Dramatic Recreation & Reality TV
Recreation and reality are the two edits where the story gets decided in the cutting room. One restages what happened and has to feel true; the other has hours of what happened and has to find the shape. I have done both at broadcast scale, and both start from the footage.
Restaged, real, or both
Recreation is the only kind of television where the breakup is scripted, the tears are scheduled, and the audience still has to believe it happened on a Tuesday. On 50 Ways the real stories came first, they were restaged, and my job was to cut the acting out of the performances until what was left read as memory. The narrator keeps the clock; the scenes have to live inside it.
Reality is the other way round: nobody scripted the football cannon on What Could Possibly Go Wrong?, and eighty three yards is either the number to beat or the number you got. The cameras caught what they caught. The edit finds the episode in it and decides which take of the cannon is the story.
Both have been through my cutting room on broadcast deadlines. If you have a story that really happened, restaged or caught, this is the room it gets finished in.