But the vetting of contestants can create tensions between the creative executives and the executives in charge of standards.
"Producers are all about the characters," said Ben Silverman, chief executive of Reveille, a production company that produced The Restaurant for NBC, Nashville Star for USA Networks and the forthcoming Blowout, a reality series about a hair salon in Beverly Hills, California, for Bravo. "But networks have to look after their advertisers and affiliates. There have been times when I fought for contestants, but have not won the argument."
It is an odd line to walk and one that seems to keep moving. In 2000, the producer Mike Fleiss had a hit for Fox called Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire. But after the season ended, it was discovered that the prospective groom was named in a restraining order obtained a decade earlier by an ex-girlfriend who claimed he threatened her.
"It really damaged my career," said Fleiss, who found himself temporarily exiled from network television but is back in the thick of it with the ABC hit The Bachelor. "But I think people are realizing now that if you put anybody under that kind of presidential scrutiny, you are going to find out something weird about them."
Sometimes, a seamy background story can add to the tang of the show. Before The Simple Life was even broadcast on Fox, it was revealed that one star, Nicole Richie, had pleaded guilty to heroin possession and that Paris Hilton had played a starring role in a pornographic video on the Internet made by a former boyfriend. The revelations did little to hamper the show's success.
Finding the right mix of authenticity and contrivance in a candidate can be a touchy-feely exercise. "A big part of what we do is giving the producers a big enough palette, enough diversity, to tell a story," LaPlante said. "I think people turn on the television and like watching these people, but they have no idea what we went through to find them. Our job is to work through the layers that people have and see if they have something special."
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