Former Contestants And Producers Are Explaining How Reality TV Dating Shows Actually Work, And It's Sooo Fascinating
Welcome, welcome. If you're like me and watch too much reality TV just to feel something, you're in luck. I've gathered you here today to discuss the random and very real behind-the-scenes facts I've collected from contestants and producers about dating reality TV shows.
NBC Law & Order / Via giphy.com
Let's get into it. I was inspired to write this post after I came across this recent interview with Tanya Manhenga from Love Island UK Season 9 talking about the weird house rules she had to follow on the show.
About her time in the Love Island villa, she said, "If you need to go to the toilet you have to ask. ... During the day, we have stay outside. If you're going inside, [they ask] 'Why are you going inside?' You need to explain why you're going inside."
The Tony Awards / Via giphy.com
That led me down a rabbit hole. So, here are 23 more facts and secrets I learned about reality TV dating shows — straight from the sources themselves:
1. Sanam Harrinanan, also from Love Island UK Season 9, said that there were only two toilets in the entire villa — and they'd often be covered in pee:
@madamejoyce Tiktok: the truth about the love island villa with @Sanam Harrinanan 💩😭 #madamejoyce #viral #fyp #foryou #nigeriancomedy
♬ original sound - THE MAD/AME
@madamejoyce / Via tiktok.com
She said, "Living with 12 to 14 other people was horrid. ...There's only two toilets and ONE shower in that whooole villa. The only thing that really made me think, 'I wanna go home' is whenever I'd go to the toilet, I see that the toilets lifted up and just pee all over the floor and seat."
2.Also on Love Island UK Season 2, contestant Kady McDermott told Cosmopolitan that there were no clocks so they didn't know what time it was.
She said, "We started to figure out the time by where the sun was! If the smoking area was in the shade when we woke up, we knew it was before 7 a.m. But the days were very long, and the producers never let us sleep in past 9:30 a.m. [because] that wasn’t entertaining. They used to wake us up through speakers."
14 people, two toilets, one shower, no sense of time, and controlled bathroom breaks...
9Go / Via giphy.com
And people say that's not good TV.
3.Contestants from Too Hot To Handle also confirmed they had no clocks in their villa. They said they would tell time by when they ate their meals.
4.Speaking of Too Hot To Handle, contestants genuinely did not know that was the show they were on. The crew told them they were on the show Parties in Paradise and even wore fake merch to make it believable.
Cam Holmes from Season 2 told Buzzfeed, "I had a bit of an inkling before when I thought okay, this might be Too Hot to Handle, but they honestly threw us off so well. I got picked up from my quarantine period to go to the villa and the guy had a Parties in Paradise hat and it was facing backwards and staring me in the face the whole time. Obviously, the host Jeff came out and I remember thinking, what is the show? I can't be going on here, this is a dreadful premise of a show! No one's gonna watch this!"
5. And the Lana voice you hear on the show — that's actually the voice the contestants hear, too. And apparently the name "Lana" has nefarious origins:
If you found yourself watching Too Hot To Handle and wondering where we got the name Lana from ... reverse it. https://t.co/ESdxxrPsyb pic.twitter.com/KyLOk4FWca
— Netflix (@netflix) April 24, 2020
Netflix / Via Twitter: @netflix
This is not great news for me, a person named Lana.
6.Moving on — let's dive into what happens behind the pods in the Love Is Blind world. Apparently, each filming day in the pods is around 12 hours long and can involve three-hour-long dates.
Jarrette from Season 2 told Buzzfeed, "It was very long days. You start out dating 15 women, and then each day the women that you're dating decreases — but as your dates decrease, the time frame of the dates are increasing. When we got to day eight or nine, we were dating for three hours during the day — and then night dates, where it was up to two hours."
7.Love Is Blind series creator Chris Coelen told ET that contestants who wished to get engaged were given "a couple of choices" when it came to engagement rings.
Coelen said since contestants weren't in the "real world" and too far in the season, they couldn't go out to a shop themselves. However, the show still "wanted it to be as authentic to them as it possibly could be."
8.And if you've ever wondered why reality stars talk about "bad edits," it's probably partially because there is SO much footage that needs to be sifted through and edited down. Coelen told the Hollywood Reporter that Love Is Blind Season 2 was edited from "over 30,000 hours of footage."
9.Recently, several contestants from Season 2 of Love Is Blind came forward about alleged mistreatment on-set. In an interview with Insider, Danielle Ruhl claimed that she fainted in the pods due to insufficient access to food, water, and sleep. Jeremy Hartwell, another contestant, also sued Netflix for unsafe working conditions, claiming that they were deprived of sleep and had a lack of food and water.
Kinetic, Love Is Blind's production company, said the claims had no merit. "The wellbeing of our participants is of paramount importance to Kinetic," they said in a statement to E! News. "We have rigorous protocols in place to care for each person before, during, and after filming."
10.On The Ultimatum, some contestants said they didn't know an ultimatum was at stake until they began filming.
Jake from Season 1 said, "[It wasn't] until the first interviews that we actually found out, 'Hey, there's an ultimatum to be given.' And that was a big shocker to us! A lot of us didn't even know there was an ultimatum, or that marriage was anything to do with the show."
11.Tiff Der said that getting onto The Ultimatum: Queer Love was about a three-month-long process with "thousands of questions, multiple hours of video interviews, psych evaluations" and involved getting an ESA letter for their dog. They said they got the call confirming they'd be on the show two weeks before filming.
12.The Ultimatum franchise recruits many contestants through Instagram. From Season 1, Madlyn, Colby, Jake, and April said someone reached out to them on the app. From Season 2, Tiff said a casting producer slid into their DMs.
Madlyn told Buzzfeed, "[The message] was something along the lines of, 'Is your relationship at a standstill or a roadblock?' It was pretty vague. Seemed like a weird clickbait kind of thing to me."
13.In comparison, for the Netflix show Dating Around, series showrunner and former Bachelor producer Alycia Rossiter told Vulture that the show sought out cast members in unexpected places like libraries, bookstores, and bridge clubs.
Executive producer Chris Culvenor also told Vulture that they "really wanted to look for people who wouldn’t go on shows like this" when casting Dating Around, and wanted to put "ordinary people in ordinary circumstances" instead of ordinary people in extraordinary places, as seen by other shows.
14.While FBoy Island makes it seem like eliminated FBoys spend their whole time struggling and facing harsh elements like those in Survivor, showrunner Bill Dixon confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that they don't actually spend all their days and nights in Limbro, and instead get put up in a house or a hotel.
"They go to a hotel, and they're fed every day, and they're fine," Dixon told EW. He joked though, "Honestly, if I had a choice between some of the cheap hotels down there [in the Cayman Islands] and actually staying in Limbro, I might choose Limbro."
15.I feel like this is a pretty well-known fact about a lot of reality TV shows, but in case you didn't know, a lot of dating shows do not film contestants eating. Former Bachelor Sean Lowe told Glamour, "Nobody eats, and that's primarily because nobody wants to watch you eat and the mics will pick up the chewing."
He said, "Between the two date portions, they would bring us to a hotel, where you can shower and change and get ready—and it's during that time that you can eat." Similarly, Kady McDermott from Love Island said that people are rarely seen eating on the show because the crew would use that time as a break to change out microphone batteries.
16.Sean also told Glamour that "the show is so paranoid about spoilers and people getting inside information" that they never use the contestants' real names on their show radios and mics. They'd call the guys Clyde and the girls Bonnie.
17.The rose ceremonies on The Bachelor take forever. If they start at night, they last well into the morning.
Sean told Glamour, "It is absolutely exhausting. On TV, what you see is I hand out a rose, the girl comes forward and accepts it, and then I hand out another rose. In reality, there's about three to five minutes in between each rose because all 15 cameras have to reposition. That first night lasts until about 7 a.m., and then each one after that lasts until about 3 or 4."
18.On some shows, like Love Is Blind, contestants spend hours getting to know one another, but for the leads on Joe Millionaire: For Richer or Poorer, they admitted they spent very little time getting to know each potential partner.
FOX / Via giphy.com
"It looks like we spend a lot of time with these women, but the truth is [we] don't," said Kurt Sowers, one of the leads for the 2022 reboot. "We see them for short spurts at a time; the conversations are limited. Most of the time, [our] conversations are [interrupted] by other people and/or producers."
19.Like other shows, the Joe Millionaire leads also worked wildly long days and didn't really know what they were getting themselves into after being approached on Instagram.
"We were working 16, 18 hour days and as hard Kurt and I were working in front of the camera, everyone on the production side was working, literally, close to 20 hour days behind the scenes. It was pretty crazy to watch that happen," Steven McBee, the second lead said. "They purposely didn't tell us a lot about what we were getting ourselves into. They didn't tell us the nature of the show, how big the show was."
20.On Married at First Sight, where singles get married the moment they meet, the show preemptively sets aside money for a divorce.
Clark from the UK version told Cosmopolitan, "You have to let producers know when you want a divorce — budget was already set aside for it. The money was already in place when they put the bid in for the program."
21.As of 2018, Married At First Sight had a "22.2 percent success rate," with four of the 18 couples who wed still together, according to E! Online.
22.As for drink limits on reality dating shows, it all depends on the show.
In the past, excessive drinking on The Bachelor was an issue, but after sexual misconduct allegations, a two-drink-max rule per hour was reportedly instated as of 2018. As for Love Island, Kady McDermott told Cosmo drinks were limited to "two glasses of wine a night." And on Love Is Blind, Natalie said, "I'm not sure if there was a rule or not, but none of us went overboard with the drinking."
23. And finally, those matte wine goblets used in both Love Is Blind and The Ultimatum are deliberate.
The @LoveisBlind spinoff, ‘The Ultimatum’ is going for a silver aesthetic… do you think they just spray painted the gold goblets?😂 #LoveIsBlind #LOVEISBLINDreunion #SpinOff #TheUltimatum #GoldGoblets pic.twitter.com/fewx4YABni
— Emma Young (@EmmaAubryn) March 5, 2022
Netflix / Via Twitter: @EmmaAubryn
“The silver goblets in The Ultimatum are an homage to the gold goblets in Love Is Blind. We think the goblets are a subtle but fun way to tie the elements of each show together,” Chris Coelen told TODAY. And while it remains unconfirmed, TODAY said that the opaque cups are likely used so editors can cut scenes together without worrying about continuity issues.
