When you reflect on a show you have recently viewed, it will usually focus on the drama and gossip of fictitious characters you’ve welcomed into your life. But with the writers strike and decreasing budgets in television, reality TV has exploded with a copious amount of shows and plots that emerge from non-actors who have chosen to live in front of a camera.

Either way, reality or fiction, the background music in your favorite scenes is what can keep you on the edge of your seat. The careful placement of these songs is the creativity of the music supervisors. Greg Debonne is one of those artists who has worked on numerous reality TV shows featured on MTV and VH1, as well as Lifetime Television that features one of his most stand out credits: Lisa Williams: Life Among the Dead.  I recently got to sit down with Greg and ask him about his thoughts on Music Supervision in this Reality TV World.

While it is cheaper to use no-names to star in shows that doesn’t require writers, and other jobs a series or sitcom would require, is this boom of reality shows good for the entertainment industry? Are there even enough people with the talent to successfully piece together life with its soundtrack?

The Problem:

Quality control is on the front-line of issues in recent runs of reality TV.

“Many music supervisors in reality television don’t really understand their own function in a broader sense,” says Debonne, “if there is a music supervisor at all.”  According to Debonne, no music supervisor means the job is then placed on someone else in the production who is juggling other responsibilities and also doesn’t have the experience to do the job effectively.

“With many reality productions being made on the cheap…there aren’t always going to be those talented editors,” said Debonne, explaining that high number of shows being produced has opened a surplus of jobs that are usually more rare and coveted. “Many editors in reality TV are primarily picture cutters whose job happens to entail laying in music.”

The Solution?

So what will music supervision look like down the road for reality TV if budgets are too minimal for higher caliber music supervisors, like Greg, and the ever-evolving trends in the industry make it too hard for the multi-tasker to keep up?

“With a limited budget,” explains Debonne, “you want to maximize your customized music cache for the series in such a way that, ideally, each cue covers all the bases of quality. However, when you’re going for quantity of selection in addition to quality, you can find yourself including [not] the most up-to-date production, but stylistically and arrangement-wise, they can fit the application and work well.

“It comes down to understanding the medium,” Debonne points out.

Anyone can pick out songs, but Debonne explains that this is only one fraction of a much larger picture.  “I would say an understanding of music relative to arrangements and orchestration makes a difference … It helps if the music supervisor has a good ear, which means a general working knowledge of harmony, i.e. keys, scales, the intervallic relationship between tones, etc.

“If you’re really serious about creating a beautiful bed, you want to think about the quality of harmonic transitions from cue to cue. If there’s a song or a cue that just fades and the editor needs a definitive ending, you want to be able to hear key-wise what chord the editor needs that can be pulled from another source in order to provide the resolution he or she desires … Having a broad knowledge of harmony is ideal in those instances as well as for the overall creative process.”

*edited by Amelia Consendine