“That’s a great wide shot,” Chris Daly, a reality TV producer for over 17 years, says generously. “That shot helps the cast not feel like they’re being watched, and the audience like it’s not a planned shot. It’s not a set scene, it feels more ‘real’.” I’m playing the demo for The Crush House, a reality-TV-inspired dating game developed by Nerial and published by Devolver Digital, and I’m trying to appease a specific kind of audience: voyeurs. Daly is watching me play via Discord stream, and chiming in with his expert knowledge as I attempt to craft a hit series.
The Crush House puts you in the role of Jae Jimenez Jung, a producer with a handheld camera capturing the lives of four young hotties living in a colorful Malibu mansion. You choose the cast, decide when to run ads, and cleverly craft your camera angles to satisfy a wide variety of viewers from wine moms to voyeurs to cinephiles. Though you can’t control how the cast behaves in The Crush House, you’ll have to pay attention to the live feed of audience reactions to ensure that you catch the best, juiciest drama, or else your show could get canceled.
Daly has been involved in reality television for so long, he could write a book on it. He’s worked on hit series like Jersey Shore, Project Runway, Big Brother, Ex on the Beach, and Floribama Shore—all shows that I have intimate knowledge of thanks to my decades-long obsession with the low-brow medium. He’s the perfect person to be in the passenger seat of my Crush House playthrough: when the cast gathers around the Crush Juice-themed water cooler, he offers some notes on branding (“You try and stay away from any branding or labels, especially if it’s a trashier show.”); when party girl Priscilla and homebody Charli get in a slap fight, he goes on a lengthy monologue about the real-life rules of reality TV fisticuffs (“If it’s a show where there’s going to be fighting, security will be on set, or a producer would go in and break it up. If it’s a show with a man and a woman fighting, the guy would be kicked out immediately. A show like Big Brother where it’s just a cast in the house and there’s nobody in there and we go over like the loudspeaker, ‘separate, break it up;.’); and when Emile lights up a cigarette, he scoffs (“We don’t actually show cast members smoking”).
Though I only make it to day four in the Crush House before failing to appease three different viewer groups and thus getting the series canceled, Daly and I have a blast comparing the in-game drama with our favorite reality TV moments—the unabashed trashiness of Rock of Love with Bret Michaels, the vindication of Vanderpump Rules’ Ariana Madix hosting Love Island, and his forever love for the Kardashian family. We coo over the vibrant decor of the Malibu mansion, and giggle when the game’s plant-loving viewers demand we get more shots of the garden, or when the wine moms lose their shit over a tight shot of Emile’s ass. I’m bummed that the in-game show was canceled because I wanted us to squeal over more drama, or cackle even louder when I zoom the camera in on Emile’s juicy butt while he’s in the midst of arguing with the anti-social Alex. “I kind of wanna go back and play it myself so I can see if I can get the shots that they want,” Daly says as the game ends. The Devolver PR rep promises to get him a code.
I played for over an hour and I didn’t even get to uncover The Crush House’s dark, twisted secret. I guess that’ll have to be on the next episode…
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