PREACH IT! Still more proof that reality TV ain’t real
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Still think your favorite reality TV show is being totally honest with you? You might not want to read this. Now comes fresh evidence that the reality genre is anything but believable. Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag -- the epic fame whores at the center of MTV’s “The Hills” -- reportedly are being urged by a producer to stage fights.
“MTV has been asking them to do inappropriate things for the show,” a source close to the couple (in other words, the couple) tells X17 Online. “They’ve wanted Spencer to play up his aggressiveness for ratings, and he doesn’t want to do it. For Season 5, MTV producers even asked Spencer to hit his own sister Stephanie.”
By now, this sort of news, presuming it’s accurate, should come as no surprise. Lauren Conrad has confessed that she staged some of her scenes on “The Hills,” such as one phone call that actually had nobody on the other end. CW’s new airborne reality show “Fly Girls” seems to take bad acting to a whole new level. (The Washington Post called it a “reality-esque series filmed in deceptive, ‘Hills’-style fake-o-vision, about a quintet of Virgin [America] Airways flight attendants who are based out of LAX and are forced [by producers?] to share a condo, which they call the Crash Pad.”)
And then there’s the E! show “Pretty Wild.” We got this behind-the-scenes peek at the show in a recent issue of Vanity Fair:
At Alexis Neiers’s home in Westlake Village on the afternoon of her arraignment, the E! reality crew was filming a scene in which Neiers’s parents recount for their younger daughter, Gabrielle, what happened in court that day. Neiers’s mother, Andrea Arlington Dunn, and father, Mikel Neiers, stood in the living room, taking direction from E! supervising producer Gennifer Gardiner, who was feeding them lines: “Tell her, ‘Everything’s going to be O.K., Gabby.’”
“Everything’s going to be O.K., Gabby,” said Dunn, who was still dressed for court in a brown suit.
Don’t get us wrong. We here at Preach It! love ourselves some reality TV, particularly “Top Chef Masters,” those Roto-Rooter guys who hunt ghosts and that Octomom banshee on “America’s Next Top Model.” But do we believe what we see 100%? We could say yes. But we’d be faking it.
-- Leslie Gornstein
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