Medill lecturer Beth Bennett knows how life looks on a television screen. She was a field producer for “Starting Over,” a reality show taped in Chicago spring through fall of 2003. She worked in TV news for the majority of her career before signing on at Northwestern full-time. Bennett talked to North by Northwestern’s Hillary Proctor about her experiences capturing “reality” on camera. Note: Because Bennett’s contract with the “Starting Over” production company has not yet expired, she could not discuss specifics of the show.

What was “Starting Over” about?
It was a show about women making change in their lives and, as the name suggests, “starting over.” It was about women getting a fresh start in their lives with the help of life coaches, and they would come and live in our house. They had some issue they were trying to solve in their life, and the life coaches would work with them to reach their goals.

How many people were involved in the show?
The cast would range, but anywhere from six to nine women in the house at any given time. And it was produced by Bunim-Murray, which produces (MTV’s) “The Real World” and it’s a very, very high-quality production job for reality. And they invented reality TV in a sense; they had the vision for reality TV long before we even knew what reality was.

Describe a typical day as a field producer.
Field producing in reality TV is a lot of fun. I think I learned more producing in reality TV than I did in any other industry about story, cuts, edits, shots, following action. As field producer, you would go out with a crew of a photographer, an audio person, sometimes a production assistant, and follow the cast when they left the house through whatever they were doing.

Also, as a field producer, sometimes you would produce your own segments. So if, let’s say, a cast member on a reality TV show is trying to learn how to ice skate, you might produce just for that one cast member their experience taking ice skating lessons. So field producing can often encompass a lot of different roles, but I often think of it as going out into the public and trying to produce this show that’s meant to be reality; it’s meant to be unaffected by producers, editors and agendas. You’re going out and trying to mitigate some of the production needs, versus the need to keep the storyline real.

Who produces the other segments?
It depends, because the thing about reality is that it kind of produces itself. And this is a really important distinction to make: there are a lot of different types of reality TV. There’s very organic reality and then there’s more scripted reality.

The original “Real World” was very organic: the goal was that the producers did not get involved and did not try to interfere with the action that the cast members were involved in. The goal in a more organic reality TV show is that the production element falls to the background and the cast really behaves the way they would normally behave. And then you have more scripted reality show, like “The Bachelor,” and the producers really have a large role in setting the scenes that the cast members will go and act in. That’s not to say that the cast members get a script; however, if you have a fantasy date in Hawaii, that sets a tone, and so in that sense it’s highly, highly produced.

And then the other thing that producers in reality TV shows [do] that is really important, in more organic reality shows or in scripted shows, are the confessionals: when the cast member takes a step back and the producer will sit in with them, or sometimes they sit by themselves, face the camera – that’s a lockdown camera – and talk about their experience. And then that becomes the narration behind the show. Sometimes cast members do it by themselves; they just sit in a confessional space and talk to the camera, and they’re not guided by a producer’s questions. Then other times the producer will sit in with them and guide them through the interview. I did some of those confessional interviews as well.

Is it difficult to be in that position? What’s it like?
I thought it was great interviewing experience. If you’re a journalist at heart, then your goal is to get a story from someone, and your job, whether you’re a local TV news reporter or a web producer or you write for print or you’re a reality TV producer, your job is to get good stories and to conduct great interviews. So I really enjoyed it. I came out of local news where I frequently, 5 days a week, was talking to people who had really traumatic and often really tragic stories. So for me, in terms of my career, I felt like it helped me to refine my interviewing skills.

Would what was said in confessionals dictate what you would focus on for the rest of the show?
Well, let’s take a show like “The Bachelor.” If, in a confessional, the bachelor suggests that he does not like the way that one of the cast members treats other people, that sets a tone for the producers and the rest of the crew, so now all of a sudden you’re looking for that storyline. Or if the bachelor says he really is connecting with one cast member, maybe now the crew begins to pay more attention to her and what she’s doing and the crew is looking for opportunities to capture shots of the bachelor interacting with the woman he’s identified as the person he thinks he has a real connection with. So it helps to tell the story and it also helps the producers to figure out where the cast member may be going.

What was it like to make the transition from TV news to reality TV?
In the news business, for me, I was always on call. There was never a night that I went to bed when I didn’t have my cell phone and my pager next to me, and there were many, many nights that I got a phone call telling me to come in right now, or come in early, or go to the scene of this…I did not get a whole lot of sleep as a television news reporter, especially early in my career. I thought going to reality meant that I would have more of a set schedule and that I would be able to figure out when I would be able to have time to myself.

But what I think a lot of reality producers find is that you have to follow the cast, and the cast lives 24 hours a day. So if the cast is not going to bed at 10 o’clock at night, then you can’t expect to go to bed at 10 o’clock at night. So it’s a lot of fun and it’s exhilarating, but if you’re the kind of person who likes to be home on Sunday morning and read the newspaper, and the cast likes to be up and out, you have to give up part of your life in that sense. Just when you think it’s time to go home, you find something else going on. And that happens across the board on all reality shows. I keep coming back to shows like “The Bachelor,” but we could use a show like “Beauty and the Geek.” That’s a house where everyone’s getting to know each other and people are fighting and they’re getting along and romances are developing. And that’s happening at two in the morning and at noon. So you are always on if you’re a producer.

What was the hardest thing about field producing?
This is true in television news and reality TV: Good field producers are able to anticipate action before it happens, and they have all their ducks in a row. So a good field producer knows before they get to the next place where the cast is going. Or [in] the next scene where there’s some news incident happening, [they] already knows what the lighting might be like, what types of camera shots he or she is going to want to get, who he or she is going to want to follow or interview. So even though it’s all spontaneous – news and reality – the producer has to put a lot of thought into what if, what it, what if? You never arrive and just say, “Let’s see what’s happening.” The minute you get there, you already have a plan of how you’re going to follow the news or the action on the show. What I’ve found, both in news and reality, is that it’s difficult when you’re new, but as you develop more of your skills, it becomes instinct. So you just know that if you’re going to a certain setting late at night, that lighting will be a problem. You just know it and you anticipate it, and so you talk with your crew about how you’re going to work around it.

How long does it take to tape a typical reality show?
It’s hard to say that because you follow people 24 hours a day, but if they don’t do anything interesting, then you don’t have a story. If there’s no conflict, you don’t have a story. So you hope that you’ll get a whole season of shows out of a 10- or 12-week taping period, but that may be really wishful thinking. If you find that your cast isn’t creating a lot of story, then you may be taping for longer. A lot of shows’ casts rotate on and off. “Beauty and the Geek” is a good example, where you sign up for the show knowing you may be on it for three months or you may be on it for two weeks; it depends on how far you go in the show.

Do producers get to know the cast members, or do they tend to stay removed?
In reality TV, there are a few different schools of thought. The traditional, organic school of thought is that the producers should have no relationship with the cast, because when the producers get involved with the cast, that’s part of the cast’s lives, and they begin talking about it. And if the cast is talking about a producer on set or in the house, the producer is now part of the story. So if the cast spends an hour talking about the producer, you’ve just lost an hour of story time, because you can’t present that to the audience. So the most conservative and traditional approach is that producers should really have no relationship with the cast, to the extent that the cast should not know producers’ names, should not know photographers’ names, audio people’s names, and really the producing staff should blend into the background. I think that was started in sort of the early days of reality. And now certain shows are more liberal. If it’s a fairly scripted reality show, there may be more room for the producers to get to know the cast because the producers are scripting it, and so you’re not going to lose an hour’s worth of time because they’re talking about you, because you have them doing something that’s been set up in advance.

What did you gain from this experience that was most beneficial later on in your career?
I think from my brief experience in reality TV, I got an even better understanding that the story has to rule. If facts and details don’t support an overarching story, then you really have to think critically about how much time you spend on those facts and details. The story is for the audience, and if it doesn’t include dramatic, compelling elements, then we need to find either a different story to tell or a different way to tell the story. And that’s a lesson I took with me back into the news business.

I’ll also say that the equipment and the shooting on most reality TV shows is fantastic, and I learned a lot about field shooting and about lighting conditions and audio conditions that I never knew coming out of the news business.

What’s your favorite reality show?
I really like “The Bachelor.” My husband and I are kind of reality geeks, which is funny because my husband is very, very well educated. I wish I could tell you that it’s something really highbrow, but it’s not. I like “The Bachelor”; my husband and I were addicted to “Beauty and the Geek”; and then we like fictional shows that are shot like reality. Like “Entourage” is not reality, but it’s kind of shot like that. We also like Bravo’s reality shows, even though they may be off the air now. I’m embarrassed to say it, but honestly, that’s the truth.

So you must watch reality shows differently than most other people do.
Yeah, my husband is an attorney and he hates when I talk about camera angles or shots or storyline. He just wants to watch. And then sometimes I’ll kind of pick it apart: ‘Oh, they should have followed her because she just got so upset, but they let it go,’ or ‘I bet they missed that because everybody’s talking about this big fight between two cast members but we’re not seeing the pictures which means that they weren’t able to shoot it.” And it kind of drives him nuts.

We were watching a story on CBS the other night; it was the evening network news and the story was out of sync with the audio. And he didn’t notice it, but of course I had to point it out and then it drove both of us crazy.

I bet your husband has learned a lot, though.
Yeah, and I think he’d be very embarrassed if he knew I was admitting to watching these shows, but I think it gives us, and it gives most viewers a sense of escapism that you just don’t get otherwise. And that is why I think reality has made such an impact on our viewing culture.

That’s part of why news makes an impact: people love to see the real deal, and that’s why when you tell people you have exclusive video of some amazing news event, people watch, even if the video or the event is not all that compelling. It’s the same thing with reality; to be able to peer into someone’s life from your own living room is pretty powerful.

Would you do it again if you were offered a chance to?
Well, I’m very happy at Northwestern…I think if I were offered a short-term freelance project, I might consider it, but I don’t think I have any full-time aspirations beyond Northwestern. This is where I want to be.

I would encourage my students to get into it. I’ve had students who were interested in going into reality and I think it’s a really fun career, especially for a young person. It involves typically a lot of travel; it is a lot of intense work; and then when the show wraps, you’re off for three, four, five months at a time. It’s a fun lifestyle, and a lot of the people who work in reality are young, so it’s a fun atmosphere. I think some people might see it as working in reality TV might be somehow an affront to our news profession, because you’re moving from purely fact to semi-fiction. But I think if you’re a professional, you can walk in those worlds and not blend them. And it’s great training, I think, for anyone who works in the news business who tells stories using the real world, life events in the news. It’s great experience.