Sometimes you just want to throw wine at your friends, fondle strangers, or set your hair on fire in public—at least if you’re a certain kind of reality TV star.

In the COVID era, Bravolebrities (as Bravo calls the stars of its reality series) can no longer jet off to exotic locations, brawl in clubs, or get sloppily drunk together. Yet the network dipped a toe back into these murky waters this summer, when executives mistakenly assumed “the virus would be at its lowest point and it would be safest to come out and shoot,” says Bravo’s executive vice president of production, Shari Levine. Real Housewives of Orange County was one of several shows that resumed filming, as crews returned to capture the women preening and provoking in their glitzy natural habitat. This time, though, both crew and cast members were masked.

After production shut down across the world in mid-March, entertainment executives expected to be back in business soon. “I remember leaving the office on that Friday and being like, ‘See you guys in two weeks!’ ” says Nancy Daniels, who oversees development, production, and day-to-day operations for the Discovery Channel. Like most networks, Discovery scrambled to remotely edit footage it had amassed and embraced remote shooting by Zoom or iPhone.

A whole subgenre of socially distanced selfie content quickly emerged as a temporary fix. American Idol contestants recorded auditions remotely. Vanderpump Rules stars sniped at each other from the comfort of their living rooms for a reunion episode. Netflix even shot a remote Tiger King aftershow to catch up with its now notorious subjects. (Joe Exotic, of course, could not attend, due to a preexisting engagement with the criminal justice system.) But as the pandemic continued to spike in the U.S., the TV stockpile dwindled. Scripted comedies and dramas, with their sprawling, union-protected casts and crews, were slow to return to production. Unscripted television—the industry term for reality TV and docuseries—has always been more of a Wild West: Its crews are composed largely of nonunion freelancers, its budgets often far lower. Suddenly, unscripted was in the spotlight, with producers figuring out on the fly how to shoot in the middle of a swift-moving pandemic. As Daniels says, “What’s working one week won’t work the next.”

“Bubble” shows suddenly offered a glimmer of safety. Big Brother, The Bachelor/Bachelorette, Love Island, Temptation Island, and Naked and Afraid all separate contestants from the world, stranding them in a pressurized atmosphere where drama unavoidably erupts. (In the case of Naked and Afraid, participants are also separated from their clothing.) But what happens when the artificially engineered isolation of reality television becomes…everybody’s everyday reality?

Big Brother’s return to CBS for its 22nd season this summer made for disorienting viewing. Where once the hermetically sealed pod felt like an escapist adventure for viewers, it now just looked like ordinary life for Americans living under COVID constraints. Conversely, for the contestants, what had been privation felt like a giddy return to normal socializing. “Oh my gosh, I’m just so excited to see people!” Da’Vonne Rogers squealed through her green mask as she prepared to enter the Big Brother house. “I haven’t seen people in a long time!”

Bravo figured out work-arounds fast. Summer House usually trails castmates as they commute to a Montauk beach house for bouts of petty debauchery; this season, each housemate committed to a six-week quarantine stay, during which curbside pickup replaced club hopping. For Top Chef ’s 18th season, Bravo decided to house “cheftestants” and crew in a vacant Portland, Oregon, hotel, shooting on a larger-than-usual kitchen set built with social distancing in mind. Even the cooking challenges themselves were designed to reflect the struggles and ingenuity of restaurants during the pandemic.

Keeping everyone in seclusion means the producers have greater control over the participants, but there are downsides. If one person gets sick, “it has much greater ramifications for everybody,” Levine says with a deep sigh. “I sound like a crazy person, but the sanctity of the bubble is the most important thing because it keeps people healthy and safe, and it lets us continue shooting the show.” What if someone goes rogue and punctures the bubble? “That is what keeps me up at night.”

The pandemic has played havoc with some of the big network competition shows’ talent: Former Bachelor and Bachelorette cast member JoJo Fletcher was asked to temporarily take over hosting duties for the upcoming season while Chris Harrison quarantined after dropping off his son at college in a COVID hot spot. And before Big Brother began its three-month shoot, host Julie Chen told CBS News, “Some people I thought were definitely going in the house—they tested positive for COVID-19 so they couldn’t go in. And I thought, Well, expect the unexpected.”

One solution for unscripted productions was to parachute into countries largely untouched by the virus. Discovery shot some Shark Week segments in Australia. For the new season of the adventure series Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted, the National Geographic Network sent the chef and a small crew to Iceland, Croatia, Portugal, and Finland. “I think someone like Gordon Ramsay was super excited to get back in the field,” says Michelle Upton, NatGeo’s senior vice president of production. The same goes for Bear Grylls, who shot an episode of Running Wild With Bear Grylls in Iceland.

Most productions now implement a combination of quarantining, testing, PPE, and social distancing. Crews tend to be smaller, filming schedules shorter. For NatGeo’s forthcoming projects with actors Will Smith and Chris Hemsworth, it plans to follow “The Safe Way Forward,” a joint report from Hollywood’s unions that involves a zone system to limit contact, regular testing, and a dedicated COVID-19 safety expert constantly on hand. But many unscripted series employ nonunion crew members, and their productions are not required to maintain union standards. On some productions, testing is regularly made available; on others, crews have to wait in long lines at local urgent care centers to get swabbed. And if someone does get infected on set, there’s no guarantee that freelance crew members will get full pay during their quarantine or recovery.

All of this worries the people going back to work. “We’re all talking and sharing stories, and you realize whether it’s a big production or not, you have to watch out for yourself,” says James Ball, a veteran director of photography for unscripted television.

The cost of COVID is hefty, ratcheting up show budgets by as much as 20 percent. Most television executives say they’ll pay whatever is necessary to keep everyone safe, but practices vary wildly. One reality TV crew member described a kind of caste system, where executives remained in their comfortable homes in New York and L.A., giving orders from a safe distance, while crew members put their bodies on the line.

“There are all these protocols that each company is deciphering for themselves,” says Johanna Vanderspool, a showrunner and lead organizer of the NonFiction “Union,” an advocacy group for unscripted professionals. In a recent poll about NFU members’ experiences during the pandemic, more than a third of respondents said they did not feel confident that productions were serious about protecting their employees from COVID. Only a quarter reported that a designated COVID compliance officer was present on their sets.

“Producers and crews already have been treated like they’re expendable in this industry since it started,” says one field producer who’s worked on popular unscripted series. “COVID is just another hoop for production companies and networks to navigate through as cheaply and as quickly as they possibly can. Networks are saying, Hey, let’s get this in the can quick, because if numbers spike again, or there’s some other weird, ungodly event that 2020 has in store for us, we have content for an audience to tune in to every week.”

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