People love to ask reality TV producers one question.

“What’s the absolute worst thing you’ve seen on set?”

They always ask it like they’re hoping for something juicy, something messy enough to gossip about over drinks later. They want a catfight that got out of hand or a contestant who threw a drink at the camera, something shocking but ultimately harmless.

I used to answer with some sanitized story about a fistfight in a hot tub or a contestant who locked herself in the bathroom for two hours and wouldn’t come out. I’d tell it with a rueful smile and a “you wouldn’t believe what people will do for TV” attitude, and everyone would laugh and shake their heads and feel satisfied.

The real answer is Kira.

But to explain why, I have to go back to when I was still stupid enough to think I was one of the good guys.

I had just graduated from film school in Los Angeles, still paying off my student loans with a checking account that hovered somewhere between “barely fine” and “about to overdraft.” When I got hired as a production assistant on a major network dating show, it felt like winning the lottery. Not prestige television, sure, but still TV. Real, working television.

The head producer was a woman named Diane, and everyone spoke about her the way film students talk about Oscar-winning directors. She was famous in the industry for making hits. Unscripted content, unscripted drama, unscripted tears. People joked that if Diane walked into a room with twenty strangers and a camera, she could turn it into a season-and-a-half.

On my first day, she sat me down in her office. The blinds were half-closed, casting thin stripes of light across the framed posters of her past shows. She smiled at me like we were about to share an exciting secret.

“Our job is to give America a show worth watching,” she said. “Sometimes that means pushing people a little bit. You understand?”

I nodded way too quickly. Of course I understood. I wanted her to like me. I wanted to be a person she remembered when it came time to hire for the next tier up.

We had twenty women living in a mansion, competing for one guy who was objectively handsome and objectively boring. Diane called him “serviceable.” She said he didn’t matter anyway. “He’s a prop,” she told the story editors. “The women are the story.”

Last season, two contestants had gotten into a fight and one had ripped out the other’s eyebrow extension. Production plastered that clip all over promos. Diane liked to point to it during meetings.

“I want to top that,” she said. “We have to go bigger this season.”

I thought she was being metaphorical.

The first week, I noticed how much alcohol was everywhere. The bar in the common room never closed. Champagne at breakfast, cocktails at noon, tequila shots at midnight. Production assistants were told to refill glasses before they got low. If anyone said they’d had enough, we were supposed to coax them. “Just one more. You’re fine. You’re here to have fun.”

One night I pulled Diane aside and said, “Is this… a lot? I mean, from a liability standpoint?”

She laughed softly, like I’d said something cute.

“Drunk people make better television,” she said. “Reality TV 101.”

By week two, I was assigned to shadow one of the contestants—Kira.

She was twenty-five, with dark hair she kept twisting around her fingers when she was nervous. She was pretty in a quiet way, the kind of person you might not notice in a crowded bar but would remember the next day because of the way she listened when you talked. She was shy, kind, and constantly apologizing for taking up space.

Diane pulled me aside before I started working with her.

“Become her friend,” she said. “Get her to open up. Find out what makes her cry, what she’s insecure about. I need to know everything. Weaknesses, trauma, family stuff. Anything we can use.”

She said “use” like it was just another neutral production term.

So I did what I was told. I sat with Kira by the pool between shoots while the other women shrieked over the bachelor in the hot tub. I asked about her life back home, her parents, her job. She told me about her anxiety, about how she’d had panic attacks in college bad enough to send her to the ER. She told me she was on medication now and mostly stable.

“Did you bring your meds?” I asked.

Her face went tight.

“I did,” she said. “But when we checked in, someone from production took them. They said they’d hold them for me. They haven’t given them back.”

Something twisted in my stomach.

I wrote it all down in my notes and reported back to Diane at our afternoon check-in, because that was my job.

“We’ve got to go bigger,” Diane said, tapping my notebook. “If she has a history of anxiety, we need to put her in situations that push that.”

The next day, she announced a challenge.

The women would be speaking in front of a live audience about their “deepest vulnerabilities.” Public speaking, public exposure, bright lights, strangers. Every person who’d ever had a panic attack knows that setup intimately, even if they don’t have cameras pointed at them.

Kira walked onto that stage already shaking. I stood at the edge of the set, heart pounding, watching her grip the microphone like it was the only solid object in the room. She got two sentences into her speech before her breathing went shallow and fast. Her chest hitched. Her eyes went wild.

“I can’t—” she gasped, and then she folded in on herself.

She collapsed onstage.

A murmur went through the crowd. The host froze. The other contestants looked around in confusion and fear.

I moved without thinking, stepping onto the stage. “We need medics,” I shouted.

A hand closed around my arm hard enough to hurt.

“Let her finish the breakdown,” Diane said in my ear. “This is gold.”

I looked at her like she’d slapped me. “She can’t breathe.”

“The medic is right there,” she said. “Camera A, stay wide. Camera B, push in on her face. Don’t cut.”

Kira curled on the floor, hyperventilating, tears streaking her foundation. A sound tech crouched just off-frame, out of the shot but close enough to say they’d “been there.” The audience sat in horrified silence, which would later read as reverent on TV.

We rolled through the entire thing.

Afterward, Kira apologized to everyone.

“I’m so sorry,” she kept saying, her voice hoarse. “I ruined the challenge. I’m so sorry.”

She apologized to us.

We let her.

Week three, another contestant stopped me in the hallway, mascara smeared down her cheeks.

“I need to go home,” she said. “This place is destroying me. I can’t sleep. I can’t think. I’m having panic attacks every night.”

Relieved—actually relieved—I brought her to Diane, thinking this would be the line. We’d done something extreme; now we’d show we were responsible.

Diane pulled out the contestant’s contract and flipped to a highlighted paragraph.

“You see this?” she said, tapping the page with a French-manicured nail. “If you leave, you’re in breach. We’ll sue you for damages. Every penny you have and every penny you’ll ever make. Is that what you want?”

The girl stared at the paper, her face draining of color. She said she’d stay.

I watched her deteriorate a little bit more every day after that.

By week four, I was already having trouble sleeping. The schedule was brutal. We woke contestants at three in the morning for surprise dates. We kept them standing in yards of silk gowns in the cold for retakes of reaction shots. We dangled them emotionally between “you’re safe” and “you might go home tonight” for hours.

Kira took it the worst.

She’d lost so much weight her dresses hung off her shoulders. Her hands shook constantly. When the cameras weren’t on her, she wrapped her arms around herself, her stare fixed on some middle distance only she could see.

One afternoon, I tried to slip her half a sandwich during a break.

“You need to eat,” I said softly. “You’re going to pass out.”

She gave me a grateful, exhausted little smile and reached out for the food.

A voice cut through the hallway.

“If you undermine my production one more time,” Diane said from the doorway, “you’re fired. And I will make sure you never work in this industry again.”

Kira dropped her hand.

I threw the sandwich away.

Finale week, everything blurred into a haze of night shoots, confessional interviews, and late edits. Call time was 6 a.m. Every day ended long after midnight. Everyone was frayed, stitched together by caffeine and adrenaline and whatever cheap wine the art department hadn’t used for props.

Kira didn’t show up for her call time Monday morning.

At first, people made jokes about contestants oversleeping. I waited for her to come shuffling in, apologizing like always. She didn’t.

I went to her room with my clipboard under my arm, trying to be casual about the way my heart was thudding. I knocked.

“Kira? It’s me. You okay?”

Silence.

I knocked again, harder. Called her name.

Nothing.

We had spare keys for emergencies. I told myself this was an overabundance of caution as I slid the keycard into the slot.

The room was dim, curtains mostly closed. The bed was untouched. Her suitcase sat open on the chair, clothes spilling out like a still image from a packing tutorial.

The bathroom door was half-open.

I pushed it fully open and saw her.

Kira was lying on the cold tile, one arm stretched out, fingers curled toward nothing. Empty pill bottles were scattered near her hand. Her hair fanned around her head like someone had staged it that way for a shot, except no one had.

I dropped to my knees.

“Kira,” I said, voice too high, too small. I grabbed her wrist.

Her skin was cold.

That was the detail my brain stuck on, like a looping shot: the shock of cold skin under my fingers.

I screamed for help. A medic, producers, security. The hallway filled with bodies and radios and sharp, efficient voices. Someone pulled me back against the wall. Someone started chest compressions. Someone called 911.

They tried to revive her.

She was already gone.

I stood there with my back against the tile, watching the scene like it was happening on a screen. I remember thinking, absurdly, that the shot was too wide, that the lighting was wrong.

When they carried her body out on a stretcher, I lost it. I was sobbing, hands shaking so hard I couldn’t grip my clipboard. I watched Kira’s face disappear from view under a white sheet.

The ambulance pulled away, siren off.

After the chaos, after the police had taken statements and the network lawyers had appeared, I went to find Diane. I needed to believe that this, this, would finally be the moment we did something right.

She was in her office, on the phone with someone from the network. The door was cracked open. I stopped when I heard her voice.

“We can spin this as a tragic ending to the season,” she was saying. “The ratings will be incredible.”

My stomach turned.

She hung up, turned, and saw me.

“We need to shut down production,” I said. I sounded hysterical to my own ears. “We need to tell people what’s actually happening on this set. We need to—”

“Sit down,” she said.

I sat.

She turned her monitor toward me and pulled up a contract. My contract. Pages and pages of dense legal text scrolled under her cursor.

“You signed an NDA on your first day,” she said calmly. “You also signed a non-compete. If you say one word publicly about what happens here, the company will sue you for millions of dollars. You will lose everything, and you will never work in entertainment again. Do you understand?”

I stared at my own digital signature at the bottom of the page. My hands were trembling in my lap so hard I pressed them against my thighs.

“What about Kira?” I asked. “What about telling the truth about what killed her?”

“Kira signed a contract, too,” Diane said. “She knew what she was signing up for. This is reality television. Sometimes people can’t handle it.”

Something in me cracked, but not loud enough for anyone else to hear.

I nodded because it seemed like that was the only safe thing left to do.

When she dismissed me, I stood up too quickly and had to grab the edge of her desk to keep from collapsing. She didn’t notice. Or if she did, she didn’t care.

I stumbled down the hallway, past other producers watching footage like it was any other day, and made it to the bathroom just in time to throw up in the first stall. I stayed on my knees with my forehead pressed to the cold metal partition, my body shaking, my throat burning.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Kira on the bathroom floor. The empty bottles. The gray cast of her skin. The feeling of her cold wrist under my fingers.

The image replayed on an endless loop.

Later that afternoon, Diane called an emergency staff meeting. About twenty of us crammed into the conference room—camera operators, sound techs, assistant producers. The air felt thick.

Diane stood at the front of the room, arms folded, her expression composed.

“We’ve experienced a tragedy,” she began, voice soft and measured. “I know this is a difficult time for everyone.”

She went on to say that Kira had struggled with mental health issues long before coming on the show. She said that despite the support and resources production provided, Kira had “sadly succumbed to her illness.”

My jaw clenched.

She said there were mental health professionals available at all times. Lie. She said contestants had full access to their medications and that Kira had chosen not to take hers. Lie. She said the show prioritized contestant well-being. Lie, lie, lie.

Everyone in that room knew it.

No one said a word.

She reminded us we’d all signed NDAs. She talked about the importance of honoring our agreements. She said the network would release a statement and we were to direct all media inquiries to publicity.

“Any questions?” she asked.

Silence.

“Thank you for your professionalism,” she said.

The next morning, two people from the network flew in—crisis management consultants. They were perfectly put together in that corporate L.A. way. The woman’s hair looked like it had never met humidity. The man’s tie knot was so tight it had to hurt.

They gave us a three-hour training on how to talk about Kira’s death.

We practiced lines like, “We were deeply saddened by the loss, and our thoughts are with her family during this difficult time.” We were told to emphasize that contestants signed comprehensive contracts and were fully informed about the show’s format. We were told to mention “robust support systems” and “access to mental health professionals” whenever possible.

They handed out laminated cards with approved talking points. We tucked them into our badge lanyards and our back pockets and, in my case, the top drawer of my desk.

That night, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling until the sun came up. No sleep. Just Kira’s face floating behind my eyes. Every alternate timeline where I’d made a different choice. The day I reported her anxiety to Diane. The sandwich I didn’t let her eat. The panic attack I let them film.

If I’d quit. If I’d called someone. If, if, if.

I started having panic attacks of my own.

A few days later, someone mentioned casually that the network had decided to move forward with airing the season.

“They’re going to dedicate the finale to her,” one of the assistant producers said. “Special tribute segment. They think it’ll ‘honor her memory.’”

Honor.

We had six weeks of footage of Kira’s breakdown, her exhaustion, her fear, her collapse.

Honor.

Three days after that, Kira’s family released a short statement through a lawyer asking for privacy. It didn’t mention the show.

Not long after, I heard that the production company had sent them a settlement payment. The family signed an NDA. Legally, they couldn’t talk about the show’s practices or anything that might have contributed to their daughter’s death.

We had bought their silence, just like we’d bought mine.

Time blurred. I tried to talk to one of the camera operators, Mike, in the equipment room.

“Does any of this feel wrong to you?” I asked. “I mean… what we did to her?”

He closed his eyes for a second, like he was bracing for a blow.

“We all signed the same contracts,” he said. “I’ve got loans. I’ve got a kid. If I get blacklisted from this industry, I’m done. I feel bad, okay? But what are we supposed to do? It’s too late.”

He picked up an equipment bag and walked out. I stood alone between coils of cable and stacked tripods and realized everyone else was just as trapped as I was.

A few weeks later, Diane called me into an editing bay. On the monitors, Kira’s panic attack footage filled the screens.

The raw material had been transformed.

Slow-motion shots of her face as she tried to breathe. Close-ups of her shaking hands. Cutaways to other contestants looking horrified. Music swelled underneath, strings and piano designed to yank tears from viewers’ eyes.

They even added subtle sound design to make her breathing sound more ragged.

The collapse was framed like the climax of a scripted drama.

“This is what the show needed,” Diane said, smiling, eyes reflecting the flicker of the footage. “Make sure this goes in every promo. It’s going to hook people right away.”

When the season premiered two months later, I watched from my apartment because I couldn’t stomach going to the viewing party. My phone lit up with texts as soon as the ratings came in.

We’d blown past last season’s numbers.

By morning, we were trending. Entertainment sites called it “the most emotional season premiere in reality TV history.” Clips of Kira’s panic attack circulated online with hashtags and crying-face emojis.

Diane texted the production team: “Amazing work, everyone. The network just renewed us for two more seasons.”

I sat on my couch, laptop open to an article praising our “sensitive handling of a tragic situation,” and felt like I was watching the world from underwater.

The tribute episode at the end of the season was worse.

It opened with a montage of Kira’s “best moments”—her laughing in the pool, talking earnestly in confessionals, then spiraling into the breakdown, cut with slow piano and soft lighting. The host gave a speech about how she’d “touched all our hearts.” Contestants cried to camera about how special she was. The network donated to a mental health charity in her name and promoted the link on their website.

Social media applauded them for “raising awareness.”

Diane started doing interviews about mental health in reality television. She went on morning shows talking about the importance of “supporting contestants” and “taking their well-being seriously.” She wore a somber expression and spoke with a catch in her throat when she mentioned Kira’s name.

I watched the interviews and felt my sense of reality tilt, just a little. She had personally authorized confiscating Kira’s medication. She had personally told me to let her “finish the breakdown.” Now she was being praised for her compassion.

Three months after Kira died, Diane called me into her office and offered me a promotion.

“Associate producer,” she said. “You’ve proven you can build rapport and extract great content. You’re good at this.”

The salary bump nearly doubled my pay. I moved out of my studio into a one-bedroom in a nicer neighborhood. I bought real furniture instead of Craigslist leftovers.

The money felt like blood.

I took the job.

Because I didn’t know what else to do.

The company made us attend grief counseling the next week. A therapist set up in an empty office. She had kind eyes and a gentle voice.

“How are you coping?” she asked.

I wanted to tell her everything. I wanted to say, We took away her meds. We pushed her until she broke. We filmed it and turned it into a storyline. I wanted to confess that every day I woke up, I felt like there was wet cement in my lungs.

Instead, I said, “It’s been hard, but I’m managing.”

She gave me pamphlets about grief and told me her door was always open.

I left feeling even more alone than when I’d walked in.

Time moved on. Production never really stops in our world—it just lurches from one show to the next. I helped cast new seasons. I helped design new “emotional challenges.” I watched new contestants walk into the mansion, eyes bright, hearts open, ready to “put themselves out there.”

We kept the same tactics: constant alcohol, sleep deprivation, isolation, manipulation.

Without saying it out loud, everyone understood that what happened to Kira was not a warning. It was a lesson in risk management.

We still confiscated medications. We just tightened our documentation. We still pushed contestants past their limits. We just made sure the contracts were more detailed.

At some point that year, I got a message request on social media from a woman with Kira’s last name.

She said she was Kira’s mom.

She wrote: I know you worked on the show. I’m just trying to understand what her last weeks were like. I would be grateful for anything you can tell me.

My hand shook as I read it.

I stared at that message for ten minutes, the words blurring. Then I blocked her and deleted the request.

The guilt lodged under my ribs like a piece of shrapnel.

Months later, we were back in production on a new season with a new cast. One contestant, Veronica, reminded me of Kira so much it hurt to look at her. Same shy sweetness. Same hopeful eyes.

Diane loved her immediately.

“She’s perfect,” she said. “Tons of emotional depth.”

I was assigned to work with Veronica. At first, I tried to be gentler. I asked softer questions. I didn’t poke her open wounds as hard.

Diane noticed.

“Don’t go soft on me,” she hissed after a production meeting. “If you can’t do your job, I’ll find someone who will. Get better content from her, or you’re replaceable.”

So I pushed harder.

By the time Veronica had her first panic attack on camera during a group challenge, the system was running itself. I tried once to step in and call for the cameras to cut. Diane’s hand tightened around my arm like a vise.

“If you undermine my production again, you’re fired,” she said. “And I will enforce every clause in that non-compete. You won’t work in this town for two years. Do you understand?”

I understood.

Veronica did not die.

She made it through the season, smiling thinly when the cameras were rolling and going blank when they weren’t. At the wrap party, she stood by the window, holding a glass of wine she wasn’t drinking. Her eyes were empty in a way I recognized.

I lasted about three minutes standing next to her before I had to walk away.

Around that time, a former contestant from another dating show—Jennifer—published an article online. She described being manipulated by producers, of having food withheld, of being kept awake for thirty-six hours before an elimination. She said they’d taken her anxiety medication when she arrived “for legal reasons.”

Her story went viral.

I watched the industry response in real time.

Two days later, the network sent her a cease-and-desist letter. They threatened to sue for breach of NDA and defamation. Within a week, the article was gone. Her social media posts disappeared. Then an apology appeared.

She said she’d been “emotional” and “misremembered events.” She praised production for their professionalism.

I knew the pattern by then. They’d paid her. They’d made her sign more paperwork.

The lesson was clear: if you spoke up, the system crushed you.

By the time I’d been in reality TV for five years, I was a producer with a reputation. My shows delivered “great TV.” I knew how to identify vulnerable contestants during casting, how to push them just enough to break on camera but not enough to get us sued—most of the time.

I also had a bottle of vodka in my desk drawer at work and another under my bathroom sink at home.

The first time I poured a drink for myself at 10 a.m., it felt like crossing a line. By the third week of doing it, it just felt like part of the job.

My friends from film school noticed something was wrong. They stopped inviting me to things after the fourth canceled dinner, the third time I showed up drunk to a birthday party and left without saying goodbye.

On paper, I was doing great. I’d been promoted twice. I had a nice condo with hardwood floors and a balcony overlooking a tree-lined street. I drove a car with leather seats and a decent sound system. My 401(k) looked good.

Inside, I was hollow.

I tried therapy again. A different doctor, a different office, the same problem: every time I got close to saying what had really happened, I saw legal language in my head. NDA. Non-compete. Damages.

So I kept it vague.

“Work stress,” I said. “Deadlines. The industry.”

The therapist nodded and said it sounded like burnout. She prescribed medication for anxiety and depression. The pills helped me get through the day without shaking. They did nothing to silence the image of Kira on the bathroom floor.

The longer I stayed, the more entrenched I became.

At year six, I was producing a dating show when one of the contestants came to me during a break, eyes red, hands trembling. She told me she was thinking about hurting herself. She showed me scars on her wrist. I followed protocol and reported it to the showrunner.

He watched footage of her breakdowns three times, pausing on frames where her face was streaked with tears.

“The footage is incredible,” he said. “She stays. We’ll keep an eye on her.”

She survived the show, barely. Six months later, I heard she’d attempted suicide. The company settled with her family and buried the story in paperwork.

I got promoted to executive producer after that season.

That meant I was now the one sitting in an office watching footage and deciding whose suffering was worth more screen time.

I was Diane.

I trained junior producers. I sat on panels at film schools, telling wide-eyed students that reality TV was “a powerful medium for storytelling” and “a great place to start your career.” A girl in the front row told me she admired my work. I smiled and gave her my card.

Back on set, I mentored a new production assistant who reminded me painfully of myself my first year. Eager, hopeful, convinced she could make “meaningful television.” I assigned her to a contestant who’d mentioned an eating disorder in her intake interview.

“Become her friend,” I told the assistant. “Find out what triggers her, what she’s insecure about.”

“Is that so we can make sure she’s supported?” the assistant asked.

“Yes,” I lied smoothly. “Exactly.”

She came back with pages of notes about trauma, about the exact words that made the contestant cry. She thought she was helping. I passed those notes to the head producer, who used them to design challenges that would push the contestant toward unraveling on camera.

The assistant’s questions tapered off over the next month. She stopped asking why we poured drinks at 10 a.m. She stopped flinching when we woke contestants at three in the morning for “surprise honesty circles.” She started suggesting manipulations of her own.

She was learning.

I watched her slide down the same slope I had.

Eight years after Kira died, I had three shows in production and two more in development. I’d signed a lucrative development deal for a new format built around aspiring entrepreneurs competing for investment. I bought a house in a “good” neighborhood. My name appeared regularly in trade publications, paired with adjectives like “innovative” and “fearless.”

I also drank until I passed out most nights, because it was the only way to sleep without seeing Kira’s face.

One night, drunk on my couch, I found Kira’s mother’s social media page. She’d posted a photo of Kira as a kid—missing front teeth, grinning at the camera, a birthday cake in front of her. The caption talked about her “beautiful spirit” and “kind heart.” She wrote about how much she missed her.

I read it three times and cried for the first time in years.

Not just for Kira, but for the fact that I knew exactly what had destroyed that beautiful spirit and kind heart, and I had gone on to replicate the same destruction for other people, again and again.

People ask me now, at industry parties or during Q&As, what the worst thing is I’ve ever seen on set.

They’re expecting a story they can gasp at and then forget.

I never tell them about walking into that bathroom and finding Kira on the floor. I never tell them about the coldness of her skin or the way her hair splayed against the tile. I never tell them about the laminated talking points or the settlement checks or the way her face was turned into marketing material.

Instead, I tell them some story about a drunken fight or a meltdown over hairspray.

Because the real answer isn’t just Kira.

The real answer is what happened after.

It’s the way her death taught the industry to hire better lawyers instead of changing its practices. It’s the way I stayed, year after year, and trained other people to do what Diane trained me to do. It’s the contestants whose anxiety we amplified, whose trauma we mined, whose breakdowns we cut into sizzle reels.

It’s the quiet knowledge that when a contestant looks into my eyes and asks, “Has anyone ever gotten seriously hurt doing these shows?” I can lie without even thinking about it.

The worst thing I’ve ever seen on set is not a single moment. It’s a system.

It’s the cameras still rolling while someone falls apart, and the producers calculating how it will play over dramatic music. It’s the NDAs and non-competes that lock everyone in place. It’s the way the audience cries at the tribute packages and then tunes in again next week, hungry for more.

It’s Kira, and every person like her, and every person like me.

This is reality television.

This is what it costs.