CHAPTER 6

Catfish: The TV Show

Not long after the documentary Catfish was released, I began to get emails. Tons of emails. It was like the floodgates had opened, and everyone who had ever been involved in a fake online relationship was contacting me. They were relieved to finally have someone to share their experiences with. And it wasn’t just people who had been catfished. I was suddenly the go-to guy for anyone who had gone through an experience online that left them feeling vulnerable, or unhappy, or concerned that they were being “had.” Overnight I became an expert on all kinds of frustrating and enigmatic online relationships, a guru on digital love, as it were.

In a way, it was the perfect answer to all the frustrations that had led to me being a victim of catfishing in the first place. I’d gotten involved with my catfish as a result of my desire to be a better person, my longing to be useful and appreciated. Well, now I could really be that Nev.

Miraculously, I’d been the victim of a hoax and had handled it with sensitivity and compassion, had demonstrated an ability to listen to my catfish and to forgive her despite all the mistakes she’d made. I’d finally been the nonjudgmental, sensitive, caring, nice guy I’d always wanted to be, and it had—fortuitously—ended up on tape for the whole world to see. The whole world thought I was that guy. Which meant I had the rare opportunity to make Nice Nev the New Nev—permanently.

As these stories poured into my inbox—as strangers stopped me in the street to tell me about their experiences—I was both shocked and amazed. Clearly I’d tapped into a previously undiscussed issue that was plaguing our society. My experience was just the tip of the iceberg: There was a huge underground river of relationships taking place that were just like mine. And what surprised me the most was how many different types of people—of different ages, backgrounds, vocations—were experiencing the same thing. I was getting letters from teenagers and from senior citizens, from rich people and poor people, from all over the earth.

Finally, I turned to my brother, Rel, and said, “This is crazy. We should follow up on these stories and make a show about them.” And so Catfish: The TV Show was born.

Catfish: The TV Show has been on the air for three seasons now. People come up to me all the time and want to know what goes on behind the scenes. For those of you who are curious, here’s a (very) brief FAQ.

Question 1: “Hey, Nev, how exactly does the show get made? Who contacts who?”

First, people write in to our show, asking to be featured on an episode. It can be the hopeful or—more rarely—the catfish, who wants to confess. Whether they write in for help meeting the person they are falling in love with or are looking for the perfect opportunity to finally come clean, people come to the show with the same hope of finally having a physical interaction with the person they’ve been digitally pursuing.

We start by spending two full days with our hopeful—getting to know them, seeing where they live, often meeting friends or family, and also investigating this person they are in love with. It’s interesting to note that when we come to help these people, they really have to put their lives on hold—take time off from their job, miss their classes. We arrive in their lives like a tornado and bring everything to a stop while we lift them up into the air and spin them around for a week. In a good way, of course. A gentle, loving tornado.

Then we travel with them to the hometown of their potential online love, and by our fourth day together, we are going to meet the catfish. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes it doesn’t. On the fifth day we reconvene with the two of them and spend some private time with the catfish to help them open up and understand why they were doing what they were doing. And then, poof! We are gone.

The five or six days that we are there are arguably the most exciting, confusing, emotional, and difficult days of that person’s life. During that time, a relationship in which they were incredibly invested either grows significantly or crashes and burns. We have to be in it with them. Max and I completely invest ourselves, engage with these people, and do everything we can to support, encourage, inform, and advise. We do our best to create a relaxed and comfortable environment so that people will open up to us.

To be completely honest, doing this show can be emotionally exhausting for us, as well. I often don’t know how I feel about the lying catfish I just met, or even about the hopeful who has been engaged in this relationship for so long despite some incredibly obvious red flags. I often have no idea what to say to the people I am trying to help. I can’t offer them an easy fix. And sometimes I feel like no matter what I say, I’m not going to get through to them. Anyway, who am I to help them, when I myself am often just as confused and uncertain about life?

At this point, I try to have a long conversation with Max or our awesome showrunner, Dave Metzler. They remind me that our purpose isn’t to solve the problems of the people we meet. Instead, it’s to listen and to give these people an opportunity to think about how they feel and what’s driving their actions—sometimes for the first time in their lives.

Question 2: “Okay, Nev. But don’t the people who contact you know that the show is usually about fake relationships? That it’s almost always a hoax?”

Sure. But the truth is that I’m their last resort. They believe that the show is the best chance they have for finally meeting the person they are in love with and getting some answers. It’s not news to them that they may be catfished. That’s why they’ve reached out to me in the first place. Somewhere in the back of their mind, they know that this relationship they’re having isn’t quite right. And they are ready to learn the truth, for better or for worse.

But they also think they are going to be the exception to the rule—because exceptions do happen! They are holding out hope, clearly. What I love about our show is that we try to inform our hopefuls of what we’ve discovered prior to introducing them to their catfish face to face. It’d be so much more entertaining to not tell them anything we find, and watch the train wreck as they knock on the door—but we try to warn them, gently. We may be a reality show, but we try to be kinder and gentler than real life will ever be.

Sometimes, though, I still have to remind myself that this is someone’s reality. I remember sitting in a car with Lauren (episode 204) on the way to meet her supposed catfish, Derek. Lauren was playing her cards close to the vest, so I kept pressuring her to think about the worst possible outcome in an effort to elicit some kind of emotional reaction. “What’s wrong with this guy?” Max and I kept asking her. “Maybe he’s hiding something? It’s been eight years!” “Let’s keep our guard up.” We didn’t want her to be blindsided.

Finally, to her credit, Lauren stopped us. “You’re making me feel like shit before I meet him,” she said. “You guys, it’s not always bullshit. You do this all the time for people. But for me, it’s new. I don’t do this.”

“This is not a show for you,” I said, realizing. “This is your life.”

“Yeah,” she said, crying.

It was a really great wake-up call for both me and Max. We may always try to be nice and empathetic guys, but you can never really understand what someone else is feeling. Does the victim suspect their “love” is a hoax? Maybe, but emotions aren’t that black-and-white. After Lauren called us out, we tried hard not to repeat the same mistake. We remind ourselves constantly that the feelings of a human being are far more important than our television show.

Question 3: “Don’t you ever think, ‘God, these people are stupid’? How do you maintain such a nonjudgmental attitude?”

Well, I’m heavily sedated through most of it. Just kidding.

The honest answer is that it is hard. Just like the people watching the TV show, I often want to roll my eyes when I hear outlandish stories of digital romance. But right before I succumb to the instinct to laugh or be dismissive, I remind myself that I had the exact same thing happen to me. Anybody who heard my story would have said the same thing: “How can you be so dumb? You don’t actually believe that, do you? An eight-year-old selling her paintings for thousands of dollars?” But I believed all of it.

To the hopefuls having these relationships, it feels very real. There’s a backlog of phone calls, text messages, and emails that we don’t have time to show on air—if the hopeful even managed to save them all. We don’t have the advantage of showing our viewers the slow, piece-by-piece trickle of how each relationship developed. When you talk to someone every day, you feel like they care about you, and they do! But when you fast-forward and sum up an entire digital relationship from the outside, it often looks totally implausible. Which is why I’m equipped for this job: I know how it feels to be in that kind of relationship on a daily basis.

So even if, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, “This is so obvious; how can they not see this?” I remind myself that (1) I didn’t see it; and (2) there’s always a chance it’s real. We’ve seen it on our show. The world is crazy; weird stuff happens every day. So I’m not going to make any assumptions.

Question 4: “Max! We want more Max! Tell us all about Max!”

I’ve known Max since high school. He and Rel met at a UCLA summer film workshop: Rel was walking down the hall, singing “The Confrontation” from Les Misérables—“Valjean, at last, we see each other plain”—when, directly behind him, he heard some guy singing the next line of the song—“Monsieur, le Mayor, you wear a different chain.” It was Max. The rest was history. Max became my friend by default; I spent my high school years tagging along after him and my brother.

Max wasn’t originally supposed to be on Catfish at all (I know; crazy, right?)—I had a different friend picked out to be my on-camera partner. Max stepped in to temporarily pinch-hit when my friend had a scheduling conflict, and after we saw Max on the screen, we all knew he was perfect. The yin to my yang. It’s turned into an amazing three-year partnership. But he still holds that fact over my head: “I wasn’t even your first choice!”

I’ve learned a lot from Max—especially how to be more self-aware and considerate to the people in my life. I marvel at his filmmaking abilities. He’s taught me so much about storytelling. I feel lucky to call him one of my best friends.

We’ve had a few fights; for example, during season 2, we were the only people sleeping at a bed-and-breakfast in Burlington, Iowa—even the owner wasn’t staying there. I’d gone out for dinner with the crew, leaving Max at the hotel, and I decided to sneak back in and make haunted house sounds to mess with him. He got a little spooked—though he won’t admit it—and then a lot annoyed, as I kept the sounds going far too long. When I finally revealed myself, he lunged at me, and we ended up wrestling in the living room. It ended when we realized that his nose was bleeding, and I ran to get tissues. We didn’t want to hurt each other; it was just a best friends’ tussle.

Question 5: “What’s it like for you and Max, being on the road together so much?”

Max and I are total opposites in the way we travel.

Max can’t wake up in the morning. He’s a night owl—editing all night—and wants to sleep in. He sleeps with the shades totally closed: He’s a cave dweller. You literally have to pull the sheets off him and jump on the bed to get his day started.

I couldn’t be more different: I’m a bright, chipper morning person. I jump out of bed and am immediately energized. But once we are both up, Max puts on music—usually EDM (electronic dance music)—and we end up having a morning dance party.

Max gets to the hotel and it’s as if his suitcase is spring-loaded. He opens the lid and everything erupts. His girlfriend, Priscilla, is a stylist and fashion blogger who takes him shopping and puts his outfits together. I give him a really hard time about that, probably because I secretly wish that I had my own personal stylist, too.

Meanwhile, I am always knolling. If you don’t know what that word means, it’s the process of keeping things neat, everything at right angles. (You can watch a hilarious Tom Sachs / Van Neistat film about knolling online.¹) I’m constantly making sure that things are squared up and symmetrical. My hotel room always looks like the cleaning lady just left.

Max and I shared rooms in season 1 and—despite our differences—it was great. But these days, we get our own rooms. It’s probably better for everyone.

Question 6: “Do you guys have a lot of material you don’t use? What doesn’t make it on the show?”

For every episode of Catfish, we have exactly forty-two minutes to tell the story of the online relationship we’re investigating. In order to get those forty-two minutes, we spend five or six entire days with our subjects, eight to ten hours a day. Do the math: That’s a whole lot of time we spend with these people that ends up on the editing room floor.

It’s incredibly frustrating to me that so many of the storylines from these people’s lives just won’t make it into the final episode. Life is complicated. We work hard to draw all this information out of our subjects—their motives and all the nuanced details that explain why this person feels so strongly about that person even though they’ve never met. It often gets distilled into a three-second graphic of a text message that says “I love you so much, baby.” That’s not sufficient to illustrate a six-month—let alone a six-year—love affair.

Question 7: “Does being on the show ever change the lives of the people you’ve met?”

In most cases, the people we’ve met on the show have not spent a lot of time thinking about—much less talking about—how they really feel. No one has ever asked them, so they haven’t pushed themselves to figure it out. Personally, I’ve been in therapy since I was a teenager (you’ve read enough of this book to understand why), and my expectations for personal insight are high. But that’s not fair. Often, we think we know how the catfish and hopeful feel, and we’re wrong. I have to remind myself, “I don’t know how this person is feeling. I’m just here to encourage them to think about their feelings so they can make sense of their actions.”

Sometimes the people on our show really do get insight into their behavior and motivations. So for those who are willing to do some soul-searching, I think the show does change their lives. But it always breaks my heart when I follow up with a catfish and ask them what they’ve learned and they say, “Don’t get into Internet relationships.” Because that’s not the point of our show.

What do I want those people to have learned?

• Know what you want!

• Be comfortable with who you are!

• Demand respect!

• Treat others kindly!

The emotional issues that catfish face aren’t so different from yours and mine. It’s just that their behavior is more extreme. Through the people I’ve met while making the show, I’ve come to understand that catfishing reveals what’s missing in all of our lives: true communication and self-awareness. The lessons that catfish and their hopefuls need to learn are the same ones that we all should learn.

Including myself. It’s taken me thirty years—with a lot of help along the way—to understand how I should be living my life, why I should appreciate myself, and how to challenge myself. It may not be possible to transfer that hard-earned wisdom within the confines of a TV show, but my hope is that through the documentary, the TV show, and now through this book, I have at the very least begun a cultural conversation about how we are relating to one another and to ourselves.