> My personal opinion is that most of those shows are entirely scripted. Practically all of them are. It is way more expensive to shoot compelling reality TV t

> My personal opinion is that most of those shows are entirely scripted. Practically all of them are. It is way more expensive to shoot compelling reality TV that's at all resembles what the term implies. Uncertainty about what you'll get, and capturing a real narrative taking way, way more time, means your productions costs are many times what they would be for something that's mostly scripted from scratch, or built out of (scripted) re-creations of things that already happened.