Photo via @perfectlyray1 on TikTok
Sometimes people spend a lot of time on television shows, both scripted and reality, without seeing any on their work come to fruition. Not only that, but the conditions of working on productions can be grueling and confusing.
In this case, a young woman says that in September 2021 she spent 27 days confined to a hotel room without a cellphone or any contact from the outside world only to never get a chance to be on the show. Not only that, but the show itself has never aired.
@perfectlyray1 decided to share her story on TikTok this past December because she was currently visiting the state of Georgia, which was the same place where she was, in her words, “help captive.”
She had auditioned to be on the show for a year and when she finally got the call she needed to fly from Los Angeles to Georgia in two weeks.
Dashed expectations
@perfectlyray1 says the hotel itself was a little “motelish” and wasn’t very nice, but she was okay with it because she’s “not that bougie.”
Everyday they called her on the hotel phone to ask what she wanted to eat, which was great. What wasn’t really fun was not having a phone or being able to contact her friends and family in the outside world. She couldn’t even leave her hotel room for any reason during this time.
Also, she was initially told that this was only going to last five days for a quarantine, and after that she would go film at the house they were filming the show at.
The day she was supposed to be filming, they called her on the hotel landline and told her to be ready by 5 p.m.
@perfectlyray1 was ready by 3 p.m., but no one came for her until 10 p.m. They told her that there was so much going on at the house and they couldn’t bring her on the show that day, but they had a big entrance planned for her in the morning.
At 2 a.m. she got another call asking her to be ready in 20 minutes. She rushed to get herself ready, but no-one came until 4 a.m. Again, they told her to wait until the next day.
From then on out everyday she was told on the phone that today might be the day that they could use her, but she was never summoned to the set.
On the 27th day a producer and a therapist showed up to let her know they no longer needed her on the show.
“I don’t ever know how to express how that felt,” @perfectlyray1 says. The closest she could come up with is shock because the only thing that had kept her going alone in that hotel room every day for nearly a month was the hope that she would be brought onto the show.
Once the producer left her alone with the therapist, she had her very first panic attack.
What kind of show was it?
@perfectlyray1 reveals that this was a dating show “like The Bachelor” and she was told it was a “classier show.” She instructed to bring a lot of ball gowns, and not bikinis, like are sometimes required for shows like Too Hot To Handle.
Because of this, she racked up her credit card buying tons of nice clothes for the show, which indicates that shows like this don’t pay for wardrobe.
Why didn’t she leave earlier?
@perfectlyray1 got a lot of questions about why she didn’t just leave the hotel after a while of being strung along. She answered that it was hard for her to consider leaving because she had been been in talks to be on the show for nearly a year. The first call she got about it was December of the previous year.
She felt like she would have regretted it if she walked away and missed the opportunity to be on the show.
Was this a real show?
Thankfully, she did get paid for her time being secluded from the rest of society so she was able to take some time to process her experience before returning to work.
Despite being paid, @perfectlyray1 is confused and curious about her experience and put out a call asking anyone else who actually filmed for the show to contact her and let her know what happened with it.
Part of her suspects that she was actually a part of some sort of social experiment. She can’t mention the name of the show or the network because of the paperwork she signed, but she says that the network was “really big,” and the show was a brand new show.
It’s been over a year since her experience, and it still hasn’t aired.
