“Take a breath and go ahead,” Robert Galinsky says, eyeing his student from across a Zoom screen. Dylan, a 45-year-old from Phoenix, Arizona, dressed in a light blue button-down, exhales and begins to explain for the third time why he wants to search for true love on the Netflix reality-dating series Love Is Blind.
Dylan says he has prioritized his real estate career over romance, and dating apps have failed to produce lasting love. But when he talks about building a connection sight unseen, or “from the inside out,” as he puts it, Galinsky stops him. “That’s killer—we want to save that phrase,” he says, advising Dylan to shave his three-minute explanation down to a sound-bite-worthy chunk. After all, reality TV narratives are built by producers and editors (he cleverly refers to them as “preditors”) who favor pithy catchphrases.
Dylan has only made it past the first round of Love Is Blind casting so far, but is already in his third session of 10 with Galinsky, a self-described “presentation coach” who has guided hopeful clients to spots on shows, ranging from Project Runway to Survivor, since 2007. That was when Argentinian dog groomer Jorge Bendersky became the first reality TV hopeful to contact Galinsky, who also coaches TEDx presenters, corporate executives, and students at The Juilliard School (he’s currently advising jazz musicians on how to introduce the historical context of their music before a performance). With Galinsky’s guidance, Bendersky became a top-three finalist on the short-lived Animal Planet series Groomer Has It, and the New York Reality TV School was born.
Like many of those who have sought Galinsky’s services, ranging from Millionaire Matchmaker and Bad Girls Club alum to Chelsea Clinton and 50 Cent, Dylan wants to put his best foot forward onscreen. Think of it as hiring a private tutor before the SAT—with the knowledge that millions of eyeballs will be watching your exam. (The cost of Galinsky’s one-on-one services for reality TV coaching begins at roughly $300 per session, with rates increasing for more specific training once a client is cast on their desired show.) Galinsky, who has a background in acting, treats reality TV as improvisational theater. During the session that Dylan has allowed me to observe (provided I omit his last name), Galinsky quizzes his client on dating deal-breakers, urging him to use the stating of any potential red flags as an opportunity to accentuate his own strengths. What if, as Galinsky posits, a suitor is turned off by someone who is rude to waitstaff, for instance? Dylan immediately discusses his time as a bartender in college. Galinsky smiles approvingly; in one answer, Dylan has both reassured his future wife and revealed a personal detail that will bolster his overall storyline.
“Fakes are the first ones kicked out of the house and voted off the island,” Galinsky says. “So if you know thyself, you’re going to be that much more powerful….You have to have an immense amount of self-awareness to be on these shows, to understand how you’re not going to let someone bulldoze you…so that you become the funniest, most pathetic meme that’s out there.” To get a better sense of how he can best orient a client toward reality TV stardom, Galinsky asks them to provide their origin, scar, and aspiration: where they’re from, what shaped them, and their postshow hopes. “A girl [once] walked in and said, ‘I want to be able to live in the Real World house and drink everybody under the table,’” he recalls. “After two sessions she said, ‘I’m quitting the class because I realize now all I really wanted to do was say “fuck you” to my dad by getting drunk in front of everyone.’”
Mining personal trauma is also central to the methodology of Chad Kultgen, the Los Angeles–based coauthor of How to Win The Bachelor: The Secret to Finding Love and Fame on America’s Favorite Realty Show and cohost of the Game of Roses podcast, who began coaching contestants for The Bachelor and its spin-offs back in 2021. “Reality television and influencing are the same thing, at this point, as our American politics—it’s all one lie,” he says. “How long can you maintain the lie of the persona you’ve created? And I love helping people do it.” Kultgen gets clients, who have included Taylor Hale, the first Black woman to win Big Brother, to establish what he’s branded a “personal tragedy card”—the sob story contestants share on camera. “You’re going to be stacked up against people who have death in the family or addiction. Is ‘I didn’t get into my favorite sorority in college’ really going to get you on the show?” he asks. “And if not, how do we spin something to make it more likely that you will?”
When a reality show hopeful contacts Kultgen, he first scans their social media, weeding out candidates as a producer might. A prospective contestant’s Instagram account should mimic the look of the show they want to be on—if that’s The Bachelor, they should be wearing cocktail dresses that call to mind the rose ceremony or pool-party-worthy swimwear. Each season, the same slots need to be filled: the villain, the girl next door, the fool, the professional—think lawyer or doctor. After clients fill out a short questionnaire, Kultgen meets with prospective contestants to determine the persona that makes them the most castable. “The hardest conversation to have is always, ‘I think you’re going to be the villain,’” he says with a laugh. “No one thinks they’re the villain.” Using his assessment, Kultgen helps write applications and edit video auditions, and he has even written love songs and poetry for his clients to perform should their group date call for it. That’s a particular thrill for Kultgen, who is a novelist and screenwriter—and charges nothing for his reality TV coaching services, saying he does the work “for the thrill of playing reality TV like a video game.” “It literally is like writing a TV show except it’s reality,” he says, his eyes lighting up with joy. “Whenever people are like, ‘No, but it’s real,’ in the back of my head, I’m just like, You have no idea. I’m literally writing dialogue for these scenes.”
Then the coaches watch the fruits of their labor play out on TV—the good and the bad. “I don’t have kids, but I would say this is the closest I’ve ever felt to being a parent,” Kultgen says, “sending my little player off into this game.” Galinsky once accompanied a client onstage at Shark Tank to instill extra confidence when he pitched his empanada business. But he cringed when a client on the Netflix real estate series Owning Manhattan failed to bring up her broken marriage during a key moment of conflict. “It was the most poignant moment to bring that up and get the audience on her side. It was the perfect time to bring up the broken marriage and why her heart hurts so much…but she wouldn’t do it,” Galinsky says with a sigh. “So she lost what might have been more camera time, and she lost…a certain amount of empathy and understanding that people would have given her. She would have lost some of her privacy, but…she might’ve harvested more fruits from that had she gone in that direction.”
As Tina Fey once wisely said, “authenticity is dangerous and expensive.” Disclosing something like marital strife on reality TV can bring reward—or ruin. When Galinsky began coaching in the mid-2000s, most clients sought “fame for the sake of fame,” with “no endgame,” he recalls. “Now there’s way more intention. People know they can make a living out of it.” The proof is in the numbers: According to Deloitte’s 19th annual digital media trends survey, released earlier this year, 56% of Gen Z’ers and 43% of millennials feel that social media content is more relevant to them than traditional entertainment—and much of that relationship gets monetized on social media. About 40% of both Gen Z’ers and millennials follow reality stars or athletes after seeing them on TV, Deloitte found, which makes said reality stars’ time on these shows incredibly lucrative.
Even the villains have softened their approaches, keeping their personal brands in mind. “The ones who spit in somebody’s face or slap them—those things don’t add to your portfolio,” Galinsky says. But there will always be a place for scandal in the landscape that catapulted Donald Trump to the presidency. Galinsky has consulted for a few New York–based politicians, one of whom has had a public downfall. This person has yet to appear on reality TV, but Galinsky suspects their time is coming. “The vast majority of producers of reality TV shows have no scruples,” Galinsky says. “So the more disgusting and raunchy that some people can be, the more likely and happily they are put into place.”
So are reality stars born, or can they be made with the help of an experienced coach? Like professional athletes, some are “naturally gifted,” while others will “just fucking outwork you,” Kultgen says, noting that he thinks the genre’s LeBron James is a caddish Australian playboy from Netflix’s Too Hot to Handle, who will soon headline his own dating series on the streamer, Let’s Marry Harry, produced by Alex Cooper. “Harry Jowsey has created a fictional version of himself, like a pro wrestling identity,” Kultgen says. “I don’t think it’s any coincidence he has the biggest social media following of any male reality-dating player.” That’s over 4 million Instagram followers—more than those of the last six Bachelors combined.
Those numbers—and the existence of reality coaching itself—suggest that the genre isn’t going anywhere, even if shows would rather deny that such mentoring occurs. (Galinsky says he’s signed multiple NDAs with series that have privately enlisted coaching services for their players.) “It’s actually part of the fabric of this country,” Galinsky says. “For better or worse.”
Dylan from Phoenix feels freer since starting his preshow training. And if he does meet the love of his life, he has no qualms about divulging how he prepared. “I don’t think that would be something that I could hide,” he explains. There are more dire fates than receiving whatever judgment awaits him. “To get on that show and not find anybody,” Dylan says, “that’s kind of my biggest fear.”
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