House of Heat, Tubi’s new reality TV show, is both a throwback to the very first modern reality TV show and its subject, and a reality show that would have seemed improbable a decade ago, never mind 30 years ago.
Like The Real World in 1992, it follows strangers who move in together while pursuing jobs in the entertainment industry. House of Heat’s cast, however, are all producing their own erotic, explicit content.
We’ve gone from Real World cast members being shamed for such work to a show being cast with people who make a lot of cash selling images and videos of themselves via OnlyFans and other online venues.
House of Heat, which streams new episodes Thursdays on the Fox-owned Tubi, is not explicit, except in dialogue. It gives some attention to the business and mechanics of creating such content, whether that’s a cast member writing carefully in a notebook a list of “Notes for OnlyFans Live” as another cast member gives advice, or three men talking through a threesome scene, who will top who and where they will film.
It’s a sex-positive show, though there still is shame, with a fascinating divide in the house based on what they show and/or sell. Brandon, who’s the newest to this type of work, offers a toast to “great sex and paychecks,” but not all are having sex on camera.
House of Heat (Tubi, Thursdays) stars Jade Ramey, Brandon Karson, Chase DeMoor, Steph Mi, Nafeesah Terry, plus two couples, Ava Louise & Vinny Buffa and Sumner Blayne & Koaty Blayne.
You may recognize Chase from Netflix’s Too Hot to Handle, Floor is Lava, and/or Perfect Match, or you may recognize others from Instagram or whatever adult sites you may or may not visit.
I found their discussions and relationship to their work to be fascinating, especially the way it’s “content” that’s so mechanical. Sumner tells someone, “You should not be doing any content you’re uncomfortable with,” and later suggests he and another man fuck his boyfriend, perhaps on a balcony.
While it nods to those early seasons of The Real World, with a group of mismatched strangers sharing a house together, it tips toward more-recent Real World with fighting and drama.
I found the drama manufactured by Ava to be especially exhausting, and it starts immediately, with her stealing everyone’s hangers. Later, she includes interrupts Chase’s live stream and shouts that he doesn’t produce his own OnlyFans, which he worries will threaten his business.
The show is produced by Amber Mazzola and her On The Stoop Entertainment. She previously produced The Profit and E!’s WAGS, and I interviewed her this week.
We talked about the roots of the show actually being in MTV’s The Real World, and also things like casting and the production’s rules, including that no sex was to be filmed in the house.
We also discussed why a streaming show, which has no legal restrictions on its content, is comfortable showing us its cast saying “fucking and sucking” but the word “coming” is bleeped, or why a cast member looks at a shower and suggests he will “fuck you in here” but when his girlfriend says “suck your dick,” that gets censored. Even a sex-positive show about adults making content for each other still runs up against our societal prudishness.
The interview below has been condensed and edited to clean up human speech.
Andy Dehnart: Was this a show that you developed and pitched?
Amber Mazzola: An executive at Tubi called me and asked me if I’d ever heard of OnlyFans—and I can honestly say that I hadn’t. Quickly, I became very well-versed in it. It was huge, big in pop culture and everyone was talking about it.
From there, I cast it, found the house, and developed the show. But I didn’t come up with the concept at first.
You mentioned casting. How did you even start? Are you looking for personalities actually on OnlyFans and their sexual content as part of your casting? Or was it looking at their non-sexual [content] since that’s what the show is going to be more focused on?
Well, first it was this task of seeing who does OnlyFans? We found that there’s a bunch of agencies. So much like normal reality stars, there are agents and managers that represent OnlyFans stars. There’s a handful of really great ones that corner the market.
From there, it was a matter of weeding through them. A big social following is important for us; Tubi’s a streamer. And I think getting a variety of what they did—we don’t want everybody in the porn industry, [as] we’re not going to show porn.
So it was important to have a balance as well for what the kind of content was.
Did you find people immediately interested in doing this? I’m curious about the social-to-TV pipeline. Five years ago, maybe, it seemed to be new, and now it’s like, [influencers] don’t need TV—We have more fans here!
That’s a good question, because a lot of these people are making way more on their platform than they will on a reality show. I didn’t feel like there was a lot of convincing because people want more money and more viewers, and to target different audiences.
I think that was an appeal to a lot of people. And having a platform like Tubi that gets [78 million users], that’s appealing.
That being said, you still had OnlyFans stars who are making a million plus, so not all of them were jumping to do the show—especially if they’re all living together.
It’s one thing if they could go home to their lives and sleep in their beds, but you can’t on the show.
How long were they sequestered—living together?
They were sequestered, probably eight to nine weeks.
That’s pretty considerable these days in reality TV. It’s not like you shot this all like The Bachelor in three weeks.
It was surprising—like old-school reality, it felt like in a lot of ways.
I’m curious sort how you pitched it to them, or how you envisioned it in terms of what their interaction would be? Or was that something that was just a big question mark, like we’ll put them in the house and we’ll see what happens?
I really wanted Real World—like old school reality is really what I was looking for, and the network was on board with that.
So it wasn’t just putting a bunch of crazy people together and see what happens, but there’s part of that.
But I definitely think we wanted old-school, authentic reality, not manufactured. We weren’t coming in and producing it like on some of these shows. We just wanted to create an environment and cast the right people where we knew we would get great content by letting them do their thing, what they’re good at.
Doing what they’re doing, I’m curious about filming and doing their OnlyFans content in the house. Did you have conversations with them—like, we’re going to film everything, but no one will see it? Or when you do what you do, we’ll close the door and let you do that?
We definitely had rules, and there were definitely lots of conversations, lots of releases, lots of rules. One rule is we’re not shooting porn. So if you do that, then you’re doing that outside this house.
Now, there are a lot of other ways that even the people that do porn make money on the platforms, [such as] live OFs or brand deals. Some of them have podcasts. It didn’t all have to be porn, if that’s what they did.
We did give them one day off a week, so if you make a lot of money doing something that we’re not going to show, you can go off and do it one day a week when you’re not in the house.
There’s an episode where Koaty and Sumner are going to have a threesome with someone, and they end up not doing that because they’re having a fight. [The third guy] thinks the energy is bad, but they’re talking about as if they were going to film it in the house.
That threw us for a little bit of a loop. (laughs) Had that progressed any further, had there not been a fight, there would have been producer intervention. They could have continued it at their home, you know.
But a lot of times, we would see the business and the behind-the-scenes, and then they would go to their own house or a hotel.
That specific instance was somewhat of a surprise to us as producers, and was happening organically, but at the same time that it wouldn’t have come to fruition in our house.
Gotcha. That’s The Real World of it all—like you were talking about, I definitely felt those vibes. I was just really fascinated by the mechanics. Even just calling their sexual activity “content” just felt so cold and callous to me—or maybe I should just say business-like. Was that surprising to you, what you actually ended up seeing them doing?
It was all surprising to me, yes. The fact that so much of what they do is a business.
You mentioned Koaty and Sumner, which is interesting, because they’re a couple. Part of the problem with their dynamic and their relationship is that they are a couple, and there are times when you need to be intimate as a couple, but then there’s the business of it.
And that’s one of the reasons for their arguments and fights—the reason that they’re at each other’s throats. It’s a hard balance for them.
But for us, it was weird. You see Jade walking around in string bikinis all day long like it was nothing. Because to them it isn’t anything.
There is an interesting divide in the house between the “we have sex on camera” and “we do not” people. Did you expect to see that kind of clashing—the judgment that came, or maybe it was actually more defensiveness?
Definitely not on day one. I don’t think we expected to see that right away, because it happened right away.
They all do different things, right? And there was no judgment on our end as producers—certainly not on my end. They make a damn good living. Talk about the American dream—right, like The Profit?—some of them are really living the American dream. So there was no judgment.
It was weird how judgment did trickle down and they were judgmental of each other. I don’t think that was planned. Certainly, you try to cast a diverse group of people that aren’t always going to see eye-to-eye, but that was a surprise at first.
To dive into the drama a bit: Day one, Ava comes in and steals all the hangers and there’s even a fourth-wall breaking [moment]: We have enough hangers for all of you, maybe go check Ava’s closet.
Did you have any sense that she was going to be as much of a shit-stirrer/drama-causer as she was? Or did that come as a surprise?
I think we all knew that Ava was gonna be a shit-stirrer. I’d be lying if I said that we didn’t think Ava was going to ever be passive a single day on the show.
That said, we didn’t know how little of a filter she actually had. It’s one thing to go through a casting [process], and you’re putting your best foot forward and showing how crazy you can be. It’s another to be there for nine weeks, doing it in person, in reality.
I don’t think we realized, as producers, the level to which she would go and be unfiltered.
It’s either in episode one or two when Chase does the live [OnlyFans show] and she interrupts and says he doesn’t run his own OnlyFans, and then we see him talking to a producer.
I’m wondering if you had any rules governing their interaction with each other. He suggested that it was going to hurt his business, and he wasn’t in for that part of the drama.
Chase wasn’t in for any of it, to be honest, even from the first day that he got there.
We have rules. We have house rules, just like every house reality show. There was never a rule, don’t interrupt someone’s business.
There was a rule like, Don’t deface someone’s property, don’t hit the cameras, don’t do this or that. But it’s up to Chase to fight his own battles if she’s going to walk in on him.
We didn’t know that was gonna happen. That’s what’s crazy. A lot of this really did happen in the moment. Sometimes, as a producer, you’re like, Oh my gosh! You’re caught between this line: Do I interrupt it or do I let reality play and see what happens? It’s a fine line.
Was there ever that line crossed for you this season?
When they got physical, that was a line that was definitely crossed where we had to stop it. We’re never going to accept that on a show.
Ava has been defending herself, of course, and she [posted on TikTok] that we all didn’t see the real Chase, and that [“he was literally threatening to beat up people the entire time” and “abused production and cast members”]
I’m curious if you can confirm or deny that, or if you have any thoughts about it.
I didn’t ever see a violent side of Chase, actually. I was actually very surprised that Chase, as a professional boxer, had as much self-control as he had, throughout the whole time.
I was impressed. I would actually, behind the scenes, always say, Wow. I might not have had that much self-control.
But Chase didn’t want to be there, which was the problem. Chase thought he was exempt from everybody’s rules. He didn’t want to do what Ava was doing. He didn’t want do what producers said. He didn’t want to sleep in the house.
That’s what really annoyed Ava is that Chase, just from day one, thought he was above it all, you know? He came in really not knowing the situation, not jiving with the people, and really made no attempts to.
I guess that explains why he left. Were you okay with that?
Yes, at that point, we were. Because there was tons of—what Ava’s probably referred to—tons of times off-camera, on-camera, [times] where he was threatening to leave. So at that point, it was like, okay, bye. You know? (laughs) If you don’t want to be here, then don’t be here.
[What about] Jade leaving and coming back? Was that her decision to step away for a little while, or did you ask her to come back, just to finish up the season?
When Jade left—again, this really is shot like Real World. So when Jade’s leaving, she’s leaving. I did call her managers, and they said, What? They were learning about what was happening, as I was. It was all in real time.
I didn’t know whether Jade was going to come back. I wanted Jade to come back. I really liked Jade, and liked her for the show, but she added a different element, especially without Chase.
I called her and asked her, “What are you doing? Are you coming back?” She needed time, a break and a breather. It’s hard. You’re living all together. Everyone has different opinions, everyone’s judgmental. They party a lot, they don’t sleep, so it’s tough.
It’s like adult summer camp, but it’s also their lives and their businesses.
Obviously, most shows disconnect people from their phones and social media, but were they 100% online just like they normally would be?
They were, but then there were rules as well. They can’t post in the moment and reveal anything about other cast members. They can’t reveal what’s happening in the moment at the house. You can take a picture, but you can’t identify the house.
So anything that they did while they were there was very benign and kind of innocuous.
I’m curious about the post-production part—and this might be on the network level, but I found it so fascinating what could and couldn’t be said. [Vinny says] “I’m gonna fuck you in here,” but then [when Ava says] “suck your dick,” it gets bleeped.
The truth is, we were all figuring out as we went along. At times, we were pushing the envelope. This was a new show and a new topic matter, and also owned by Fox. There’s a line. I think they didn’t know where to draw the line. We want bleeps, but you don’t want to bleep out the whole show.
We tried to have some sort of balance. Technically, it’s a streamer: you don’t have to have blurs, you don’t have to have bleeps. But in order to not repulse everybody, you need to have some sort of decorum.
And it is advertiser supported, which I think is the real issue.
Right, yeah. I think it’s a fine line. It’ll be interesting to see if we’re picked up for a second season. It would be interesting to see what we come back with for standards and practices—what are the rules, what are the bleeps, what are the blurs.
You’re hitting pretty much an hour-long [episode] mark with about 43 minutes or so [per episode] Was that something that was determined in advance, or was it that the content would kind of dictate episode length?
We were supposed to be a half hour show.
Oh, wow.
Yes, we had so much great content. Our first two weeks of shooting made up the first five episodes. So there’s a lot of footage. So we ended up being an hour show.
When you were trying to filter through all this footage, did you have a sense of trying to balance drama versus business? Or was it being led by what the cast was doing?
No, I think there was definitely that fine line. We tried to have every episode have a mix where you would learn something about the business of OnlyFans or adult digital content, because to me, that is really fascinating, right? The fact that someone could make $200+ thousand a month—that, to me, is fascinating.
Sometimes the drama takes over, and it’s hard to do that.
Yeah. At first, I was really into the old-school Real World vibe, which was interesting because it was people with actual jobs living in a house together.
And, I would be curious what the season would have been like without Ava. Maybe the show would have not popped in the way it does, but it feels like she was almost too much. Maybe it doesn’t work without a villain?
Ava definitely overpowers the conversation. So that’s tough, at times—she likes to hold court in the kitchen. So it’s definitely finding a balance.
I think if there’s a second season, striking that balance will be very important.
You mentioned a second season. I you do get a second season, would you imagine bringing back the same cast again?
It’s the million-dollar question right now. I love our cast. I really love our cast. I would love to bring them back.
I would love to add some more in as well to spruce it up a bit and add some other diversity and other storylines, and shake it up a bit. But I really do love the cast that we have. I also think they have unfinished business, so we’ll see.
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