My family and our home were on that show "This Old House" in the late '90s. Norm Abrahms was the host, and they picked our house because of my dad's collection of Shaker furniture. The idea was that we gave him a tour of the house (while being filmed) and then he demonstrated to the camera how to make furniture like our.

Everything was 100% genuine. Norm and the crew were kind and super respectful to all of us. No second takes. When he explained to the camera how to build replicas of the Shaker furniture, it became apparent that he was a master woodworker. Before he left we all took photos together and he signed some stuff. It was a really special day.

That was right when reality TV was starting to pick up steam. MTV's The Real World was big at the time. I don't think Survivor had come out yet. That was the show that opened the floodgates.

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sofacushionfort

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Norm Abrahms is my second favorite Jewish carpenter

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I was a production assistant (read: lackey) on a reality TV pilot about "Soccer Moms." The premise is they find a housewife, give her whatever her dream job is for a week, and then at the end of the week ask if she wants to keep the job. During the week they create family drama, set it up as working vs. loving your husband and kids, and put the mom in ridiculous situations at her new "job." It's allllllllll manufactured, the same way as all these shows. The executive producer will be set up in the backyard feeding questions to the director and cameramen. They set up fake conflicts constantly. She "chose" her family, and hopefully they all got therapy afterward.

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Andy Acceber

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What a crappy premise for a show. It basically sounds like fear-mongering women into thinking they're bad moms to make them believe they're incapable of holding down their dream jobs. Who approved this nonsense?

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I was on the Long Island medium in 2013. Theresa came to my house to do a private reading and it was voted on as one of the best readings of the season.

Problem issss....she’s full of s**t. The production crew were awesome folks and not to mention I was borderline blacked out drunk at 3 in the afternoon for the reading but you wouldn’t be able to tell watching it.

The episode was called “Diving right in” and she addressed my fathers passing in 2010. She pulled on my heartstrings and I cried my eyes out.

I’m 18 months sober now

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Hayhaypaula

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Good for you!

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When I was in Korea they wanted to film me (some random white guy) eating their traditional foods. They filmed my reaction but I really liked the food a lot. They had me re-take it and pretend it was too spicy and gross so they could show that foreigners can’t handle it.

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BluEyedSeoulite

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I believe it. They either want the foreigners to LOVE everything Korean and to basically *be* Korean or the other too weak for Korean stuff.

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I was on Wife Swap when I was 13 or so, and they made up more than half of it. They make it so there's a nice family and a bad family. They made us the bad family of 10 living in a house bus. Anything they can't make look bad, they don't put on the show. They act nice and all but make you look like a fool on TV. I remember my mum coming back home crying and stressed out.

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Rita Gilbert

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Theres a lot of wife swap on this list

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I was on Wife Swap when I was 11 or 12. The show gets hours of footage for two weeks and then puts it into a one-hour episode. So you can imagine they can try to make the narrative whatever they want. They really try to emphasize what makes your family different and often exaggerate or encourage the participants to exaggerate. With only one or two cameras, you often enter the same 'scene' multiple times, so we actually met the swapped wife for the 'first' time three times to get different angles.

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Dilly Millandry

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Wow, some places do allow you to get married VERY young! (This is a joke)

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One of my neighbors was on a house disaster renovation show, and it was a mixed bag. I think the crew hired by the show actually did very competent structural renovations and repairs, but the 'designer' had super-niche tastes, so the family ended up repainting everything and throwing out all the decor to get the house ready for resale after having to act super happy for the cameras.

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Naesil

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All of these house makeover shows have some "designer" who tries way too hard and just throws in every "hip" thing and makes the house look horrible, like every room and wall is different color, horrible decals which will go out of fashion before the show airs etc.

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An acquaintance of mine was filming for Don't tell the Bride. The show pulled out when they refused to cooperate. The husband to be had all these ideas his wife would love but the production crew said it had to be a 50 Shades of Grey theme wedding. It was popular at the time and she worked in the sexual wellbeing industry. He said no so they found another couple to cooperate with their insane ideas.

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Andy Acceber

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Pretty much anyone who works in the sexual wellness industry hates 50 Shades of Gray. There are enough red flags in that series to stage a carnival.

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Not a "family" show per se, but my high school was asked to be on a reality TV show called If You Really Knew Me, which was about high school cliques. I think we were also asked to be on a show about our journalism club, too. Our school turned down all the gigs because the teachers thought it would paint us all in a bad light (they were prob right lol). Us kids were originally pretty bummed, but after we watched some of the MTV reality shows about other high schoolers, we realized they were right and it would probably document us doing embarrassing cr*p with artificial drama.

I also knew a "geek" who was on Beauty and the Geek. Everyone was told to play up their parts, so the geeks had to develop geekier mannerisms and hobbies, and the beauties were forced to say stupid things. The romances were real, but that's just what happens when you bring together a group of young people together lol, and the producers played it up to continue the drama.

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Droopsnoot

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How is this legal

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My uncle was on one of those million-dollar reality shows in LA. He absolutely was not a millionaire, just had a slight claim to fame making furniture out of airplane parts for rich people in the area. He already had a home he was quite happy with but was invited by a producer friend to basically tour three different staged houses, 'pick' one, then have a barbecue at said house with his friends at the end.

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GoddessOdd

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I really think all shows calling themselves "reality" shows should be held to some standard. There should be big disclaimers all thru the program, something like this: "This is not real. None of this is real. This show is 100% staged by the producers, and any similarity to this show and reality is purely coincidental."

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My friend was on an episode of cheaters. The entire thing was completely staged. She met her “boyfriend” the day they started shooting.

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I went to a taping of Lets Make a Deal. A woman chose a curtain and won a car. Awesome right? Nope. The producers stopped the filming and said hey that’s not supposed to be behind that curtain. They did a reshoot after about 30 minutes of changing the curtain. They made her choose curtain 2 for this shoot (she chose 3 with the car) and behind that was the bad prize. Also, Wayne Brady is a massive massive jerk. I used to love him.

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Oopsydaisy

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I would have thought there was a law suit in that.

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About 15+ years ago, My husband and I had our townhome done on Clean Sweep. We get along REALLY well and they were constantly trying to find something that would cause tension, or drama between us. We’re just not like that, though. We’re just a couple of aging punks that like kitschy stuff. Our place was still relatively new, we had just bought it 6 months before and it was pretty decent, just had one catch-all room of junk and boxes that we hadn’t yet sorted. But it was their first season and they needed guests. We were just quirky enough, I guess.

The redesign was ok, and we still like the living room mural. But to this day I’m still pissed about the s***ty paint job on our staircase handrail. When we bought our home, it was a beat up mess from previous owners and we really worked hard to improve it. My husband and I spent a whole day scraping off old paint on the rail, sanding it, priming it, and then painting it a fresh white. The TV show had painted it a horrid bright green and it wasn’t even dry yet when they did the reveal. It had paint bumps and blisters and wrinkles on it. They also used gloss white paint on my brand new coffee table, TV stand, and bookcase - which were already finished in the colour that I liked. We eventually had to get rid of them and buy new ones.

But wait! There’s more! On the day we had to sort things out to keep, trash, or donate, it was about 100 degrees F outside. We had to sort on the back parking of our townhouse, which is blacktop. My husband gets migraines from heat sensitivity and brightness. They refused to let him wear sunglasses. Guess what happens? Heat sickness, migraine, then vomiting. We had to stop filming and get him to our local hotel room so he could recover in a dark, air conditioned room.

Now we have 2 kids and the place is still decent but totally different and lots of toys etc everywhere. Months later, we get a tax notice that we owe $1700 from the “gift” of the remodel. Yay. Older and wiser now, will never do something like that again.

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So, not technically a big well known reality show.. but there used to be a “home makeover” show that had 5 different designers that would get their own episode on a rotational basis, and my mom was one of them.

For one of her episodes, she actually did a makeover of our own house as she was selling it. She made my brother and I stay with her for the week of filming (parents are divorced), which I thought was weird, but whatever. She roped my teen brother into making some art for the show, so he got his little bit of fame, and I just hid in my room the whole week.

I remember I thought I had caught my mom alone, and we had a conversation where I expressed how uncomfortable I felt with people in our home, and why did I have to stay that week at her house, as there was no “arrangement” ever on which house my brother and I stayed at. Anyways, some camera guy snuck up on us and filmed the whole thing (without me knowing), and then asked me if I could repeat myself, but be more “mad” at my mom. I felt so violated.

Also the fact there were four mid-20 year olds hanging out right outside my bedroom the whole week (I was 16/17), and that was just so f**king creepy now that I think about it years later.

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BabaBizzle

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Your mom put you in an uncomfortable situation and potentially dangerous situation. She’s a b****.

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Not me but a childhood friend. He lived in a nice big house down the street, and then a reality show was filmed there. The teenage son got drunk, caused a traffic accident and got into a fight. The show followed the family as they dealt with the aftermath. Except this entire family was actors, filming in my friends house.

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Some kid in a neighboring school district was on 'My Super Sweet Sixteen'. He was one of the few boys on the show (I think it was season 1) so he got ridiculed and bullied pretty bad. His parents moved him down to Florida for the rest of high school.

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Ace Girl

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Misogyny and toxic masculinity hurts everyone.

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My friend's parents were on World's Strictest Parents. They came to my house on the 4th of July, and when they showed our house on TV, it was a huge mansion rather than our actual house. The camera crew also told the visiting 'bad kids' to steal alcohol from our house.

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My friend was on an episode of Supernanny. He told me that everything was already planned out and staged. At the end, he got to meet his NBA idol Dwyane Wade and came into school the next day with Wade-branded clothes and shoes. I remember them showing him beating Wade in a one-on-one basketball game. If that isn’t scripted, then I don’t know what is.

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LeeBreezy

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i mean, thats pretty cool. id go on a staged nanny show if i get to meet d wade

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I was on the dating show “Elimidate”. It was setup to the point that the producers did their best to create drama by pushing questions like: “XYZ was really acting like an ass that last round. Tell us about what an ass XYZ is.” I felt the final show edits were pretty accurate to the real life events though.

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MTV’s “Made” came to our high school to turn two girls into each other. One was portrayed as this artsy starlet who did musicals and show choir, and the other was portrayed as this sporty, fit, athletic girl.

The reality was both girls were into sports and the performing arts.

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Not me, but I know Matt James (Bachelor) from my old job. He's a pretty cool and laid back guy. Definitely not a mama's boy like the show made him out to be. I feel bad about his experience on that show.

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Janus Preez

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I wonder which non disclosure agreements all of these people need to sign. The idea of being on TV is nice, the reality not so much

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A friend of mine was on a show called Love Island. Once he left I didn't ask for many details but he said that basically every minute of the show is scripted and there was a single scene they had to shoot about 6 times.

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I knew a girl whose sister was on Bad Girls Club Season 9; her name is Falen.

She said that being on the show was emotionally & physically exhausting; they would intentionally not feed them and give them a ton of alcohol instead so the girls were hangry & incredibly drunk. They got almost no privacy & the producers would intentionally stir up drama (telling girls lies about other girls, ect.) and then just let the fuse go off.

It was interesting to watch the season too because Falen and I are both the children of East African immigrants (which is how I met her sister) and our immigrant community in the US is very religious, judgemental and tightknit. Honestly it was cool for me as a teenager to know someone who was also East African but comfortable with drinking & cursing on TV. Falen was definitely very messy on the show, but it's a form of freedom and I appreciated that.

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BabaBizzle

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So odd how these religious people feel they can bring their ideals to free thinking countries and then get pissed when their kids begin to assimilate to the freedoms of their new country.

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I have a friend who was on one of those home makeover shows in the mid 2000s with her mom. She said it was awful. They created all this drama between her and her mom for a side narrative and actually trashed their house for the “before” shots to make the makeover look more extreme.

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My uncle and his family were on an episode of Wife Swap. We were invited over for a family holiday dinner. It was a very weird experience; we signed our souls away in paperwork before being cued to enter their house (I was in about one second of the episode, walking in their doorway). Uncle hated the experience because they coerced him toward certain behavior and made my sweet little cousin out to be a demanding, spoiled brat, which she was very much not.

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Ooh I finally have a response! My boyfriend and I filmed the pilot for a show (it’s in production currently and is supposed to be picked up by _____) The show features us and another couple going on cheap dates with a fixed budget. The couple with the best cheap date wins an expensive date package

There were a lot of weird moments. When engaging with the host, she kept messing up her lines and would sometimes say something several times before getting it right, and we had to react like she didn’t spend 3 minutes stuttering. None of the conversations with her were natural, because she would pause to reword her lines a lot while we sat there with a frozen smile on.

We were prompted what to say frequently, and did a lot of re-takes. It took all day to film “two hours.”

Everything had to be set up. EVERYTHING. We were mic’d at each location change, business owners had to agree to us popping up.

Sometimes we’d say something and the director would ask us to repeat it. The cameras are hard to ignore, especially when at any second the director would say “Talk about ____ but in full statements.”

It was fun though, I really liked talking to the sound guy about his experiences. He was telling some industry horror stories. Also me and my boyfriend lost, so we went to a bar and laughed about it.

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Kate Johnson

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But you haven't seen the show yet, so I'm wondering exactly how much goodwill you'll have after it airs...

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I've said this before, but my friends family was on wife swap. My friends mom was the 'villain.' The other mom was presented as a total saint. What they didn't show is the woman was suppose to muck the horse barn, feed the chickens and something else farm related. She refused & had a terrible crying fit. They have an incredibly nice barn & set up. At the end the woman budgeted how the money was to be spent. On tv the amount didn't add up. IRL she gave money for them to hire a 'horse mucker'

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Not during childhood, but a few years ago I was buying my first house and leaving my family farm in West Virginia. Thought it would be neat to try to get on House Hunters. Filled out the application and got an email and phone call the next week.

Of course you are already in the process of buying the home when you film, so they know you are approved for the loan and etc. Which I knew this, still seemed fun.

So anyways the lady called from California, she seemed nice enough but all business. Asked who would tour the house with me and I said my brother (I was unmarried and he would do well on TV). She asked if my brother liked the house I was buying, I said yes. She said that didn't work, she wanted him to try to talk me out of it since it was from the 1870s and he would try to get me to buy something more modern.

They also wanted me to look at other houses and offered to pay only $500 I think. I decided it wasn't worth it, making fake drama and having my whole small town thinking I'm dishonest, for 15 minutes of fame.

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Friend of mine was on “Don’t tell the bride” the one where the Husband gets like 12 grand and has to plan every aspect of a wedding without the brides involvement. Typically the weddings end up being some selfish BS all about the husband which the wife sometimes ends up enjoying. My buddy said when they went in to the initial planning sessions with the shows crew him and his missus were separated and grilled about their first, second, third all the down to like ninth or tenth choice of weddings. Any ideas which matched the other persons were instantly thrown out, as was his top three ideas. Basically they forced him to come up with about ten different plans for a wedding and pick the one they believed she’d like the least, just for drama. They only went on the show because they were super short on money and hoped that they’d get a decent wedding on the shows dime. They ended up having another wedding they funded themselves a few years later because the one they were forced into on the show was so s***ty.

I was also working as a shift manager for Burger King when they filmed an episode of “back to the floor” a show about high up managers coming back to work a couple days as a basic staff member in their company. The dude involved was super chill, but the production staff wouldn’t give us any real time to work with him, so it f**ked us over on that shift because we basically had a “dead” station in the kitchen. They also filmed a montage of him running a closing shift and they did a “will get the restaurant cleaned up and closed down in time” theme. They ended the montage with us all turning the lights off and leaving with a cry if “success” from the manager, then the film crew f**ked off and we had to go back into the restaurant and finish the job...

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About a thousand years ago, Fox had a reality series called American Gladiator, which was a little bit similar to those ninja warrior obstacle course shows.

Anyway, being a lowly PR intern, I was sent to the convention center in (major Midwestern city) because American Gladiator was holding auditions and they needed bodies to help.

So there were basically a bunch of different fitness tests and people who scored above a certain cut point got sent long even further in the process.

I saw some pretty well trained athletes coming through there. There was this one guy though who had DRESSED for the part but was not remotely athletic. But he had this Sammy Hagar surfer fitness look about him. He runs his set for me—a fellow intern and I were basically timing 50-yard dashes.

I spot one of the producers watching the lines of people waiting to run their dash and they spotted this Sammy Hagar lookalike. The producer pulls me aside and says, “Hey, you see that guy who looks a little h it like Sammy Hagar? Whatever he scores, send him through.”

He ran with a guy who was super in shape and missed the cut score by like one second. Sammy Hagar was a good 3-4 seconds behind and everyone on lone lost their minds when they saw me reject the actual athlete and send along the guy who would look good on TV.

I have never trusted a reality show since then. That was about 1990/91. They’ve always been BS.

And to that athlete dude: sorry man but you’d have looked stupid; it wasn’t about athleticism at all.

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A friend of a friend's Mustang was in South Beach Tow.

The business (Tremont Towing I think) is a legitimate towing business.

One of the director's came up to him and told him that his car was being towed for some infraction (it was the friend's fault entirely so the towing business was in the right). But before the car would be towed, he was told that if he agreed to be in a scene, they'll have everything set up for his "grand entrance" and if he acted all surprised / make a spat and go crazy, they'll just give him back the car at the pound.

He didn't agree to it because he didn't want his face shown on TV, and the director was cool with it. The friend did allow the car to be in the scene though. Well on the flip of a switch, suddenly 2 actors came out of nowhere (a couple) and they filmed the scene. You had these 2 people freaking out about a Mustang being towed that wasn't really theirs...

He thought the whole thing was hilarious.

Thankfully even though he didn't agree to be in the scene, apparently he was so chill with the entire thing and with the crew that they just gave him his car back.

He calls it a win.

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I was kind of on one. For one episode. I used to live with a couple of friends of mine who owned their own remodeling business. They were contacted by HGTV to be on a show about flipping houses.

Basically, the hosts of the show knew absolutely nothing. The hosts would have my friends show them what tools to use and how to use them for a shot, and then the cameras would roll and the hosts would act like they were doing all of the work. It was all fake, though the work was really done by my friends and the house was really sold. Last I heard, the family still lives there.

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Not as a kid, but a few years ago I was on an episode of True Life, they spent about 5 weeks with me in total filming stuff, they hired a therapist for the episode because my real therapist couldn’t be on it because of her office rules, then after filming was over for awhile I dyed my hair and then they contacted me wanting me to do some post interview shots and because my hair was a different color they bought a bunch of those temporary hair color sprays and basically spray painted my hair and brought me to a producer’s house and had me stand in different areas and talk about what had gone on and my feelings for what I had “just done”. I had no memory of what we had filmed, nor any memory of what I’d been feeling when we had filmed, so they had to remind me of everything and basically say “would you say this?” “I guess” “no literally, say it.”

Also I had several conversations with producers about how they needed drama and needed me to have something to overcome so they ended up fabricating some drama between me and my mom. It was really dumb and I guess now that episode is on Paramount+ according to my Instagram inbox lol.

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I was on Kiesha's Perfect Dress, a spin off of Say Yes to the Dress. My cousin was looking for her wedding dress. They would have her come out multiple times in the same dress to get different takes of our reactions. Would tell us to say mean things of we didnt like the dress.

I was one of the people who they did the one on one interview with and they pretty much made me seem obsessed with my cousins breasts looking large in the dress because I cracked one joke in the interview about her being flat chested.

She did end up buying her wedding dress from the show however and it was very beautiful.

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Kate Johnson

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Buying the dress? They should have given it to her after all that nonsense!

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I was on wifeswap when I was 11 or 12. The show gets hours of footage for 2 weeks and then puts in into a 1 hour episode. So you can imagine they can try to make the narrative whatever they want. They really try to emphasize what makes your family different and often exaggerate or encourage the participants to exaggerate. Due to only 1 or 2 cameras you often enter the same “scene” multiple times, so we actually met the swapped wife for the “first” time 3 times to get different angles.

They also often push the mom to make new rules based on the narrative they want to tell, and ask you questions that could fit that narrative. My family for example was portrayed as uneducated hicks that didn’t take work seriously. It always left a bad taste in my mouth and I think it hurt a lot of my self confidence in high school. They also hired people to take care of the kids off set and the guy we had was borderline abusive and threatened to throw us in the snow banks when we weren’t quiet and often got too physical. There was little to no oversight on this.

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Back in the late 90s my friend attended a taping of Jerry Springer. They pulled him out of the line, offered him some cash and put him in some phony scenario on he show.

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Extreme Makeover: Home Edition came to our neighborhood once. The family lived a few streets away. This woman was always NASTY. Miserable to be around, petty about people parking in front of her house, yelling at us anytime a Wiffle ball or Frisbee ended up in her yard, shouting at neighbors about being too loud while having a party. She was a Karen ahead of her time! When she got picked for the show, the neighborhood was floored. The show made her out to be a saint among heathens, which we all expected, but knowing the real her, it was just so damn frustrating for all of us.

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GirlFriday

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When this show came to Indianapolis, I worked as the liaison between the show and the City government. The "experts" on the show, showed up about 1 hour per day to be filmed doing stuff. The local construction company did all of the work while the experts took credit for it. In the end, the owner of the home ended up with several problems, including his children being kicked out of school (that was the dad's fault because he had lied about his address to get his kids into a better school system and when the show aired, the school knew what he did), the neighbors were pissed because of the increased traffic from people driving down the street to see the new house. The new house did not fit in with the neighborhood (the built a mansion in between two abandoned properties) and even though the community raised money to pay off the mortgage, the family lost he home because the property taxes went sky high because of the increased square footage and detached garage and clubhouse.

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Worked on a show like this. Saw all the raw footage. It was hundreds of hours of footage turned into a 43 minute show, so of course by omission you are not getting the full story. But I would say the first 85% of the show was more or less "real." The kids would act up, the parents were overwhelmed, etc. When the parents were sat down and the star explained what she was seeing, the emotions and feedback were real. What was not real in certain weeks was the wrap up. In each episode, the problems were resolved, but that was not often the case.

Also, the solution was always the same, and the problem was ALWAYS the parent. It was eye opening. I'm convinced now, if a kid acts up, it's the parent's fault. The parent might be a nice person, sincerely mean well, but don't possess the skills and discipline it takes to be a good parent. The solution was always 1) be consistent, that means individually and as parents... 2) give the child structure, let them know what they will be doing that day, being a good parent is not about giving your child complete freedom to do whatever they want, it bores and frustrates them... 3) give them little rewards for doing the right thing, even if it's just a sticker or drawing a little happy face on the calendar or something, don't take their good behavior for granted... 4) Listen to them! Don't act like they don't know what REAL problems are, what REAL suffering is. If they are feeling sad and frustrated, acknowledge that it is real and let them talk. Don't interrupt them to offer a pat solution or to tell them they're being ridiculous. Most of the time, the kids just need to vent.

So all that stuff was real. A lot of times the parents thought they were victims, unlucky to simply have been given kids who weren't perfect robots, and you could tell the problems would reappear after the taping stopped. But on the show, it always ended with everybody in the family coming around. Happy ever after.

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ℙ𝕦𝕣𝕣_𝕞𝕒𝕚𝕕

ℙ𝕦𝕣𝕣_𝕞𝕒𝕚𝕕

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2 years ago

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Good parenting advice at least.

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Friends were on a home remodeling show with their kids that didn’t take off. If was half game show. They had to compete in Price is Right kind of games to win things for the house. Only they filmed that part after the remodeling work was done. The show predetermined what they’d win.

They were supposed to help with the remodel as well. They only did what was filmed. The kids were disappointed because they wanted to demo everything. All the work was done by contractors. The hosts/decorator just showed up for filming and barely talked to them. The cute chatting and get to know you part was mostly scripted. The family is very arty and colorful but they were wearing polos and khakis on the show.

Over all they loved the experience. The contractors didn’t have to do major structural work so there was nothing crazy to go wrong. They did fake some problem for drama, but I don’t remember what.

The take away from them was the whole show was fake but they enjoyed the experience. The crew and contractors were nice and they became friends. They had their house professionally updated and decorated in a week. They sold a year later and it absolutely helped their resale value.

They were picked because they met the producer walking through their neighborhood scouting locations close to the production office in LA.

I don’t think it ever aired. The video I saw looked like it was still being edited.

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My aunt was all set up for an episode of Super Nanny for my two cousins (both girls, one teenager and the other almost-teen at the time, the younger being the main force behind most of the craziness). But, the older one found out and told the younger, and sat her down for a few episodes to show her what was coming. Everything suddenly got so peaceful, two pleasant from pleasant home.

A few days later, the producers called my aunt to schedule the filming. And she told them she'd still love to do it, but they had complained turned their behavior around, so they might not get a show out of it. So, it was canceled, but that bit of news never made it to the younger one, so she continued operating under the impending Super Nanny threat for a long time....like too long. For another few years, it was like threatening a child with calling Santa Claus for bad behavior, and it was equally effective. Sweet girl, but not the brightest.

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Oopsydaisy

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2 years ago

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Love it!

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I know someone who was on breaking amish as a side character. It had scripted storylines.

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Back in 2005 my parents re-did my sister’s room to look like a horse’s stable - we lived on a few acres and had two horses and she was ‘horse girl’. My mom sent photos to a Home & Crafts magazine and ended up getting into a special edition about cool kids’ rooms.

A few weeks later we got a call from ABC wanting us to be on Wife Swap. We weren’t super serious about being on the show, but they offered us $50k so we at least heard them out.

They interviewed my mom and dad over the phone, who got the sense that they had taken us for a super redneck family and we’re hoping to swap us with a city family or something along those lines. In reality we’re a pretty normal group. My dad is a pharmacist, my mom drove a Lexus at the time and would probably have loved a few weeks of city life.

They interviewed my sister as well - I never talked to them. I was sick when my family did the initial photoshoot for the magazine and the WifeSwap folks weren’t to interested in me.

All in all we could tell they were just looking for extreme people from different walks of life to churn as much drama as possible. They didn’t find that with my mom and we didn’t make the ‘cut’. Pretty glad we didn’t end up going through with it!

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A friend of mine was on the biggest loser. He said a lot of the drama isn't so much staged but the events get painted in a certain way. For example during one on one interviews they got him to describe something in a way that blamed someone else. They also would film a "weekly" weigh in, and then do another one 2 days later and the coaches would be angry they hadn't lost much weight. Then they would have another one 10 days later and talk about how hard they had been working

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Dodo

Dodo

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2 years ago

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I feel like this one should warrant a disclaimer on the show that it's fake.

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When my sister was 13 she was invited onto a TV show in Hong Kong that followed kids/teens living a day in the life of a particular occupation. She was asked to work in a bakery.

On the day of the shoot she was up and ready super early, but the crew arrived 2 hours late. They later edited this to look like my sister had slept in.

At the bakery, they specifically asked her to swap out sugar for salt, and knock over a stand of baked bread, all for the camera. In both instances she questioned why they wanted her to do this and they said “It’s just for the camera.”

She was portrayed like a really incapable teenager, all for the drama, and from that day (I was 11) I knew never to believe what happens on reality shows.

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Our house was on a makeover show just before we moved in(previous owners were foster parents and had been nominated by a former foster kid who didn’t know they were moving). They did the kitchen/diner and made it open plan with a lounge area, it was really lovely. Except it’s completely ruined those types of programs for me. We were left with loads of work to do. Basically they only do the parts that are going to be shown in the after footage so the floor wasn’t fitted properly, some sides of the cupboards hadn’t been painted etc.

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I was on set for an episode of Married at First Sight recently, they were filming a scene at my workplace. There were a few guests that had appeared in reality shows before who claimed that the reality shows they had been on were heavily scripted, but this one didn’t seem to be.

Some people were asking the producers about what would happen during filming, and the producers kept saying they didn’t know, and that they just kinda start the cameras and see what happens. The couple seemed to get along really well, didn’t look like there was much drama. The crew was pretty picky about how the room was setup, and what was in the background of the shot, but other than they weren’t too controlling.

If anything my biggest complaint with the crew was punctuality. They told some guests to get there earlier than they were scheduled to get there themselves, and then they showed up 40 minutes later than scheduled anyway. I heard that this is pretty normal for tv crews tho.

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My wife was hired as a home school teacher on wife swap. Since the Mom home schooled they want another home schooling Mom to step in and teach. It is all manufactured. They tell the kids to act up. My wife kept getting in trouble cause she kept turning her mic off and wouldn’t play their game. She got like 3 seconds of screen time because she taught and did not play into the reality show BS.

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