>> I can't tell if they're scripted or they are genuinely taking advantage of the people they are interviewing.
A friend of mine used to live in a small town near another small town where one of the episodes of Ghost Hunters was filmed. That particular episode focused on an "old historic hotel built in the 1800's" and the frontier-era ghosts haunting it. It was a very compelling episode but I found out after watching it that the hotel had been built only a few years prior to the episode being filmed.
My personal opinion is that most of those shows are entirely scripted.
> My personal opinion is that most of those shows are entirely scripted.
Practically all of them are. It is way more expensive to shoot compelling reality TV that's at all resembles what the term implies. Uncertainty about what you'll get, and capturing a real narrative taking way, way more time, means your productions costs are many times what they would be for something that's mostly scripted from scratch, or built out of (scripted) re-creations of things that already happened.
A friend of mine used to live in a small town near another small town where one of the episodes of Ghost Hunters was filmed. That particular episode focused on an "old historic hotel built in the 1800's" and the frontier-era ghosts haunting it. It was a very compelling episode but I found out after watching it that the hotel had been built only a few years prior to the episode being filmed.
My personal opinion is that most of those shows are entirely scripted.