I had a discussion with my cousin about “The Biggest Looser” and we’d both noticed that the contestants had been there for two months - with quite awhile to go, considering how many were left.
Most of the people there have spouses and kids back home and then presumably have bills, mortgages and all sorts of other stuff to pay.
How do they handle that? Do they get a salary while they’re on the show, does the show pay their bills, or do they just have to have good enough finances to not have to work for a couple of months?
I used “The Biggest Looser” in my example, but I extend the question to other reality shows where the contestants are away for a long time (ie Survivor).
The contestants on Big Brother sometimes talk about their stipends on the live feeds. They also say that making it to sequester pays better than not. Some of them don’t even care about winning, they just want to last long enough to get paid the sequester money. I think the AI contestants get paid too. There was one contestant from one of the early seasons (whose name I forget, but she was a blonde country type who got a job on the TV Guide channel after AI) who said that even with a 7th place finish, she was able to make enough money to buy a house.
This is probably well known, but since it hasn’t been stated.
There seams to be a believe quite a few people (at least in my experience) that reality programs are filmed/shown in real time. A week’s worth of reality TV in many cases is just a couple of days. As an example, the application for Survivorstates that you will have to live in a remote location for approximately seven weeks. Those seven weeks are then stretched into a full season’s worth of programming.
But the reason I started thinking about this is the discussion I had with my cuz in which the Biggest Loosers contestants said something about being two months in (and you can’t really loose all those pounds in a really short time).