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Reality TV is facing many workplace-related lawsuits. This producer says it's not a new thing

Seth Sherman
Patrick McElhenney
Seth Sherman

Reality TV has had its ups and downs since becoming one of the major forms of television in the last several decades. But today, some of the industry’s most anticipated series are facing lawsuits, allegations from talent and production crews alleging poor working conditions and more. From "Love is Blind," to "Squid Game: The Challenge," to YouTube’s MrBeast’s Amazon Prime series "Beast Games," there have been a lot of headlines about reality show discontent.

Seth Sherman, a longtime reality TV producer for projects like “Little People, Big World,” “The Challenge” and “Shark Week," says, it’s a tale as old as — well, reality TV. Sherman joined The Show to discuss.

Full conversation

SETH SHERMAN: These kind of lawsuits first to start off have been going on for as long as there's been reality television. Like it's, it really isn't a new thing. And the proof of that is that the “Squid Games” was experiencing very similar complaints just a year earlier. So like this isn't something that came about with the advent of Mr. Beast entering the reality television world. This is something that has been going on for as long as there's been competition series.

LAUREN GILGER: So when you see people going after these experiences afterwards suing them for various things, whether it has to do with the working conditions or NDAs, they had to sign things like that, it's not surprising, but it does seem to say something about the way in which reality TV is made, right? Can you shed some light on that for us?

SHERMAN: Absolutely. I think a lot of people, especially if they have not worked in any kind of television or movies before, are surprised at exactly how arduous the experience is. And that's not just for the people that are participating. A standard workday in reality television is 12 hours. And that does not include time, especially for people like producers. And if you are a technical director, those folks end up having to work off the clock, oftentimes hours in excess of the 12 hour day that they just completed.

GILGER: So it's production crews, its production schedules, its talent, it sounds like there's, there's a tight amount of pressure and time to produce these kinds of things very quickly.

SHERMAN: Absolutely. I think most people though work an eight-hour job. I would say most Americans. And so if you're coming to this experience, cold and you just, you are doing 12 hour day after 12 hour day, it can be a very, can be very surprising and very uncomfortable. But it, it is part of how, how we make the economics of these shows work.

So the challenge is, is that if you're shooting only for an eight-hour day, by the time that you get things set up, likes and everybody knows their mark and the exact flow of action has been decided upon by the producers. You're going to run out of production time in that day, you'll never be able to keep a schedule.

GILGER: So it's the logistics of it. Explain a little bit about how these shows work. Like having done this for a long time. Like I'm sure there are cases in which these people who file these lawsuits have very legitimate claims.

But also some of it has to do with what you're saying, like about how this is just the reality of making the economics work. When you're on like a game show kind of set or a dating show kind of set, a reality show kind of set, it's not like you're just coming into someone's life and filming it. There is real production that goes into it.

SHERMAN: Absolutely. And I think what's happening here and I don't have any firsthand knowledge of this, but Mr. Beast is probably learning the hard way, the same lessons that reality TV producers have learned for the past 30 years and we didn't invent those things either. There are roles that are performed in reality television. There are best practices that we follow that all were taken from scripted television and for movies, obviously, over the last 30 years, we've adapted some of those practices and some of those roles more closely for reality television. But there was a template more or less beforehand.

So I think the attitude from folks like Mr. Beast is that we don't need to do things the old fashioned way. And unfortunately, when you're managing large crowds, managing lots of competitors, when you're trying to make a competition fair, all of those things are things that we've done before. And you're, you're, you're basically reinvent the wheel, learning how to manage all of those crowds and how to do what we call game show rules, which make a competition fair.

GILGER: Game show rules, tell us about those. What do those look like? This is like standard across the industry.

SHERMAN: It is. Yeah. And it's some, some of it is a little bit informal but it comes out of the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. So there became a series of standard practices that you have to adhere to, to make sure that a competition is fair.

GILGER: That's really interesting. So it has to do with the way in which the industry is changing right now a little bit too, it sounds like.

SHERMAN: Well, I think you're gonna increasingly see people that are coming from social media from TikTok and places like that. And they don't have any of that experience necessarily.

GILGER: Let me ask you about some of the moral and kind of ethical questions that come up when you start kind of critiquing reality television, right? I mean, you have to mention "Squid Game" here and the kind of incredible irony of a show like “Squid Game,” which was about the grim realities of reality television, kind of having its own reality TV show. And that facing criticisms.

I mean, how do you maintain a standard of ethics and fairness like you're talking about there when you're, when you're dealing with these shows that, that can play with those boundaries.

SHERMAN: I think it all comes down to planning. All of the people involved in a show like that are going to try their hardest to make sure that it's a fair competition, but there's a certain amount of planning that has to go into capturing an event like that where you have 500 competitors.

I think that, that people from when you are looking at this as a participant, you might mistake some of the things that the producers have to do to literally make a TV show for them gaming the system or preferring one competitor over the other. But my guess is that for the most part, they're just trying to make a TV show, one that's incredibly difficult to film.

GILGER: And by make a TV show, you mean, like they're finding storylines, they're finding drama, they're finding moments that are intriguing.

SHERMAN: Absolutely. At any moment, somebody can emerge as the main character. It's the sort of thing, like you make your best guess, but you really don't know until the filming starts who's going to emerge as a story that the audience is going to want to follow. We don't know who's going to win.

GILGER: Is that what you like about reality TV? As opposed to something that would be scripted and you would know the outcome already.

SHERMAN: There, there is something about it where you feel like you're watching people's behavior unguarded and you start to be able to get inside people's heads in a way that a piece of scripted entertainment doesn't necessarily do.

The other thing that I think is interesting is that each person who's participating is essentially their own writer. The things they're saying have not been scripted in advance. We don't know what they're gonna say. We just, we're gonna put them into a situation and see what happens.

GILGER: So, one thing I wanted to ask you about before I let you go is the possibility of a union because we've heard this from, you know, big reality stars like Bethenny Frankel and others that, you know, there should be some kind of reality TV participants union to protect them from these situations. Do you see that happening?

SHERMAN: I would love to see it happen. I don't think it's going to, I would love to see it happen though. And not just for participants. I think everybody involved in the making of the show should have the opportunity to unionize all of the protections that we do enjoy in this industry, in the reality television industry come from efforts that unions made in script television and movies. The 12-hour day is something that comes from, comes from filmmaking.

All of the rules around, turn around and all that kind of stuff like having so many hours of sleep before you show back up. It's set, all that comes from what work that unions did on our behalf. Most of these shows are adhering to union rules, even if they aren't union codifying. That isn't a bad thing. Making those shows signatories to an agreement where they're protecting the rights of the people. Making the shows, I think would be a fantastic thing.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Lauren Gilger, host of KJZZ's The Show, is an award-winning journalist whose work has impacted communities large and small, exposing injustices and giving a voice to the voiceless and marginalized.
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