This show is fake/rigged/whatever...

[Ree]

I dont take anything on TV as purely authentic.. not even the news.

My nephew is a police officer.

Last summer, he posted a link on Facebook to a clip from a news show where his team was swarming a house for an arrest. He said something like, "I look pretty good, don't I?"

I watched the clip and was quite impressed to think my nephew was part of a team that took down a huge ring of those "grandparent" scammers. (They call elderly people claiming to be a grandchild in trouble and scam money.)

In fact, I had told my co-worker, whose own mother had been a victim of the scam, that my nephew had helped in an arrest of one of those rings.

A few weeks later, I was talking to my nephew and asked him about it.

He said his team was filmed making an arrest, but it was some drug or firearms bust, and it was bumped from the news and never actually aired. The producers just used that footage in the news show as a background, since they didn't have footage of the actual arrest they were reporting.

It kind of made me look at news shows a bit differently.

[SongsOfDragons]

I know a lot of Top Gear UK is staged, though it's tricky (to me, at least) to discern what's staged and what they actually experienced. Clarkson's cracked ribs in Vietnam and May's clonk to the head in the Middle East specials really couldn't be staged - they looked painful.

But most notoriously their, um, encounter with the Alabaman petrol station with the slogans written on their cars...considering they had to leg it and the camera crew were attacked, and the next bit of the show was audio only and then via camera phone which showed Hammond using his shirt and a bottle of coke to clean their cars...

We just found it (stupid and) funny, but we told a Nebraskan friend what slogans they wrote on each other's cars (it was a prank, 50 points is you can get the other shot; serious backfire methinks!) and his response was

[Daskinor]

Top Gear is tricky, Im still trying to figure out in their caravaning episode if Richard and James dropping Jeremy's caravan off a cliff was really only an accident.

[the_std]

There is only one part of Top Gear that really stands out as staged to me... FAIR WARNING, THIS IS A SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE SOUTH AMERICA SPECIAL... SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER....











SPOILERS AHEAD...








Okay, so, when Hammond's little Toyota "Donkey", as he calls it, rolls down the hill towards the ocean, totaling it completely... He just so happens to get out of the car and start giving a heartfelt, distracting speech RIGHT before it goes over. I'm pretty sure that the producers knew the car wouldn't survive the descent, so they came up with a way for them to destroy it without hurting Hammond.

Not that I have a problem with it. I'm just pretty sure it was faked.

[SongsOfDragons]

I think both of those car destructions were staged, the Donkey for the reason explained - perhaps for the reason that not only would it have failed to survive the descent attempting to do so would have killed Hammond in the process, and the poor bugger's been through enough in that regard. But what the do stage I feel they stage quite well, blending it into the real stuff and mostly for the lulz. XD

I think the worst offender has to have been the Albanian Mafiya short, the ending just got silly. Still was amusing though.