Drama, Drama, Drama
Drama, Drama, Drama
A conversation with an Emmy-winning wildlife documentarian to determine whether my taste for reality TV is acceptable
I don’t think I like reality shows. I think I like game shows.
That’s how I justified watching The Bachelore(ette) for more than a cheap laugh a couple years back. I had never seen a single second of the show until 2022. The way people could rattle off the names of prior contestants the way I could remember old baseball players, remembering who was on which season, the narratives, the drama, the engagements and breakups — that was like a foreign language to me until it suddenly wasn’t.
I’m not sure what changed in my brain chemistry. I got into The Bachelor during chemo, so maybe the drugs had scrambled my brain just enough to flip whatever switch was necessary to enjoy it. I told some friends who were part of “Bachelor Nation” that I was working on my citizenship, or at least had a visa more robust than a tourist visa, and they told me that the season I joined was almost unwatchable because the Bachelor, Clayton, was such a knuckle-dragger.
Perfect, I thought, I don’t want these to be real people. I want this to be a game. A silly thing to laugh at and riff about, until I realized I wasn’t riffing – at least not entirely. I wasn’t critiquing the show’s quality. I was critiquing the contestants (let’s call them that to keep up the Game Show appearance) and their personal choices.
But it was still a game. I was aware they were playing a game with a prize at the end. I didn’t want to just admit that I was enjoying drama unfold without their being an incentive.
Truthfully, this wasn’t actually my first foray into reality TV. There was this show one time where they got a guy who sort of looked like Prince Harry, and a bunch of American girls, and they didn’t tell them he was Prince Harry, but they didn’t tell him he wasn’t either. It was so good. It got canceled before the finale.
Anyway.
I’m still hit or miss on The Bachelor (although I did just watch The Golden Bachelor and think Leslie deserved better from Gerry at the end). But after one of my most trusted friends recommended a show called Summer House, where the premise is just a bunch of New York “kids” (“kids” in the New York millennial sense that they are well into their 30s but emotionally somewhere else) have a giant house in the Hamptons where they drink, fight, hook up, and eat watermelon every weekend throughout the summer.
I was skeptical about my friend’s recommendation, despite trusting his taste usually. I told him, “I don’t just like reality shows and drama for drama’s sake. I need stakes. I need elimination challenges.”
He assured me there are stakes, real ones, emotional stakes.
The show starts with a cold-open crossover with characters you haven’t met yet hanging out with characters I haven’t met yet from the Vanderpump Cinematic Universe. I’m still pretty out of my depth with reality knowledge here, so this honestly felt like jumping into Marvel at like the second Avengers Movie, asking, ‘Wait so who’s the green guy? How does he know them?' There is no explanation about who anyone is, why they’re there, or why they’re already nearly blackout drunk. That sort of seemed like the point. I wasn’t sold. Minutes later, I knew everyone’s names, backgrounds, and could complete the web diagram explaining how they all know each other. I knew their motives. Their pasts. Their family dynamics. The way they reacted to alcohol. Their favorite late-night snacks (a lot of watermelon).
I had to admit to myself that I don’t just like game shows. I like reality TV in its purest, distilled, dramatic form.
I started thinking more about the reality show dynamic, and the way I thought of it as a guilty pleasure, something I’d hold off on telling a friend or new acquaintance until I decided it was safe to do so without my reputation taking a hit. But, would I do the same thing for a nature documentary? No. In fact, I’d say that discussing a David Attenborough program or the newest season of “Planet Earth” is downright cocktail-party-core in terms of safe conversation choices. There’s no drama, right?
Nature documentaries are all manufactured drama, if you think about it. Right? You think that wolf’s name is really Dakota? No. He has some secret wolf name that we’ll never know, much less be able to pronounce. You think that he or she is really cluing in the producers about his or her motives in a testimonial booth? No. They have to watch what’s happening, and creatively edit it and narrate it to create a plot. A narrative. Drama. That’s what makes us watch. Otherwise, we’d all just watch national park live feeds to see wolves or bears or ducks or geese or any other animal just wander into frame for a second, maybe eat something, maybe shit, and then wander back off, right?
Right? I honestly didn’t know.
Being that nature documentaries (both with animals and drunk people) are scientific, educational media, I decided to test this with the good old scientific method. I had my hypothesis, and to see if my understanding of the nature documentary world was legitimate, I got in touch with Felipe DeAndrade. Felipe is a friend of a friend who also happens to be an Emmy Award-winning wildlife documentarian whose work has been featured on Netflix, Disney, Nat Geo and more. If you watched a big-name nature documentary (or if you watched Tiger King), chances are he had a hand in it. I joked that he’s practically David Attenborough. He said, yeah, but instead of being an old white British dude, he’s a young brown dude getting in the nature documentary game.
I got Felipe on the phone from Costa Rica, where he’s currently filming jaguars for a PBS Nature documentary.
Brendan: So I know almost nothing about what goes into making a nature documentary, but it seems like they have to create a “drama,” in these documentaries, right? What’s the direction for you as someone who’s tasked with creating these stories. You know what I mean, when they project a name and motivations onto the animals?
Felipe DeAndrade: Yeah, well, to start off, animals are the worst fucking actors. They never show up on time, and when they finally do, they want to eat each other, and there’s no union. I don’t know how you’re supposed to work under those conditions. However, they are the greatest subjects. Anything you think you’re going to get from an animal, as long as you’re prepared, as long as you have your research in place, they’re going to reward you with so much better activity, so much better storylines. So it’s less about crafting the drama per se, and more about, like, finding the right way to tell the story. Because what the audience doesn’t realize is like, for example, let’s say reality TV shows as a comparison, you’re squeezing that lime for every last drop. ‘Oh, so-and-so is sleeping with who? They’re fighting with who? This is that backstory,’ as opposed to with animals, you almost can only use 10% of what you have, because I don’t think the audience is ready for what the reality is. It’s a lot more gruesome than people think, things take a lot more time, they don’t follow any sort of code. I’ve been working on a jaguar film the last year, and I can definitely say that a lot of these male jaguars would get canceled for their behavior if there was such a thing. But that’s not how nature works. They’re biological beings and they follow their own code. In contrast to a reality show, everything that you see in wildlife actually happened and wasn’t instigated, you know? As long as you have an ethical crew and natural history story filmmakers on the job. But of course, that’s not limited to bad behavior. There are of course people who manipulate animals that try to bait animals for certain shots. But overall, as an industry, we follow the same agreement that we’re just going to set up the camera, roll, and see what happens. And all of that is true.
Are there any meetings, or do you get notes from a producer to kind of fudge things? If I haven’t spent months in the wild filming the same family of jaguars, I can’t tell them apart. So do you ever just merge ‘storylines’ to use a dumb word?
Let’s call it ‘film magic.’ in certain instances, if you’re trying to tell the story of a certain individual, if you don’t have enough of that specific individual, you might use some shots of another animal that looks like it, or that’s kind of doing a similar thing. But that’s just judged on best intention. So, rather than sticking to a specific animal doing the story that you want it to, you are going to cut in different characters and other individuals to even make it look like it’s the same individual. But that really is a either lack of time, money or knowledge. Because if I had the time, money, and if I do my due justice on research, I’m going to get everything I need from one individual. But unfortunately, wildlife films nearly don’t sell as much as bullshit or reality TV or manipulated stories.
We don’t have as much time as we used to have. You used to have years in the field to make wildlife documentaries and tell stories. But now, you’re lucky to get even three weeks to tell a compelling sequence. So, to answer that question, yes, sometimes things do happen and you do use editing magic to make certain individuals come off as other individuals, but that typically is only because we’re literally limited by resources, time and money that go into wildlife films. And that’s probably because people are more interested in the drama of ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians’ or ‘Jersey Shore’ or something like that.
I think what you just said about intentions resonates the most. Your intention is to educate and advocate, versus the Kardashians or whatever is not … to educate anyone on anything.
‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians’ is about a bunch of middle age and older women running around and trying to lock in their fifth divorcee, right? I can definitely tell you that the cougars in the hills I have out here are a lot more dangerous, a lot more interesting, and a lot more beautiful.
[Editor’s note: Burn.]
What is the process of, like, getting the “characters” built out, since they’re wild animals?
We call them supermodels, right? People like to think of animals as animals, but what we don’t realize is that there are unique cultures within different species, and then within those species, there are unique individuals. So I call certain individuals ‘supermodels,’ because they love to strut their stuff on the runway. It’s like a catwalk, except the catwalk is the jungle for them.
So certain individuals will be a lot more comfortable with human presence, with camera traps, with you waiting in a hide as they’re eating, with the scent or smell that you leave behind when you walk.
[Editor’s note: Not entirely unlike the casting process of a human reality show, I’d imagine.]
And I always tell people, they’re like, ‘Oh, well I was in the jungle and I didn’t see a jaguar,’ well, they saw you. There have been moments where I set up camera traps next to a kill, didn’t see anything, left the site, and then within two minutes of me leaving, a jaguar comes in and starts eating. So they always know where you’re at long before you know where they’re at. So that process for me is absolutely fucking amazing. Getting to know unique individuals and telling their stories, it honestly creates a lot more empathy for animals, because you realize there are no subcategories of rules that jaguars for instance follow. They’re unique individuals within their own right. They have unique temperaments, they have different desires, they have different goals, and how that plays out in front of you depends on how comfortable they are with you, which means you have to know what the hell you’re doing in order to make a jaguar comfortable with you.
[Editor’s note: In reality TV, how it plays out in front of you and how comfortable they get in front of you depends on alcohol available.]
What does it actually look like mapping out those narratives and character arcs, so to speak?
Well, a lot of the time it starts with what’s possible. When you have this grand idea, like, ‘OK, let me make a jaguar documentary.’ To make a jaguar documentary, you need to identify your characters, your behaviors, and then who’s going to allow you to get that. So, like I said, it usually requires working with scientists and specialists, people that have a project in an area, because they’re going to have a family tree or know certain individuals, they’re going to know their temperaments and their timings, so you want to fast-track the process by partnering with scientists. And so that’s the best thing you could do.
[Editor’s note: As far as I know, Bravo did not consult with any scientists for ‘Summer House.’]
A lot of the time when you look at reality shows, they typically leave a shit show wherever they go. You’ve gotta clean up after the hurricane. I remember I was at the University of Florida there was like a set of twins that got in trouble because they ran into ‘Jersey Shore’ in Italy, and the dean of our college wrote out this big long thing, like, ‘For any of the students over in Italy, you can’t party with ‘Jersey Shore,’ otherwise you’re kicked off campus,’ or something crazy like that. They leave a mess to clean up. But if you’re an ethical wildlife filmmaker, you’re partnering with the people on the ground. You’re helping out the locals. Because helping them out helps you out. It’s that access to information that’s critical.
[Editor’s note: To be fair, the ‘Summer House’ people have mentioned cleaning crews who clean up the house when they leave. Also one time they went to a local art fair and got really drunk, but they still supported the local artists. Two more points for ‘Summer House.’]
I always say that whether you get or don’t get a shot is determined long before you’re even out there. And that’s judged on how much research you put into it and the relationships that you built with the people on the ground.
Do you have to make any scientific sacrifices for the sake of entertainment to appeal to the people who value pure entertainment over education? Sort of any sugar to hide the medicine?
That’s always the struggle, right? At the end of the day it’s entertainment first. And so even if a network or if producers are obsessed with animals, they love them, they care about them … I mean, think about it, dude. You’re up against the challenge of attention. Attention is far more valuable than gold, than oil, than anything in today’s day and age. So the challenge with wildlife filmmaking is we’re entertainers first, and we have to entertain. So you have to kind of spice it up. You have to sprinkle a little pixie dust on the scene, on the film, on the stories in order to get people to give a shit. And unfortunately, a lot of times, people take the easy way out and they just ramp up drama or death or anything like that. So as somebody that’s just obsessed with nature, I find all of it amazing, and it doesn’t always have to be high stakes in order for me to care. I think if you tell a story well, you’re going to get people to fall in love with certain individuals, and that’s, for me, the best way to approach wildlife filmmaking. Look at individuals. Look at which characters are doing unique things, and follow them around. Don’t just get lazy and tell a blanket story about a jaguar, but which jaguar are you following around is more important.
So the pixie dust does exist. It’s just that the challenge, in your mind, is to be so good at telling the true story that you don’t have to rely on it.
Exactly. You really have to juggle a lot of balls if you’re a wildlife filmmaker. You’ve gotta be a producer, you’ve gotta be a camera man, you’ve gotta be a researcher, you’ve gotta edit in your head before something happens, ‘OK I have this shot, now let me go and complement it with this shot I have of the individual, OK I didn’t get enough of him so let me go after more male jaguars doing certain things in order to fill that gap.’ You’re always thinking on the fly, and you’re always, always, having to improvise. You have to be at the top of your game to tell wildlife stories. It’s getting harder now more than ever, because of climate change, becuase of habitat loss, because of hunting, because of poaching. We’re in the sixth mass extinction right now. So my job is increasingly hard every single day, because the subjects that I depend on to make a living, there’s less of them almost every single year. I’m doing a jaguar film right now, and one of the biggest preys are the sea turtles of the jaguar in this area, and there are less sea turtles dramatically. It’s one of the highest nesting beaches of sea turtles on the planet, and it’s almost been a 50% decrease in 20 years. At that rate, they might go extinct in our lifetime, and they’ve been around since the dinosaurs. So if we don’t think we’re having an impact on planet Earth, send some people to Costa Rica and I’ll show them otherwise.
So, where does this get me in terms of my own appetite for reality show trash? Well, I think a little bit back to where I started, honestly. It turns out that there is a little bit of “movie magic” in the wildlife documentary industry, but it’s all for the stated objective of making you learn something about the world around you, and often comes at the result of not being prepared.
I’m not sure what I’m learning or where I’m growing from producers sowing the seeds of destruction with rosé and well-placed microphones to catch questionable FaceTime conversations. And after talking to Felipe, I certainly don’t care for the idea of an ‘elimination challenge’ or any other high stakes in a nature documentary.
I think about something else Felipe said during our conversation, though, and an idea comes to me about how these two worlds could come together.
I’ve gotten to work with the Pope, Bill Clinton, Mike Tyson, with the two living Beatles, with athletes, actors, but nothing comes close to the majesty of staring a 300 lb. male jaguar that’s three to five feet away from you looking into the center of your being, and being like, ‘I don’t give a shit who you are, how much money you have, what your experiences are, if you fuck up, I’m going to check you on it.’ There’s nothing that demands my respect more than a wild animal in its natural setting.
We take the Pope, Bill Clinton, Mike Tyson, the two living Beatles, some athletes, some actors, and a 300 lb. male jaguar, and we put them in a house on the Hamptons. And then we just roll the camera. Watermelon will be included.
Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is SPRINTS