Bachelorette producers punish a contestant, Amazing Race starts, Trading Spaces turns 20, and more
Dear newsletter friends,
This week brought us several big broadcast reality TV premieres—including, finally, The Amazing Race 32.
Before the season premiered, I took a look at TAR 32’s epic, two-year journey from casting to air.
And I watched and recapped the first episode. 🎉
Overall, it was really fun, and seems like a great cast, even if the show is nothing like the one I used to love. (I actually wrote about that 10 years ago: How The Amazing Race should fix itself.)
Bachelorette villain has to pay producers
The big news story for me this week was that one of The Bachelorette’s biggest villains was ordered to pay the show’s producers $120,000.
I learned about a judge’s decision in the case when someone sent me a link to a story published by a regional news outlet last month. That story was short on details, so I paid $25.40 to download court records, and you can see some of those here. They include two pages of the show’s contract.
After I published my story—linking to that original story, of course, but also adding my own analysis and reporting (information from the actual court documents)—Entertainment Tonight wrote a story with a nearly identical headline but with zero sources cited.
I was annoyed. But when other outlets started crediting Entertainment Tonight—oof, my righteous indignation kicked into high gear. So I did the rational thing and went off in a Twitter thread:
The TLDR version: When websites and media organizations don’t link and give credit, they hurt themselves and the publications whose work they’re building from.
Trading Spaces at 20
It’s somehow been 20 years—two decades!—since Trading Spaces premiered.
About 18 years ago, I went on my first-ever reality TV set visit to the location of an early Trading Spaces episode. In a suburban Houston neighborhood, I learned all about what was real and what’s not.
Here’s my trip behind the scenes of Trading Spaces.
A fun coda to the story is that, 16 years after I spent three days with Doug Wilson and Laurie Smith, I interviewed them again, when Trading Spaces was coming back.
Recommended, news, and a correction
Here are my top recommendations for this week:
If you have HBO / HBO Max, this show. I’ve just started season two and it’s just as great as season one.
If you’re missing last week’s evictee on The Great British Bake-Off, this compilation of their best moments.
Meredith Blake’s look at the evolution of reenactments on true-crime reality TV
The Vow, which ends Sunday—I’m still really loving it—and Joe Reid’s perfect casting of the movie version
News from the week:
The Bachelorette’s Ashley Hebert and JP Rosenbaum are splitting up: Here’s JP’s post and Ashley’s post
Kristin Chenoweth is hosting a Food Network competition based on Candy Land that’s judged by Aarti Sequeira, and I cannot wait for this. That show—and all of Food Network’s holiday shows—are now on my fall reality TV show premiere calendar.
Buddy Vs. Duff is coming back but without Duff, so it’s now Buddy Vs. Christmas. I guess Food Network really wants people to hate Buddy.
A correction and apology
Last week I excitedly declared that episodes of one of my all-time favorite shows, the PBS series Manor House, were free on Amazon. After I sent the newsletter, when I went to close the Amazon tab in my browser, I decided to buy them.
That’s when I realized that Amazon was telling me that it was $0.00 per episode because it’d modified the price to reflect credits I had from getting “no rush, just be kind to your workers” shipping. So it wasn’t showing me the actual price, which is $1.99 an episode, or $10 for the full season.
That is still quite a deal, but $10 is not free, so I apologize for the screw-up. (Don’t take it out on Manor House: it’s still a great show.)
Okay, that’s everything I have for this week. Hope you have a terrific Friday and weekend. Thanks for subscribing and for wearing masks in public.
best,
Andy
🌄 This is Reality in Focus issue 216, first sent 16 October 2020, and it did buy Manor House.
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