There’s a sound bite that still plagues Spencer Pratt, the reality star best known as one half of Speidi, the bleach-blond villains of MTV’s most infamous reality show, The Hills.
From 2006 to 2010, the show documented the lives of several barely 20-somethings in Los Angeles as they pursued jobs in the entertainment and fashion industries, toxic relationships with one another, and weeklong benders at mid-aughts hot spots like Les Deux and Area and Hyde. To this day, Pratt tells me over the phone, he gets tweets about the things he “said” back then, from waves of online critics still incensed by the callous way he seemed to treat his girlfriend, Heidi (née Montag, now Pratt), and her best friend, Lauren Conrad—the subject of a vicious rumor involving a sex tape purportedly started by Pratt. “I’m fine with people making drama out of anything heightened that you’d do in your real life,” he says. “That’s the kind of fake reality I’m cool with…. But the worst of it isn’t what they showed me doing, but what they showed me saying. It’s the sort of editing I am not down with, and feel is totally whack if you’re calling it reality.”
Pratt had been shooting a scene with his best friend, Brody Jenner (son of Caitlyn Jenner and songwriter Linda Thompson), when he said, “let’s hit that back door” of Les Deux—a “flex,” he says, of their VIP status on the L.A. social scene. “They take it and they edit it, and it looks like I’m saying I’m gonna hit Heidi from the back door,” says Pratt, audibly pained. “They cut the Les Deux part out completely and made it look like I was talking about Heidi. It’s like, I don’t talk like that.”
Pratt claims that the sound bite was fabricated, made by producers who also cut conversations from his calls with now wife Heidi into conversations with another castmate, Audrina Patridge. This was, he says, a gambit to simulate a love triangle that never was. While the series shows Pratt apparently admitting to starting a rumor that Conrad had made a sex tape, Pratt says that too was engineered using audio from other scenes. He claims his sentences were repeatedly sliced and diced beyond comprehension to obfuscate the image of a 23-year-old guy who, yes, was often selfish and shitty on camera—but is evidently still shaken by the lewdness of the “back door” bite. “I did what I did and I played the character they wanted me to be,” he says, “They murdered me…[with] a few things that I feel like were Frankenbiting on the original Hills.”
An hour after our conversation, Pratt calls again, the sounds of his three-year-old so audible that I think at first Gunner Pratt got ahold of his phone and rang me back.
“One more thing: I never apologized to Lauren about the sex tape,” Pratt says, dispelling one of the show’s most famous scenes. “I was talking to a producer and they stitched the audio of our calls—separate calls—together. Is that Frankenbiting?” (Representatives for MTV, the network that aired the original run of The Hills, did not respond to a request for comment on Pratt’s claims.)
It’s no secret that much of reality television is fake—something that viewers know and accept to varying degrees.
On shows that feature ensemble casts, like The Hills, Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise, and ABC’s The Bachelor—“story-based” series that follow a narrative arc—story lines are frequently concocted by producers, and scenes are “directed” or even reshot for clarity. (Much of this has been reported on by writers like the Los Angeles Times’ Amy Kaufman and even inspired the plot for UnReal, Lifetime’s TV drama about the reality machine whose nefarious central characters, Kaufman alleges, were likely based on Bachelor producers Mike Fleiss and Lisa Levenson.) And for the most part, audiences have grown wise to this sort of manipulation.
We know that reality shows flatten real people into characters who are often designed to fit a certain archetype—the martyr, the bitch, the womanizing heartthrob, the one who lives to stir the pot. After all, “No one wants to see friends sitting around being nice,” says Dan Udy, a King’s College scholar who has spent years studying producer manipulation on reality TV. “You want to see people fighting.”
In fact, as reality television has slithered up the cultural hierarchy, its fans have stopped caring so much about how faithfully these shows portray their stars. More than ever and above all, the viewers instead want to be in on the joke—to witness the proverbial breaking of the fourth wall between cast and crew, where they feel the true thrills lie.
If you were to come up with a list of the most compelling moments on reality television in the last few years, most would feature instances where producers have had to intervene unexpectedly: The Bachelor’s Colton Underwood jumping a fence to run away from camera crews after contestant Cassie Randolph broke up with him, say, or The Real Housewives of Potomac’s wine-bar brawl, during which producers had to physically pry two wives apart. Midway through the last season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Kris Jenner tearfully informed the show’s longtime producers on camera that her family had decided to end their series after 14 years.
Yet despite all this, even the savviest viewers may not know how frequently they’re being manipulated by the technique known as Frankenbiting, in which producers formulate sentences from multiple clips into something reality stars didn’t actually say or mean.
For a long time, cast and crew alike were mum on how Frankenbiting works. But that has started to change as audience expectations change—and with them, demands on producers and contestants to deliver the best content as quickly as possible. More and more people who work in the reality industry are beginning to speak up, some despite their NDAs—from overworked producers to stars who see a particularly damning edit that catches fire on the internet, where nothing is forgotten and cancel culture awaits.
In January, producer Toni-Ann Lagana, who has worked on shows like My 600-lb Life and Gordon Ramsay’s The F Word, wrote a tell-all for The Hollywood Reporter about the lives of underpaid, overworked “story producers” who sort through hours of footage to craft deceptively straightforward reality scenes. They often use software called Avid, wrote Lagana, which can make salient phrases from multiple shots sound more natural when strung together. Though Lagana was initially nervous about attaching her name to the story, she tells me now that the risk was well worth it. “I was so pleasantly surprised by the overwhelming response from coworkers and past bosses reaching out to congratulate and thank me for speaking up,” she said in an email.
Per Lagana, most story producers are freelancers and don’t have a union to advocate for their rights, which makes it difficult for them to object when their bosses ask them to use Frankenbiting. Nearly every producer I spoke to for this article has an instance that haunts them—a time they were asked to do such extreme editing of footage that it wound up having serious long-term ramifications on the person whose image they were making over onscreen. Simply rearranging a word or two, or cutting phrases from multiple scenes to come up with whole sentences that were never said verbatim, can have a massive ripple effect.
“As long as you find the pieces to match intonation and that kind of thing, you can make [a Frankenbite] sound like a regular sentence,” says a producer who worked on a popular dating show, who chose to remain anonymous so she would be able to continue to secure future work from the show. “You could, as I assume you’ll do, pull pieces of what I’m saying and put it where it’s convenient for you.”
After finishing a first cut of a scene, depending on the show, the producer will do an edit of a scene, which is then passed on to the editor who finishes the cut. They’ll then submit the scene to network executives, who will give notes before the scene is finalized and ready to be aired. Often, those notes are intentionally vague: “I’m confused,” one might say, or, “Need to see more Lisa.” And that’s by design. “No one ever says, ‘We need a villain,’” the producer notes. “It’s more mobster in the sense of like—you know how in movies when they’re sitting at the table and they’re like, ‘You know what needs to be done’? It’s like that.”
That producer’s “instance” is one of the commonly cited ways of how Frankenbiting is abused. And though it happened several years ago, it still hangs over her head like a little black cloud. “There are some [situations] where I was like, This is bananas,” she says. “You’re just like, Whatever, I’ve just got to do the job. But there was one where I really liked the person I had seen in the footage…. She was self-aware and she was self-deprecating. She was, like, a person you would actually enjoy hanging out with if you met her. And so that was her downfall, because it became easy to make her something she wasn’t.… If we would have played her straight, she would have been fun anyway, but the powers that be just latched onto that element and decided, ‘Let’s make her the villain.’”
“We turned her into a villain, and then what happened was that’s how society or America or the world saw her,” she continues. “And they were awful to her. She had to go on a redemption tour for years. I felt awful, because you want to be like, ‘This girl is actually not that person at all.’”
Some cases of Frankenbiting eclipse individual story lines, as in the case of one crew member who worked on a docu-style reality show about real-life exorcisms that aired on the Discovery Channel in 2011. The show purported to have the approval of the Vatican, which later denied its participation. It wound up airing as a one-hour special in lieu of a planned 10-episode run. The whole thing, the crew member said, was a fiasco—not least because of the Frankenbiting their team had been asked to do. “We had priests who we interviewed and they would say, like, ‘When someone’s possessed, it’s not like in Hollywood where they’re climbing on the walls,’” they recalled. “And so when they said that, we just [edited them to say], ‘it’s not like [in Hollywood],’ and then we had this sound bite that was ‘they’re climbing on the walls.’” (A rep for the Discovery Channel declined to comment.)
The incident still bothers the crew member, who now works on less salacious series for a different network. “You know, I grew up in the Midwest where everyone is nice,” they say. “I do feel a sense of guilt.”
Producers say that they’re encouraged to do whatever they can to harvest as much dialogue as possible—to later shape scenes as needed—during filming. In her book Bachelor Nation, Amy Kaufman writes that Bachelor producers have gone so far as to track contestants’ menstrual cycles in order to pinpoint when they’re at their most vulnerable. And even then, they’d allegedly cut together misleading edits—juxtaposing answers to questions about upsetting subjects (a family member’s death, a traumatic childhood experience, a past heartbreak) against unrelated story lines to make the women look hysterical or crazy.
A former Bachelor producer, who also chose to remain anonymous to protect work opportunities, said she was not at all surprised by Kaufman’s reporting. “I’m sure there’s a lot of truth to a lot of it,” she says. “I definitely think on shows, they’ve had to cut back on how much alcohol they serve contestants because they’ve gotten in trouble, but certainly if someone’s loosened up, they’re more willing to do something, and that goes to what you’re saying about menstrual cycles as well.” (A Bachelor source says they have no record of producers keeping track of contestants’ menstrual cycles—and that they do not employ Frankenbiting to deceive contestants or audience members.)
As guilty as Frankenbiting makes producers feel, their emotions obviously pale in comparison to the people whose words are being manipulated. If a reality star pushes back against production, there’s often little they can do to change the outcome of how they’ll be portrayed. Such was allegedly the case for former Real Housewife of New York Carole Radziwill—a journalist and former producer herself who, over the course of her six seasons on the show, earned a reputation for calling out producer manipulation and resisting manufactured drama. On the show, she says, producers regularly panned the camera away from her face while shooting, then cut in audio from other scenes in service of the story line.
Radziwill says this treatment came to a head in her final season on the show, which centered on the demise of her longtime friendship with fellow housewife Bethenny Frankel, who, Radziwill suspects, worked with producers to realize the plot. “It’s as much about not putting in information as it is about putting in information,” Radziwill says. “At least at RHONY, it was more about the absence of dialogue.” (Bravo’s The Real Housewives of New York did not respond to a request for comment about Radziwill’s claims.)
At first, Radziwill was bothered that producers didn’t care to take her concerns seriously. (Alex Baskin, the president of Evolution Media, which produces many of Bravo’s West Coast shows including The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Vanderpump Rules, told me that he often purposely keeps his voicemail full, in order to prevent aggrieved cast members from leaving him messages). But she was relieved when she began to notice that savvy viewers seemed to pick up on all this, and took to social media to call out the show’s allegedly bad-faith editing. “The audience is pretty smart, and they’d tweet these things and I’d think, God, they’re so right on,” she says. “So the fact that they were so utterly confused about what went on between Bethenny and I—it signals a fake story. Production was trying to ram this story line through, and it didn’t quite make sense, because it wasn’t true. The truth rises to the surface. The truth is very easy to see.”
This assumes, of course, that viewers actually want the truth—or that ethics in reality television even matter all that much when compared to everything else going on in the world.
But as cynical as the industry may seem—especially in a culture where, as two producers told me, some contestants are only too happy to play prescribed roles, knowing a FabFitFun deal or other brand endorsement may be waiting on the other side of their villain edit—many producers and personalities alike still believe that reality television shouldn’t be exempt from the enforcement of ethical standards. Many producers also think that change for the better is possible without killing off the fun.
Part of the responsibility, though, might rest in the hands of viewers, who are ultimately the ones to decide which sorts of shows become the industry standard. “If we weren’t tuning in and watching, they wouldn’t be constantly churning out TV shows that potentially emotionally scar their participants,” says scholar Dan Udy, who is currently in the process of writing a book on Frankenbiting. “We’re all kind of implicated in a massive-level machine.”
One thing that might help—and that would be in line with the way reality stars tend to behave now anyway—is encouraging viewers to see them as actors, rather than variations on their offscreen selves. At the end of the day, they make their livings by appearing on camera. “I still feel like reality stars, a lot of them in general, have a lack of respect from the network or from certain people. [To] actors, they’re like, ‘Great job!’” notes Heidi Pratt. “And with reality TV sometimes, at least in my past and what I’ve experienced, they’re like, ‘Get em. Make ’em bleed.’”
Either way, the future of reality production and Frankenbiting in particular needs to be addressed—if only to protect the mental health of the industry’s performers and producers. “I think in terms of individuals, unfairly portraying them, and people not wanting to be portrayed in a way that is not true to who they are…I think it does matter,” says the former Bachelor producer. “But there’s also a larger issue because I don’t think everyone does get it. I think some people definitely get it, but sometimes you see controversies where people are really upset that somebody was shown in a certain way, and they can’t believe that this person was manipulated. They still don’t see what’s going on behind the scenes. I think there’s enough people who really don’t see that, that it sometimes begins to feel like reality—like real reality, you know what I mean? And that’s dangerous.”
This story has been updated.
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