You can get into the studio audience of just about any tv show (game shows, talk shows, tapings of prime-time tv shows). All you have to do is write and let them know when you will be in town and request tickets or contact the studio and find out the process.


>>>How on earth could anybody look at a game show and expect "reality"???????
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>>>Are the Dutch that un-intuitive that they need everything spelled out precisely????
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>>Why, how. Where on earth... Maybe in Holland? Are you Americans simply more realistic or are you simply narrowminded on this one? That's the question now.
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>I think it's a true cultural difference. TV in Europe is still bound by some institutional habits that somehow never took root here, and American TV is just a business and never really was an institution as such. While European TV stations pretty much all began as state systems, here they all began as businesses. And nowadays they still imitate their predecessors (that's called tradition, or narrowmindedness, whatever).
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>I can see how a Dutch quiz would just sell studio tickets to random passers by, or readers of a magazine or anything, simply because the random audience was always random audience. The most extreme I saw in Europe was that a circus or a theatrical troupe (*) would put one or two guys in the gallery to jump out when needed.
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>People believe in random audience because their audiences have always been, and still are random and aren't really coached. What I saw during that one quiz in 1984 was that there was this girl with headphones and a clipboard who would raise her hands and mimic the applause, as instruction to the audience, but that was all - they weren't really watching her.
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>Now if you have a tradition in which anything you see on TV is ad space plus entertainment first, and anything else if and only if there's some time left and we get to make some more money on it, then you don't get a quiz in which actual knowledge is the last requirement, but drama is topmost and foremost. If it takes cherrypicking the audience and coaching them or simply paying them to do what they need to, then so be it, as long as it's profitable. We aren't an educational institution nor a charity, we are a business, and since there's no biz like showbiz, the show must go on etc.
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>So you expect a random audience. They don't.