It’s deeply satisfying to watch artsy cinema with complicated ideas and bizarre narratives. You feel like you’re developing your taste as a critic and getting to know yourself as an individual much better. But this requires a lot of focus and patience. Once in a while, you’re in the mood for the entertainment equivalent of fast food—reality TV! There’s absolutely no judgment here because we enjoy an occasional TV binge, too.

However, when you take a look at how the metaphorical sausage is made in the kitchen, it can completely change your perspective. Today, we’re looking at some industry insiders’ stories about what really happens behind the scenes on reality TV shows. Grab some popcorn and scroll down for their experiences.

#1

I’ve got an old friend who writes for a reality TV show. That’s right…scripts the spontaneous stuff for actors to say.

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#2

I have a friend who worked as an editor for reality shows a few years back. The thing I remember him telling me is that because they shoot so much footage, he can make any storyline the producers want with it.

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#3

I worked with someone who had been on one and he said they tell you what to say and how to answer. They also mix and match the answers. They basically film you completing a set of sentences in a controlled way and then thread the narrative they’re going for. It’s utter nonsense end to end.

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As per Statista, just under a third (31%) of Americans who watch TV as of September 2024 are 18 to 29 years old. Meanwhile, 34% of viewers are 30 to 49 years of age, and 28% of viewers are aged 50 to 64.

The nation’s appetite for reality TV appears to be very big. For example, Statista reports that the number of shoot days spent on TV reality productions in the Greater Los Angeles area gradually increased from 2017 to 2023, with a peak in Q3 of 2021.

In the United States, 36% of everyone who watches TV or uses streaming services said they would watch reality shows. However, it’s not just the U.S. that enjoys this genre of entertainment. South Africa (60%), India (46%), and Australia (42%) also love the genre. On the flip side, reality TV is far less popular in Mexico (10%), Spain (16%), and France (20%). South Korea ranks between France and the U.S., with 26% of viewers tuning in to reality shows.

#4

My cousins were on Supernanny. They were 8 and 11 maybe. They don’t remember much but they weren’t that bad. Things were heavily edited and they were coached on how to be naughty.

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#5

A friend of mine growing up was on the bachelor. She made it to the homes town visit episode.

One of the earlier episodes was supposed to have a hot tub scene but the tub was broken. Rather than scrap the scene, they sent someone to Wal mart to buy kettles.

Those shows are beyond fake. There’s nothing real about them including the people.

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#6

The retakes. Endless retakes. It’s tiresome. You think filming has wrapped up but then have to do pickups. The stuff someone ballsed up on and there can be many

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Of course, reality TV shows are fake. The real question is which specific areas are fake, and to what extent. Editing techniques, scripted events, convoluted dramas, and over-the-top acting can make for some very entertaining scenarios. Everything is played up for the sake of the audience. And it can be a ton of fun to watch. You know it’s all exaggerated, as do the producers, which makes for some interesting dynamics, twists, and self-aware comments.

On the flip side, well, if reality TV is all you ever watch, you’re going to rot your brain. Consuming too much of anything (TikTok reels, Instagram memes, delicious donuts) is bad for you. But kicking back once in a while with a half-dozen silly episodes about people doing questionable things while being watched by the entire world? Do it guilt-free. Reality TV can make you feel much better about your own life. And whether we admit it openly or not, it’s so much fun to criticize people for making mistakes that we totally wouldn’t ever make because we’re oh-so-perfect.

(Hindsight is 20/20, and anyone can make silly mistakes when under pressure. Besides, the amount of dumb things the average person says every day is ludicrous. We could all look like heroes or villains with selective editing)

#7

Not sure if this counts but my sister was on *The Queen Latifah Show* and she said during commercial breaks, producers and whatnot would coach them on what to do and say to spice up the show.

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#8

They filmed an episode of The Bachelorette in my town. It took them 20 hours of production time to make the 40 minute episode. And yeah, fake. They would film the batchelorette by herself, then later on film the guys, then edit it together like they were at the same place at the same time.

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#9

A friend of my family worked uncredited with Bear Grylls for man vs wild. Because Grylls is at the end of the day an actor (although pretty knowledgeable about what he’s talking about) he’s required to be insured by his studio. In comes family friend.

Before an episode, family friend (a former british army paratrooper) attends a meeting with Grylls, and his team, who tell him where Grylls wants to go, and what he wants to do while there (EG: The congo, build a raft, survive via fishing, and set up a tree shelter). Family friend is then jetted off to the place in question with his own team, and the group of them d**k around in the wilderness, seeing how viable Grylls’s plan is.

After a few weeks they jet back, and inform the company about the hazards, validity, and expected cost. This allows the production company to correctly determine any insurance, gear, safety issues, and plan out Grylls’s survival trip.

Family friend has some really good stories about being in survival situations, and is always really blase about things like “oh yeah we picked out a cave to camp in, and a bear tried to eat us lol’

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Have you ever been on a reality TV show or worked on one? Do you have any secrets about what happens behind the scenes that you’d like to share?

What are some guilty pleasure shows that you like tuning into? What are the most real and fake shows you’ve seen aired? Tell us all about it in the comments.

#10

Not strictly a reality show but my dad once rented out his workshop for a DIY style program for one of the networks in my country. Just to set the stage; the show was hosted by a female interior decorator and a male handyman and in a normal episode the female presenter would visit some kind of family that had kids but couldn’t afford to decorate the children’s room nicely. She’d then draw up a nice design for the room and do simple of the simple tasks like painting the walls or hang up some shelves while the male presenter would build the furniture for the room (this was all shot in my dad’s workshop).

Some of the things me and my dad learned talking to the production staff:

1: The female presenter had absolutely no interior decorating or DIY qualifications prior to being on the show. The “designs” she made were done by behind the scenes people.
2: The female and male presenters hated each other guts and never interacted with each other except the final presentation of the finished project. They used clever editing to make it look like they were on the same set at the same time but once you looked for it, you started to notice that they were never actually on screen together.
3: The male presenter was the only one doing work on camera but he was aided by three or four people never shown on screen.
4: That being said, his actual skills were completely legit and he could actually do everything he claimed to do.

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#11

I acted as a lawyer for a reality TV show many years ago. They fired me when I started advising them that they needed informed consent from participants to appear. They said that was impossible, and in any event, half the participants are mentally unwell anyway. I said that just makes me even more certain you need informed consent, and in that case, make sure you have a fully qualified mental health professional sign off of the capability of the prospective participant to give informed consent.

I have not worked for any reality TV shows since.

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#12

Classic not be, but…A friend of mine has a sister who made it to the X-Factor semifinal 10+ years ago. From around their second or third audition, she signed a contract that specifically said how far she would make it before she got sent home. Everything was planned from her first televised act (there is a pre-audition or two that isn’t shown on TV where they select the contestants). The bands and singers that made it to the final also knew beforehand, but my friend’s sister told us that she wasn’t sure if they were told exactly who was going to win. Also, if you don’t have a tragic nor specifically interesting story to tell when you’re interviewed, they’ll make up a sob-story themselves. Of course it’s been so many years since she was on the show that a lot of things can have changed, but this is how it was back then.

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#13

I work in reality and docuseries. Can answer specific questions if you have them. The turnaround time in renovation shows means that the quality is atrocious. Never let your house be used in a renovation/rehab show. You’ll end up paying almost full price for c**p quality. I would say the only exemption is something like Grand Designs where they document the building process but don’t interfere with it at all.

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#14

Not technically a reality show but I had a former coworker on House Hunters. It may not be known but they’ve already purchased the house, then they are shown other places, sometimes even their friend’s house. He said it was boring because he had to stand in the same room for hours and keep making random comments about it. He was worried at the end that he would be shown a really nice place and people would shame him for not picking that one since it’s framed that all of the properties they are looking at are currently available.

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#15

I tried out for project runway when I was 22, my senior year of college. It was a LONG process, and the fact that you needed to show 3 nice completed looks to the judges was a lot of money on my 22 year old Joann fabrics salary. I went to nyc and got in line at 5 am. My college friends were my models. And it was a lot of waiting. I eventually got mic’ed up to see Tim Gunn and Daniel Vosivic and they were very nice but on a flash said I was to young and not developed enough as a designer. That one part was so fast and my friends thought I would have gotten really upset after but I was happy I even made it to the interview room!

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#16

A former coworker of mine was on a home renovation show. Months later, they had a significant house fire due to mistakes in the rushed workmanship. The show had to pay for some of the repairs. My coworker ended up moving, and I have no idea the details (what went wrong, how much the show paid) because my former worker is contractually required not to say anything.

Another former coworker of mine is on a lot of those cooking competition shows. She loves them.

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#17

I was offered top 100 in an early season of a singing show in Australia. I rejected it because the contract they wanted me to sign had a non-compete clause that stated that even if they didn’t use me, I wouldn’t have been able to release music independently for 2 years and not have been able to release music with a competing label for 5 years. In retaliation they used my footage but heavily edited my voice and used footage of the judges saying “no” instead of “yes”. I also wasn’t allowed to discuss it publicly for a number of years and am never allowed to use that show’s name in conjunction with my career.

I also had a family friend who won a cooking show here in Australia as well. The final was filmed about a month before it aired, after filming the winning contestant, they re-set everything up and then filmed the other person winning. This was so if it got leaked that the intended winner had indeed won, they would switch the footage and air the loser winning instead (giving them the prizes instead). Luckily for me one of their family members told me in secret and I won a couple hundred betting on them to win whilst they were weren’t considered a favourite.

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#18

Probably already pretty well known, but on House Hunters, the people looking to buy a house have already bought and signed a contract on their chosen house. The two other homes they are shown are “shill” properties that might or might not even be for sale. If the house is shown fully furnished, it’s a shill. I have friends who were on the show years ago and still laugh about their great acting jobs pretending to be interested in houses that weren’t even on the market.

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#19

Was helping make an art piece for some renovating show, the time frame given to complete it in the show was entirely wrong. In the show they said it took them like a week to redo the entire place but in reality we finished that wall painting over a week and they hadn’t even started renovating the place until two months later. At best it took them three months to do the thing, far from the one week they presented it as on the show.

Was also on a family quiz show aimed at kids. The rules were a bit complicated but essentially behind the camera and audience they did have people helping the kids get the right answer if they were stuck. It didn’t seem as much an issue though as it just made the game more fun for the kids.

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#20

I had a friend who was going to go on one of those tv talent shows but wanted me to look at the contract first because i knew quite a bit about the music industry. the contract was horrible. like i’ve seen some s****y contracts in my time but never any this bad. basically you had to scrub your online history, they own any song ideas/covers you ever posted online, any original songs you come up with now belongs to the record company, the contract you’re signed to a 6 album deal if you come in top 5 and if you try to get out the contract then you’ll have to pay them back any money they put into you along with any money they claim your music “lost” which was really just you not meeting projections. you’ll also have little control over your artistic voice but will still be blamed if they dont think the songs are good enough, even if you were working with the song writers they force on you.

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#21

I live where a show is filmed and have had friends on it twice. The entire premise of each episode was completely fake. Not a single bit of what was happening was real at all. And they told one of my friends–who is an expert on the item he was talking about–what to say because the real description he gave of the item wasn’t dramatic enough for the show. So, the description that made it to tv is not even accurate–it’s fantasy made up by the producers.

Another friend was on a different reality tv show. In it, he gets caught doing something he isn’t supposed to do and is thrown out by security. It’s portrayed in the show as if this is all actually happening. Nope. He was hired as an actor to come in and break the rules to get kicked out. Everyone was in on it.

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#22

Robert Irvine is as big of a douche as you would expect him to be.

Also — we had a producer who we used for certain interviews when we wanted someone to cry. That’s right…we specifically tried to make people cry. It’s good TV.

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#23

I worked on The Truman Show back in the 90s and it was ridiculous. You had to keep smiling all the time and pretending everything was perfect. It was so fake. I just wanted to yell “Knickers!”

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#24

A student of mine got into one of those singing/talent shows. They dropped out because the TV company wanted them to sign over the rights to the songs they wrote. They weren’t covers but originals.

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#25

I’m a construction super and was building a store in downtown LA as an episode of Bar Rescue was being produced across the street. The following happened:
1. The guy in the store next to me told me that bar being “rescued” had been closed down for 8 year;

2. The “overnight” restoration of the bar took 8 days and up close was total c**p;

3. The outside sign that the Acme Sign Company stayed up “all night” to make was there for 4 days under a tarp;

4. The bar was also a micro-brewery, and had big vats of beer in the bar. However, the vats had no beer in them so they hid beer kegs behind them and ran clear plastic tubes to the taps;

5. They had no permits for the electrical and plumbing work that they did and the fire alarm and fire sprinkler systems were never inspected;

6. My dumpster appears in a shot with John Toffer standing in front of it talking. Episode 30.

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#26

Even “unscripted” reality TV like Big Brother or Survivor are heavily manipulated to show what the producers want for a story instead of what is actually happening. [Charlie Brooker explains it in this 5 minute video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBwepkVurCI) very well where he sets up a fake big brother style show to demonstrate how easy it is to manipulate the viewer.

Other egregious offenders are talent shows where you see audience shots. There is zero guarantee any of those audience reaction shots are relevant to what is on stage that moment – or even that they were filmed the same day.

Don’t believe ANYTHING you see on TV is how it actually happened unless it’s a live shot that does not cut away at all.

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#27

One of my job titles was “shadow fabricator” for a costume construction competition show. I’m not actually allowed to tell you what a “shadow fabricator” does, but I’m pretty sure you can guess.

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#28

This is like third hand, but it makes too much sense to not be true.

There is (or was) a show on HGTV about people shopping for houses in tropical places. I was working on a project where we were designing a house (basically a vacation mansion) in the Bahamas. The construction manager for the house basically had to live down there the whole time it was being built. So, he has to find a house for him and his family to live in during that time.

Well, he and his wife had applied to be on this show and were actually selected. But, when they taped the show, they were already moved in and everything. So, what they did is find 2 other properties that were for lease and then they basically took all their personal possessions out of their house and “hid” them. So, when they were looking for a house, one of them was the house they were already living in and that house would be the one they ended up picking at the end of the show. Then, they get the stuff back in the house and shoot the “well, we’ve been here for a month and we love it” portion of the show.

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#29

Editor here.

Arguments frequently get reshot from different angles / to enhance coverage for key scenes.

Sometimes people will have to have the same arguments multiple times and we’ll pick the best sections to make it as dramatic as possible.

Also often a good percentage of close-up reaction shots are from something completely different happening at a different time of day. You’d be surprised how many reaction shots that are ‘perfect’ are often just shots of people reacting to something mundane or concentrating on something mid-take.

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#30

Two friends of mine and the girlfriend of one decided to do a “she’s cheating on me with my best friend” bit to get on the _Jerry Springer Show_ back around 2000 or so.

The producers like their submission and did a telephone interview with the couple, but not the best friend. They asked questions like “If you find out it’s true, would you kick his a*s on stage?” and leading questions like “Do you think she might have got pregnant and had an abortion? No? Are you _suuuuuure_ she didn’t get pregnant and have an abortion?”

The best friend was in on it, but acted surprised when he got invited to go on the show.

Backstage on the day of filming, they met Jerry (whom they all agreed was very friendly and funny) and got coached/riled up by the producers. About 15 minutes before filming, the two guys were planning out how they’d fight, when one of the producers rushed in and started grilling them. “Did you guys make this up? Do you [the best friend] know why you’re here? Did you lie about what happened? X

They admitted to making it up, and promised to sell it to the audience. Both guys bragged about being martial artists (true) and having a lot of stage fighting experience (false), and the girlfriend even offered to jump in swinging. But the producers weren’t having it.

They kicked my friends out and filmed some other love triangle. The show had paid for them to fly out with round trip tickets, so they got home, but later got a bill for their hotel rooms (which were apparently contingent on their segment being used).

Disclaimer: this is the story as I was told. I was out of state training for the Army at the time, meaning I didn’t witness any of it. However several other friends corroborated their account, so I tend to believe it.

Image credits: MjolnirPants

#31

I have a friend who was on one of it. She said she had to say things that were written for her, do things she had to do. Off the camera she could talk to someone from their team or just chill in social media. Mostly boring. She couldn’t tell anyone (close friends and family maybe) about show before it’s ready, then it was out with all of the advertisements and etc. It made her very popular! That’s what she wanted actually

Edit: They also weren’t there 24/7 like it was in the show, so they lived in a hotel near the set, some of them were getting there by car every day

#32

Realty TV show runner here.

1. On more toxic shows producers will stir up trouble.
2. Cooking shows, an army of culinary food stylists actually making the food and “step-outs” of the best versions for camera.
3. “Docu-follow” the most real version of any of the reality categories still interrupts cinema verite to get someone walking in a door again or an OTF, “on-the-fly” interview.
4. It’s very hard to capture reality with a crew of 5-6 or more following the action and getting appearance and location releases.
5. Most of us working in reality tv love cinema and my guess is the majority of us wanted to be filmmakers but the amount of work in unscripted is more abundant.
6. Oh yes and I forgot “organic ad integrations”

#33

My house was used for an episode of Party Down South. A producer contacted me becuz she saw we had a rental unit. They paid me $250 and sent the actor, her mom and grandmom and a camerawoman who was also also the producer. They did a “shot” together to celebrate sending her off which was diet coke I gave them to put in shot glasses so they faked it and made nasty faces drinking it. The filmed her taking clothes out of the drawer and packing and then leaving the house. Then the left. The actor left her clothes bu mistake and never picked them up. These shows are all fake. Everyone’s gotta know by now, eh?

#34

Friend of mine was in a dance competition show in a different country to where he lived. He was immensely popular and there was a real buzz for him, it was clear his success was going to exceed the prize of the show. Producers called him in at that point and asked him to sign a contract that said they received 50% of all of his income, including from his established dance school and career in his native country. When he declined to sign the contract, the following week there was a “surprise double eviction”

#35

Not firsthand knowledge, just reality-show-adjacent: a couple that lived in our neighborhood had a reality series. They were in the middle of a move from Texas to Florida when Hurricane Harvey hit and did an episode about checking on their home and business in Texas for damage. A lot of the driving around footage was very much not their own neighborhood, which was unscathed in Harvey, no matter what the editing implied. It was weird to watch.

#36

I heard from something Jon Ronson did where the people who cast the reality television / Jeremy Kyle stuff is to ask the applicants what psych meds they were on. The more meds they were on the more likely they would be to be chosen

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