Matt Baume

My guest this week on The Sewers of Paris is Caleb Roehrig, author of young adult mysteries and the occasional romance. Caleb had always wanted to be an author, but life intervened and he found himself living in LA, working as a producer on reality TV shows. He didn’t realize it at the time, but tha

There was a nude photo scandal that nearly stopped The Real World from ever making it to air -- early in Season 1, over half the cast threatened to walk away from the project because of how the producers were treating them. I've got the behind-the-scenes story in this week's bonus video ... plus the

Hello there! Imagine it's 1992, when being an openly gay person is tremendously dangerous in most of America -- and you've volunteered to have your big queer life broadcast to millions of homes. Norm from season 1 of The Real World had absolutely no idea what he was signing up for, but he knew enoug

Hello there! I'm recovering from some back trouble this week so I'm sliiiiiightly woozy on muscle relaxers... but I won't let that stop me from making a bonus video! This week, I have the real life story of how MTV created The Real World in a desperate attempt to prove that they were still cool, and

Hello there! I'll have a great big new video for you next weekend about An American Family, but in the mean time here's some more fun stories about another unscripted show, Candid Camera. We'll start with the time the producer was involved in an airplane hijacking that was assumed at first to be a p

Hello there! For this week's bonus video, we're going way back to the 50s for a peek at the show that would lay the groundwork for the groundwork of reality television. Candid Camera was a fun, lighthearted show (created by a terrible tyrant of a man) that was among the first to experiment with came

My guest this week was present for some of the earliest days of what we now recognize as reality TV — he helped produce Gay Riviera, a 2001 Bravo series about queer dating. Kevin Haddad never expected to find himself behind the scenes of a series that helped developed the rules of reality television

Where do you find the nerve to stand up for yourself? My guest this week is Brian Moreno, who discovered a big wide world of gay culture in his conservative town. By day he was a shy nerd, by night a nightlife photographer documenting wild queer parties — at one point helping to throw a gathering th

Do you always NEED to dream big, or is it sometimes ok to just be happy with what you've got? My guest this week has some experience when it comes to achieving big dreams -- Scott Flanary was the winner of Season 29 of The Amazing Race, which had been a goal for pretty much all of his adult life. So

How do you think you'd come across if someone made your life into a reality show? My guest this week is Ross Semple, who grew up in a sort of fishbowl where the presence of family was constant and privacy didn't exist. And so naturally the round-the-clock surveillance of reality shows resonated with