Nancy Hadley was the muralist on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition when I was there and working with her often made the whole thing bearable.  She is smart, funny, crazy talented and way more fun to paint with than just about anyone.  Since then, she has been active all over design TV.  We’ve also worked on murals and designs for lots of different clients.    Here is a quick story from Nancy Hadley.   -Daniel

I bolted the front end of this motorcycle to the wall, Nancy made it fly!

I have been working in reality television for five and half years.  My first show was Extreme Makeover: Home Edition on ABC.  It was one of the highlights of my professional life.  The workload and deadlines were brutal but I expected and loved it. I had not anticipated the incredible friendships I would make while working on the road.  A typical schedule for work would go as follows.  Get up at 4am, shower, eat breakfast, lift two little girls out of bed and take them to the car, coax one larger 8 year old boy into the car and wake my husband.  With a car-load of very sleepy people I would drive to the John Wayne airport.  My husband would pull out my enormous suitcase, hand me my backpack and kiss me goodbye.  With the kids it was a little more emotional. There were many many hugs and tears and I would have to peal off little hands to start my journey. At the check out counter the attendants recognized me.  They would always ask where the house was going to be this time.   I had the security check down to a science that is until liquids were not allowed.  Computer out of bag – check, shoes off – check, jacket off – check, boarding pass and id in hand – check, avoid line with strollers – check, make joke about athletes foot risk – check, walk thru and pack it all back in my bag.  In the terminal I would frequent a snack stand that sold muffins but as I did not drink coffee, I ordered it with hot chocolate.  Next I would find my way to the gate and search for a seat till my boarding letter was called.  Just one year prior to my travel for the show I was an extremely nervous flier.  I would pace while waiting to board and roll airplane disaster stories through my head before surrendering to the fact that the plane was just going to crash. I would count seats to the nearest exit and take a baby census because maybe they could save us.  Always astounded to land safely I would exit thankful to be alive.

By JD Roberto

This is the third in a series about the reality of reality TV.  -Daniel

By the end of the first episode of any season of Big Brother, even the casual viewer can readily identify the cast of characters.   By the first reward challenge on a new round of Survivor, we can look at the tribes and easily pick out the racist, the bitch, the flamboyantly gay guy, the crotchety old guy, the hottie , the gross “don’t let him hug you” guy.

And, not surprisingly, just like you can look at the Bible thumping Mom from Iowa and the pre-op transsexual from West Hollywood and see a train wreck in the making, so can the folks responsible for delivering 44 minutes of great TV to your living room every week.

Kennedy, JD Roberto, Elvira. (All five of them in one great pic!)

The casting department of a reality TV show has a unique and demanding job to do.   Not only do they have to cull through thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of submissions, but they have to do so with an eye toward more than appearance and resume.   Unlike a traditional casting session in which producers are looking for “hunky doctor #2” for three lines on Grey’s Anatomy, reality casting directors are trying to assemble an ensemble of possible storylines.

It’s a kind of chemistry lab in which the staff tries to guess what Contestant A will be like when combined with Contestant B and the later arrival of Constant C.

Yes, they want a certain demographic spread and  it doesn’t hurt to have people that look good wearing very little – but it’s the chemistry and interaction that make the drama.  Without a cast of characters in whom casting directors see possible fireworks, alliances, friendships, affairs and fights – they know they have no show.

Moreover, casting directors (hand in hand with producers) are trying to do this job while following a story outline set down before the season even starts.

Wait,  what!? A story outline on reality TV!?!

You bet.  (on an unrelated side note, there’s no Santa Clause. Bah, hum bug).

But despair not.  This isn’t the ‘all reality TV is fake’ bombshell you might like to think.  It’s a necessary part of creating an entertaining season of reality TV and it actually creates an environment that encourages the unexpected, authentic and unscripted.

By JD Roberto

This is the second in a series about the reality of reality television. – Daniel

JD Roberto hosting "Food Fight"

Would it upset you to know that before any season of any major Reality TV show a group of producers gets together and decides what’s going to happen?    Is your notion of “unscripted” television offended by the idea of storyboards and series bibles piled up in production offices around Los Angeles ?   Well, it shouldn’t be.   Without these basic tools, your favorite reality show would be a wandering, directionless snoozefest.    Story needs structure.   In the real world, the phrase “let’s just turn on the cameras and see what happens” is only uttered by freshman at NYU film school, frequently with less than ideal results.

Even in the elite world of documentary filmmaking, creators begin the process with a sense of what story they are going to tell and how, in a perfect world, it’s going to unfold.   The 2008Academy Award winning documentary Man on a Wire is described by the New York Times as being “constructed like a heist movie.”   And check this quote from the trade magazine Variety:

Cleverly, he [director Marsh] inserts some re-staged material from the beginning moments that feel like the windup to a heist movie, but unlike many docs including freshly staged action, the line between new and archive is fairly invisible.

If the documentary film that won Sundace, the BAFTA and the Oscar is “constructed like a heist movie” and lauded for blurring the line between actual events and recreations, what should we expect from prime time entertainment?

The collaborative art of making reality TV is a complicated and nuanced endeavor  (yeah, I said art, sue me).    Getting a sense of how casting, story editing and post production adhere (strictly) to age old rules of storytelling will enhance your appreciation for good reality TV and, I hope, your distaste for the bad.

It’s also exactly what we’re going to do next week…

Herb Ankrom and I worked together on Extreme back in 2005.  He is an incredibly caring and conscientious producer, and can show you a pretty good time in New York as well….  but that’s a story for another time.  Here are three questions with Herb Ankrom.    -Daniel

1. What has been your most memorable experience in reality TV?

My most memorable experience would have to be my time on Extreme Makeover Home Edition. Its hard to select just one moment on that show – there were SO many. Being able to do two things I love – help others and produce at the same time was a magical time and one I hope to be able to do again some day. One highlight I can remember was producing a segment with Elton John when he came to be a part of an episode – that was an amazing moment!

2. Do you think Reality TV can positively affect the world?

I absolutely believe that Reality TV can affect the world, I was a part of that for five seasons on Extreme. I was lucky enough to be very involved with the families of that show and do have a very good opportunity to see how the show affected them after the show was done – and to see what an impact the show had on the community once we were there and after we were gone!

3. What are you currently working on?

My business partner and I have just completed season 2 of our ABC show “True Beauty.” We also have sold a show to NBC which is very exciting, and we are in the midst of development on several other series! So, its an exciting time for DC/TV!

Herb Ankrom on the set of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

So I’d just burned through all my Tivoed episodes of Bully Beatdown and was catching up on a little Facebook mail when I started to get some IM’s from a loyal viewer of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. She was asking me why some families were chosen, and others weren’t, and she went on to say that she felt like some of the families chosen “didn’t deserve the makeover they were given.” Now I gotta be clear for a sec, I’m not on EM:HE anymore and I absolutely DO NOT speak for the show or for ABC. But c’mon… didn’t deserve? Really?

Follow me on this because I don’t think I’m gonna say what you’re expecting me to say. The fact is that all of us have suffered indignities and loss while others lived in luxury. Should we be rewarded for this virtue? Likewise, all of us have lived in relative plenty at one time or another, while others have been stricken with starvation and disease. Can we be punished for this gluttony? In my opinion, none of us deserve the kind of lotto crushing bonanza that is lavished upon the lucky families that EM:HE chooses. And therefore, ALL of us deserves it.

One of the great things that reality TV has done for the country, and I mean this sincerely, is show us that we are all very much the same; we all have the same needs and dreams and obstacles and wishes. We are courageous sometimes, cowardly sometimes. We work hard, we get lazy, we try to better ourselves and sometimes we become complacent. By what standard can any of us possibly rate the kind of lavishness on EM:HE? Certainly it’s nice to see the families (who are often stricken by gut wrenching hardship) given the new homes. It makes us feel good and promotes a wonderful sense of community spirit and generosity and volunteerism. But I think it is downright unAmerican to decide that some families “deserve” the generosity and others don’t. None of us deserve it, and of course, all of us do.

JD Roberto on the set of "Outback Jack" for TBS

By JD Roberto

This is the first in a series about the reality of reality television–Daniel

It’s not a question of whether or not reality TV lies to you; of course it does. It has to lie and, if you’re even remotely honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you want it to lie. You want to be misled and deceived because – in your heart of hearts – you know that the alternative is unrelenting boredom. There’s little more insomnia-curing than unadultered, unproduced voyeurism. Go spend a day at the mall, sitting on a bench watching life, in all its mundane glory, unfold in front of you. Now tell me that’s what you want on the primetime schedule. You don’t and you know it. As Nicholson would have you remember, “You can’t handle the truth!” because the truth makes minor league badminton look like a thrill ride.  At its best, Reality TV is a masterful blend of the authentic and the contrived; a sometimes uneasy marriage of documentary and duplicity. Yes, you’re being lied to – but not in the way you imagine. It’s both more honest and more manipulative than you’ve ever imagined.

Join me over the next few weeks as we go behind the scenes in the world of “unscripted” television and learn why deceit and drama are not only necessary elements of reality TV, they’re a hell of a lot of fun.