Will the Real TV Show Contestant Please Stand Up? More Actors Infiltrating Reality TV Shows, Making Reality Even More Dubious

Will the Real TV Show Contestant Please Stand Up? More Actors Infiltrating Reality TV Shows, Making Reality Even More Dubious by Roxanne McDonald

“The Bachelor”, “Survivor”, and now “I Love New York” have changed the image of what we old-timers knew as true reality TV—casting actors over “real” people.

It’s not that we begrudge anyone for their talents and for their hoping for, needing, and even deserving a break. But we seasoned reality TV followers long for the days when real people showed up to play a game, win some money, or fall in love.

Jonathan Penner was discovered to have a background in acting quite a few weeks into the airing of “Survivor: Cook Islands.”

On more than one season of “The Bachelor,” women were denied a rose because they (Jenna, Susan, and others) were suspected of being present not for the prince but the performing.

On season two of “The Flavor of Love,” Krazy was finally found out by Flav, who told her what time it was “‘cause she wasn’t there for her man” but for a record deal.

And reality TV history maker Jack Benza (a pseudonym) “acted” his way through more than 30 reality TV shows by jumping through whatever hoops he had to for the producers.

Now it is reported/rumored that there actors on “I Love New York.” According to Reality Blurred and GuyTVBlog.com writers, Chamo is actor Mauricio Sanchez, who has appeared on such [non-reality] shows as “All My Children” and “The Guiding Light,” and Heat is actor Jason Rosell, who “ once appeared on Gilmore Girls.”

Maybe we have become indifferent to the infiltration, having been aware of it since Jerri Manthey implicated herself as aggressively pursuing not the prize money but the exposure for an acting career that “Survivor” 2 (“Australian Outback” would afford her.

Maybe it is a logical given—that TV game show contestants have ulterior motives (and often real talents that would otherwise go unnoticed, as pretty much gone are the days when a producer “discovers” a star waiting tables in Podunk, Pennsylvania—which, of course, accounts for the infiltrators today who are taking advantage of the new vehicle to fame).

But maybe reality and surreality and fiction and nonfiction are all glopped together in the global mass that is TV…opportunity any way you define it.

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