Reality Challenged: A Reality TV Producer Explains The Science Behind the Stunts

In this three-part series, Christian Niedan explains how producers create the physical challenges you see on your favorite reality shows.

America’s reality TV shows often face the basic challenge of making the mundane worth watching. For tag-along shows like Cops and Deadliest Catch, the action is built into the job concept. For personality-driven shows like Jersey Shore and the Real Housewives franchises, the job of the cast is to continually complain, drink and fight their way to ratings. But for the competitive last-man-standing genre, with its revolving doors of contestants vying for money, love and apprenticeships, games are a necessity for keeping viewers entertained. This is where a challenge producer comes in, because they are staked with coming up with the missions that shows like Survivor, Amazing Race and The Apprentice use to whittle down their ranks of competitors. And what about non-network reality shows? Challenge producers can be even more important in cable reality, because fewer resources creates a higher premium on creatively-inexpensive games.

Sam Cotler has worked as a challenge producer for several cable reality shows. He shared the stories behind a few of his more-memorable games, beginning with one he designed for troubled couples show Tool Academy that involved a lot more scientific chemistry than viewers might have realized. It came about while Cotler was working on another show through 495 Productions and fellow producer Josh Peters showed him a YouTube clip of a Japanese game show with an unusual challenge setpiece.

“They had created a pool of what they called ‘ublek,’” Cotler recalls, “which is a non-Newtonian substance made of cornstarch and water at a very precise ratio. They had done it on a very small scale, and it was kind of fun watching the people run back and forth on top of it without sinking. But if they stopped, they’d sink like quicksand. So, we decided to find out how to do this, but we wanted to do it on a larger scale. I also found a clip from the Ellen DeGeneres talk show where the weird science guy had come on, and he was showing her this weird substance that he could make with household products.”

Cotler got in touch with the scientist from the Ellen show, who described how to create ublek and recommended he use a kitchen mixer, little suspecting the full-scale construction project Cotler was planning. That project would soon involve tons of cornstarch and water, as well as multiple cement trucks and dumpsters. First, though, Cotler would have to sell his executive producer on the concept. So, using a ratio of ten pounds of cornstarch to every one gallon of water, he put together an ublek prototype in a large bucket and showed that a person could run in place on top of it. That’s because when it’s stirred together at the proper ratio, ublek resembles both a liquid and a solid — the latter, because if you punch it hard enough, your fist should bounce right off.

“I by no means pretend to know anything about physics or the molecular composure of things,” Cotler explains, “but it seems like under pressure or when force is applied, it becomes a solid. When it’s left untouched, or you just dip your finger in, it acts as a liquid. If you try to pick it up, it becomes sort of rubbery on your hand, and it’ll drip off. It’s very weird.”

Cotler’s first use of the dual-property substance was during the third season of Vh1′s A Shot At Love — a dating show starring, appropriately, bisexual twin girls.

“It was an outdoor context, but we did it with one dumpster. The game was the cast had to run back and forth and grab these cans, and they had to move all the cans from one side to the other. It was basically just a relay race. MTV really liked the game, and the executive producers really liked the game.”

Yet when it came time to design games for Tool Academy, Cotler didn’t have an ublek sequel planned — that is, until the show’s executive producers decided they needed to make a splash. Three days before a previously-designed challenge, Cotler’s bosses asked him to change course and resurrect the ublek challenge on a grand scale.

“Tool Academy‘s about relationships, and every episode has a theme like communication, fidelity, maturity, humility, and you come up with a challenge. But there’s therapy sessions on the show too, which are a little more serious, so they like to have fun in the games. It can really just be a pun, or a cliche, or just an innuendo that ends up becoming a game. We came up with this game called ‘Nest Egg,’ like, ‘Well, you gotta be more mature.You gotta put away money — a nest egg.’ And the game was with nests and tons and tons of eggs. They’d have to run to one side of the goo, get the eggs, and then run back and then put them in a nest, which is as stupid as it sounds.”

Knowing he had to go bigger than the previous ublek incarnation to accommodate Tool Academy‘s larger cast, Cotler filled four dumpsters with cornstarch and water, which took plenty of manpower and materials.

“We needed, I think, three cement trucks, one or two water trucks, a crew of I think 30 people, and 42,000 pounds of corn starch, which is an entire semi-truck full of cornstarch.”

That last item proved a surprisingly tough acquisition for “Nest Egg” challenge co-producers Cotler and Josh Peters because of their three-day deadline.

“So, there is a wholesale food supplier in Los Angeles who thinks that I manufacture some kind of drugs or something out of cornstarch, because I think I’ve bought more cornstarch than the Sara Lee company had in that year. They delivered these pallets and pallets of cornstarch, and then I had to rent forklifts, because we realized we couldn’t possibly carry these bags one-at-a-time up to the cement truck and dump them in. The cement company doesn’t do that for you. They just run the truck. You have to load the cornstarch one bag at a time into the mixer. And the whole time you’re doing it, you have to also be monitoring the ratio to make sure the right amount of water is going in for the right amount of starch. And with multiple trucks that’s really confusing, but I had a good team.”

The large quantities also made this large-scale game a financial challenge for its producers.

“Normally, a game on a show like that can be anywhere from a few hundred dollars to $50,000 — but the $50,000 end of the spectrum is few and far between. I mean, those of us who do cable shows don’t have the luxury of doing that very often. I don’t see their budgets, but I watch the shows, and I’d imagine that the games in shows like Biggest Loser and Survivor, that’s probably the low-end of their spectrum. So, this one I think came in the high $40,000′s, and it’s one of the rare times I’ve been given that kind of money to work with. But at the same time it’s nerve-wracking, because with something that relies so much on being precise and the chemistry of it, it could very easily go wrong. And on top of the cost of producing it, the big thing in reality TV is the clock’s always ticking, and you hear that cash register with every minute. Camera crews are expensive, the day is short, you can’t hold them up, and once they’re set up and those 10-12 cameras are pointed at your challenge, you have to be ready to do it — or it’s your ass. Because that cash register is ringing away.”