How Safe are Reality TV stars, Really?
The aim of reality TV shows like Survivor, Fear Factor or The Amazing Race is to have viewers get swept up in the unlikely drama that ordinary contestants find themselves sucked into. People watching it at home get to enjoy at the one step remove, the unbelievable situations that these reality TV stars get thrown into. Entertainment productions are always underwritten by insurers. It helps keep everybody on a production set safe. The problem with reality TV is that it actually is reality; nothing is scripted. Should anything go wrong when a person being chased down by horrific dogs on Fear Factor or should some starving participant encounter a toxicant insect to eat on Survivor, these shows really have no real way to protect their participants. And this makes it kind of difficult for insurers to underwrite one of these shows.
One reason that insurance companies come forward to insure the safety of reality TV stars is that the risk that they place themselves in really tends to exist more in the eye of the viewer at home than in what really happens on the set.
On a show like Fear Factor or Wipeout, for instance, while the show’s producers have no control on the micro level, they usually have so numerous safety measures configured into the system that a participant has almost no actual real risk to deal with. They just don’t show the viewer at home anything of how careful the show’s producers have been. It is kind of like going on a crazy roller coaster. It’s only crazy if you don’t take into account 100 years’ worth of safety features that have gone into the design of the system. If any of these shows were experience even one instance of participant injury, the claims that could result from it could seriously wipe them out forever. And even in cases where safety features are hard to design, insurers do step in order to catch the risk. Insurance products really do exist for extreme risk-taking.
Do you remember the Nicole Kidman movie The Stepford Wives? Nicole Kidman’s character in the movie, is a network executive who OKs a major reality show were married couples are supposed to participate just to see if they can be tempted to stray for very appealing people that the show brings in. Among the reality TV stars on the show actually has his wife leave him for one of the hunks the show brought in to tempt his wife. The aggrieved man storms into an awards show and threatens to shoot everybody. That isn’t really such an bizarre scenario, really. There is a certain element of risk in placing reality TV stars in situations where they can get emotionally hurt, even if there is nothing that physically threatens them. When an insurance agency underwrites a show, they make sure that the contract that the reality TV stars on the show sign, includes every contingency to do with hurt feelings. Once that is done, there is pretty much nothing for an insurance agency to do.
