How Love Island and Big Brother find their casts

Let's jump into Unscripted Updates, where I discuss what's happening in the world of reality TV news.

First up today is an upcoming memoir called In the Shadow of Eight, Surviving the Reality of My Childhood by Colin Gosselin.

You might recognize that last name as...

You know, as the last name of the stars of the show, John and Kate Plus Eight from TLC.

And Colin is one of the kids.

He's now 22 and written a book about, as the subtitle suggests, surviving being on a reality TV show as a kid.

I'm looking forward to reading this and also hearing what he has to say about that experience especially of being a child reality TV star.

We obviously heard from many child scripted TV and film stars and unfortunately I think there's Going to be a lot more of children of reality TV stars coming forward with how those experiences affected them in not so great ways.

Colin has talked openly about his family situation and talking about emotional and physical abuse.

So I'm guessing we will have more of that.

And that will be, you know, difficult and also, I don't know, instructive, I guess.

But I'm really curious to see what he has to say about the TV part of it all and how that affected his childhood.

As one might expect his mother, who's estranged from him, reacted to this forthcoming book and to some of his posts about it in completely, totally rational ways.

Kate addressed that on TikTok and someone said to Kate, like, you should sue him for defamation.

And Kate replied, as a mother does, you know, who maybe wants to reconcile with her kid.

I can't because I'm a public figure.

Rules are different, unfortunately, or I definitely would.

So that's true for public figures in the United States.

And that means celebrities, politicians, people in government, other public offices.

have to prove actual malice on behalf of someone who defamed them or allegedly defamed them in addition to proving the defamation.

And what that means is trying to prove that someone had a malicious intent.

That's nearly impossible to prove in most cases, which is why there is, you know, so much coverage of celebrity that is, let's just say, a little casual with the facts, and it's, as long as you're not malicious about it and trying to destroy someone's life, it's okay if you, you know, are Weekly World News and report something ridiculous, although that falls under a whole other category of satire.

Anyway, clearly Kate is not happy about this, and she said that she consulted an attorney about this, and that's just, you know, I'm sure it's going to be messy, but again, looking forward to seeing what Colin has to say.

Next up, coming to connect to our main topic a little later, is the fact that we have lost now two people from Love Island USA this season.

And I don't mean people who have left through the normal mechanisms of the show, but people who were disappeared from the cast because of their past behavior.