and the standard of their play strategy rather than by pandering to public opinion. The extended turnaround between filming and broadcast affords the opportunity for the producers to spend much more time in the editing room, creating coherent narratives, through-lines, emotional beats and amusingly ironic edits from hundreds of hours of source footage in post-production, creating a 'heightened reality' which plays out much more dramatically. (All reality shows manipulate events through editing, of course; I'm just saying some shows do it well.)

Though you may assume the second class of reality show is an evolution of the first, the mother of the reality TV show boom -- Survivor -- is shot months in advance, skilfully and cleverly edited, and the outcome is decided entirely by the contestants. So the first and now most common reality show type is actually a regression from the original -- a way producers invented to get the same kind of buzz of a successful show like Survivor for a much lower budget, in a way that produces additional income, and with the publicity benefit of being able to plant ostensibly legitimate stories about the show in the media as the competition unfolds on TV screens in near-realtime.

I'll have to complete this train of thought in another entry, where I'll tell you about the best reality gameshow (it's not Survivor), and try to make you feel bad about not watching it.