I absolutely loved this article from The Hollywood Reporter -- it's about Discovery Channel's popular reality program Deadliest Catch. You know the show -- it's the one that tries to make deep-sea crab-catching look fun and cool and exciting (for me, it would be none of the above). It is an engaging show, though -- I've watched a couple episodes, and I will admit, it was hard to turn away from the events on those fishing boats. The people who make these reality shows have genuine talent when it comes to turning ordinary jobs that otherwise would be boring and monotonous if they were experienced in actual life into magical fantasy worlds that become career goals for the viewer taking them in on the small screen. But, the thrust of the Reporter article is that not everything you see on Catch is necessarily representative of actual events all the time.

Apparently, the producers of the show did some editing on the premiere that spliced together two separate events to make them seem like they were happening at the same moment in time. I won't go into the whole thing, but there was a flooding situation on a boat that occurred during one month, and there were giant waves causing chaos on the sea during an entirely different month. The two sequences were combined, and presto -- you think the waves happening during month B are causing the flooding that took place during month A. An outline is offered up as proof of the creative editing, as the document seems to direct editors to make the combination.

The Reporter article states that this might be considered controversial since Catch is supposed to be a documentary and not a reality show. Well, as I've said, I've seen Catch, and personally, I can tell you it isn't a documentary. Nope; not a chance. This is a reality show, and as such, the viewer will always want to assume that not everything is as it seems.

I have to wonder what would be so awful about people realizing that so-called reality programming is, in fact, not much different than World Wrestling Entertainment's (NYSE: WWE) product, that it is oftentimes staged and/or scripted. Would ratings go up, or would they stagnate? Would there be a backlash? Maybe there would be no backlash; maybe media networks like Disney's (NYSE: DIS) ABC and News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) Fox would benefit. Even though everyone should know that most reality shows aren't real in the true sense of the term, I wonder if viewers would watch reality shows even more than they do now if producers fessed up to the amount of staging that does go on. Consider: viewers would feel like producers are no longer taking them for idiots, and producers would then feel free to really juice up the creativity. Going back to wrestling for a moment, I'd have to assume that anyone reading this who happens to watch WWE has never felt slighted by the fact that Triple H doesn't really hate Vince McMahon and vice versa -- the only thing that would annoy, I suppose, is a boring storyline.

So, perhaps the powers that be at companies like Disney and Discovery Holding (NASDAQ: DISCA) -- which owns a large interest in the entity that directly operates Discovery Channel -- should just put it out there: reality shows aren't that real. Let the producers go wild so that we'll get even better plots...and higher ratings. Hey, I know that Gene Simmons Family Jewels isn't about the real life of Gene Simmons and his clan -- but I still watch.

Disclosure: I own shares of Disney; positions can change at any time.