When Captain Lee Rosbach welcomed producer Courtland Cox onto the superyacht he was commanding, the Cuor di Leone, about 10 years ago, he wasn’t doing it out of the kindness of his heart.

“My boss had called and told me that the boat was being considered for an eight-week charter on a reality show,” says Rosbach, remembering back to a time when he had no interest in reality TV or reality TV people.

But as any Below Deck viewer knows, hierarchy is inarguable. So at the request of his boss, Rosbach begrudgingly gave Cox what he calls the “10 cent tour. Most of the production company didn’t know anything about boats,” remembers Rosbach. “And I knew absolutely nothing about TV production. I remember thinking, ‘If there was ever a recipe for a disaster, this has gotta be it.’”

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Since that meeting, and Below Deck’s 2013 debut on Bravo, Rosbach has been stunned to see the series become a massive success—expanding into two spin-offs, Below Deck Mediterranean and Below Deck Sailing Yacht (with two more on the way), eclipsing Real Housewives as the network’s most-watched linear series last season, and earning its first two Emmy nominations this year—for unstructured reality show and editing an unstructured reality program. But the Captain was spot-on about Below Deck in another sense—the ambitious at-sea series was a logistical nightmare to create.

The idea for Below Deck—a delicious upstairs-downstairs look into the yachting world—had come from former Bachelor in Paradise director (and former yacht steward) Rebecca Taylor Henning and her husband, Doug. They introduced Cox and his 51 Minds producing partner Mark Cronin to the rarified superyachting world—where multimillion-dollar vessels are staffed by young, hard-partying adventure seekers. During the day, “yachties” serve and satisfy the whims of wealthy charter guests. At night, they carouse with crew, burn through cash tips on booze, and in some cases, pursue ill-advised romances with coworkers in their cramped downstairs quarters.

Unlike many reality shows, which are set in controlled locations and cast based entirely on potential audience appeal, Below Deck features actual yachties doing actual jobs aboard actual vessels. These yachts are subject to maritime law and insurance policies, meaning that production cannot interfere or influence the captain’s handling of his or her boat. As The New York Times put it, “for a reality show, [it is] uncommonly constrained by the bounds of reality.” Among the many considerations each season:

• The yacht has to be big enough to fit a control room and small tech room, and oriented in a way so that it can be wired for camera and audio. Because each yacht is registered in a different country, production has to take a crash course on varying regulations each season.
• The island location has to have a dock that can house the boat for the six weeks; plus the infrastructure to house approximately 50 employees for six straight weeks of production.
• The shooting hours are round-the-clock. Remembering an early learning curve, Cox says, “Our first call sheet had camera crews arriving at 7 a.m. and wrapping by 10 p.m. because that’s what you do for a normal reality show. Then we realized that yachties stay up until three o’clock in the morning drinking and hanging out, and we didn’t have the cameras there to cover it.”
• The shooting season is a finite and inflexible timeline of six weeks. Per The New York Times: “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 cast, for the most part, has to have actual yachting qualifications and certifications. “You can’t just find people who are fun and funny and interesting,” says Cox. “You have to find people who have the credentials and training to even be legal.” (Some entry-level cast members have occasionally inflated their résumés—which the captain realizes pretty quickly.)

“We had to completely change our production model,” says Cox, looking back on Below Deck’s inception and the first handful of seasons it took to iron out wrinkles. “You have to evolve all the time because on any given day you have to monitor the swell, the wind, the wind direction, the proximity to a beach, the transportation time for a production crew to get from the hotel to the yacht, etc.”

Rosbach, who is the only Below Deck cast member to have appeared on every season of the original series, says that the chemistry of the constantly rotating cast members is another factor that can’t be predicted. “Each season you’re trying to get it together with different levels of experience and different personalities, and let’s toss in the fact that they are very young, inexperienced, and in an exotic location with copious amounts of money to spend. It’s a perfect storm in a good way because things happen that you could not script.” (The franchise has featured maritime drug busts, bad romances, cheating scandals, nightmare charter guests, and even a yacht crash.)

Noah Samton, senior vice president of current production for Bravo, theorizes that the authenticity of Below Deck’s working conditions—which were so difficult to figure out how to capture—is what keeps viewers engaged each season. “There’s none of the skepticism that people sometimes have about reality: Is this real? Is this not real? With Below Deck, it’s clear that we’re just following them through their actual work lives.”

This was most clear on Below Deck’s eighth and most recent season—which opened with Rosbach in the hospital and closed with the cast disembarking early due to the coronavirus. The season featured the usual Below Deck trademarks—messy romantic and coworker drama, chaotic crew turnover, and magnificent vistas—but with a few emotional twists. Rosbach was reunited with his surrogate son-at-sea, Eddie Lucas, a viewer-beloved bosun who appeared on the show’s first three seasons. The crew was dealing in real time with mounting coronavirus concerns. And then, Rosbach—the same captain who initially didn’t want any part of Below Deck—opened up unexpectedly on camera.

Seated at dinner with charter guests Jackie and David Siegel, who lost their daughter to an overdose in 2015, Rosbach revealed that he recently lost his son Joshua after an addiction battle. Most reality stars have no problem reflecting on their own traumas on camera, but for the usually gruff captain, it was a poignant moment of vulnerability that struck a chord with longtime viewers.

“On the heels of this incredibly awful tragedy that Lee and [his wife] Mary Anne suffered…to be able to have someone familiar like Eddie come back, when he has been like a son to Lee, it got magnified into this kind of amazing but awful coincidence,” Cox says, reflecting on the previous season. “While you’re seeing what Lee went through and seeing what Eddie meant to him, it really puts it in perspective—how you’re making a TV show with real human stakes.”

Because of the pandemic, the eighth season had to be edited remotely—a Slack challenge for production members used to talking out certain footage in person. “It’s mind-blowing when I think back on it, because it’s a monumental season to try to put together under terrible circumstances,” says Cox, explaining why the nominations for this particular season are especially gratifying. “This is a nice validation of all of that hard work that we’ve been doing for 19 seasons now.”

Cox exclusively confirms that Rosbach and Lucas will be reunited, again, on Below Deck’s ninth season, which premieres October 25 and will be set on St. Kitts. In a separate interview, Lucas reveals that he will appear on the season in a new rank as first officer. “It’s a different dynamic between me and the Captain—I can kind of challenge his way of thinking and better understand his leadership style. No matter how long I work with the Captain, I keep on learning new things.”

Bravo recently announced that the Below Deck franchise continues to grow, with two new spin-offs slated to debut next year. Below Deck Down Under, also produced by 51 Minds, will be set in the Whitsunday Islands, between Australia and the Great Barrier Reef, and air on Peacock. “Not only is it down under in terms of being in Australia, but a lot of the show is literally being filmed underneath the water in the sea paradise that is the Great Barrier Reef,” explains Samton. “There’s a lot of diving, scuba diving, snorkeling, spear fishing, and the cast actually gets involved in a lot of the diving excursions.”

The other spin-off, Below Deck Adventure, produced by Shed Media, will take place in Alesund, Norway. “We’re shooting in the fjords,” explains Samton, “so the water’s a lot colder. If you fall in there, it can be dangerous.” The charter guests in this spin-off, points out Samton, will also be markedly different for the Below Deck universe. “These are people who spend a lot of money on adventure excursions to paraglide or explore glaciers. These are not the same people who want to get a tan and drink 20 margaritas on a boat,” says Samton. “Each expansion has brought something unique with it that you don’t find in any of the other franchises that have come before it,” says Shari Levine, Bravo’s executive vice president of current productions, who thinks the franchise has endless potential. “The idea of people living and working together getting into romances with each other onboard provides so much fascinating material for viewers. I call it a perfect show because it has so many different kinds of stories and different kinds of reasons to watch.”

As for Captain Lee, he says he was “shocked and humbled” by the recent Emmy nominations. Speaking about Below Deck’s run, Rosbach says he’s just happy the production team hasn’t gotten in his way.

“I don’t run my boat any differently now than I did 20 years ago or 25 years ago,” says Rosbach. As for the idea of the Below Deck universe expanding even further with the new spin-offs, the captain took a moment to reflect in his own parlance: “Jesus. Who the hell would’ve thunk?”

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