In spite of canceled sponsorship deals, cries of immorality and calls for boycotts from Islamic groups in several Arab countries, reality TV is still going strong four years after its debut in the region. Hoping to get a bigger piece of the action, pan-Arab broadcasters are making reality shows an increasing part of their programming. LBCI, Future TV, MBC, Dubai TV, Infinity TV and Rotana have all either greenlighted new shows, commissioned new seasons of preexisting ones, or both.

Most of these stations have kept the edginess of their shows in check to cater to the conservative moral codes of the 22 Arab nations that make up their market. The exception is LBCI which, despite being sanctioned, continues its practice of grouping single men and women in a house and filming their interactions 24/7 in shows like Mission Fashion and Star Academy. But beyond the limitations imposed by moral considerations, the presence of editing, staging and possibly coaching can make the shows feel less than real.

"The Scenario"
Producers by and large take a backseat to the participants’ lives unfolding in the environment they have created for them. “We were completely isolated from what was happening outside,” says Bruno Tabbal, a former Star Academy contestant. “We didn’t even have contact with the control room.” But that’s not to say that they don’t work to inconspicuously create the momentum that drives the shows. If there is a blatant intervention the producers are admittedly guilty of, it is carefully selecting the most interesting contestants and crafting the situation they put them in. To avoid a dry show, not only do producers hand-pick the participants with different character profiles and some juicy history, but they also plan the situations contestants are to experience. “We create situations where it is only natural that there’s conflict between the contestants because the competition is so fierce,” explains Infinity TV’s Street Smarts creator-producer Ziad Batal, underlining the valuable prizes down the line, ranging from hundreds of dollars in cash money to recording, modeling or design contracts. “Competition creates friction, which creates animosity, which creates drama, which creates entertainment for us.”

And what better way to create more friction than by putting gossip into the mix. It is no secret that producers stir things further up by using contestants’ comments or opinions against one another. “This is part of the reality game,” says Ihab Hammoud, general manager of In Media Plus, which is producing Beauty Clinic and Season 2 of Project Fashion and is developing two other reality shows, all for Future TV.

Through it all, the already camera-conscious and self-restrained contestants are asked to remain natural while avoiding any behavior or form of speech that might be offensive to not only the community they find themselves in, but also the millions of culturally and ethnically different viewers. “We were asked to be ourselves and to be respectful of each other and of the audience,” recalls Tabbal.

Contestants are required to “keep things clean” to avoid any surprise backlash, but producers are also known to do some cleaning of their own. To improve the quality of the production, they minimally stage scenes. For example, in “graphic” shows such as the plastic surgery-focused Extreme Makeover and Beauty Clinic blood scenes are edited out and shots are carefully planned. In assignment-based shows such as Project Fashion and Street Smarts, producers are known to ask contestants to reenact a crucial utterance or undertaking the cameras might have missed.

“We’re telling a story”
While producers deny that they coach contestants or force them to speak up, they insist that such tricks of enhancement, which are very common in their line of work, are essential to the progress of the stories being told. “Even though it is reality,” says Batal, “at the end of the day, we’re telling a story.” That’s why story editors or story producers are critical in reality shows, especially when it comes to turning tens of hours of footage shot into a compelling one-hour episode. “They follow the contestants and they log their activities throughout the day,” explains Batal, who assigns two story producers for each team of contestants. Adds Hammoud: “They are the ones who pick up the story in every event, incident, challenge or case, simply because when they go back to the editing, they know what [footage] to edit and how to edit it.” More importantly, they are the ones who make sure contestants are captured in their most intimate or personal moments – and producers rely on these reactions and emotions to make the shows more captivating.

Obviously, for every minute that is aired, hours of footage remain unused. According to producers, these choices are made first and foremost to serve the dramatic elements of the story they are telling. And yet, one cannot help but wonder whether any footage was intentionally blocked, especially when the 24-hour channel of shows such as LBCI’s Star Academy, Miss Lebanon, The Farm and Mission Fashion often focuses for several minutes on an empty room or a door, for example. LBCI representatives did not respond to our questions for this story.

Asked about the footage selection process, Batal says: “There’s a lot of censorship. I’d love to show everything that really happened but I cannot do that.”
The result is restricted, planned, and censored. But while American and European viewers complain about too much reality, Arab viewers seem to be happy with less. Why? Because it is not reality that has them hooked. It is the drama in real people’s lives, unscripted drama, which producers say is a better term for the genre. Asked why reality TV is increasingly popular, Future TV’s commissioned producer Hammoud says: “Simply because it has all the components of drama – the cast, the location, the incidents, the complications, and so on – except for the script.”