This might sound dumb but I really don’t get it. Sometimes it looks like the interview (most often in a separate Interview room) was really made right at the time a scene happened, but then again you see people wearing the same things in every interview that supposedly should have happened across multiple days.
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I was on My Strange Addiction about a decade ago so I can give you perspective from there…
Basically they did multiple long form interviews on multiple days. We shot for a week, during that week we had a few on location interviews basically just summarizing the situation and how I felt, all very casual, (OTF or OnTheFly). The biggest were the 2 seperate nearly 3 hour interviews where they asked me the number of different questions multiple times as well as reframing some questions. 18+ hours of footage for an 11 minute segment.
Got the impression that they just wanted as much footage as they could to edit however they wanted, and were trying to specifically give me lots of room to breathe so they could go wild in the editing room. One interview was at the first of the week and the second was at the end, but I wore the same clothes and was asked many of the same questions. Continuity is important on a shoot like that, but unfortunately they had issues with their audio so I kind of sound like a robot in the final version. But they also didn’t have time to do it again so it went to print.
So to ELI5 – production cruise will tell you to keep a set of clothes and a lot of reality TV show interviews are focused on repetition and trying to get provocative comments. I really watched my wording and you can tell in the video that they stitched multiple sentences together to get me to say what they wanted me to say, it was kind of embarrassing to me because most people couldn’t tell that it was not edited.
A lot of the people they hire for stuff like this have experience with acting, or the therapists they hire have done video work before so when it comes to multiple people being interviewed for a reality show they often know what they’re doing and have been on set before. They have a Rolodex of people who know how to behave on camera.
Unrelated to MSA:
I did some production work for a reality show a long time ago about putting gay guys through boot camp (stupid show) and that involved interviews, but it was more the Bachelor/Real World kind of interviews where they setup a booth and do a round of them on shooting days. Alcohol was always served.
Now if you’re talkin about live reality shows like Wendy Williams or Jerry Springer, the interviews there are much more fast and the hosts are much more aggressive (I was on Bill Cunningham and another that didnt goto air) and oftentimes there’s producers either on earphones or with cards on the sides trying to direct the conversation a certain way. Some of the shadier shows will tell you to “GET ANGRY” or “DROP THE BOMB” etc to try and stimulate drama.
That’s all the time I have for now but if you have any other questions feel free to AMA.
Edit: speech to text corrections
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