Shortly after we completed our circumnavigation, we got a call from a Hollywood production company. The person calling was the assistant to the producer and an avid boater. He had followed our website and thought that our travel stories were fascinating, so he had talked his boss into considering us for a reality TV show. As the assistant explained to us, the new trend in reality TV is not to put people in crazy contrived situations, but to find people who are doing interesting things and simply follow them around. Apparently, the main reason for this trend is it keeps production costs incredibly low. The big question he had for us was: were we up for it? Of course, we said yes.
Knowing that there are a lot of hoops that have to be jumped through to get something like this going, particularly in the current recession, we didn’t let ourselves get too excited about it. We only told a handful of people.
Over the last couple of months, we have gone through a several sets of interviews (including some psychological testing), and contract negotiations. We were grilled about how prepared we were for emergency situations, physically, psychologically and emotionally. We recounted our scary stories about the sunken sailboat, the Java Sea passage, and Stromboli. After each meeting, we expected a call saying “thanks, but no thanks,” but instead got calls saying “Let’s schedule the next meeting.”
When the formalities were completed, it was time to work on a pilot episode. The pilot is Continue reading →
