A question of ethics in Reality Television was raised yesterday in a panel discussion at the
Australian Content in the Streaming Era Symposium at ACMI in Melbourne.
SBS Head of Unscripted Joseph Maxwell, producer Lauren Rose Beck (Prepping Australia) and critic and podcaster Brodie Lancaster (See Also) addressed the way reality participants were presented on screen including producers and editors being complicit in the ‘villain’ edit.
SBS Head of Unscripted Joseph Maxwell said the edit was very important in documentaries.
“You want to maximize the drama in your edits. You want to make sure people’s characters ‘print’ and how they come across. You absolutely want to do that. I think the role of the editor is critical … you know, the skill in the artistry to be able to get those stories, especially when you’re purely using those their words, not a voiceover. We’ve all seen the kind of ‘frankengrab’ of what that can do to people, distorting their words. Hand on heart, I think we deal with real integrity,” he said.
“There’s a rule I’ve sort of lived with. I made Reality TV a long time ago, but more from a documentary background, I think there’s something very powerful about ‘Would you be happy to sit next to them to watch this show go out?’
“It’s a really good, quick integrity test. Because if you’re not, then I think there’s something going wrong. If you are, you might say, ‘Yes I have shown you being really difficult,’ or something like that. But that speaks true to what happened and true to how you are and who you are. So for me, that’s just a useful, personal test.”
Lauren Rose Beck referred to high profile incidents in the UK and the impact which had followed.
“There’s actually been a British parliamentary inquiry into the duty of care needed to be given to participants of reality shows following a spate of suicides,” she said.
“It was established that production companies do have a duty of care to not exploit or misrepresent the participants. But how that actually is executed day to day in production, I think still leaves a little bit wanting.”
Brodie Lancaster also recalled 2023’s season of Below Deck Australia in which a drunken sexual assault was narrowly avoided.
“There were camera crews in their bunks as a very drunk man was trying to get into bed with his very drunk female coworker, who was asleep,” she said.
“In that moment, what a blessing to break the fourth wall break with producers, who were not afraid to show themselves on camera. They they walked into frame and change the entire trajectory of these people’s lives in what could have been a very dark episode of a show that, in previous years, might have just been edited out.”
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