How does reality TV differ from documentaries?
I think when somebody refers to documentary versus reality television, I think that the people doing documentary are trying to keep to some kind of journalistic standard, I imagine. The truth is that it's not that black and white. If you're trying to make an entertaining documentary, you are probably manipulating the story a little bit so that it's entertaining. You're either compressing the time line a little bit or you're amping up some of the emotion, even with music. Even adding music to something can enhance its emotional impact, and it's not journalistically rigid to be adding music. The news never adds music to their presidential interviews, whereas a documentary maker will. If we look over all that, the people who think they're doing documentaries are trying to adhere to some kind of journalistic portrayal of the truth, without interfering with what they're filming. When people do reality television, I think it's pretty much acknowledged that they're telling, in general, a true story, but there's a lot of creative leeway with the editing, with how you amp up the emotion of the story that you're telling - not just through simple things like music, but also through careful choice of interview bites, even manipulation of interview bites to help tell the story. Reality television is basically a social experiment more than a journalistic look at real life.
