TV shows discovering it's hard to find unusual contestants

It's one thing to find someone who wants to be a millionaire. It's another to find someone who will strap herself into a polygraph machine and tell 23 million home viewers plus a live studio audience, including her husband, whether she thinks her troubled marriage will survive another five years.

Television producers are facing unforeseen challenges in casting this season's new crop of oddball reality shows, some rushed into production because of a shortage of scripted material created by the Hollywood writers' strike. Even though the strike has been resolved, the networks' appetite for reality shows is likely to continue. Ratings are relatively high for some shows in the genre, and they are cheap to make compared to scripted programming.

But there's a problem: Great oddballs are hard to find. As reality shows with more straightforward premises, such as "Survivor" and "American Idol," have shown their age in recent years, the broadcast and cable networks have reached for more outlandish concepts to keep viewers tuning in. The new shows call for large casts of mothers, fathers, children, dogs, D-list celebrities, jovial fat people, ripply muscled athletes, exhibitionists, bisexuals, sheriffs-in-training and self-identified "rednecks." They're all willing to air their deepest secrets on national TV -- in the case of that married woman, on Fox's new hit series "The Moment of Truth" -- for a shot at some prize money and a few minutes of fame.

To fill all the spaces on these shows, the small group of TV producers who specialize in casting reality programs have begun adopting unconventional strategies. They troll social networking sites to find teens; call the parents of child athletes and scholars featured in small hometown newspapers; and interview potential contestants' family members, ex-spouses and high school teachers to feel out their personal histories and psychological profiles.

Because viewers demand on-screen romance -- and it isn't always so easy to orchestrate -- the producers of CBS' "Big Brother" series added another layer to their casting process this year. They gave potential contestants a "love match profile" and then cast the contestants in pairs based on people who were closely matched.

Independent casting agent Lynne Spillman, who casts some of CBS' most popular shows as well as some of its newer, more experimental ones, including the forthcoming "America's Top Dog," said that to find Midwestern working mothers, one of the most elusive demographics in reality TV, she once posed as a prospective home-buyer online. There, she was able to meet and court real-estate agents to appear on her shows.

Spillman is casting six programs right now -- three that have been announced, three in development. Known by some in Hollywood as the "godmother of reality TV," she helped invent the American version of the genre, getting her start casting the first generations of MTV's reality shows, including "Singled Out," and going on to help cast CBS' "Survivor" and "The Amazing Race."

"Our methods for finding people have really changed," Spillman said. "I used to look for hot young people to be on dating shows. Now I'm looking for dogs and children."

The latter has been a particularly daunting task for the show "Kid Nation," which recently completed its first season and which calls for a cast of 40 children younger than age 16. The first "Kid Nation," which plopped youngsters into a ghost town, drew criticism this fall from parents of several of the show's young participants, who said supervision had been light and children had drunk bleach and been burned by hot kitchen grease. CBS denies any wrongdoing. In casting the show, Spillman has adopted "research-based methods," including scanning local newspapers.

"You can't walk up to a little kid in the park and say, 'Hey, wanna be on reality TV?' " she said.

The demands for contestants haven't just gotten higher; the shows themselves have gotten more complex, creating a run on guests who can handle the intellectual, psychological and physical rigors of reality television. "I deal with trying to find people who are smart and have a personality. That's really tough," said Neal Konstantini, the casting director for a number of NBC reality shows, including game shows "Deal or No Deal" and "One vs 100."

Konstantini got his start as a contestant on a reality dating show, and then moved over to the production side. He has done casting for "The Bachelor," "The Amazing Race," "Big Brother" and "Survivor," among others. He spent the summer on a six-week, nine-city casting tour, during which he and a staff of producers interviewed more than 70,000 prospective game-show contestants.

NBC producers have begun to employ rigorous tests to whittle down possible candidates, all of whom are clamoring for a chance to win millions. Scott St. John, the executive producer of "Deal or No Deal," said Konstantini and his staff conduct extensive "emotional investigations" of prospective contestants, including interviews with the person, friends and family, former and current spouses, teachers, colleagues and so on.

"We're looking for people with high self-esteem, bordering on narcissism," said Howard Schultz, the creator and executive producer of "The Moment of Truth," a new Fox show that debuted in January.

There is a premium on genuine narcissism. David Lyle, the president of News Corp.'s cable channel Fox Reality, was looking for Teflon egos when he worked on casting the network's newest reality show, "Battle of the Bods." The show's premise involves taking five attractive young people, putting them in a room together and asking them to guess how a roomful of others would rank them in order of attractiveness. Lyle said his chief challenge has been in finding people who are not too polished in front of the camera. "Ideally, you want to find someone who only thinks about something after they've said it," he said.