The Basement Affair

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In season nine of ABC's reality TV dating show, The Bachelorette, the cast made a music video for a song called For the Right Reasons.

Today, we'll be starring in our very own rap video.

For the video, The Bachelorette, whose name was Desiree Hartsock, and the group of men who were trying to woo her, were joined by the rapper, Soldier Boy.

Yo, what up, up, what up?

It's your boy, Soldier Boy, tell him.

What's up, Soldier Boy?

Let's get it, Bass.

Let's go.

Desiree and Soldier Boy strut in front of three cars parked outside of the Bachelorette mansion.

Camera cuts to a dozen or so, mostly white men, dancing around in sunglasses, doing questionable imitations of hip-hop video clichés, making it rain, pointing to their bling, as they clumsily rap about all the wrong reasons to be on the show.

None of this deeply silly video makes any sense outside of the context of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.

But within the context of these shows, the right reasons mean something very specific.

It means that a participant is there, or appears to be there anyway, hoping to find love.

Someone who is there for the quote unquote right reasons exists in contrast to someone who is there for the quote unquote wrong reasons.

And that's anyone who is looking for fame, a career, social media followers, or attention.

On a dating show, saying someone is there for the wrong reasons has become shorthand for calling someone an opportunist.

But being there for the wrong reasons, those are the only reasons that make any sense.

Because the right reason to go on a reality show?

It's to be on a reality show, right?

This is Decoder Ring, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Slate's TV critic Willa Paskin.

Every month, we take a cultural question, habit, or idea, crack it open, and try to figure out what it means and why it matters.

You can be a fan of reality television, a hater of reality television, or even agnostic about reality television and wonder, why do people do this?

Why do they go on reality television shows?

On this episode, we're going to answer that question by looking at the experiences of two women who were on one specific series.

One of these women was a performance artist.

The other was an inadvertent performance artist.

And both of them went on the show for all the wrong reasons, which is to say, they went on the show for reasons all their own.

Today, what are the real reasons people go on reality TV?

My name is Ann Hirsch and I'm an artist.

In my dream scenario, like, I'm on reality television, you know, when I'm 40, when I'm 60, when I'm 80, just kind of as this like way to record my life.

In 2009, Anne Hirsch was getting her MFA in video art at Syracuse University.

She was 23 and particularly interested in the way women presented themselves on social media.

She had done a year-long project, she called it the Scandalicious Project, in which she posted videos of herself on YouTube playing an exaggeratedly sexual character.

Like if a man came up to me and like tried to like, I don't know, like whatever get on me, but like not really be into me, I would like grab his balls and like pull them off with my nails.

And I heard that someone actually did that in the news.

So like I know that it's possible.

In 2008, YouTube was still in its infancy.

The platform was only created in 2005, if you can believe it.

And this sort of performance, playing around with identity and anonymity, femininity and sexuality, it was still relatively new.

For the time, Anne's videos were very successful.

They had hundreds of thousands of views and an engaged commenting community sprung up around them.

They got picked up on 4chan, the infamous meme-generating message board, and Anne found herself with fans and with haters, all curious about who she really was and what she was trying to do.

For her next project, another piece of performance art, Anne wanted to explore these ideas about women and self-presentation in an even more heightened context.

Reality TV, a format she thoroughly enjoyed.

Survivor, America's X-Top Model, I Did Like Apprentice,

Flavor of Love, Rock of Love, all the terrible VH1 shows.

When you say like all those terrible VH1 shows, do you think they're actually terrible?

I guess when I say terrible, I mean more like morally reprehensible.

I've been thinking about pornography

as being very similar to my relationship with reality television in the sense that like I watch pornography physically, my body like enjoys it.

Like there is these parts of me that I'm conditioned to like it.

But then, you know, on another level, when I'm watching it, I'm like, wow, this is really misogynistic and racist and really fucked up.

For her project, Anne wanted to do performance art about reality TV by being on reality TV.

She had heard about a dating show that was seeking contestants, Frank the Entertainer in a Basement Affair.

Frank the Entertainer in a Basement Affair would premiere in January of 2010 on the music-related network VH1, both a descendant of those terrible VH1 shows Anne just mentioned, and an example of it.

It starred Frank Maresca, a muscular and handsome 31-year-old Italian-American who was still living in his parents' basement.

When VH1 gave me the chance and offered me my own dating show, I thought this is great.

I could finally get the chance to meet a woman and move out of my parents' basement.

The show was structured like a normal elimination dating show, with one woman being kicked off each episode.

The twist was that all 15 of the female participants were living at Frank's house, not only with Frank, but with his parents.

The very premise was a kind of parody of The Bachelor.

Instead of a group of women competing for a fairy tale hunk, they were competing for a dude whose mom still did his laundry.

Now the bachelor is literally being framed as a loser who lives in his parents' basement.

So there's already like a level of like patheticness that made me think, oh, I could have a chance, you know, because they're trying to really cast the most sad, pathetic people that they can find.

In order to understand how VH1 could be airing a dating show about a guy who lives with his parents, but who is somehow supposed to be desirable to 15 women, I need to back up.

Right now, there are certain reality franchises, like the Kardashians and The Real Housewives, that encompass an entire ecosystem of shows.

Spin-offs and spin-offs of spin-offs.

From 2004 to about 2010, VH1 had its own such ecosystem, starting with a show called The Surreal Life and ending with Frank the Entertainer, which would be among the last of this set of shows, for disturbing reasons we'll get into later.

These wild, zany, openly contrived shows had a purposefully skeezy feel to them.

A contestant smoking too many cigarettes in a model home stench.

They featured outrageous characters who were often stereotyped, but didn't seem to mind.

They were deeply insincere, but very authentic, an extremely potent form of reality TV that sent up other reality TV shows.

Bad behavior was rewarded on every single show.

That's Mark Cronin, a co-creator and executive producer of all of these shows, and one of the founders of 51 Minds, the production company that made them.

Survivor

was on TV at the time, and it was selling, you know, life or death.

And The Bachelor was on, and it was a gauzy,

you know, romantic fantasy, you know, and very earnest.

I hope my shows are punching a hole in the earnestness of

some reality television premises.

The first of the 51 Mind shows, The Surreal Life, initially aired on the WB in 2003, before being picked up by VH1 in 2004.

It was envisioned as a comedy, a reality TV version of a sitcom starring washed up celebrities like Corey Feldman, MC Hammer, and Vanilla Ice.

The Surreal Life eventually spun off into Flavor of Love, a dating show starring the public enemy hype man, Flava Flave, famous for wearing huge clocks around his neck, that was a send-up of The Bachelor and which premiered in 2006.

Instead of being overly romanticized, Flavor of Love was knowingly ridiculous and even gross.

On the second season, a contestant pooped on the floor while everyone in the cast was making a champagne toast.

Elimination is over.

I just want a sigh of relief.

So I take this deep breath and

what is that smell?

And as I'm going up the steps, I look down and I was like,

The show became a huge hit for the network.

The breakout star of Flavor of Love was a woman named Tiffany Pollard, also known as New York, an especially direct, charismatic, and over-the-top personality.

She was given her own dating show, which was also a hit, I Love New York.

One of the contestants on that show was Frank Mareska, who was given the nickname Frank the Entertainer.

I would like to be called the Entertainer.

Why?

I'm pretty entertaining.

I could entertain you in many different ways.

Is that right?

On I Love New York Season 2, Frank licked New York's toes and saw his strong-willed mother Susan butt heads with New York's equally strong-willed mother.

After that, Frank appeared on I Love Money, a spin-off game show featuring contestants from all of the 51 Minds series.

This is all to say, Frank may have been handsome and appealing, but by the time he got his own show, the idea that he was primarily there to find love was obviously absurd.

He and his family were a working part of a reality TV machine.

Cronin says that after the first season of Flavor of Love, it was basically impossible to cast anyone on these shows who didn't primarily want to be on TV, who wasn't there, in other words, for the wrong reasons.

Like once a show showed a bunch of people could make appearances at clubs and get paid, word spread very quickly and very rapidly you start getting people who are like trying to become famous.

But

it doesn't matter because deep down they're they're a crazy person who's uh uh can't help saying outrageous things.

Anne understood this.

She knew the best way to get on the show would be to play a familiar reality TV stereotype.

The sexually provocative, self-obsessed, anything goes girl.

Just like really playing up, being really wacky, really wild, really zany, overly sexual.

Hi, Frank.

Hi, VH1.

How's it going?

I'm Anne.

I'm 23.

I'm a student.

You can see this character in the audition tape she sent to producers.

She's wearing a hot pink bikini in a plain, overlit white room.

Today, I'm here to talk about why I am really fucking good for Frank the Entertainer.

And I mean, really, the answer to that question is very simple.

At this point, the video cuts to Anne gyrating against the wall behind her.

You're gonna see that we're gonna connect.

Okay, Frank, um,

can you call?

Can you call sometime, you know?

Let me know what you think.

She got a call back.

The next step was to have an in-person audition.

Because Anne was doing this for her art and her own research, she taped that audition, in which she kept up the act.

What about tell me why we should pick you?

Okay, this is an easy question.

You should pick me because, number one,

I'm hot

and I'm really creative and artistic and unique.

I'm fucking hilarious, I think.

Anyway.

Anne's performance worked.

She got a call telling her she was through to the final round.

The production brought her to New York, took her cell phone, and put her up in a cheap hotel by the airport and made sure that she didn't encounter any of the other women before filming began.

She was only supposed to be there for three days, but it ended up stretching into six.

Six days she spent mostly alone, barely going outside, watching reruns of Full House, eating food the production brought to her door.

People would come and interview her occasionally, and it was at this point that she met the producers of the show.

And then I was like, well, where is the show going going to be taped?

And they were like, so we're going to like tape the show in Frank's real house, like with his actual parents, the real house they really live in all together.

I was like, oh my God, that's so exciting.

Like, where is it?

And they're like, it's in Brooklyn.

Anne had done her research.

She knew Frank's parents did not live in Brooklyn.

And so in that moment, like, I realized, okay, these people will lie to me about

anything and they're going to do it really, really well and they're going to do it with the biggest smiles on their faces.

Oh, crap, like I can't believe anything anyone is telling me.

So I think it was good at that moment to realize that, but maybe I would have been better off if I hadn't realized that in a lot of ways.

And didn't know it then, but right down the hall was another contestant who had a totally different set of motivations, but a very similar story.

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In 2009, Kathy Nardone was also 23 years old.

She was from Staten Island and she'd already been on a reality TV show called I Survived a Japanese Game Show.

I'm from Staten Island.

I have a big mouth.

You either love me or you hate me, but I really don't care either way.

I'm from the dirty set.

Kathy loved the experience and just wanted to be on more shows.

I've met a lot of people like that who are like, I would never want to be on a show, or I would never be able to be on a show.

And it's like, I will be on all the shows.

You know, I

really, I just wanted to be on TV.

Like, and I wanted to be on TV more.

And I wanted to be on TV more,

you know?

Kathy was working as a model and an actress, and she was trying out for a music video when a woman named Carrie, who will show up again later, told her there was a casting call for a reality TV show starring Frank the Entertainer.

Oh my God, I actually like

think he's cute and you know, he's funny, and he's the only person who I probably would have gone on a dating show for.

Kathy had a crush on Frank, but she also had grander ambitions.

My game plan was to have a spin-off, and I didn't even want to win.

You know, they pick the most entertaining person on the show to get a spin-off.

And, you know, if I get second place, I get a spin-off.

You don't get a spin-off if you get first place because you get the guy.

Like, I don't care about the guy.

I want the spin-off.

Because of her previous experience, Kathy knew just how to approach the audition process in order to optimize her chances of getting cast.

Do you have to act like you're a complete idiot to get on reality shows because they want to be able to manipulate the shit out of you?

Does that mean that when you were doing the auditions then, like, you were like, I'm going to pretend to be stupider than I am because I know what they want?

A hundred percent.

Yeah.

I definitely didn't want them to think I was smart, you know.

So I probably like, you know, made some like sexual jokes and they were like, oh yeah, she's gonna do some crazy shit.

Let's get this girl on the show.

Kathy wasn't knowingly doing performance art, but she had arrived at the exact same strategy as Anne for getting on the show, posing as a sexually provocative woman.

This persona and the way these shows encourage and judge it simultaneously was part of what Anne was so interested in exploring.

But Kathy had come to this persona intuitively.

And just as it had for Anne, it worked.

Kathy too got cast on the show.

Kathy remembers sitting in the hotel, feeling trapped for six days, using her room's landline to call Carrie, the woman who had originally told her about the casting, and with whom she'd become friends.

Carrie had made it onto the show too, and Kathy wanted to draw up a game plan on how to best position themselves.

Yo, let's blow it out that we're we're friends, so that we're the last two.

So here Anne and Kathy were, both with their very own reasons for going on the show, and both with very specific ideas about what would make the experience a success.

And then filming started.

The moment Anne left the hotel to go to the house, the enormity of what she was trying to do, pretending to be someone else on camera for a month, hit her.

So I go down to the lobby.

It's like there's, I don't know, 15 girls or something like that.

I was a rack.

I was like, so nervous.

And so we're like getting into two vans.

And right before we get into this van to start to go to the house, I just throw up.

The other girls in my van see this and they're just like, oh my god, what?

Like, what the fuck?

This girl is like already crazy.

So then that just like made things even worse.

In the first episode, you can see that the show is sticking to its typecasting of Annie.

That's how Anne was referred to on the show as a too much girl.

I think Frank is totally sexy.

I mean, like, if he wanted to, he could suck on my toes.

I mean, I don't want to force anyone into anything, but, you know, that would be cool.

But behind the scenes, Anne wasn't so confident.

I was like in my bed, just so anxious and nervous.

Like, I was throwing up.

I was just, I was a nervous wreck.

Like, the girls were making fun of me.

It was just like a disaster.

And I was like, what have I gotten myself into?

Like, why did I do this?

Like, what am I going to do here?

Like, this is just a mess.

Like, I don't relate to these women.

Like, this is just going to be an awful experience.

Like, I'm going to look terrible on television.

Like, this is just a disaster, basically.

Anne was also realizing that the part she had written for herself, it wasn't that original.

And relatively speaking, she wasn't that good at it.

I, you know, kind of realized, okay, like these women that I'm with, they are the true performers.

You know, I call myself a video artist.

I call myself a performance artist, but like compared to them, like, I'm not.

I couldn't beat them at that game.

One of the women who was much more adept at playing this part was Kathy, who wasn't playing a character.

You just need to be the most extreme version of yourself.

I was the most extreme version of myself, but that was also kind of me, you know?

So

I tried to be even more extreme than what I was already, which was pretty...

pretty extreme.

At this point, it should be pretty clear that both Anne and Kathy, probably like almost everyone else on the show, were doing performance art.

And the major difference between them wasn't so much that one of them knew it and one of them didn't.

It's that Kathy could keep on performing an amped-up version of herself indefinitely.

While Anne's attempt to play another person entirely was too hard to sustain.

We have a phrase, it's the house always wins.

No matter what you think you're going to get away with, that will last two days at the most.

That under the bright, hot, white, hot glare of the lights and cameras, your facade will wither and you will become who you are.

This is the thing about reality TV.

As fake as it is, most of the time, the people on it can only play a version of themselves.

So I kind of decided the weirdest thing I could do, actually, would just be myself, my normal, the way I actually am in real life, because there's not many people like me on these shows.

And that's going to seem really, really weird.

So already it's gonna be this kind of like people at home are gonna be like what is this girl doing here like she doesn't fit in she's weird like this seems random and off by the end of the first episode you can see this change and is sweet offbeat and a little shy much more like she is in real life what do you want to do with your life what are your dreams and I want to be an artist

it's is it like video games

So what makes you

sure that you were given a key to Frank's basement?

Over the course of filming, Annie was entirely repositioned by the show, which adapted to her new persona no problem.

It swiftly turned her into the nerdy girl in the romantic comedy who will eventually get a makeover that reveals she's been a hottie the whole time.

Literally, that scene happens on the show when two of the women give Annie a makeover before her date with Frank.

I think Annie is a sweetheart.

She's so beautiful inside and out, but I mean, I'm a makeup artist and I just really want to do something cute and nice for Annie.

I'm gonna like make you into a playmate.

Wow, Annie, you look beautiful.

Very, very nice.

Who did that for you?

Tammy and Christie did it together.

Really, good job, ladies.

She looks very lovely.

Annie, she never ceases to amaze me.

Everyone on the show, the other women, Frank, and even Frank's parents, only had nice things to say about Annie.

If she had come in as one stereotype, she had become another.

I was known as the realest girl in the house, the nicest girl in the house, the most authentic girl in the house.

Like everyone's like, Annie's so real.

She's really here for Frank.

Like that was kind of like how I was being framed, basically, which is also really ironic because in some ways I was the most disingenuous person in the house.

She survived several more eliminations, but she still had her eye on the prize, her work.

She wanted to challenge the show, to challenge the audience, to make viewers see, however briefly, that Annie was a simplification, a construction, a stereotype created by editors and producers.

This character that I was being, which was myself, just became a normal part of the show.

And then I was like, wait, no, like this got, this can't, you know, now I'm just, they've just integrated me, right?

Um,

and so then I kind of decided this person that I've been being, that person has to go out the window.

Anne knew she had to pick an occasion where her behavior couldn't just be edited out or ignored.

In episode seven, the contestants had to participate in a singing challenge, writing a song in pairs, to perform for Frank and his parents in an empty New York comedy club while wearing sparkly evening dresses.

Welcome, ladies, to the Cruiting for Love Challenge.

Now, I really hope that you all could sing as good as you look.

You all know my brother singing.

Annie goes on stage with her partner.

And at first, things seem to be going normally until she tells her partner to stop.

They stop.

Like, seriously, like, stop.

What?

Because I want to get freaky.

Did she just say what I think I heard her say?

At which point, Annie performed an extremely dirty rap song she had written for the occasion.

It's about this love.

I think it's gonna stick.

It's not about fear.

Like, f in my mouth when I give you a b.

What kind of song is that?

Ends it, hey.

Time to shut your ears, cub.

It's not about.

Everything just stopped.

Like the production just stopped.

Like everyone was just really shocked.

Anne recorded an uncensored version of the rap for her video art piece, Here for You.

Here for you, as in, I'm here for you, Frank.

And fair warning, it is really explicit.

It's not about pussy, you're a dick.

It's about our love.

I think it's gonna stick like cum in my mouth when I give you a blow's job.

Hey, mom and dad, it's time to turn your ears off.

I'm going down to the basement, cause I'm going down to the basement, cause I'm going down to the basement to get myself some frank.

It's really explicit.

I've watched a lot of reality television, and this moment, even the censored version, it's genuinely surprising.

It's very rare to see something on a show where you in the audience and the people on screen have so little idea what is happening or why.

If you were watching this moment at home, I think you really would have been like, wait, what?

After her performance, the show and Annie, the character, try to make sense of what happened, try to make a narrative out of it.

Annie apologizes and says she just really wanted to make Frank see her in a more sexual light.

But at the end of the episode, she was kicked off.

Annie, I'm so glad that you were in my life, and I really hope that you and I could always be be friends.

I had completely broken this character that I had built up, and all of a sudden, like production realized, we don't know what this girl is doing.

Like, we've put her in this one way, she has this other agenda, and we don't know what's going on, she's dangerous.

And so, then, of course, I was kicked off, which I expected to be kicked off at that time.

She had broken, however, temporarily, through the reality of the reality show, which is to say, she had accomplished exactly what she set out to.

Anne had gotten her wrong reason.

While Annie had been presented as the nice girl, Kathy had been made into something close to the opposite, the kind of charming bad girl of the group.

I don't mean that Kathy was the villain.

I mean she got the rule breaker at it.

In one episode, she got blackout drunk.

In many, she would get into little tiffs with other contestants.

She was competitive.

She and Frank seemed to have a a genuinely sparky, love-at-first-hate kind of chemistry.

They bickered, they got in each other's faces, and they liked each other.

I'm nervous that I might be going home because I had a little too much to drink last night, and Frank seemed really pissed at me.

Kathy stepped forward.

You know, even though Kathy really messed up last night, we do have a chemistry.

It's either we're gonna fight like crazy or we're gonna like each other like crazy.

Kathy never seemed crazy or unhinged, but she was, as she intended to be, outsized, gunning for that spin-off.

And you can see that this motivation does not have to disturb the storylines of the show at all.

In episode five, after a contestant suggested Kathy used to date a famous man, she didn't.

It's not worth getting into beyond that.

She went to Frank to explain herself.

I am, but you know that I am.

Like, that's the thing.

Like, I feel like...

I feel like, you know.

Let's go down and have sex and show me.

I'm kidding.

I'm kidding.

I'm just kidding.

We know that Kathy isn't there for the quote-unquote right reasons, but in this moment, it's easy enough to go along with what she's half-heartedly saying because it helps further her and Frank's romance.

Though Kathy reacted to Frank's suggestion of sex with mock horror, in the next episode, Kathy did, in fact, go down to Frank's basement.

To put all speculation to rest, yes, Frank and I did have sex.

Kathy might have been on the show for all the wrong reasons, but she didn't sleep with Frank to win or to secure a spin-off.

She just liked him.

Frank was not Kathy's priority, but he wasn't nothing.

Like, I did actually want to get to know Frank, but I didn't care if I won.

You could say I was there for one reason more than the other, but,

you know, it could go either way.

This is the thing about reality TV, which is what makes it real, even though it's totally constructed.

Despite the fact that shows are trying to simplify everything, people are complicated.

We don't have singular motivations.

Fake scenarios can bring about genuine emotions.

Kathy could want a spin-off and also want Frank.

Eventually, after more and more mention of her and Frank's amazing chemistry, Kathy did make it to the final two, alongside her friend Carrie, just like they had planned in the hotel before filming had even started.

As will be familiar to anyone who watches The Bachelor, the final two women were put into predictable roles.

The good girl and the bad girl, the virgin and the whore, the one presented by the show as a great wife and mother, and the other presented by the show as the one with whom Frank had a great sexual connection.

Kathy, of course, was the bad girl in this pair, while Carrie had been presented throughout as the appropriate one, caring for Kathy when she was drunk, preferring not to sleep with men early in a relationship, and approved of by Frank's parents.

Frank the Entertainer may have taken place in a playful, bachelor-lampooning universe, but even there, Frank chose the good girl, Carrie.

Carrie, will you accept this king of my heart?

Yes.

Want your hair.

They didn't date for very long.

Frank later ended up marrying a woman who had nothing to do with the show.

In losing, Kathy had accomplished her wrong reason, or half of it.

Just as she planned, she came in second on Frank the Entertainer in a basement affair.

Looking back, I would say that things probably did more or less go according to plan.

The only thing was that at the end, I was like pretty fucked up.

Like you're in this house with the same people for a month, which doesn't seem like a long time,

but you know, you see the same people every day and then you're seeing this guy all the time.

And like, how often are you dating somebody who you see every day?

So obviously I felt like I got really close to him and we were

friends.

You know, I felt like we were good friends.

And then when it all ended and it was the outcome that I wanted, I was still upset because I felt like I was losing a friend, despite the fact that this was all just a show.

I always thought going into something like this, you would never end up feeling the way that you feel.

You know, we had like all these experiences together, and like he just went with the easy choice.

Sorry, I'm like, really, really trying, but I can't even pull it together right now.

I had never seen Frank the Entertainer in a basement affair before speaking to Anne for this episode.

Watching the show while knowing her and Kathy's motives, which the series kept off screen, made it so much more fascinating.

When you know the participants' real agendas, you can see the push and pull between between them and the show, between what the producers want to make them into and who they want to be very clearly.

And you can also see something else the show would otherwise obscure.

Anne and Kathy's savvy, their intelligence.

Their motivations for going on the show are so much more humanizing, so much more full of wit and will than being there for the right reasons or the wrong reasons.

One of these is what passes for a compliment on reality television and the other is what passes for an insult.

But both flatten and stereotype the people they are applied to, turning women into earnest good girls or vapid fame whores.

In this way, Anne's project worked.

If you watched the show, if you saw her art, if you heard this, her story, you know that on reality TV, there's always more going on than meets the eye.

But that's something that people who watch reality TV already understand.

Trying to suss out what's really happening is a fundamental part of all reality TV watching, a kind of active viewing that is a storyline unto itself.

That's why everyone is always talking about right and wrong reasons to begin with, because trying to determine motivations is part of the viewing experience.

Anne's project made this particular show especially vivid in this respect, but assessing what a show is up to versus what the participants are up to, trying to figure out the intentions of everyone involved, trying to figure out who is there for whatever reason, it's reality TV watching 101.

Reality TV of almost all genres becomes more fascinating, more entertaining, more substantive when we do this kind of active, engaged, skeptical viewing.

Reality TV is always obscuring something from its audience.

But in the case of Frank the Entertainer, there was a bigger thing being obscured than usual, a seriously disturbing thing that had happened on another show, but affected production all the same.

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At the time Anne and Kathy were getting ready to begin filming, Fifty Wood Minds had already wrapped another dating show called Meghan Wants a Millionaire.

As that show began airing, right at the time production was beginning on Frank the Entertainer, a runner-up contestant on Meghan Wants a Millionaire, Ryan Jenkins, was being sought as a suspect in the brutal murder of his wife, Jasmine Fiore.

It led to an international manhunt, with Jenkins escaping to Canada on a boat before hanging himself in a hotel room.

Jenkins had a history of domestic violence, but the show's background checks didn't come up with anything.

Here's Mark Cronin again, who was also an executive producer on Megan Wants a Millionaire.

That contestant created a huge problem for all of us reality television producers, which was, oh my gosh, what's going on?

Who are we letting on TV?

Are we out of control?

Have we done something horrible?

How did this guy get through?

The fallout from this event eventually led to the dissolution of of 51 Minds' relationship with VH1.

VH1 looked at us like, how did you guys get in here?

Like, who let you in the door, you disgusting 51 Minds producers who have just ruined everything for us.

All of this changed how Frank the Entertainer was made and was the reason that there were never any further spin-offs of it or anything else.

This was why Ant and Kathy ended up spending the week cooped up in a hotel room before taping, instead of just a few days.

They were being rigorously screened, far more rigorously screened, not just with background checks, but with psychological checks than they would have been previously.

There was an enormous backlash on casting and who could be in the show and how psychologically stable are they, etc., etc.

So we had to cast maybe three times as many people because we were just rejecting so many for any kind of personality flaw.

And the trick for reality television producers, well, you want somebody who's a little nuts, right?

so it became very difficult to cast

the kind of cast that we had done in the past.

And so I think that made the, it flattened it out a little bit, that show.

The idea that an experience that was so vivid for Kathy and for Anne, one so taxing and exciting, was an intentionally tamped-down version of the other VH1 reality TV shows.

It makes me feel a little queasy imagining what taping those shows must have been like.

For this whole episode, I've been saying that right reasons don't matter.

That the right reasons are the wrong reasons, and the wrong reasons are the right ones.

And on reality TV, that's true.

But that's because on reality TV, motivations are a game.

Right and wrong don't mean very much because the categories that matter aren't right, they aren't wrong, they are entertaining and boring.

Everything, even morality, is just for show.

But in real life, of course, intentions do matter.

And one one issue with reality television is the way it has contributed to the idea that motives are beside the point or really easy to discern or better when they're bad because bad ones are so much more fun to watch.

Do you have any like ethical feelings about your job?

Like do you have any qualms about your job?

I feel horrible.

In the present climate of our government.

and the president that we've now selected for ourselves.

Because I feel like reality television is super powerful and can create

a version of a person that is not true.

And

to the extent that you can make somebody seem like a more successful businessman than they really are, or more decisive than they really are, or more always right than they really are.

I never realized that these monsters would come into the real world and, you know, get actual power.

I always felt that creating these personality monsters was just fun, you know, because

how can they hurt us?

Well, it turns out

you can create a reality monster that can live in the real world.

Anne and Kathy both turned out fine after their experiences, and both would like to be on reality TV again.

Anne is still an artist.

She's had exhibitions and performances in Los Angeles, London, and at the New Museum in New York.

She's even been on reality TV again on a low-key show called Oddities, where people shop for curios in a a knick-knack shop.

Like at the end of the day, like, even though for me it was performance art, like it was fun.

Like, even though I was like a nervous wreck for part of it, like, I would do it again in a heartbeat.

It was really fun.

When else do you get to do that?

Like, to have that little bit of fame.

Like, it was thrilling.

Kathy now works a regular job and lives a basically normal life, which she has some reservations about.

I tell people all the time, reality TV like will ruin my life.

Like,

you know, it's, it's like

you are never the same because, you know, you go from being somebody to

like, what am I doing?

I'm like a normal person.

I think I'm a normal person.

And

to say I'm okay with being a normal person, like, I am, but at the same time, I would prefer to not be.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willapaskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch, who also does illustrations for every episode.

Special thanks to Annie Chelsea, who helped us record the episode.

Thanks also to Julia Turner, Dan Coyce, June Thomas, Nick Perlman, Tom Foreman, Anjaya Joda, Leonid Roloff, Lindsey Smith, Rich Juzwiak, Michelle Collins, Michael Hirshorn, Viviana Rosales-Olin, and Matt Harkins of the THNK 1994 Museum, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you next month.