Welcome to… Reality Room

Elon’s reality show, Reality Room, had its red carpet premiere on February 6. with about 130 attendees. Reality Room involves Elon students competing in challenges, strategizing to create alliances, and eliminating each other until there is one person standing. 

So, how did this all begin? 

Rose Lehrman, a cinema and television arts major from Larkspur, California, was approached by classmate Luke Stoddard at the beginning of the 2019 spring semester. Stoddard created the concept of Reality Room as a high school English project and altered its format to make it a good fit for a new Elon TV show. 

Stoddard needed a co-producer, and there was no question that Lehrman would be perfect for the job. She had always wanted to work in reality television, especially since she is a fan of the Bachelor/Bachelorette franchise. 

To start, Lehrman and Stoddard brainstormed how to manipulate Stoddard’s original concept to make it as entertaining as possible. Lehrman highlighted the need to be creative when deciding which obstacles to throw at the cast.

During spring semester, the pair advertised the show at the club fair in order to recruit a cast in time for shooting in the fall. With three pages of signatures from interested students, Stoddard and Lehrman cast a group of 10 students for the first season. 

Lehrman now works on her own show for six weeks each semester. But, of course, producing a show comes with some difficulties.

“I am motivated every week by my crew, … and I am also motivated by the audiences who are active,” she said. “The only difficulties we faced during the process of creating the first season was figuring out the right amount of equipment we needed to use—because at the beginning of the process, we were renting out way more than we needed—and also managing the editing process. Editing takes a really long time, especially when we wanted to make it really, really good and entertaining for people who both enjoy reality television and for people who have never seen reality television.”

Lehrman is excited season one of Reality Room is finally here and is already starting to film season two.

If you want to see the show unfold yourself, tune in to YouTube or Philo on Tuesday’s at 8:30 p.m. EST. Who knows, you might know someone in the cast.

Cast of season one. Photos courtesy of Reality Room’s Facebook page.