I think the majority of "modern" scripted shows have their captions done from an actual script, which accounts for things like a character's name in parentheses beside a line spoken off-camera, or captions that are shifted left or right to indicate which character is speaking. Most of the older scripted shows seem to have had their captions outsourced to the same companies that handle a lot of "customer service" phone numbers. Maybe that's why "Steve" always sounds so distracted.
Competition-type "reality" shows have captions that are pretty much unreadable. I guess, in order to preserve the "secrets" of each episode, the captions are done on the fly, resulting in lots of missed or incorrect dialogue, and the whole thing is often displaying with a significant delay. For some unknown reason, the captions on Mythbusters are as bad as the ones on Survivor. I suppose they don't want the caption typists to spoil the test results and cheat the Vegas betting system.
On the subject of lines that are similar-but-different, the USA series In Plain Sight always had an opening and closing voice-over philosophical monologue by the main character. Apparently, the scripts were changed more often than not between the time they were sent to the captioners and the time they were recorded. The overall sense of the monologues was the same, but the texts were almost always significantly different, multiple sentences-worth. I used to replay each of those segments (once I discovered the difference) so I could listen once and read it once, since they were usually too different to try to process both at the same time.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for a day. Light a man on fire & he's warm for the rest of his life!
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