Hacker Cinema
Operation Repo
2008 · TV series · documentary · 30 min episodes · 11 seasons
Operation Repo is an American television program that depicts the world of car repossession with a team that portrays fictionalized tales of repossessions from California's San Fernando Valley. Similar to another truTV show, Southern Fried Stings, the series is filmed in a cinema verité style but consists of scripted and dramatized performances by actors. The show is filmed by recreating scenes in which the cast conducts repossessions of automobiles for finance companies. In the show they also perform repossessions of other exotic and strange items such as luxury boats, planes, limousines, motorcycles, ATVs, Zambonis, ice cream trucks, tow trucks, buses, trucks, expensive bicycles, hot air balloons, wood chippers, forklifts, and tanning beds.
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Reality TV is actually a dream business product for entertainment networks. This works on two levels - people are far more inclined to follow stories if they believe the characters are real. Great authors and storytellers have the skill to create 'real' sounding characters. Reality TV works on the assumption that the characters are real - skipping over the part where the writers have to skilfully create the characters. Thus you don't need many writers to come up with reality TV, just general plot points.
The second part is that the actors generally work for free, or close to free. This gets around pesky actors problems, such as unions, conditions and all the other things.
So you have people with a lower internal bar to 'believing' the stories and getting involved, and a cast that generally is working for free under conditions that would get regular actors up in arms.
The result is big profits for a successful reality TV show. The problem is that reality is rarely interesting outside a game show or contrived setup (ie survivor, biggest loser). So you get quasi-reality shows like Operation Repo which is completely acted following scripts but posing as reality, through the 'reality like' shows where real events are distorted to highlight the differences, right down to proper documentaries which try and follow the facts as blandly as possible. And the ratings will, other things being equal, be inversely proportionate to the amount of 'reality' in the show.
Bottom line : people who are to go on reality TV shows would do well to avail themselves of the facts before going in. Whether this means getting an agent or something like that, I don't know. But wishing and hoping for fair treatment is an unwise strategy. (note: I'm addressing reality shows in general, not this specific example).