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Everyone watches reality TV shows, whether you’re a die-hard fan or it’s only a guilty pleasure. They’re entertaining and sometimes, they’re too good to be true. This is why viewers usually wonder if these shows are staged or downright fake. As most would assume, what we see on TV is not always real. For example, a restaurant owner revealed that the Kardashian-Jenners once fake getting drunk on sparkling water for an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
This is not the first or only show to have been revealed to be staged. Most recently, an employer who appeared on the CBS series Undercover Boss revealed what it really was like to be on the show. They also admitted whether what played out on-screen was real or staged.
Undercover Boss Was Created After Stephen Lambert Witnessed This Real-Life PR Disaster
Stephen Lambert, the creator of Undercover Boss, got the idea for the show based on a real-life corporate disaster. In his book, Undercover Boss: Inside the TV Phenomenon That Is Changing Bosses and Employees Everywhere, Lambert revealed that the concept for the show came from British Airways head honcho Willie Walsh’s response to a reporter’s question about whether he’d suffered traveling inconveniences using the same airline he works for. Walsh simply responded, “I can’t because people in BA recognize me.”
Lambert, who had previously created the successful reality TV show Wife Swap, then went on to pitch his idea for a new show to Channel 4. Following the success of the British series, Lambert and executive producer Eli Holzman brought the show to CBS for an American spin-off.
Since 2009, Undercover Boss has become a worldwide phenomenon. The American version of the show has 11 seasons and more than 120 episodes, with the latest season having premiered last year. And in 2018, CBC announced that a Celebrity edition of the show was in the making.
This Part of Undercover Boss Is Actually Real
While not every part of Undercover Boss is 100 percent real, turns out that the workplace shadowing we see on the show isn’t entirely staged. Holzman revealed in an interview that not all the scenarios the undercover bosses partake in are completely staged, but rather the bosses don’t know “exactly where they’re going to go, and they don’t know exactly with whom they’re going to work, because we want them to [have] an authentic experience.”
Although the series research on the workplace and its employees to figure out what’s worth showing on the show, there’s room for spontaneity. For example, in one episode, a Boston Market employee was reprimanded after inadvertently confessing to his boss, “I literally hate customers more than anything in the entire world. I hate them so much.”
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The Employees That Appear on the Undercover Boss Are Specifically Selected
This might not come as surprise but more often than not, the employees you see on Undercover Boss have been specifically chosen by producers for their stories and personalities. Holzman revealed in an interview, “If there are two people who do the exact same job in the exact same way, and one of them, as soon as you see them, you laugh uproariously or cry because their story’s so amazing, and the other one it’s crickets and you’re really bored, we’re going to go with the really good one.”
According to ScreenRant, people who have been on the show even claim that the latest hires are usually the ones who are chosen to appear on the show. Additionally, the employees that we see on the screen are often given guidance on what to say in from of the cameras. An example is Megan Pustaver, who appeared in a season 4 episode. She revealed in her AMA Reddit session that she was told by producers to share a life-changing event.
Someone who worked for a company that was featured on Undercover Boss recently revealed what it was like being on the show. They also admitted that things didn’t exactly go the way they played out on-screen.
“I worked on a cruise ship when they filmed ‘Undercover Boss’. The CEO pretended to be doing a documentary and had various crew members train him for a few hours. While no one was expressly told what the gig was, the show had already been going on for a year, so we all sort of knew what was up,” this worker revealed in a Reddit thread asking what reality TV shows were fake.
The employee then talked about what the grand reveal was like:
“When they did the ‘reveal’ that he was actually the CEO, they did like five shots of the crews’ ‘surprise’. His big gesture at the end was $150,000 towards crew welfare (pays for parties, day trips, etc). It came to like $8 per crew member when you consider how many crew members there are. Those that were featured (and even one who got cut from the show) on my ship did get an all-expense paid European cruise, so that was nice for them at least, provided they wanted to go on a cruise on their vacation from working on a cruise ship.”
