Heidi’s first conversation with the other mother quickly escalated into a fight. Finally, the mother looked her in the eyes and said, “you are alone. Nobody cares about you.”
Heidi instantly knew that the show had used both families’ psych evals to locate sources of sensitivity and pain. They then exploited that pain to entertain audiences.
The producers had also cast and practically scripted the show, though the participants didn’t know it.
They had cast one family as the “bad family” and the other as the supposedly “good family.”
In a later video, Heidi expanded on these roles. “Producers would try to get my family to be mean to Tara,” she shared. But clarified that this effort was “never overt.”
She stayed awake at night, trying to find ways to avoid the fights producers planned for the following day.
But there were clear expectations for how each family would speak and behave, and producers often riled participants up off-camera to get them to engage in conflict during filming.
Those familiar with Wife Swap might remember the “house rules” that each family goes over at the beginning of the swap.
But these rules weren’t reflections of the family’s regular lives and were instead written by producers.
“You sign it. And producers force you to stick to what’s on the paper,” Heidi insisted. If the families did not follow this “script,” the show would re-film their scenes.
And any time they had to re-film, the families were liable to be sued for one million dollars. That’s right; if the families exercised their free will, spoke their minds, or left the set, the network could take them to court.