There are a lot of awful things in this world—Keith Morrison, egg salad, L.A. Candy—but as terrible as all these things are, you can always take comfort in the fact that most things could never sink as low as the reality show Cheaters. "That show, truly, is the worst thing in the world," you'd remind yourself each night before sinking into a peaceful slumber. (Nothing facillitates a restful night's sleep like identifiying the world's worst thing right before bed. It gives you a sense of order, you know?)
In case you're mercifully unfamiliar, Cheaters is a "Gotcha!"-style reality show, the "Gotcha!" here being: "Gotcha cheating on your spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend! He/She is in that van over there! Loose the injured party so we can catch the expletive-ridden humiliation explosion on camera!" In one infamous episode, the smarmy host of Cheaters was stabbed by a cheating boyfriend after the boyfriend was caught with another woman on a boat and the Cheaters host confronted him. The clip of this episode is below. Sorry if it's just kind of a nauseating swirl of blurred-out faces, bleeps, yells, and humiliation. That's just Cheaters:
Naturally, no one felt bad about the Cheaters host getting stabbed on a boat by one of the people who he was trying to wring camera-ready humiliation from because, well, if anyone deserves to be stabbed it's the guy who makes a living by exploding relationships on film for some reality show that airs on G4, right? It's basically vigilante justice, and who doesn't love (the right kind of) vigilante justice? It was kind of cathartic because the audience of Cheaters was mentally stabbing their television every time the show oozed across the screen, anyway. We all willed it to happen.
But according to an article on The Hollywood Reporter's Live Feed, that stabbing never happened. Apparently, it was all staged, as was most of Cheaters. Those cheaters never actually cheated. The wronged parties were never actually wronged. And, gulp, Gotcha! reality shows do not reflect reality!
From Inside Edition (via Live Feed):
But the best-known episode of Cheaters, the episode that put the show on the TV map, is the episode where host Joey Greco gets stabbed by an irate man caught cheating.
"So none of it was true?
"No," says Cassandra Terrazas, a Dallas hotel receptionist who says she was paid $350 for a few days work playing a woman who is caught having an affair with the man.