How 'Claim to Fame' Clues Are Chosen + Changes for Season 3, According to a Producer
On Monday, one of the summer's best reality shows, Claim to Fame brought its second season to a close, crowing a new winner and revealing the final four celebrity relatives. From the massive blowup of Tom Hanks' niece in the premiere to no one having a clue who Donny Osmond is, Season 2 has been a delight. Fingers crossed that ABC brings back the game of hidden identities for a Season 3.
As with watching all reality TV shows, however, watching Claim to Fame often prompts questions about just how the show operates. How is the cast of nepo-babies assembled? Who makes sure they haven't met before at a charity gala or movie premiere? And most importantly, who creates the dozens of clues slowly doled out to the cast each season? So much is going on behind-the-scenes and nosy inquiring minds want to know.
Thankfully, ABC and Kinetic Content, the production company that created Claim to Fame were kind enough to connect Parade with one of the show's executive producers Eric Detwiler, who's been working on Claim to Fame since its genesis. Here's everything he could tell us about the show's casting, clue creation and behind-the-scenes details, plus what he's looking forward to should it return for Season 3.
ABC
Matthew Huff: Could talk about how the idea for Claim to Fame came about and how you became involved with the project?
Eric Detwiler: We were looking for a new kind of format for competition elimination. I don't think there's any other show in the world where you have a voting mechanism that leads to a guess off, where anyone, unless you have immunity, could be sent home for a right or wrong guess. There's just so much jeopardy and stress built up in that moment. To build a show around that kind of structure was really, really exciting. And on top of that, to make something that is celebrity adjacent, that has an element of guessing to it, especially on the heels of shows like The Masked Singer was really, really fun.
From the beginning, we knew the show was always going to be about concealing the truth and lying and the cat and mouse gameplay in the house. But it's also important to us that it's not a mean show. Even when you watch a guessoff and somebody has a wildly wrong guess, like, Jane did this season guessing Chris is related to Elvis Presley, there is still this moment of warmth. There's still hugs and tears and good feelings between the cast members. And I think that really comes from the fact that these people are not celebrities. They're related to celebrities, and no one really knows what it's like to be related to a celebrity unless you are, and what it's like being in their shadow. And to finally have a chance for them to step out into that spotlight for themselves and put their own personality front and center, I think is a really liberating and gratifying experience for the participants.
So obviously, the first season was a success. You're moving into the second season. Were there things about the first season that you tweaked or changed or elements that you reworked in between the two seasons?
For sure. There was a massive debate during post-production for Season 1 as to what the audience should know when they're watching the show. And so probably the most obvious difference between Season 1 and Season 2 is how much we filled in the audience on who contestants are related to. Starting with Amara and Whoopi Goldberg in Season 1, right out of the gate, we let that cat out of the bag. In the two truths in a lie game, we were telling the audience what was a truth and what was a lie. I think when people didn't know what the show was and maybe didn't have an idea of how big of a celebrity relative we might have in the house, it felt like we needed to give them something. We needed the audience to know these people are actually related to some pretty big names. We decided in Season 2 that it's a lot more fun for an audience to play along, even if they have the benefit of the internet at home to verify their answers or to research.
ABC
How does the casting process work, because you guys do get some pretty big name relatives. Do you reach out to people? Do they reach out to you?
So the casting approach on this show is unlike any other show I've worked on previously. We really tackle it from all directions. So early on in the process, the producers sit down with Donna Driscoll, who heads up all our casting efforts at Kinetic and say, look, here are the different buckets that we're interested in. We know we're going to need some actors and some musicians and some athletes and wouldn't it be great to have a historical figure or a political figure or an author? What's some kind of wild card category and then we might get specific with her. Wouldn't it be great to have the relative of a former U.S. president? Or wouldn't it be great to have Eddie Murphy's kid on the show? And from there we do some pretty direct research, trying to dig in to find out who those people are and who might have a willingness to participate in the show and who might have the best personality to be on the show. That's combined with incoming applications as well. At the end of Season 1, ABC put a promo up for our casting website and invited people who are related to celebrities to apply, and we got a lot of incoming traffic from that.
I think once people understood that the spirit of the show was ultimately fun and positive, and it was a safe show that wasn't trashing celebrities, we got a lot of incoming from that direction.
I think it's important when you put the show together that you don't have too many people on one end of the spectrum in terms of age or the other. You want to get a mix of celebrities from different eras and then we aim to get the biggest possible names that transcend time and are also just a great source of material to create clues.
How do you make sure that these people haven't met each other previously? Because it seems like in some cases there could have been overlap.
There definitely is a chance that there could be overlap in the real world from our celebrity relatives. And so we try hard to cross check against social media channels to make sure they're not following one another, don't end up in posts with one another, and try to make sure that the celebrity relatives themselves are not highly connected to each other. If you look at somebody like Monet and her dad [JB Smoove] and somebody like Eddie Murphy. Would JB Smoove and Eddie Murphy run in the same circles because they're both comedians? Maybe, but we felt fairly confident that Shayne and Monet did not know each other.
How do you guys decide which clues you're going to use for which people? How does all of that gets mapped out?
It happens as far ahead of time as possible, and often when we're developing the games. One of my favorite new challenges from Season 2 is the "Feeling It" game where they're out with giant gold statues in the field. It takes time to create those. So we've got to go through and make sure that our clues, whatever they're going to be, are done ahead of time. We didn't know going into that challenge who was going to be eliminated, and who was actually going to be active in that challenge. So we had to build those large scale props for every single person that was going to be in the house.
ABC
We try to our best to level the playing field on the clues to make them as even as possible. But it's a highly subjective thing. What happens if one participant in the house happens to be a massive expert on hip hop music? They're going to know a lot more about certain clues than others. And we're counting on the fact that we've got such a diverse group of people in the house that that subjectivity is going to balance itself out.
ABC
So are all of the clues pre-mapped out and preordained? Or is there some changing stuff on the fly depending on how close or far away characters are to figuring out an answer?
The clues are set ahead of time. The art department goes to great lengths to make sure we get just the right props, and we might tweak a thing here or there visually to make sure that the clue is as clear or unclear as we want it to be. We added some things to the Clue Wall midseason this year to give them more information and give them more misdirection. But all of that stuff was planned ahead of time and then implemented.
This season Carly felt like the bench clue was too obvious. There's always going to be some sort of question regarding the fairness of whose clues are more obvious than others. Is that something that concerns you at all when you're sort of putting it together?
We do everything in our power to make the game as fair as possible. There are an equal number of clues in the house for every single participant, but sometimes things that aren't clues are misinterpreted by participants as clues.
In Season 1, there's a moment when the cast is trying to figure out who Dominique is related to, and they're looking at the Clue Wall. And one of the red herrings on the Clue Wall from Season 1 was a pencil sharpener. And Logan saw that pencil sharpener and said Al Sharpton, but it was a complete non clue. He made that leap. It clicked in his brain. It is interesting to see the way the minds of the participants work when they are only dealing with the information in front of them, and when they are desperately seeking solutions to puzzles, they can turn almost anything into a clue.
ABC
Do you feel like from Season 2, going into a possible Season 3, would you make the clues harder or easier? Or do you feel like that you've calibrated the correct mixture?
I don't think we'd change our approach. Like I said, the clues are always going to be subjectively viewed by the participants. I think the best thing that we can do is come up with fun, clever clues that satisfy us as producers, as creative people, and we think will satisfy the audience. But there's just no telling exactly how the participants are going to interpret certain clues until they get there. Watching them look at the astronaut and bee clues on the Clue Wall this year and start thinking about Buzz Aldrin. That was no one's intention.
Do you just sit around and brainstorm a bunch of clue ideas for each person? How does the brainstorming process work?
Once we have, I would say, maybe our top 20 potential contestants, we get the creative process started by making a fairly simple list. If it's an actor, what are the names of all the movies that they've been in? We just list those out and then in a column right next to it, we just start brainstorming what a simple visual representation of that would be. And we basically build a database of potential clues for every person. Then once we get down to our top 12, our art department goes to town in terms of finding or building those specific clues.
Is there anything from Season 2 that you want to tweak for Season 3 or any sort of big ideas that you haven't got to do yet?
I have two ideas for the Clue Wall specifically that I'm not going to tell you. And I am hoping that now that celebrities have seen Season 2, that wherever possible, we can get videos from the celebrity relatives. I was really pleased with the way that those turned out this season for the ones that we were able to use.
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ABC
Those were so fun. Especially with Dolly Parton since she's such a big name.
A funny story about that. I'm so appreciative of all of the celebrity relatives that did send us videos. But you've got varying degrees of video quality. Some are cell phone videos.
When the video came in from Dolly Parton, she had hired a professional crew and lit that thing. She's wearing a microphone. There's clean audio. I'm like, would you expect anything less from Dolly Parton? It was a real pleasure to be able to get that in from her and have her on the show.
Do the contestants have a lot of downtime? What are they doing the rest of the time, and how long are they there from start to finish?
Essentially, we shoot every episode, with the exception of the first episode, over the course of two days. And then we do have some dark days where the cast is in the house, producers are with them putting them on ice so that they're not continuing to have story development. But they're there about three weeks for the whole process to get everything done.
There's so much footage of them. There are robo-cameras throughout the house that are recording 24/7. A lot of time, they are just theorizing in their journals or they're writing and they're talking to each other about the different theories about who could be in the house. But there's also plenty of other downtime when they're just hanging out in the kitchen, having a meal and talking about their families.
We just HAD to release this #ClaimtoFame deleted scene, sorry not sorry JR 🤣 pic.twitter.com/ydOm9Fcwth
— Claim To Fame (@ClaimToFameABC) August 20, 2023
There's one deleted scene were there's a mouse in the house. People are sitting around the kitchen, and there's this little mouse that comes scurrying across the floor, and JR and Gabriel freak out when they see this mouse, and Karsyn's so excited, and she's trying to talk to the mouse. It was just a funny moment completely disconnected to any gameplay.
Do the contestants that are using fake names ever slip up?
It has not happened. I am hopeful that it will happen, and I think that it will. I had this dream that somebody's going to come in and put on a complete fake accent.
Are there any sort of dream celebrities or groups of people that you haven't been able to get yet that you would love to see on the show?
I obviously want the biggest, most interesting names. But I'm kind of more interested to flip it in a way we never have. Maybe the parent is the relative? The child is the celebrity, and their parent comes.
Also the amount of clues we could pull together for a Taylor Swift relative would be amazing.
This interview was edited down for brevity and clarity.
