Mike Darnell: Confessions of a reality TV genius

Twenty-four years ago today, two strangers got legally married on live television, and the modern reality TV genre was born.

Long before Married at First Sight, 90 Day Fiancé, Love is Blind, and all the other shows that treat arranged marriages as just another option for lonely singles, Fox delivered the first-ever reality TV wedding with Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?. The two-hour special saw real-estate developer/comedian Rick Rockwell wed nurse Darva Conger, drawing an audience of 22 million viewers — and fueling the ire of countless critics, who excoriated the special as a new low for the TV industry.

Little did they know, the evil genius behind Multi-Millionaire was just getting started.

For Mike Darnell, Rick and Darva’s (soon-to-be-annulled) marriage was the beginning of an unscripted empire. As the Fox network’s chief reality exec from 1994-2013, Darnell led a reality revolution by taking bold — and often bonkers — chances in the fledgling genre, and spearheading some of the most WTAF reality TV shows ever released into the wild. (After leaving Fox, Darnell served as President of Unscripted Television for Warner Bros. until 2023, where he oversaw hits including Friends: The Reunion, Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip, The Golden Bachelor, and Ellen’s Game of Games.) 

In honor of Multi-Millionaire’s opal anniversary, EW asked Darnell to look back on his biggest reality TV achievements at Fox — some dubious, but all indelible. 

Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionare? (February 15, 2000)

In August of 1999, ABC earned massive ratings with its two-week run of the Regis Philbin-hosted game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The success spurred the highly competitive Darnell to come up with his own millionaire-themed special — though the result, produced by future Bachelor mastermind Mike Fleiss, almost cost him his job.

MIKE DARNELL: I was on a flight to Parsippany, New Jersey for my wife's cousin's wedding. When I had left, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire had just started, and there hadn't been a [hit] primetime game show in 20 years. It was huge. I'm very competitive, so it's making me crazy. I am literally thinking to myself, “What else do people want? They want to be millionaires.” And I'm watching the wedding and I'm thinking about the show and I'm watching the wedding and I'm like, “Who wants to marry a millionaire!” And then I had to one up it, so I called it Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?. That is literally where it came from. It came from frustration.

[When it aired], it was on against Millionaire, and by the end of the night we beat it. The head of publicity called me and said, “It's the front page of the New York Times. It’s not the front page of the Arts & Entertainment section, it's the front page.” We were thrilled. We were going to shoot a [follow-up] “How are they doing?” special. That was planned and everything.

Then as the week went by, [it came out that] maybe he's not a millionaire. I get a call from [then-Fox Entertainment chairman] Sandy Grushow on a Sunday. There was a nascent company called The Smoking Gun, and it reported that Rockwell had a restraining order against him from a former girlfriend. This was before people were doing background checks [for reality contestants], but we did one, and it went back seven years. I called Fleiss, who happened to be with Rick Rockwell riding back from whatever shoot they had just done for the special. I could hear Mike say something about a restraining order, and Rick said, “Oh yeah, I'll tell you about that later.” And I knew we were screwed. It turns out that [the background check] we did went back seven years, and [the restraining order] was nine years ago.

It was big news. Sandy Grushow went to the Los Angeles Times with the following quote, “We’re done with that stuff. I would rather fail with quality than succeed with garbage.” That’s my boss. It was a very, very dark week. But then I got a call from [then-ABC Entertainment Group chairman] Lloyd Braun, and also [then-NBC entertainment execs] Scott Sassa and Garth Ancier. All of a sudden, I was in demand. They all thought I was going to be leaving Fox because of Sandy's comments. My takeaway from that experience was, if your ratings are big enough and if you didn't do anything really wrong, you're going to be in demand. Fox found out about [the other offers] very quickly, and everything was fine within a week.

Temptation Island (January 10, 2001)

Despite the Multi-Millionaire blowback, Fox and Darnell doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on scandalous relationship shows. Remember Paradise Hotel? Love Cruise? Anything for Love? The network kicked off its dating spree with Temptation Island, which sent troubled couples to a tropical resort to mingle with sexy singles — and then decide if they still want to stay together. Critics howled, but 16 million viewers tuned in for the premiere. (USA Network launched a reboot of the series in 2018.)

A company called Rocket Science, who I did a lot of shows with, came in and they pitched an idea. I think the title was there, but the show as I remember was singles going to an island, and there would be multiple tempters. The way my mind worked, I’m like, “Why not make them couples and tempt them? Let’s see if they’ll stick with their mates.” I will be honest with you, I think I might have thought about having them be married, but we wouldn't get away with that. [Laughs] The dating genre was still very new. Anytime I did something new that was in a scandalous vein, the reaction was, “How could they do that? It’s crossing a line!” If you’re first in [with a concept], and it's even a semi-dangerous subject, you're in trouble — and then, over time, everybody does it. Now Temptation Island feels quaint!

We had a rule that you could not have a child and be on that television show. A couple named Ytossie and Taheed, we found out they had a child. There was panic throughout the network. Panic. I said, “Well, let's just embrace it.” So, I had the producers call them into a room and tell them, “We know you lied, and we know that you have a child, and you are off the show.” And that episode was by far the biggest episode we aired. So, I learned a lesson: Embrace the controversy and deal with it.

American Idol (June 11, 2002)

Producer Simon Fuller famously got a chilly reception in 2001 when he pitched his Pop Idol singing competition show to American TV execs. Darnell admits to being less than enthusiastic at first, based on other music-themed competitions he’d seen. “I watched Popstars USA [on The WB] and Making the Band [on ABC] with my wife, and I liked them until they got to [the point where] the band was made, and then I got bored.” But one aspect of Fuller’s pitch hooked him.

This was post 9/11 by a month, and we were looking for something aspirational. Simon Fuller and an agent named Alex Hartley from CAA came in and pitched a show that was basically one long audition. I liked that it was one long audition process. I was a child actor, and I always thought the audition process was interesting. You go through callbacks, and then it's between you and another person. That’s what appealed to me at first. And then once Pop Idol started airing [in the UK], I went right to [then Fox Entertainment President] Gail Berman and said, “I think this is something we should do.” Of course, Simon Cowell was an enormous star. We knew we had to bring him out. That combination of one long audition and someone [on the judges’ panel] being honest — no one had ever done that before. Popstars, Making the Band, Star Search — [the judges] were always kind. But to watch Simon say, “You sounded like a bag of cats being dropped from a roof,” I knew we had to have him.

The first day of the first audition shoot was at the Hollywood Athletic Club. It was very small; we had like 300 people show up. Year 2 was 10,000. I was sitting in the room with my wife and my co-worker Sabrina Bonet Ishak, watching [judges] Paula Abdul, Simon, and Randy Jackson film. One of these really bad auditioners came in, and my wife could not hold in her laughter. She had to run out of the room. I was like, “This is why the show works so great.”

There was a fight internally, there were promo people who did not want to air Simon being mean before we premiered. They thought the show was only going to appeal to little girls, and that he was going to scare them. I’m like, “That’s the whole show! The whole show is him being honest.” We ultimately won that battle. There’s a famous promo where a girl's being interviewed and she goes, “That effing English judge is an asshole,” and we bleeped her. I think that’s what sold the show.

Man vs. Beast (January 15, 2003)

The guy who started his career at Fox with sensational specials like When Animals Attack! in the 1990s returned to the zoological realm with this special. Pitting humans against animals in a variety of ridiculous challenges — can a Sumo wrestler triumph over an orangutan in tug-of war? Will an elite sprinter beat a zebra in the 100-meter dash? — Man vs. Beast may be Darnell’s most elegantly stupid creation.

It wasn't pitched to me. There is a famous Beverly Hillbillies episode where there’s a kangaroo that fights Granny. I must have flipped past a repeat, and I'm like, “Hmmm… I wonder if other animals could compete against humans, and how would that would go?” And that's literally where it was born. At the time, the hotdog eating champion was Takeru Kobayashi, and I put him against a bear eating hot dogs. That was probably my favorite scene because I thought it was going to be pretty even. But the bear ate, like, eight at a time or 10 at a time. It wasn’t even close!

Joe Millionaire (January 6, 2003)

On March 25, 2002, ABC premiered a new dating show called The Bachelor — and 10 million people were instantly hooked. Once again, Darnell found himself scrambling to come up with his own spin on the man-dates-25-women concept. Less than a year later, Fox unleashed Joe Millionaire upon the world, and the Feb. 2003 finale pulled in an astonishing 40 million viewers. (Fox revived the series in 2022.)

The Bachelor was really taking off, and I was going out of my mind: What can we do that’s a twist on The Bachelor? I was at lunch with my staff, and I had come up with the reverse conceit, which was, “He's really rich, but we’ll play him as poor.” And then my colleague Sabrina said, “I think maybe it'd work better if he was poor and we're lying to the women and calling him rich.” I said, “That's a better idea, because it will show who's in it for love.”

First, we had to find the right guy — and we did find him. He was literally a $19,000-a-year construction worker, good looking. The promo was amazing. I'm going to give the promo department real props on this. The first promo was, “These women think he's worth 50 million dollars. Who would tell them that?” And then it said, “Fox.” I remember the night of the finale, I was walking outside and I could actually hear people gasping [at the reveal]. I learned something from that show. The Bachelor’s reveal is, who are you picking? With Joe Millionaire, the reveal is, you pick the woman, then tell her you're not rich — then see if she'll still stay with you. And then, if she stays with you, we’re going to give you a million dollars. I knew it was good because it had four huge reveals at the end. To this day, that finale is the highest-rated entertainment thing that ever aired on Fox, period — and that includes Idol.

Mr. Personality (April 21, 2003)

Riding high on the success of Joe Millionaire, Darnell and his team pumped out a trio of twisted takes on The Bachelor, including 2004’s Playing It Straight (a single woman must guess which of the men courting her are gay), and The Littlest Groom (starring little person Glen Foster as the bachelor). First up, though, came Mr. Personality, in which a 26-year-old woman dated 20 men… all of whom kept their faces hidden behind creepy latex masks. Long before Netflix introduced viewers to dating in “pods,” Mr. Personality and host Monica Lewinsky posed the question: Is love truly blind?

I was literally at that point scrambling to come up something — the network [was asking], “What’s our next version of Joe Millionaire? What's our next relationship show?” Remember, we did something called Married by America. Everything they're doing now, I did 10 years ago. Mr. Personality was another social experiment. Joe Millionaire was, “Will you still stay with someone when you find out they're not rich?" This was, "Can you meet somebody and fall in love with their personality? And then once they reveal their mask, will you still be in love with them?" A simple concept, being redone now as Love is Blind. 

With Monica, I think I was just looking for an interesting host. Somehow her name came up and I'm like, “Wow. People will talk about it if she's a host." She was quite good, and the nicest person. She was so nice and so easygoing, and she couldn't get work then. I think she was selling purses then. That show got a lot of attention for her being host. I have nothing but praise for her; she was very professional.

The Simple Life (December 2, 2003)

In August of 2022, CBS announced The Real Beverly Hillbillies, a reality show that planned to transplant a real-life, low-income rural family into a luxury Beverly Hills mansion for a year. Two days later, Fox announced its own unscripted spin on a classic sitcom with the reality version of, featuring wealthy folks stranded out in the country. Though neither show materialized, Fox and Darnell transformed the Green Acres idea into The Simple Life, which chronicled the adventures of socialites Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie as they ditched the glitz and relocated to Altus, Ark., population 817. One month before the series premiered, a sex tape featuring Hilton and her ex-boyfriend was leaked without her consent — giving The Simple Life an unsavory and unintentional PR boost.

ABC did a documentary maybe six months, a year before, called The Hamptons, and Paris was a little part of that documentary. I knew right away, “Oh, she’s a star and we should get her.” Back then, we were thinking about what scripted IP we could make a reality show out of. In 2002, CBS announced they were going to do The Real Beverly Hillbillies. It got axed [due to a backlash]. And then we decided we were going to do Green Acres, and that’s where The Simple Life was born: Take rich people and bring them to rural America. I don't say this very often: We took the high road of those two concepts. [Laughs] With the initial pitch, Paris was in, but we couldn’t get her sister. And that’s where Nicole Richie came in.

Back then, everybody thought I was capable of anything, which I'm not. I did not release that [sex] tape. I would never do that. Honest to God, I was not thinking about “it's going to be great for the show.” Was it great for the show? Probably. Kathy [Hilton] and Paris, they were very upset and worried, and the only thing on my mind was I felt bad for them, and I wanted to make sure it was okay. I’m very close to the family. Every year, Kathy has a Christmas party. We've probably gone 10 years in a row. I still have a very soft place in my heart for Paris because she's lovely.

The Swan (April 7, 2004)

Remember ABC’s feel-good hit Extreme Makeover: Home Edition? Sure, you do. But you may not remember that it was a spinoff of the far more problematic series Extreme Makeover, in which contestants underwent a variety of plastic surgery procedures to fix perceived physical flaws. After its premiere in 2002, Darnell fielded a pitch for an even more extreme makeover show — this one with a competition twist.

A woman named Nely Galan — she’s a force of nature — she came in and she showed me a magazine, I think it was called Plastique. She's Latina, and she said if you go to a [beauty] pageant in Brazil, everybody there has plastic surgery. It's just part of the way they do things. She pitched the name, The Swan, and the idea of a [beauty] pageant where you do plastic surgery on women. And then exec producer Arthur Smith, myself, and Nely, we morphed it into this makeover show that ends in a pageant. I will give Arthur credit for this: He had the notion that [along the way], the contestants can never look in a mirror. Then the reveal, I think that was the best part of the show, was when they see themselves for the very first time.

It was more than just a surgery makeover. We had them [go through] a psychological makeover. These were women with issues that we're trying to help them with. It was definitely controversial at the time. It was a good show. I think we helped people, and it was also very dramatic. We talked about a Celebrity Swan, but we never [officially] announced it.

Hell's Kitchen (May 30, 2005)

When a trip to the UK introduced Darnell to a foul-mouthed celebrity chef, it was the beginning of a long (and wildly successful) relationship.

I was in London doing Branson’s Quest for the Best, which was our version of The Apprentice. Someone told me to watch this [ITV] show called Hell’s Kitchen. I watched maybe 10 minutes of it — the contestants were celebrities, and it was done almost day-and-date like Big Brother. None of that worked for me exactly, but I could tell Gordon Ramsay was a star. We’d already had huge success with Simon Cowell, and [Gordon] was like the cooking version of Simon. I called [exec producer] Arthur Smith and I said, “We’re going to do a restaurant show.” He will tell you himself that he didn’t think it would work. I said, “I’m telling you, this guy’s a star, we just have to figure it out.”

We shipped Gordon out here, and Fox at that time told me they didn’t want him to say the F-word. They said, “Change it to friggin.” I’m like, “I’m not going to tell him to say ‘friggin.’ That is not in his personality. He’s going to say f---.” They said, “Okay, then you have to [drop the audio].” I’m like, “I’m not going to do a silence every time he says the F-word. You’ll have like 150 silent moments in the show.” I got them to agree to bleeps. If there was a Guinness Book record on this, it is the most bleeped episode of television and still is.

I learned something from that show. Several times Gordon didn’t curse, but we bleeped him anyway because it was additive to the scene — kind of like Jimmy Kimmel does with his Unnecessary Censorship segment. But I started that with Hell’s Kitchen. And that spawned Kitchen Nightmares, which spawned MasterChef and MasterChef Junior, and they’re all still on.

The Moment of Truth (January 23, 2008)

The idea behind this game show was deceptively simple: Tell the truth and win big. But things were far more complicated for contestants, who agreed to take a lie detector test and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. (A few samples: “Have you ever padded your underwear to look more well-endowed?” “Did you ever drink alcohol while you were pregnant?” “Do you think your parents dislike your girlfriend because of her religion?”) The game was both riveting and excruciating to watch. Host Mark Walberg insisted on opening one episode — in which a woman revealed brutal truths in front of her husband — with a warning, calling it “the most uncomfortable I’ve ever been on television.” Darnell loved this series so much, he kept the specially made Moment of Truth chair in his office as a keepsake for years.

I give credit to Howard Schultz, who's no longer with us. He created that format. He made a pilot for NBC and then the New York Post wrote about the pilot, and I was immediately like, “Oh man, that's a great idea, a game show where you're put on a lie detector.” It’s an escalating ladder where the questions get more intimate and harder and harder.

When Mark got nervous [and wanted to open an episode with a disclaimer], I said, "You're just the host. This show's the show.” I’m like, “No one thinks you are responsible for this.” That was not a company disclaimer. That was a Mark Walberg disclaimer. I said, “Fine. Say whatever you want. It's okay with me.” I thought it was silly, personally, because I felt like if you're watching the show, you know what the show's about, and no one is dumb enough to think that Mark is in control of the television show.

What I found out about lie detectors is this: If you believe that the detector will catch it [if you lie], that’s enough for you to always tell the truth. If you think that that lie detector's infallible, which everybody does — and definitely the contestants did — then you're always telling the truth. Some favorite moments are from that television show. You could absolutely do that show today. But there's a line between humor and crazy. I think it's still a very interesting dynamic.

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