Casting Put A Ring On It: CheatHab

Put A Ring On It: CheatHab, the new hit relationship series on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) and streaming on HBO Max, has the people talking. It has the internet buzzing. It’s provocative, complicated, and, yes, people keep calling it messy. Viewers in the comments on social media are drawing hard lines in the sand about what they would or wouldn’t do if it were them or their relationship. But what happens when the “mess” we’re watching is somebody’s real life?

Unlike traditional reality dating shows, the couples on CheatHab aren’t looking for love. They already found it. They come into the experience at a crossroads after infidelity, emotional or physical, has broken the trust in their relationships. With relationship expert Dr. Stacii Jae Johnson guiding them through the process, they have to decide whether what they built together is worth fighting for, or whether too much damage has been done, and they either decide to pursue the person they cheated with, or a connection with one of the single men or single women they are set up with.

In Episode 14 of Unscripted Untold, we asked whether we still watch reality dating shows because we believe in love or because we’re waiting for the crash-and-burn. This time, we’re looking at that question from the other side of the camera, before the audience picks sides and before somebody’s relationship gets flattened into a meme, a villain, or a hot take.

As Senior Casting Director and Talent Producer on Put A Ring On It: CheatHab, I sat across from these couples before audiences knew their names. I heard their stories before they became storylines and saw the scars before television put a frame around them. This time, Mike turns the questions on me as we unpack what casting sees that viewers don’t, what makes us believe there’s real love underneath the dysfunction, and why vulnerability matters more than perfection when real people agree to put the most complicated parts of their lives on television.

Audiences have also become more skeptical about what they see on reality television. We hear it all the time: Is this real? Did producers tell them to do that? And I get it. But sometimes the truth really is stranger than fiction. These couples came to us with real history, real love, real resentment, real infidelity, and real hurt. We didn’t manufacture their stories. Our job was to figure out how to tell them.

And then there’s that word: messy.

Why do predominantly Black reality shows and casts so often get reduced to the mess, while equally chaotic behavior elsewhere can be discussed through a wider vocabulary of complexity, dysfunction, or humanity? Who gets to be layered? Who gets grace? And how much of what we think we’re seeing comes from the people on screen, versus the cultural lens we carried into the room with us?

Because casting reality television isn’t about finding perfect people. Perfect people would probably make terrible television anyway. It’s about finding people willing to tell the truth about who they are, including the parts they feel shame about.

Behind every hot take, meme, comment, and “I would never put up with that” is something easy to forget:

These are real people. And when the cameras stop rolling, they still have to live with the choices we get to debate from our couch.

This week on Unscripted Untold, we’re going behind the casting of CheatHab, but maybe the bigger conversation is about us:

When somebody else’s real life becomes our entertainment, how much humanity do we allow them to keep?

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