The problem with real reality television is that it’s actually quite boring — no matter if cameras are rolling all hours of the day, often people don’t do very much that’s worth watching. In a litigation culture like the United States, show producers also need contracts to cover every bystander, location, and artwork hanging on the walls. If they’re unable to secure permission after shooting a scene, their footage is unuseable. So it’s much more cost effective to set things up in advance and give your so-called characters a script.

By the time I arrived on the Amish show, it had already devolved into scripted television. There was a three-week turnaround for every episode and none of the Amish were doing anything that made for compelling television. Some had traumatic pasts that had caused them to leave their communities, but none were willing to talk about it. When they did talk, it was in a stilted monosyllabic way — after all, none of them were professional actors.

What happened behind-the-scenes was far more interesting than anything that took place while the cameras were rolling. The show’s executives fired a female producer for sleeping with one of the ex-Amish teens. She later packed up her Hollywood life and, I was told in whispers and stifled giggles, moved into his trailer in Missouri. We couldn’t show this because it would have been too hard to explain her sudden appearance as a character.

Instead, we manufactured drama. We pushed these Amish youths to encourage their other Amish friends to run away from their families. Then, we provided them with cars and filmed them going to steal away their friends in the dead of night. With a little fudging of dates of birth, we could make them legally consenting adults who didn’t need parental permission to appear on national television.

We said we were “documenting” — but what we were really doing was facilitating.

I never met the Amish who worked on our show, and neither did the story producers, the people whose job it was to concoct this alternate reality. It was filmed in Missouri and we were in a production office in New York, busily plotting their future lives on pinboards, mapping out potential story beats, and molding their emotional arcs into something resembling a narrative.

The producers didn’t talk about “right” and “wrong” so much as what we could get away with.

In one fabricated story line, we had an ordinary teenager from a troubled background who wanted to join an Amish community. It was my job to find a family willing to take her in. Through my research, I stumbled across a writer of Amish romance fiction (a blossoming subgenre in the mainstream Christian literary world) who arranged for some Amish friends to host this girl for a few days. We paid the author and the Amish family. When they griped about how little we paid them, we paid them more.

Behind the scenes, our production team tied the story line together. Enter scripting: Following staged phone calls, a faked chance meeting in a bookstore, and a stilted conversation between the troubled teen and our Amish author-turned-fixer, the two were heading “down the road” to meet the Amish family. In reality, we’d flown the teen across three states and put her up in a hotel. The few days that the Amish family had agreed upon was clearly not enough for any meaningful transformation to take place, so we scripted that, too.

The producers on the Amish show didn’t talk about “right” and “wrong” so much as what we could get away with. The common refrain around the production office was, “Well, the Amish don’t sue.”

The Amish didn’t sue as we tried to bring them into conflict with their families, putting them at risk of permanent excommunication. If they refused, we waved contracts in front of their faces, a callback to the legally binding documents that we’d made them sign, knowing they didn’t understand the fine print. They were teenagers with eighth grade educations who knew nothing about reality TV. We didn’t care what would happen to them after we left or how we fractured their relationships with their communities. They trusted us and we wanted ratings.

But we still had a show where nothing happened. And then — something terrible happened.

Cephas, the leader of the pack of troublemakers who thought that being on television was a waste of time, died in a car crash.

The camera crews weren’t around when he died. The Amish kids were reckless when it came to pretty much everything. They’d lost their communities, their identity, and in many cases, also contact with their families. They drove too fast and without seat belts. A 17-year-old cast member had already survived a major car accident that was featured in an earlier episode. We didn’t discourage this — on the contrary, footage was coming back to the production office from the back seat of cars being driven by ex-Amish teenagers racing along, well over the speed limit.

I came into the office to the news that Cephas had been killed during the night. The production team was already charged into story mode — scripting story lines around a dead teenager who had no longer wanted to be on the show.

The producers expressed varying levels of sadness. We didn’t personally know this young man, yet we looked at his face for hours each day while editing footage, and months ahead of time, we determined what was his life was going to look like using a wall of storyboards with emotional beats pinned to index cards. We were already used to referring to him — as we did to all of them — as our “characters.”