REALITY TV DRAMA
The truth behind
The nation has been gripped by the racial slur stoush on the Real Housewives of Auckland
but it has left many viewers wondering — was that for real?
On the controversial episode on Tuesday, Julia Sloane was caught off-camera calling Michelle Blanchard a “boat n******. Although Sloane apologised and insisted she meant no harm, the “throwaway comment” caused plenty of grief among the housewives.
The incident made headlines around the world — but was the scene manipulated by producers to ensure a dynamite episode?
Lawyers were called in by Sloane’s investment banker husband, Michael Lorimer, to try to resolve the issue with the Real
Housewives production team. He claimed the comment was taken out of context to make his wife look bad.
Lorimer claimed the producers overplayed Sloane’s comment and underplayed the on-screen reaction to it. Broadcaster Bravo cancelled advertising from the episode and said it had given “much consideration to ensuring the events are accurately represented”.
But since the genre was invented, reality show contestants have claimed to have been misrepresented or tricked into doing and saying things they normally wouldn’t.
Philip Smith, boss of Great Southern Television, commissioned The Apprentice New Zealand, which was fronted by troubled Wellington businessman Terry Serepisos and screened on TV2 in 2010. “In the world of reality television, cast is king,” Smith says. “You live and die by that.
“If you don’t have clashes you don’t have drama, so there is no TV show. So getting the right mix of personalities is vital from the start.”
Viewers now accept there is an element of the real and the unreal in these programmes and so does the cast, Smith says.
“Nowadays everyone seems to want to be famous and will do anything to achieve this, so you have to take what you are seeing on some of these shows not just with a grain of salt — but a sack of it.
“Like them or hate them, reality shows are not about to die. Television is now like a giant supermarket and reality is just one aisle where people can pick and choose what they like.
“Real Housewives of Auckland has been pretty raw but one positive from the incident with Julia is that it has got people talking. It has made us think about the impact of using abusive terms about other people, which is no bad thing.”
When reality TV first became popular in the 1990s, it was a guilty pleasure that would allow you to be a fly on the wall in some extraordinary situations people were placed in. But these days some shows appear to be almost as scripted and shaped as fictional dramas. There is no way to really be sure your favourite reality stars would have behaved they did without a camera present. The genre has been exposed in a number of countries for boosting ratings by faking or staging scenarios. In 2012 in the US, Breaking Amish, about a group of Amish and Mennonites who ditch their butter churns for the bright lights of New York, was slated for misleading viewers. After just two episodes reports circulated the cast weren’t exactly who they said they were.
Two members said to be meeting for the first time had a child together and another said to be leaving the faith for the first time had allegedly left more than a decade earlier.
In 2007, Britain’s Channel 4 conducted an investigation into reports that Man vs Wild star Bear Grylls had some of his stunts set up by a production crew.
The investigation also revealed instances where Grylls was staying at a hotel while claiming to be roughing it in the wild. And even the long-running
Survivor came under threat in America after the executive producer admitted to reshooting scenes using stand-ins to get the best shot.
Richard Driver, boss of Kiwi production company Greenstone TV, oversees a raft of popular reallife shows such as Border Patrol, Dog
Squad and Renters. More than a decade ago he produced a New Zealand-based reality show called The Family for TV3, about the flamboyant lifestyle of a Kiwi property developer.
Driver says makers of internationally franchised shows such as The Bachelor, X Factor and Real