Whether you love it or hate it, reality TV is a guilty pleasure many of us share. The absurdity, the superficial humor, the glimpse into someone else’s life—it’s hard not to be entertained. Yet, you can’t help but wonder why shows that are supposed to reflect real-life are so intriguing in the first place?
Well, many of them are not at all how they seem to be on our screens. “People who were on reality family shows as kids, how much of it was real and how much was fiction?” one user raised a question on Ask Reddit. Whether it’s manufacturing drama, taking quotes out of context, or manipulating the contestants and asking them to lie, hundreds of responses started flooding in.
We have selected some of the most eye-opening answers from the thread. So continue scrolling, upvote the ones that stood out the most and let us know what you think in the comments below.
#1
I worked with a junk removal company for an episode of hoarders and it was actually 99% REAL. The only thing that they would set up a couple times was if they opened a box and found something interesting off camera they would re-open it on camera and act like they just found it.
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#2
A class mate of mine was on my country’s Next Top Model. Before getting into the show she was asked what kind of hair she would never want to get, so that the producers know about it and not make her have it during the makeover episode. My classmate had long blonde hair which she really loved, so she said she doesn’t want them to cut her hair off and that she also hated strange unnatural colors like blue, pink etc.
Fast forward to the makeover episode. The hairstyling team comes in and finds her hair unfitting for a model, so she needs to get a makeover and guess what? Her makeover obviously consists of a pixie cut and green hair to make her look like a “punk fairy”.
My class mate cried throughout the entire process, so I guess the producers got the drama they wanted out of this.
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#3
My family was on Dr. Phil maybe 15 or so years ago. They definitely dug up as much drama as possible and didn’t bring any of it up until we were onstage. It was actually very traumatic for all of us. They picked us all up in separate SUVs the evening before filming and took us to a very nice, expensive hotel for the night. We weren’t allowed to leave the hotel and were picked up by the SUVs in the morning — I’m assuming so we couldn’t really speak to each other or chicken out. In the end, everything just felt so much worse. Fifteen years later and everything is a million times better, but definitely no thanks to the show.
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#4
I knew someone on Wife Swap. Her husband cheated with the ‘swapped’ wife, leading to a very real divorce. The show ruined her life for a long time.
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#5
I knew a guy pretty well who was on Millionaire Matchmaker. Spoiler: He was not a millionaire. He drove a nice car and owned his own business but lived in an apartment with a roommate. They filmed him in his apartment parking garage pretending all the nice cars were his. He was always about the smoke and mirrors for self-promotion, and it worked. Never seen anyone so unashamed to lie and cheat
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#6
My family and I were on House Hunters. In reality, the entire thing was staged — like, literally every detail. We had already owned the home for six months when our Realtor was contacted by HGTV. Neither of the other two homes was even for sale. Every scene was shot several times. The ‘three-month’ follow-up just showed us in different clothes in our actual home and was shot the same weekend. Bizarre experience. I haven’t been able to look at reality TV the same way since!
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#7
My parents were ‘dinner guests’ in an episode of Nanny 911, and they said literally everything was staged. I don’t remember all of the details, but they said the directors had a ‘code word’ they would say to the kids when they were supposed to start acting all crazy. And then once the scene was done, the kids would be perfectly normal.
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#8
I was on a dog training show when I was 8-ish. The whole thing was basically bogus. The ‘trainer’ came to our house for maybe 30 minutes tops and gave us extremely basic advice. The producers then told us we had to get changed and pretend that he was visiting us three months after he gave us the advice, and how it had made our life better, yada yada yada. It’s so dumb because our puppy was clearly the same age in the ‘before’ and ‘three months after’ shots, and my family aren’t actors, so our reactions were really fake.
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#9
I was on Wife Swap when I was 10 years old. My family had to switch with a farming family and we were supposed to be the ‘city family’ even though my family and I lived in the suburbs. There were plenty of quotes taken out of context as you’d expect. They also incited plenty of drama. I was framed as addicted to video games so they took my xbox and gameboy color for the week. A few days in one of the crew members came in with my gameboy and said “look I found this” and handed it to me. It shouldn’t be surprising that they sent the woman staying in our house into my room to ‘catch me in the act’.
To be honest not much has really changed in my life except getting snapchats of my 10 year old face when my friends catch the reruns. I’m open to any questions if anyone is curious.
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#10
I worked with 2 people who were on Teen Mom (grandmother and granddaughter, obv the granddaughter was the Teen Mom)… they told me that the directors would intentionally set up stuff that would cause drama and then start filming. For example, the directors had them go out to lunch and told the grandmother something she didn’t know yet and filmed their argument for drama, knowing she would get upset that the granddaughter hadn’t told her before (even though she was planning to). Really dumb, unnecessary drama for TV, but apparently the baby got tons of scholarships and support from the show which is why they did it in the first place, so they said it was worth it.
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#11
My aunt’s family was on Nanny 911. They have 10 kids, so it was a great family for the show to manipulate. When we all finally saw the show, it gave me a lot of insight into how heavily manipulated it actually is. They made a situation where my cousin went on a bike ride seem like she was missing and was purposely not coming back to the house, which wasn’t true. They made my uncle seem like an awful dad. He actually ended up getting emails and such with awful threats after the show aired because of how badly they portrayed him.
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#12
My friend was on a nanny show. They apparently took his birds out of the house to film and had them in a trailer, and they froze to death. When they brought them back, they all realized they were not the same birds.
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#13
I knew a girl who was on a tiny-home show with her mom. They had already bought the tiny home, and the show set things up as if they were looking at a bunch of others and picked that one.
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#14
A good friend of mine was on one of the ‘wife swapping’ shows, and it was 100% fake. The producers decided that since his family was part Asian, they should do martial arts together and had them learn some basic Tai Chi stuff for a scene, even though none of them were martial artists at all.
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#15
A wedding that I was a bridesmaid in was aired on Say Yes to the Dress. They filmed our initial reaction to the bride walking out several times. They wanted us to scream and cry. I’ll be honest, the whole thing was incredibly fake and rubbed me the wrong way. Pretty on par for the type of person the bride is, though. I don’t talk to her anymore.
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#16
I was a competing Realtor on Million Dollar Listing for an episode. I am not, nor have I ever been, a Realtor.
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#17
Not me, but I bumped into someone who was on Property Brothers. According to them, the two brothers were only ever on site for the filming. They threw out/hauled away all their furniture, and what it was replaced with was very pretty but hard and uncomfortable, bad quality (like had to be replaced within a year), and impractical for the family. Plus, the family could not get anything back from before the makeover that they wanted.
Image credits: JynxedDraca
#18
My dad was asked to be on an episode of TLC’s My Strange Addiction. He runs kind of a niche (small) business. And they were like, ‘Hey, you’re addicted to this, right?’ And he was like, ‘Um, no.’ It was a honeybee business. They were hoping he was addicted to bee stings.
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#19
I was friends with a guy whose brother was on the show 16 & pregnant. He & his at the time girlfriend were featured. They made him out to be a bad guy but he wasn’t anything like the way he was made out on tv. I had hung out with them years before and during filming.
He had his stupid moments but is an overall good guy. She had talked about being on the show before they did the deed (red flag 1) and when the kids were born she took them and run away on a few occasions. Once claiming he could see the babies and when he flew to see them, she never showed up to pick him up. He was left stranded in a different state.
So when you watch those shows it may not always be as it seems. It can be entertaining but don’t take what you see as fact. They start a lot of drama just for the audience at the cost of the individuals.
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#20
MTV’s Made went to my high school the year after I graduated and made two episodes. One was about a guy I knew really well. His whole storyline was about how he’d never even been on a date before, when he’d actually dated my sister for two years before filming, and she was pretty crushed by it. All the end goals that they made seem like a huge momentous deal were actually super casual school events that anyone could sign up for, and all the special industry guests the celebrity mentor brought in were just townies that happened to own some small business in the area that was semi-related to the goal.
Image credits: Rajareth
#21
I was in an episode of MTV’s True Life. The whole thing was fabricated, and they painted my (now ex-) girlfriend’s family to seem like they didn’t like me at all, when they absolutely loved me. When we weren’t giving them enough drama, they told us we had to amp it up or they’d cut our segment.
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