Is Raid the Cage fake?

CBS’s Raid the Cage may be over-the-top, but the show, its drama and its prizes do not seem to be fake.

If you tuned in to watch episodes of CBS’s newest game show, Raid the Cage, over the last couple of months, you will know that this show blends the best of both worlds when it comes to television game show staples.

The teams of contestants who are chosen to compete on the show have to show off their very best trivia skills. Moreover, they also have to pull off incredible physical feats in order to get their “grabbed” prizes out of the cage before the timer reaches zero.

Why Raid the Cage is probably real

And while it is incredibly fun to watch these teams of two compete with mental-gymnastics and actual gymnastics to earn the chance of beating the cage, some questions have been raised about Raid the Cage’s authenticity.

The reality is that any formulaic show like Raid the Cage is bound to be scripted to some extent.

However, from the detailed behind-the-scenes video that host, Jeannie Mai uploaded to her Hello Hunnay with Jeannie Mai YouTube Channel, it is clear that Raid the Cage is just as chaotic in real life as it appears to be on screen.

To add to this, the show’s oh-so real (and oh-so valuable) prizes, as well as its unexpected real-life drama and its live in-studio audience leave little room for anything that we see play out on Raid the Cage to be fabricated for the cameras. And it is pretty safe to say that Raid the Cage is as real as it gets (for reality TV).

Raid the Cage season one ratings

Every reality television fan will know that all good shows need a few seasons on the air before they can become great shows. But even though Raid the Cage has only just wrapped up its first season on air, it is already doing quite well.

Raid the Cage’s season one ratings can be summarized as follows:

Are the prizes real?

With things like all-inclusive vacations and Tiffany & Co. diamond necklaces up for grabs, the Raid the Cage prizes often seem too good to be true.

However, CBS seems so willing to hand out these unbelievable high-value prizes that they even partnered with the content creator, Medy, to hand out several prizes (including headphones, an acoustic guitar, a scooted, an Amazon Alexa, gift cards and more) Raid the Cage-style to promote the show.

And if the network had so many spare prizes to hand out to non-contestants before the show even started, it is fair to assume that the prizes we see collected on the show, are all real as well.

The competition on Raid the Cage can get intense

While well-known actors can easily weave in and out of character on set, it is difficult to imagine that the “regular people” who appear on Raid the Cage can fake their genuine reactions throughout the game.

And in the end, the show just showcases too much real-world drama for it to be falsified. In season one’s episode five, Renece Salaam gets trapped in the cage, after not being able to hear the three-second countdown over all of the other noise on the set.

But later on, the episode takes an even more real, turn – when Rod Gardner accidentally shatters one of the cage’s glass doors at the end of his run.

The show is filmed in front of a live audience

And while real prizes and real drama are already compelling evidence to suggest that Raid the Cage is not fake, the fact that the show is filmed in front of a live studio audience is perhaps the most undeniable evidence that Raid the Cage is real.

Kevin Rayo and Billy Swenson, who were a team of contestants on the show and shared their experience with the Red Dragon Network after the fact, revealed that they spent a total of 48 hours filming for their episode.

They also shared that they had “around 300 people” watching them during the process.

And, while scripted or faked reality television shows may be able to keep their ways under wraps with closed sets there is just no way that Raid the Cage would get away with faking elements of the show with so many people there to witness it live.