‘Below Deck Down Under’ Is Back With New Rules About Drinking

Below Deck (or as my non-reality watcher friends call it, Boat People) is one part documentary of luxury yacht workers, one part watching those workers party after the guests leave. On their nights out in places like Santorini or Ibizia, the Boat People blow their tip money on fancy drinks and get wasted, plain and simple. Last season on Below Deck Down Under, though, it almost resulted in a sexual assault on camera. That was thankfully prevented, but it forced Bravo to take a closer look at its policies on alcohol consumption.

The problem is this: yes, the Boat People are technically employees of Bravo, but they’re employees of the yacht first. So, short of stepping in to prevent a sexual assault, the line of how much control producers have is fuzzy. Season three premiered Monday night, and captain Jason Chambers says that producers went into filming emphasizing “the policies and procedures that they had already in place.”

“I don’t know if I can say this, but there was a massive drop in alcohol intake,” Chambers says. “It’s always been the policy of production and Bravo that the crew go out and be adults and pay for their own drinks. Thats fine. We monitor that.”

But he insists that wasn’t at the expense of content, saying, “They actually got a hell of a lot more content. The drama was still there. Crew still actually dropped their guard a little bit. However, they didn’t get to the point that they couldn’t get onto the boat properly. And the safety and dangers were paramount for me as a captain and production as well.”

Alcohol consumption and conversations about who’s doing too much or not enough of it are, for better or worse, a huge part of reality shows and, historically, a huge part of the Below Deck franchise. The difference with a show like Below Deck is that about half of the cast on any given season are reality TV virgins. Working and living in the close quarters of a superyacht with strangers is already a pressure cooker; add cameras capturing your worst moments for millions of viewers, and some might over-rely on substances like alcohol to get by. I’m interested to see if anything really has changed.