Premeditations of performance in recent live television

Abstract

The article discusses the ways that performances in television are premeditated. Its focus is on practices of scripting performances in current interactive and reality TV. With a basis in empirical material on television production, the article describes concretely some cases of scripting in international television formats. Its focus is particularly on forms of scripting that are seldom recognized as such, thus contributing to a feel of the real, the authentic and the immediate. Three forms of scripting are discussed: ‘cueing’, scripting of social settings and scripting of temporal sequencings. The article shows how current television formats that strive for the unscripted feel in fact could be said to involve radical extensions of scripting beyond conventional practices. In more general theoretical terms, the article suggests looking to the scripting of mediated performances as an alternative approach to the tradition of media production studies.