How Claim to Fame was created and evolved—and its major challenge change (2024)

ABC’s great celebrity relative competition Claim to Fame is unusual in American reality TV: it’s an original format, not imported from another country.

From Survivor to The Masked Singer to Married at First Sight, American producers and networks license formats from overseas, though they do a lot of work to put their own creative spins on them, sometimes transforming them entirely.

In part two of my conversation with executive producer Eric Detwiler, we discussed that, and and how Kinetic Content—producers of shows including Love is Blind, Married at First Sight, and Little Women: LA—came up with the idea.

Detwiler revealed that, in pre-production for the very first season, there was a major change made in the way challenges are structured that’s really changed the entire nature of the game—for the better, I’d say.

He’s also promised another change to the format this season, for the finale, which is two weeks from tonight. “The finale, and the way that the contestants come back for the final episode and have a real impact on gameplay, we’ve upped it a whole other level from what we did in season two—which I think was an upgrade from how we handled it in season one.“

I’m looking forward to seeing what that is, especially because the information those former players bring back into the game can really affect who wins.

Our conversation follows; as usual, it’s been condensed and edited to clean up human speech.

Andy Dehnart: I’ve been surprised at how rapidly the game has evolved and advanced since that first season. The show has itself too, although I think that’s a different thing. And I guess I’m curious about just like the strategy that we’ve seen this season and the gameplay, um, and if that surprised you all as producers, um, based on what you expected maybe based on last season.

Eric Detwiler: I think what’s so great about Claim to Fame is that each contestant brings their own strategy to the game every season. And certain strategies work and certain strategies don’t work.

If you look at somebody like Adam—who’s gotten some criticism for his lack of pop culture knowledge—I think that his strategy was a smart one: to go in and just absorb what he can from other people, even if that ended up making some other people frustrated with him in the house.

Certain people have come in so confident that they have deciphered clues and figured things out. Look at season two and that entire run of people thinking Chris was related to Elvis or Elton John.

If you think about Naomi’s gameplay this season, she was extremely confident that she had figured out who Hud was. Had she been put up on the block to guess and guessed Hud, she would have been wrong.

The strategy, to me, evolves each season, because the contestants have all watched the previous seasons, and try to glean what they can to inform how their game will be played.

Our job, knowing that, is to adjust gameplay in a way to keep them on their toes. The way that even the game of telephone was played this season—we love that game—we adjusted it because we really watched in season two that the contestants weren’t trying to memorize the entire limerick. They were just looking for those key rhyming words to put the clues together.

The design of the game shifted in a way that I think forced them to really get the full limerick out, and caused a lot of chaos for people like Miguel, who had a hard time remembering certain phrases.

I think that the strategy is always going to be different. I don’t notice a stark contrast in strategy from seasons two to three. Certainly from season one to two, yes, because the season one cast didn’t have a point of reference going into the show. They were coming into a brand-new format and trying to figure it out as they went along.

That’s one of the reasons a season one of a show like this is so special, because they’re experiencing it for the first time, and the audience [is too].

One of the things that we learned from listening to feedback, from the audience and people like you, was even the way the show is presented in season two and three, involving letting the audience at home be a part of the game.

I’m really happy we made that evolution. It makes the game much more watchable and fun to participate in, even though there are spoilers out there online as people figure things out.

Obviously, I agree. And one who avoids spoilers because I like playing along—and also either feeling smart or stupid when I can decipher a wine clue, or not.

With strategy, I think it’s just surprised me how complex it’s become. There are so many twists and turns, rivaling what we see in Survivor and Big Brother now, after 25 years of those shows—not a season three of a show that’s a celebrity guessing game, which is how it was originally framed. But I’ve loved seeing it evolve as a social, strategic competition.

I think that what I think people have realized is ultimately falling into the trap of making alliances doesn’t really help you on this show. Early stages, yes: forming friendships and working with people can work to your advantage.

What I love about the format is that the power of being in the guesser position at a certain point becomes an advantage, when early in the season it becomes a disadvantage. We saw it as a disadvantage in season three, because no one could get a correct guess for a number of weeks.

If you’ve got somebody figured out, you almost want to be the guesser. At some point in the season, the dynamic shifts. And I think that people forming partnerships early on learn throughout the process that ultimately, this is an individual’s game. If you want to win, you have to look out for yourself and take what you can while you can. Adam has done it, I think, pretty successfully.

Yeah, he was absolutely great TV, and grew on me as a player.

Are there any misconceptions you’ve seen online or elsewhere that you wanted to clear up?

No. I love that people react to the show, and either love it or get frustrated by it—or get frustrated by the contestants strategy.

But what is what is so great about the format is that it allows the contestants to play the game how they want to play the game. We let them run with their theories, and ultimately it all leads to—every episode—a pretty dramatic guess-off that makes for great suspense and great reveals.

I’m hopeful that, in the future, we can do more more reveals like the way we did with Jon Cryer. I think that was a really fun kind of nod to really the spirit of the show, and that warmth that I talked about earlier. He was giving her a hard time about her game play, but it’s all in fun.

These people are competing, but they’re there to have fun, and that they share a common background in all being related to some of the biggest stars on the planet.

That reminds me of something that I’ve loved since the beginning: We rarely get new formats in reality TV that are not imports. Who came up with this idea originally?

I’m extremely proud of the fact that this format was homegrown within the Kinetic Content development team.

There was an evolution in the format, as we got it ready to pitch the show. In conjunction with the season-one producing team that we brought in, and with Chris Coelen, who’s our CEO, really finishing off the development of that project as we got it ready for air.

It was all done internally, and you’re right [about] the fact that it wasn’t an import from Holland, or it didn’t come in from Korea, that it was really something homegrown and is unique in its gameplay.

One change that we made in development internally really made the show click. Even though the show is not all about the challenges, the key to me was the way we shifted our perspective on how the challenges would be created and produced.

Early in development, the challenges were all going to be based on a skill that the celebrity would have.

As an example—and it’s so funny that Karsyn ended up on the show in season two, because I used to use Dale Earnhardt Jr. as an example in season one early development—if Dale Earnhardt Jr’s cousin was on the show, there would be a race car challenge. Or if Michael Jordan’s cousin was on the show, there would be some kind of basketball challenge.

Ultimately, we decided not to go that route, and to build in challenges and games that were more about clues and discovery along the way. That really opened up, the types of games we can play—and really, how the game itself was played.

That was, again, something that internally we worked on at Kinetic and were able to, I think, put into really positive use for season one. It’s just been a trend that’s allowed us to create new games and find new and interesting ways to get clues out into the show.