06/03/26 · Reality

A villain edit costs about nine hours of footage and one music cue

— The Understudy

Not a rumour. This is an editor with three seasons of a competition format behind them, describing their own job, with their agreement and without their name.

It starts in the logging, not the edit

Everything shot gets described by an assistant into a searchable log. The words that assistant chooses are the first draft of every character on the show. If a contestant is logged as “frustrated” forty times in week one, the villain is already half built and no one has made a decision yet.

Then it is subtraction

Nobody fabricates. What happens is that the nine hours in which somebody is pleasant, tired, funny or bored are not used, and the eleven minutes in which they are short with someone are. Every one of those eleven minutes really happened. So did the nine hours.

The music does the accusing

My source was blunt about this: the cue is where the judgement lives. The same shot of a person walking into a room reads as menace, comedy or heartbreak depending entirely on what is underneath it, and the cue is chosen after the character has been decided rather than before.

The bit that surprised me

The edit team mostly does not enjoy it. There is a version of this story where a room of cynics laughs at a contestant, and that is not what was described. What was described is a schedule — twelve episodes, a fixed delivery date, and a note from above saying the middle of the season is soft and needs a conflict.

Which is worse, I think. A room of cynics can be shamed. A delivery schedule cannot.

The practical upshot, if you watch these shows: the villain in week three is a scheduling decision made in week one by somebody typing adjectives into a database. That is the whole trick, and it does not require anyone to be a bad person.