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participants say Wife Swap producers reenacted scenes and wrote house rules.

participants say Wife Swap producers reenacted scenes and wrote house rules.
Late to the party as usual, The New York Times reports how sometimes, reality TV can be unreal. The paper looks at tonight’s episode of Wife Swap, whose participants say, among other things, that at least one scene was reenacted because a camera wasn’t present (as we’ve seen before), and who also say that the resulting episode doesn’t quite match their experience. For example, Nancy Cedarquist and Michael Oeth didn’t get along, so Cedarquist was moved into a hotel, but that won’t be shown on the episode. Perhaps most damning, Cedarquist says a producer wrote the new house rules that she had to present to Oeth and his children. Producer Wendy Roth defends these actions because, she says, “We come out of the entertainment division. There is a certain amount of poetic license.” She also says that the reaction of participants has to do with their self-perception. “You know how you have an image of what your life looks like to other people? At some point, they realize the way they see themselves and the way other people see their lives isn’t exactly the same.”

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  • Andy Dehnart

    Andy Dehnart is the creator of reality blurred and a writer and teacher who obsessively and critically covers reality TV and unscripted entertainment, focusing on how it’s made and what it means.

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