Which is why it was tough, that September morning, to tell who was more distressed that the yacht had not left the dock: the captain or the network executive. “The window for shooting the show is the window and that’s it. He was seated in “Below Deck” mission control as part of his traditional once-a-season set visit to ensure production was running smoothly. “You can’t say, ‘Oh, the show’s not going great. It is, for a reality show, uncommonly constrained by the bounds of reality. Whereas a season of “Housewives” might shoot for four to five months, “Below Deck” is allotted one third of that time to produce the same number of episodes. The operation’s inherent expense and scheduling logistics - booking 47 hotel rooms for six straight weeks for production, for instance - render the filming timeline largely inflexible. At its salty core, the franchise is a workplace drama. Viewers are told, and immediately permitted to forget, their names as, one after another, each group of six to 10 high-rolling vacationers is welcomed aboard. The ultrawealthy guests are still more evanescent. Apart from captains and chief stewardesses, the majority of crew members arrive fresh each season, and are never seen again. Unlike Bravo’s ostensible tentpole franchise “The Real Housewives,” which depicts the lives of the same cabals of wealthy women year after year - and often underperforms “Below Deck” in ratings, according to Noah Samton, a senior vice president of current production for Bravo - the yacht shows feature few familiar faces. Typically, every incarnation is set in a new locale and follows what is presented generally as an eight to 10 trip “season” in the life of a luxury charter boat, from the perspective of the vessel’s crew. Those who have never seen “Below Deck,” “Below Deck Mediterranean” or “Below Deck Sailing Yacht,” and who do not wish to spend the rest of their lives glued to Bravo’s flotation-themed programming, must never, ever watch even one minute of either program, for the “Below Deck” franchise lures in viewers with the pitiless ease of sirens summoning sailors to hurl their ships against the sun-warmed Grecian coast. White’s breezy protestations hours earlier. White’s reaction: a newly-arrived boat was obstructing her path through the marina - exactly as her boss, Captain Sandy Yawn, had warned might happen, over Ms. To aid in this implausible task, the production crew relies on 19 cameras typed chronologies of every action that has taken place since they began rolling a walkie-talkie tuned, baby monitor-style, to the channel where the cast members communicate about work extra ears in the form of two editors perpetually plugged into alternate live audio feeds architectural diagrams of the yacht on which they sail a hand-drawn map of the marina in which they dock call sheets laying out each day’s likely schedule cheat sheets featuring the photos, names, and roles of boat crew members (“DECKHAND”) and yacht guests (“PRIMARY’S FRIEND, MARRIED TO YUKI”) and, at time of filming, more than 160 episodes’ worth of experience anticipating and on-the-fly adapting to human behavior. (“Sometimes life really sucks,” she said to no one.) Because cast members are banned from interacting with, or even acknowledging, the coterie of producers, editors, camera operators, audio specialists, fixers, and occasional representatives from Bravo network brass who spend weeks tracking their movements - much of the production crew’s on-location work consists of attempting to reconstruct the cast’s inner monologues as they unfold inside cast members’ minds. Hopefully with an excitement similar to the rapt fascination with which the production team of “Below Deck Mediterranean” watched the cast of “Below Deck Mediterranean” living out the events that would become season five of “Below Deck Mediterranean” (currently airing on Bravo) twenty-four hours a day for six straight weeks, from a small headquarters hidden in a stateroom on the “Below Deck Mediterranean” yacht as it sailed around Majorca late last summer. How might they perceive our lives - this advanced civilization for whom every facet of our existence, from elation to exhaustion, is merely edu-tainment about the human experience? Our creators are not the deities of any major world religion, but the architects of the simulation we inhabit. If so, the United States of America is about as real as, say, the Mushroom Kingdom in an unattended game of Super Mario Bros. What we understand as reality, the theory proposes, may merely be one of an astronomical number of vivid computer simulations of an ancient past, designed by humanity’s distant descendants to study the evolution of their forebears. PALMA, Majorca - A provocative theory in vogue among physicists and philosophers suggests that we humans are not experiencing, and have not ever experienced, reality.
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