A hot topic for New York Giants fans this offseason was the team’s debut on Hard Knocks.
The Giants were the first-ever NFL team to do an offseason version of the show that included behind-the-scenes looks at free agency and the draft.
But there was one question — one theory, perhaps — that persisted: Are any of the Hard Knocks scenes staged?
It’s a fair question when it comes to reality TV. Many shows categorized as “Reality TV” have scripts or at least give their characters direction on what to do and how to act. So it’s reasonable for people to assume, or at least question, that it was happening with Hard Knocks.
The truth is, though, that the Giants didn’t stage a single thing for the series.
Supervising producer Paul Camarata and senior producer Emily Leitner Cameron recently appeared on the Giants Huddle podcast with John Schmeelk to discuss the show.
“I think from the beginning, the Giants were awesome to work with and very open um about their process. As Paul mentioned, they just to give us a heads up on what is on the calendar because we don’t know what we don’t know,” Cameron said. “We’ve covered it from the player side but we’re not sure when they have the meeting, so it was a huge collaborative process.
“And it is with kind of every team you work with, but the Giants were awesome and being like, ‘okay, here’s our heavy meetings, this is kind of when we do the hard draft prep, this is kind of when we do the free agent prep, like this week is going to be 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. days whereas this one you know is lighter.’”
The Giants are a top-notch professional organization. General manager Joe Schoen and head coach Brian Daboll aren’t going to do or say anything that would compromise or jeopardize the way people view the team. Collaboration is important for every NFL team, there are a ton of moving parts and it’s important to make sure everyone is on the same page.
To that end, Cameron says it’s more of an approval process than an editorial one when it comes to content that makes the show.
“On the back end, it is really more of an approval process than any type of kind of editorial control,” Cameron noted. “For the most part, we present the story and put it together how we think is true to what happened, and also the most entertaining. The biggest part of the approval I think in all these shows is just making sure there’s no um competitive disadvantage.”
Yes, no one wants to give away any intellectual property, internal processes, or anything else that might give other teams an insight into the Giants organization that isn’t public information.
The process this team went through to create these episodes was painstaking and took hours upon hours of going through film, interviews, and footage.
There was plenty of content that didn’t make it to air because of its sensitive nature, but it’s pretty safe to say that the Giants didn’t stage anything in the process.
