Is 'Below Deck' scripted? From real crew to 'difficult' guests, how Bravo manages to create drama
'Below Deck,' which premiered on Bravo in 2013, is now in its 10th season. Audiences have speculated about how much of the series is scripted and how much of the drama is real.
'Below Deck' is about more than simply wealthy individuals enjoying exotic and expensive excursions around the world. While the charter guests play an important role in the show, it also follows a youthful, cosmopolitan crew that is either there to advance their careers in the yachting business or to wrangle their way into a brief holiday. Naturally, there have been several boatmances gone wrong, nasty and entitled guests and a strong captain at the helm to navigate the treacherous waters. When casting 'Below Deck,' producers want the best crew possible to maximize drama potential.
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What facets of the program are true?
In an interview with BravoTV.com, executive producer Courtland Cox claimed that when they were casting for the first season of 'Below Deck', many yachties were hesitant to join the show. "Initially, it was very hard to get yacht crew members to commit to doing the show because it was an unknown entity," he stated, adding, "People didn’t know what Below Deck was."
Thankfully, some individuals in the yachting industry have overcome their anxiety about appearing on the show and continue to work on yachts long after their 15 seconds of fame had expired.
While fans like witnessing the unusual and unpleasant charter guests that visit the boats, they may have questioned whether they were planted by production to generate a reaction from the crew. Despite the fact that production vets charter passengers and put them through a thorough interview procedure, they have no influence over their conduct on board. "I think the guests that come on and have an amazing time, and you look at them as a producer and go, 'I want to live that life,'" Courtland said of those charting the ships. "Those are the guests I love seeing."
According to the creators, some of the show's most shocking moments are completely unscripted. As Courtland told viewers on Bravo.com, all the instances you couldn't stop thinking about are true, to the point where the staff had to reroute their plans to fit the circumstances. "That’s the kind of thing that keeps me from coming back to the show," Courtland told the outlet, adding, "Every season, there are five or six moments that so completely engage me and so suck me in that I’m like, ‘This is why Below Deck is an amazing show that you can’t do anywhere else.'"
Among the most shocking moments for the production team were Kat Held sneaking off the boat in 'BD' Season 1, discovering Malia and Adam knew each other in Season 2 of 'Med', Rocky and Eddie secretly hooking up in the laundry room in Season 3 of 'BD' (which prompted production to add cameras there), and Ashton Pienaar going overboard in Season 6 of 'BD', spurring one of the cameramen to put down his camera and save the deckhand's life.
Ben Robinson, one of the program's cast members, stated in an interview with the Mirror in 2020, "It’s a TV show, they like drama, and they like relationships. Real yachting, you don’t focus on the small, dramatic snippets. Everybody is just trying to do their best. With a lot of these people, there isn’t much respect of rank. That wouldn’t happen normally on a yacht."
In a New York Times piece, Noah Samton, Bravo's senior vice-president of the current production, talked more about how the show worked, particularly when it comes to initiating drama. He reportedly said, "People who aren’t on TV are pretty good at keeping drama behind closed doors. We’re really good at finding the people who are going to wear it on their sleeves."
An interview with Capt Lee Rosbach, the actual captain of the M/Y Cuor di Leone, the yacht depicted in Season 1, is included in an article in The Triton, a publication on boat captains and crews. He said that the real-life first officer and engineer of the boat remained aboard to run it, while the rest of the crew was made up of individuals from other ships. And these individuals have varying levels of experience. Rosbach noted that this caused problems during filming. "The producers of the show wanted to show the long hours and the stress of yachting, but most of that was caused by the crew being inept. On a 50 m charter boat, they were all way over their heads. A couple of them tried really hard and they might have made good entry-level crew. I’m worried people will think this is what happens on a 50 m charter yacht," he reportedly said.
He added, "But it’s TV, you can put as much lipstick on it as you want, and you can call it a reality show, but it’s entertainment. It’s not made in a documentary fashion to reflect what it’s really like. Why everyone takes it so seriously is beyond me."
Rebecca Taylor, the show's co-executive producer, was also interviewed by the publication. She said that the crew was assembled in this manner because, "The original crew was perfect, but in the television world, there’s all kinds of reasons you can’t do that. It’s almost impossible to find a real functioning crew and step on with cameras and say go. Just because you have the perfect crew doesn’t mean you don’t have a convicted felon or someone with anger issues who’s going to punch the cameraman. All that matters to us in TV."
Linda P. Jones, a charter guest from Season 1 of 'Med' and Season 6 of 'BD,' detailed her time onboard the My Seanna during the shooting in a long blog post. She talked about the personnel, the meals and a fight between some of the cast members below deck that one of the guests overheard. Captain Lee's sense of humor, which she claims was deleted from her episode, was one thing she wished the cameras had shown more of. She added, "Captain Lee is every bit as funny, charming, and smart as he appears on the show. He's the real deal."
The crew receives an unrealistic amount of money in tips
While the tip meetings at the conclusion of each charter are genuine, given the nature of the program, the amount of money they receive isn't quite true, as former cast member Kate Chastain explained to Entertainment Tonight in October 2019. "On a yacht of that size, [a good tip] would be $5,000 a person for seven days of work," she stated. "Our charters are a little bit shorter, just so we can make the show. But everything else is the same… we usually get around $2,500, $2,000. Anything less than $1,000 would be depressing, which sounds crazy, doesn’t it?"
Another fictitious detail, is how the captain receives the tip. While the crew does form a line at the end of each charter to return the guests to shore, the envelope handoff is solely for cameras.
The bulk of the boats on the original 'Below Deck' utilize nicknames, most likely to safeguard their reputations after the season ends. According to yachterchartfleet.com, just one boat from the original series used its genuine name on-screen, My Seanna from Season 6. The other four names in the program have unusual names: Lumiere (Honor, Season 1), Rhino (Ohana, Season 2), Mustang Sally (Eros, Season 3), and BG (Valor, Seasons 4, 5 and 7).
‘Below Deck’ Season 10 airs every Monday at 8 pm ET/PT only on Bravo.