EXCLUSIVE: Shep Rose And The Producers Of ‘RelationShep’ On How The Groundbreaking Bravo Series Came To Be — And Where It Could Go Next

It may have started as a silly Southern Charm spinoff, but RelationShep has turned into so much more. There’s no other reality TV dating show on the air, especially, ahem, on Monday nights, as fun and yes, as groundbreaking as this one.

In making the bold decision to break the fourth wall and include producer Sarah Steinfeld as an on-camera confidant for charismatic star Shep Rose, the Bravo show has tinkered with a new element of reality TV we could end up seeing a lot more of. We spoke with Rose, Steinfeld, and executive producer Aaron Rothman about how the concept for the show came together, the ups and downs during production, and the early Southern Charm moments that helped shape this unique process.

As Rothman, co-founder of the Haymaker production company and executive producer of Southern Charm and RelationShep, who has also worked in development at ABC and was “there during the Bachelor days,” explained of RelationShep’s initial sizzle video, “We wanted a sense of UnReal, and we thought that was a really clever and smart way to put it together,” describing the result as “a really natural thing.”

As far as Steinfeld’s eventual on-screen involvement with the show, Rothman said, “She’s a really, really talented producer. And as most talented and smart producers do, they have a really good relationship with talent. She had a really, really good relationship with Shep that transcended even the TV show.”

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As Rose explained, “The first season of Southern Charm when I met Sarah, there was another girl that she worked with, Carlin [Cwik] — we were like the Three Musketeers. I don’t think they met a southern idiot like me, and we just had a lot of fun together. I asked specifically for Carlin to be on the crew as well, because I wanted, when the cameras were off, us to all go to dinner and have beers and have just a real familiar, family-type thing. I put in a few requests of people that I’ve worked with in the past that I really like and respect. They came down to visit and scout in Charleston and talk with me about how they want to do the show, and we went out to dinner and we laughed the entire time.”

In fact, Rose wishes viewers got to see even more of not just the on-camera relationships with his potential female partners, but also the playful relationships he has with other behind-the-scenes crew members. “The showrunner and a couple of the camera men are awesome. One of the sound guys eats professionally, so we would challenge him and gamble on how [many] tacos he could eat at a place in Dallas and we’d all just laugh, and he looked miserable. I wouldn’t have been against covering other little relationships, but Sarah is obviously the paramount.”

Figuring out exactly how much of Steinfeld and her relationship with Rose to show on-screen proved to be a bit of a challenge at first. “It was a learning experience for us all,” Rose said. Rothman explained of the early planning, “We had many conversations about how do we really put this together, what does it really feel like, why would we do this. Sarah really didn’t want to be on camera, so I had to do a little bit of begging.” She was quick to credit Rothman’s guidance throughout the entire process for making her feel comfortable with the idea: “From the beginning of it, I was very unsure about doing it. He got on my level and figured it out with me so that I could not be alone in all of it.”

Well, it worked. Rose points to shows such as The Larry Sanders Show and Episodes as an inspiration for capturing the vibe they were going with, and noted, “I love that premise of a show about doing a show. Of course that’s not quite like what we’re doing at all, [but] I think there’s definitely a niche for that.”

“If I had my way, there would’ve been a lot more of me and Sarah,” Rose admitted. “We drove together to Hilton Head in episode one to my parents’ house. We talked and talked about Hilton Head, my early life, and just about everything. At this point, we were like, let’s throw everything against the wall, and that’s all we can do, so we have options.”

Not that there wasn’t a bit of trial and error along the way. As Rose explained, “Another funny thing that me and Sarah still laugh about is when I was driving to go meet the girls, it was always a debate over whether [Sarah] should be in the car, and we were always like, ‘Just jump out of the car right before, just like down the street.’ And I was like, ‘You guys, do you know how stupid this is? We look like idiots.’ We were just trying whatever we thought was right. I would’ve liked to have been way more provocative in our breaking the fourth wall. However, I wholeheartedly understand the trepidation and the lack of understanding of how it works on everyone’s part.”

So while RelationShep stepped into new territory with an on-camera producer in the mix, they also kept one foot firmly planted in a tried and true reality TV mechanism: a Bachelor(ette) pad. Rose wasn’t thrilled with the idea of the women coming back to Charleston to live in a house together, and as Rothman explained, “To him there’s a stigma to being on a show that has elements that feel like other shows. He’s a discerning guy.” And as Steinfeld pointed out about the decision, “Charleston is where he’s from and he loves Charleston so much, so I think it was really important to bring him back. It’s a huge part of his life, and I think that eventually he understood that.” Plus, they promise a new element to the show tonight, which, from the promo appears to be the final women packing up and moving to a hotel for the rest of the show, that will help even more so to differentiate it from other dating shows. “It satisfied it for him, and it satisfied us creatively as to how we executed doing this kind of thing,” Rothman stated.

“I was pretty upset, I’m not going to lie,” Rose revealed. “When they said, ‘Okay, when you come home, five girls in a house.’ I said, ‘You guys, in a million years, I would never be involved in that scenario in real life.’ What I really wanted to do was go to 10 more cities and maybe at the end have like three or four people come back for a couple of days a piece and see how that goes. I understand that you go with things that have worked in the past. I was nervous about that, and I think of the few of the girls that said ‘No, thank you’ to coming back, it was that reason. I can tell you that unequivocally. Especially Jessie, the bookstore gal, and Amber, the Austin girl. I think that they’re both pretty, really chill, cool girls who like live music and are down to earth, and they were like, ‘We are not going to this house with other girls.'”

However, Rothman revealed there was a moment from season one of Southern Charm that led him to believe Rose would totally be on board with the house idea. “The one thing that I kept making fun of him for, and this is the part that sort of throws me about him, which is weirdly accurate. We hold this 4th of July party at Whitney’s loft, and we’re like, ‘You can bring a date, do whatever you want.’ And he winds up inviting like five women he’d been on dates with throughout production, basically. Just absurd.” “Like a million girls,” Steinfeld joked.

Rothman continued, “Vicki came, Dani came, who he’d just stopped dating, and there was MJ, he had met a girl at the sunglass shop that he thought was cute that he’d invited. I mean, this was like five or six years ago now. But I said to him, ���Shep, what are you doing?’ His response was very simply like, ‘Why not?’”

As producers, they used the “Why not?” attitude to let their star open up about his discomfort with the house situation. As Rothman remembered, “We leaned into it. It was like, ‘Talk about it,’ and he says it on the show. Cameran was like, ‘I don’t know how I feel about it, either,’ but they did it. He’s allowed and encouraged to feel however he actually feels and he can talk about it.”

Rose made it a point to give credit to the network for allowing the cast members on the show to be so open about the whole process. “Think about this. In one episode, Amber from Austin basically says, and they aired it, ‘Look, I don’t think I can do the whole camera thing.’ That never happens normally. That’s fourth wall, but that’s also negatively looking at the genre, to a certain degree.”

And for the women who joined him on this journey, and who helped make this a unique experience and concept for TV, Rose has no problem sharing the success with them. “I sent a group text to all the girls in the show after your article. I thought it was lovely and it was insightful, and I loved it. I said, ‘It’s easy to sometimes get frustrated at the outcome of these kind of shows or any show in general, but please read this article. At least we can take solace with the fact that we did something that was somewhat adventurous and out of the box and that makes me smile.’”

Rose also said he’s paid no attention to ratings for the show, but feels proud of what they’ve put out based on the rare positivity he’s felt from social media. “If I just went by purely reaction from friends, from people that I haven’t talked to in years that have reached out — they didn’t reach out for Southern Charm, but they reached out for this — and just being super like, ‘Oh my god, I really like it, I’m laughing.’ And then social media, you know how awful that can be, and I swear, for every hundred ‘I really like it,’ maybe two, ‘Hey, you idiot’ kind of thing, which is a pretty insane hit rate. I feel really good about it honestly right now.”

Which was not always the case. In last week’s episode, Rose is surprised by Summer, a woman he went on a date with in Dallas that did not receive an invite to the South Carolina house, but she insisted on showing up because she didn’t feel she got enough time to get to know him. Steinfeld had to deliver the news to a less than pleased Rose, who asked them to put her up in a nice hotel and not let her into the house, promising to meet her for a coffee the next day. On-screen, he handled it well, coming across as calmer than one would expect a man to be when hit with that news, respectably listening to the women already in the house and considering their feelings in that situation.

However, Rose called the move “a betrayal” and revealed he was actually “hopping mad” at the scenario, and said, “If they ever show the unedited version of what I said and who I said it to, it would be outrageous.” Steinfeld found herself right in the middle of the action, having to deliver the news to Rose, weather his anger, and also appease the woman who never made it out of the van in the driveway. “It’s one of those things where the line of producing and friend kind of clashed, and that’s hard,” she admitted.

“She knew I would react that way because she knows me,” Rose said about the ordeal. ”I’m very stubborn and principled, but I think I did the right thing. I didn’t envy her position, looking back. Because sometimes I would snap at her, but she was just the messenger. And she might have been in the wings fighting for me in that situation, and it just simply got vetoed. But looking back, I do feel bad about the position that she was in.”

“That was awful,” Rothman said. “I am being real about it. It was awful. We talked about it for days. We knew he was going to be really upset, which he was, and totally understood. You need to find the right time to do it, and it was hard. It was bad. What do you do in those moments? We’re staying true to this crazy format we’ve determined; Sarah is a piece of the puzzle and she’s responsible, so she has to tell him and we have to cover it.”

Rothman went on to defend the call of even letting Summer show up (which they confirm was fully her decision) by saying, “We wanted to do it. We need to let this thing play out the way it’s playing out. We knew he was stressed out about the experience and that this would add to that stress, and it wasn’t fun.”

Rose conceded that “sometimes the best moments happen when things happen out of left field,” and even pointed to another old school Southern Charm moment he credits with being one of the most authentic of his on-screen career. “Season one of Southern Charm, Thomas comes over to my house and says that Kathryn might be pregnant. Now, I hadn’t heard one thing about this. I had just woken up. If you look at the footage to see what I look like, I was just baffled. But a lot of people love that scene more than anything. So sometimes it’s good to really shake the branch. And my branch was shaken.”

He likely was not the only one shaken at this point in RelationShep either. As Rose explained of Steinfeld, “She’s in the middle of me, the women, and the powers that be. That was a thing I know she struggled with. And she had to deliver news to me that she knew I wouldn’t like.”

“It was a hard balance, for sure,” Steinfeld confirmed. “It was like having two jobs at the same time, and being a producer is already really, really hard. It ended up flowing really well because I just literally was like, ‘I’m just going to do my job and talk to him, and the camera needs to just be trained to shoot that.’ We had to adapt, I had to trust that they were shooting it. Which was hard because I’m a control freak. Because these little, tiny moments that we were having happen all the time, whether the cameras are on or not, it was just about capturing those moments.”

“Sarah’s a really high-level producer,” Rothman explained of her position. “We did hire her as one of the leaders in the field, and it ultimately felt that she had to spend a little more time with Shep than maybe she would’ve because we were having fun with this idea. We were always testing and trying, we weren’t 100 percent sure exactly how it was going to go, and she’s a creative leader for us. It was a challenge, because she’s managing the show as well as being individual to Shep. We would be pushing her like, ‘Talk to him, see about this person,’” while Steinfeld said she’d already be in the middle of figuring out the next day’s production schedule.

Rothman added, “Oftentimes you see Shep going to dinner on a date, it just means that there’s 50 other things happening to get you to that point. Bravo shows are big productions. It takes a lot to look the way they do. You work really hard to make it feel effortless.”

Another effortless, and truly refreshing, aspect to RelationShep is that the women of the house seem to really…like each other? The insecurities are bound to come out, but the claws really haven’t, which only adds to the fun, laid-back vibe so few dating competition shows have ever been able to capture. “He literally found and met people that he was set up with,” Rothman said. “So people had a big understanding of who he is and what he liked and that general vibe, and I think that definitely contributed to the women not being viciously anti one another. We don’t really produce to the catty. We weren’t pushing them to get at each other. We just wanted to see how the dates were playing out, how the relationships were building and growing. I think this is also part of the dirty secret of Southern Charm and some of the other shows that we make being successful is that they have a lot of humor and levity to them.”

“It gives it room to be themselves and their authentic personalities actually come out rather than just have these other story lines,” Steinfeld added. “It was also important to [Rose] especially in the beginning, we were trimming out women who were interested in becoming reality stars. I don’t know how you test for that exactly, but we tried to pick people who were just going to be cool and authentic,” Rothman noted.

Even Rose admitted to being surprised by how well they all got along. “I didn’t foresee that they would become friends. But of course they would. What was I thinking? They’re all cool. I was really happy with that unintended consequence, and honestly, not only happy, but it also made me kind of nervous. I felt like they were conspiring against me back at that house. Of course I knew that they were having discussions about this, that, and the other, but it’s funny hearing yourself talked about. It’s weird. Everyone talks about everyone else. If you think they don’t you’re insane. But it’s pretty funny listening to it after the fact.”

Until shit got really real, as they say. In episode two, the show made the rather interesting decision to take viewers from Rose’s Star Wars trivia date to a hospital room where Steinfeld’s mom was recovering after a seizure. We see her break the news to him, he promptly helps her into a car, and then apologizes to his date [Arden] before joining his friend at the hospital. This could’ve been a private moment, but sharing it with the public only helped to shape Rose’s image as a true southern gent who puts his friends above all other (literal) trivial matters.

As Steinfeld recalled of the moment, “We were shooting and my mom texted me, and over a period of 10 minutes it started to dawn on me that I should probably go. I started getting emotional and then I had to tell Shep that I was leaving and then I just went. It was scary. I just wanted to make sure she was okay. I obviously wasn’t there when he told Arden, but that was really sweet what he said, and seeing it for the first time was nice to see how much I mean to him.”

As far as bringing cameras into the hospital room, “I actually didn’t even ask [my mom]. She just said, ‘Where are the cameras? Why aren’t you at the shoot right now?’ And I said, ‘Actually, they’re downstairs.’ And she was like, ‘Bring them up! It will be like the highlight of my entire week’. She’s known about Southern Charm and Shep for a long time because it’s been like five years since we’ve done season one and I’ve kept in touch with him. So meeting Shep for her was really nice, and she was so happy that he came to the hospital. That was the sweetest moment. I just felt good that it was part of [the show]. As a producer I understand what is real and what is authentic, and that just literally came out of nowhere. It felt comfortable.”

Rothman added, “It was a really nice moment because it really came out exactly the way you see it.” Steinfeld credits Rothman with being “instrumental in really making me feel comfortable” in such a scary moment, but it was a no-brainer for him. “I’ve known Sarah for like 100 years at this point. So when you can text someone and be like, ‘Hey are you cool with this? Is this okay?’ and you don’t feel like a jerk because you have a long-term relationship with them to say these kinds of things, that’s the key to this whole thing. Then [it was] the crowning achievement of my career, because I shot it. You’ll see me through the window, I snuck in my iPhone and shot it.”

When Rose reflected on the moment, he said, “The thing of the date was that the trivia was really hard, so it saved me from looking stupid on Star Wars trivia, which I know nothing about. But, god. It hit me like a ton of bricks. So I put her in a taxi and then I meandered back to the table. We were going to shoot, and I just said, ‘I can’t do this. This doesn’t feel right at all.’ And I felt badly that I didn’t just leave with her right away. That would’ve been the right thing to do.”

“Her friendship and her family mean way more than any TV show has ever meant to anybody,” Rose continued. “I’m not diluted enough to think that that’s not the case. So nothing really mattered to me other than her, and she was visibly shaken. So I said, ‘Guys, we gotta end this.’ And everybody was cool about it, of course. Her mom has a great sense of humor and of course was embarrassed a little bit. After we found out that the mom was okay, I just turned to Sarah and was like, ‘Can you believe this show? It’s crazy.’ She’s like, ‘You couldn’t write that into a dialogue. That would be outrageous.’ But there was just a lot of things that happened that make you think, ‘Okay, this just might be meant to be that this is an interesting, good show.'”

The show also has viewers wondering if it is Rose and Steinfeld that are meant to be, with many social media theories guessing that by the end of the process, he realizes it’s his friend he’s had feelings for all along. While Steinfeld admits that they “have a real chemistry with our friendship, it’s always been like that,” neither one says they saw the speculation coming. Rothman however, noted that “It was inevitable that somebody was going to bring it up from the first two seconds of the experience, so we were kind of keeping an eye out.”

With only two episodes left, there are very few, if any regrets, felt from the direction of the producers and star of the show. “I wish there were more,” Rose said. “There’s just so many scenes that we were all rolling on the ground and just having a great time with.”

“I feel really glad that I did it because of the positivity that people are putting out there about it,” Steinfeld said. “I did it because I very rarely do field projects anymore, and I only do them when they’re meaningful to me and experimental, and this I felt was an experiment. What I love about scripted versus documentary is that in documentary it’s understood that we’re following them, so you can break barriers and walls and the whole point is to get more authenticity and to get more real and to get more moments where you can understand where the person is coming from. That is my goal with all the shows that I produce. So if I could do that with this one even more, that was my attraction to it.”

Rothman also said, “I can say I’m really proud of the show. Of all the things we’ve done, I’m really proud of the way it turned out and the way it’s crafted. It’s hard to do even slightly new things, and we hope that this is something that catches people’s interest in some ways that they wouldn’t expect it would.”

“I feel like in a way this is two or three shows in one,” Steinfeld offered. “Because there’s the road and then there’s the house, and it’s very complicated. We thought a lot about everything all the time, so that we could make it as natural as possible when we’re shooting. And I think we did accomplish that, feeling really real and authentic. I’m really proud of it as well.”

“I guess the question is, who else on Bravo would you want to see go through an experience like this?” Rothman asked, teasing potential upcoming seasons with other Bravolebrities. And after the success of RelationShep, the possibilities are nearly endless.

So while we’ll be tuning in to see where the show goes tonight, its star won’t be. His Georgia Bulldogs will be competing against the Alabama Crimson Tide in the college football National Championship, so it’s the football players, and not the ladies, that will have his undivided attention for the night. “That’s one sacrifice I’m willing to embrace,” Rose told us. “Also, Austen (a ‘Bama grad) is meeting me in Atlanta for the game. UGA hasn’t been in this position since ’82. Hasn’t been on since ’80. Huuuuuge game.”

Where to watch RelationShep