Wanna' read along? Here’s a machine-generated transcript you can use. Yes...expect a few mistakes, especially with funky industry terms, interesting names and tagging whoever's talking. If something sounds weird, trust your ears. But...sometimes that really is what we said!
Update (September 2026): The former members-only pitch site and login described below have been retired. For current pitch instructions and access status, see How to Pitch Shows to Us.
Announcer: Welcome to Producing Unscripted with Joke and Biagio.
Angry Man: Is this some kind of joke.
Confused Woman: Biagio-WHO???
Biagio: This episode. It’s episode 51 and we’re talking style guy. What is a reality TV style guide? When do you need one? What goes in your style guide? Why? Different networks will have different style guide needs and hits. That why you think we’ve finally updated the list of TV shows we’re looking for right now? And that time a network exec asked me about my emotional velocity. Music courtesy Dave Pelman Music Dave Pelman com. Hey everybody. She’s joke, he’s Biagio, we’re married. We make unscripted film and television and want to help you do the same.
Joke: Hopefully by teaming up with us.
Biagio: Okay, so first off everybody who listens I know a lot of you listen regularly and I got some emails and people are like, hey, you know, two episodes ago when you couldn’t breathe and you were choking, you said you were going to put up the list of shows that you’re looking for right now. And you were going to update that list, and I didn’t. Well, well, first of all, my apologies. Turns out bronchitis with I think he said reactive asthma. I don’t know, whatever it is that I ended up having about like three different inhalers right now. I just didn’t get it updated. However, the page is now updated. So for those of you who would like to know exactly what kinds of shows we are looking for right now, in this list comes, you know, based out of conversations that we have every day with executives based on out of those conversations shows, we’d actually be interested in making things that we think we would be helpful in getting on the air. This list is stuff that we think we can really be useful with. I mean, that’s what it comes down to it. Like, you know, don’t you probably don’t want to pitch us your version of jeopardy because I’ve never made a TV show like jeopardy! You know? However, the list of shows we have here are shows that we feel we we can get on the air, basically is what it comes down to and stuff that our production company is known for. So if you’d like to see what that list is. Those of you who are already on the mailing list know that in the bottom of those emails when you signed up, there are instructions on how to get access to the members only portal where we list this. If you’re not already on the mailing list, all you need to do is sign up at Producing Unscripted. There are sign ups everywhere. You can’t possibly miss it. You really you really can’t. Just sign up for the newsletter and follow the directions. And there is a page on the free members only producing unscripted site that includes a list of the shows we’re looking for right now, updated as of yesterday. So to all of you that I broke my promise to, I apologize, but it is up.
Traveling Salesman: My dad always told me, you can’t sell ice to Eskimos or peanuts to people with peanut allergies. Well.
Biagio: All right, so moving on to the topic of today’s podcast. We’re going to talk about something.
Joke: That we’ve been dealing with for the last couple of weeks now.
Biagio: Yeah, we’re you know, listen, we’re working on two as of yet unannounced TV series and a TV pilot. And one of the things that happens once you get a little further along with the project and you’re working directly with your network executives, you need to create what’s called a style guide, a style guide joke. What is a style guide joke?
Joke: Well, basically, it’s a lot of pages of a lot of pictures with some key descriptions in there, as well as some psychology.
Biagio: A lot of psychology.
Joke: A lot of psychology. So really what a style guide is, it is to give a network executive not only an idea of the look that you’re going for in terms of how a certain how your story is shot, how it is framed, how you would do interviews if your show requires interviews, how you would do B role if it requires certain bureau, how you would, you know, color it, grade it, frame it, all of those things. But instead of it just being like, oh, what about this? And what about this? They actually do want to see that you thought this through. So that’s where the writing and the psychology comes into play. So that, you know, it fits with the tone of the story, fits with the tone of the show that you’re going for, that it also fits the demographic that the network wants to bring to the show. So you know that you’re not going to pitch, you know, a bright and poppy network, you know, a show that’s really just all gritty and handheld camera, you know, because that wouldn’t fit. So it really is about how you how you see the show and how you plan on executing the various visual aspects of that show.
Biagio: Now you’re going to make different style guides for every different kind of show you do. And let me use as an example one of the one of the most fun and challenging style guides we ever made, which was for a TV show we did called caged for MTV. And I knew this was going to be an interesting one. When we were meeting with the executive, who’s one of my favorite people in the world. But his question to me was, you know, I really need you to explain to me how the cinematography is going to support the emotional velocity of the story. Now, I wasn’t nearly smart enough to answer the question in that moment, but but what I what we say, okay, you’re going to need to inject a little psychology into these write ups. We mean both the psychology of the show you’re making and the psychology of the executive you’re pitching to. So I’m going to let you in on a little secret. This is a little behind the scenes tip of what I did, because I knew I knew that our executive was really smart, and I knew he was going to get turned on by us. Really thinking about the show almost in the same way, like a film critic would think about a movie. And so we knew there were certain themes we wanted to explore in the show, both visually and story wise. And literally what I did was I googled a bunch of TV shows that had worked with similar themes that we were working on, and I looked for the most flowery language I could find, and I use that to inspire my own flowery language, which basically said exactly what I wanted to say about how the show was going to be made and how it was going to look. I just did it a lot more flowery because I knew that was what that executive wanted. And so, along with the flowery descriptions of Caged, one of the things that we touched on visually that was really important was the idea that, you know, the kids, a lot of the kids in the show, they felt trapped in the small town, and we wanted that reflected in the cinematography for the show. So we pulled a lot of photos, both from the web and that we filmed ourselves and we took for inspiration. That sort of had a slightly claustrophobic feeling to them, you know, were we shooting through some foreground framing that felt almost symbolically like a cage, you know? Was there a tension in the frame, both top and bottom, that maybe made the kids feel a little bit more, you know, a little bit more tight in the frame, something that just added a little bit more of a claustrophobic feel to some scenes. And in other scenes where we do with the exact opposite and just open those scenes way up visually to sort of express the, the freedom and the ideals these kids were chasing as they tried to sort of break out of the things that were holding them down, whether it was the town itself, their own bad habits, or just, you know, their own lack of self-confidence. So that all sounds really high falutin. And really what that document came down to was just some pretty pictures and some nice language that said, this is what MTV’s caged is going to look like. We also had a highlight that it would have a very documentary feel it was going to be shot. Handheld verité. This was not a jib and Steadicam kind of show. This was very documentary esque, and those were the kinds of things we had to hit in that particular style guide. It was about 20 pages long, mostly big pictures and large fonts, so you probably could have written the whole thing in 4 or 5 pages. But we’ve learned over the years that execs like big pretty pictures, large fonts, and not a lot of words. And so that’s how we sort of structured that style guide. What’s another style guide we can talk about? Joke for my show, they might know.
Unidentified Voice: Did we did we do on the magic show? I feel like we did.
Biagio: Yeah. So we did a style guide for Don’t Trust Andrew Main. And you know what was really actually the most fun part of that style guide was the network had challenged us to figure out a way to somehow include the idea that you were getting to see how an illusion got done, ever. Though, we were never going to give away how the actual magic tricks were done because that would defeat the purpose of the show. So what we came up with was the idea of using trick photography as sort of little connective tissue within the show itself. And a big part of that style guide was sort of selling the ideas of things like forced perspective, you know, shooting things backward and reversing them, using really interested reflections where you would think you were in one place and in the camera would move and you would reveal that you were in another. So really what that style guide came about was like, how are we going to support the idea of magic on this show with cinematography that feels magical in and of itself?
Joke: Yeah, and that’s all part of the style guide. Like I said, it’s interviews. It’s your basic shooting. You know, the magic show in particular. We needed to figure out about how we were going to do transitions and and all of that stuff. I know another part of the style guide was on how we would get into a magic trick, especially when it’s kind of the man on the street stuff and how, you know, we really had the cameras kind of pulled back as, as Andrew approach someone so it would feel more voyeuristic. And then as he made the contact, the cameras would come closer and obviously reveal themselves to the person he was doing a trick with.
Biagio: One final style guide I’ll talk about, because I think it provides an interesting sort of counter perspective for these two is for our current show, Ghosts Inside My Child. Now, one of the things that’s important about this show, it’s a it’s about I mean, the basic idea is pretty far out, right? Like we were literally approached by an award winning journalist who said, I’ve discovered this pocket of people who claim their kids are reincarnated and they don’t know what to do. And I mean, that’s amazing, but it’s also really out there, right? It’s one of these things where you’re like, wait a minute, I’m supposed to believe that these kids are reincarnated, that they remember dying in a past life? And so what was important for us to get across in our style guide is that all of the interviews and all of the modern day footage would be heavily grounded in reality. It wasn’t going to be hyper stylized. It wasn’t going to feel very paranormal. It had to feel very real. We wanted them telling their stories from their own space. We wanted the interviews to take place in their home, in their living room and their bedroom. We didn’t want like some cheesy backdrop, like, you know, like a black backdrop or something with paranormal lights flashing all over it. It was important that we understood these stories were coming from a real place. And if the interview setups support that.
Joke: Yeah. And I mean, you bring up a good point because part of the style guide, while not the majority of it, is also audio and one of the key things, and it goes inside my child style guide is that we were very clear we would not be using VoiceOver, that there was not going to be a narrator commenting or adding or hyping up the stories that that these stories of these parents, these families in crisis, speaking specifically about their children would only be their words, would only be them telling the story. And so that’s an important style choice, because lots of these shows use voiceover. And we specifically wrote in there that we would not. I think that, you know, with certain shows and I know we talked about this with cage, the idea of, you know, sound as was very important, both in the cage that we wanted to make sure that we got the natural sound of these guys, you know, feeling the punches and hitting the mat and all of that stuff, and at the same time really making Louisiana a character. And the sounds that Louisiana brought to it was the heat or the crickets or the whatever it was to the crackling of the barbecues on the street, you know, certain things that were very important to make Louisiana feel like Louisiana. Part of that was visual. Part of it was audio. So, so, so part of the style guide is not just how you plan on shooting it, but also the kind of audio choices you plan on making. And sometimes we go as far as editing choices in terms of transitions and, and what kind of different, you know, choices with graphics or grading and things we want to do in the edit.
Biagio: Yeah. So I mean, to wrap up the style guide, it’s an important concept to understand for once you get a little bit further along with the show. There is no set format for a style guide. Your style guide will be different for every single show, but I think when you sit down to put a style guide together, you have to ask you a number one. What am I trying to accomplish? And what you’re always trying to accomplish is making sure that the network understands the kind of show you want to make, and that they’re in agreement with that kind of show. Because if they read your style guide and they’re not, you need to make those changes. So number one is making sure you communicate the show as you see it. Number two is making sure that you communicate in such a way that your executive will will appreciate the style act. Okay. Because the very flowery language I wrote for our show for MTV caged, there are certain executives that would never write that way for it, all right. And that just because it wouldn’t be their thing, they would just say, just just, you know, just give me the straight dope. I just I don’t care about these all these extra words. So you kind of need to know your executive and feel them out and understand, you know, what it is that they’re going to spark to you in a style guide. So are you writing really flowery stuff that sounds extra smart? Are you sort of just giving it straight? You know, just the facts, nothing but the facts. And then within, once you’ve made those choices, I think the important thing to get across is how your show is going to look, how your show is going to feel and how your show is going to sound. And I think that if you basically cover those three things in your style guide in a manner that your executive is going to spark to and in a way that meaningfully gets across the kind of show you want to make, it’s going to put you way ahead of the game with the network, because believe me, there’s nothing worse than running off and making a show that you think the network wants and you think you’re on the same page with them, only to find out in post that they absolutely hate all of the decisions you’ve made. We personally have never, ever had that problem, and that’s because we put so much emphasis on our style guide very early on in the process. I will say, when we were coming up over the years, not every production company did that that we worked for, and we did see cases where the network would come back and say, this show looks nothing like what I thought it was going to look like. And you need to go back to the beginning and start at square one. So the style guide most the most important thing we’re Style Guide really does is help you avoid that pitfall. Because that really sucks.
Joke: Yeah. And that goes back to whichever episode we did about notes. It’s just number one is really start communicating. And the style guide is an important part of that process.
Biagio: Yeah. So there you go. So there’s something I bet a lot of you probably didn’t know about. I hope that it’s helpful for you. I do think that your style guide is something you can think about for yourself, even when you vary the very first time you go out to shoot something for whatever pitch tape you’re making, you know, making some decisions about what does the show look like? What is it feel like? What is the tone? How does it sound? You know, what movies, what I look to for inspiration. What what current reality shows do I look to for inspiration? Because a show that looks and feels like Duck Dynasty, you know, is completely different than the show that looks and feels like the first 48, you know. Kardashians or the Kardashians or goes inside my child versus scream Queens versus don’t trust Andrew Main. You know, shows of ours, it look completely different from each other. But a.
Joke: Good style can also elevate an idea. So we think it’s always important to think about it even in the pitching process. You know, you don’t necessarily have to completely develop it because it will depend obviously, on whichever network you sell to. But if you have an idea of what you’d want to do with it, that’ll help and inspire you as you put your materials together.
Biagio: Yeah. So there you go. That wraps it up for this week. For those of you who are maybe new to the podcast or wondering why we’re doing this podcast, you know me and joke. We own a reality TV production company.
Joke: I’m sorry, are you going through the whole story.
Unidentified Voice: Right now?
Biagio: Not the whole story. Just for new people who are like, who are these people?
Joke: Don’t we have an about page or something?
Biagio: We have? Yeah. So okay, so I won’t go through the whole story, just go to producing unscripted about, you know, hear all about the hundreds of hours of TV me and joke have made. If you would like to learn how to pitch your own concepts to us, there’s a couple things you should do. Sign up for our newsletter and follow the directions, and be sure to read our free guide 100% free How to Pitch a Reality Show, which you can find on the very front page of Producing Unscripted. Com. So that’s it everybody. Thanks again for tuning in. We’ll be back in two weeks with another episode. And you know, until next time, as you work on your show, start thinking about that style early on. It’ll really guide you in the process.
Joke: See you guys in Tui.
Unidentified Voice: Producing Unscripted with Joke and Biagio.
