There is two primary differences between producing Scripted and Unscripted content.
In Scripted, you don’t run the risk of a drunk person at a house party telling you that your career is responsible for the downfall of society.
In Unscripted, you’ll often start with all the pieces (footage) needed to create your story (rather than having to write it yourself), you just need to figure out how to make them into a complete arc.
That’s really where the differences end, though. When creating an Unscripted or a Scripted story, you’re trying to accomplish the same thing: Compelling opening, forward moving narrative arc, satisfying conclusion that pushes you to the next episode.
So how do you tell a great story when you have 80 hours of footage to sort through and only 30 to 60 minutes of TV time to tell it? This is the job of a Story Producer and here’s how they do it.
By starting at the end.
You’ll see it in screenwriting books all the time, but you never want to start writing a movie if you don’t know where it’s going to end up. There’s a reason that people joke about having a great first 10 pages of a screenplay and nothing else (Oh wait, is that just me?).
The same rule applies to TV. If you’re producing a heavily formatted show like House Hunters, this is easy to figure out. The ending is people showing off their new house. But it’s more than just that they picked the house, it’s what they say about WHY they picked the new house. The features, the neighborhood, the sacrifices, the upgrades they plan on making, and what they’re looking forward to in the future.
Once you know all of their WHYs, you can successfully tell the story of the search. Everything you know from the end informs how you plan the rest of the story. Or: How can you produce a search if you didn’t know what they were searching for?
If a family picks a house with a pool because they’ve always wanted a pool, you’ll want to see this part of the story at each house they visit. Maybe one house is perfect but doesn’t have a pool but they could build one later, maybe one has a pool but is over budget. However it shakes out, those are key details that make even a simple show like House Hunters compelling. It’s fun to see people pick out houses, but you play along as they execute their why. And the story producers who tell these stories make sure that you’re able to play along by including these parts of the story.
Here’s what an episode of House Hunters typically looks like:
4 acts (3 commercial breaks).
Act 4 is always the decision and the reveal.
Act 3 is always the 3rd house and teasing the decision.
Act 2 is always the 2nd house and teasing the 3rd house.
Act 1 is always meeting the couple, the 1st house, and teasing the 2nd house.
Four acts, six primary scenes, three teases. That’s the show! (To be fair, sometimes there’s a real estate meeting or the couple inexplicably goes salsa dancing while debating whether or not the craft room or man cave is the real priority).
When producing a show like this, it’s common to figure out your ending and then produce your beginning. By knowing the ending, it becomes much simpler to produce the “Intro Package” and subsequently, every story beat that follows, because you know where you’re going.
This same “Start at the End” method applies to documentary style shows too, but the primary difference from a formatted show (like House Hunters) is that the content isn’t self-contained. You’re never going to see that cute couple from Chicago pick out their three story condo with a rooftop view of Wrigley again, but you are going to see the cast of The Real World for the next 22 weeks.
I’ll cover how “Start at the End” works in docu shows in another post, as it deserves its own real estate, as it is much more complicated since that type of show isn’t self-contained as you’re focusing on both the episodic arc and the seasonal arc, which significantly ups the degree of difficulty.
(For the record, the craft room isn’t the priority if she already negotiated the reading nook and walk-in closet. But don’t overreach and try to push for the pool table that has a 117% chance of being unused.)