The pair watched as the family made its way to the dock — where the man fell down. Stammers and Allain immediately got up from their seats and rushed to the dock. They attempted to stop the man, urging him not to drive. His wife assured them he was fine. Stammers described the consequences of drunk driving and offered to pay for a cab, but, she said, “[The wife] kept making excuses for her husband, and was reluctant to take any action her husband might regard as humiliating.”

“Think about your life,” Allain implored him before threatening to call the police.

“What they didn’t show was how belligerent he was acting,” Stammers said of the man. “He was talking down to his wife and yelling at his son. It seemed like it had the potential to turn violent.”
When a camera crew arrived, Stammers said, she thought at first that they had been filming something else nearby and had stopped at Pop’s for lunch. She figured that when they saw what was happening, “they grabbed their cameras to film it because they could. I was thinking that this poor guy’s life is ruined,” she said. “It will turn up on YouTube or he’ll get fired. A really bad situation had gotten even worse. It was intense.”

Stammers added, “We don’t watch much television, so I had never even seen the show before. I had no idea, none whatsoever. When they told me it was a setup and that it was a TV show, I thought my heart was going to explode. I felt a huge range of emotions.”

After finally revealing the hoax, host John Quinones asked Stammers how long she would have stayed there. “…[W]e wouldn’t have left them,” she said.

Quinones told Stammers and Allain after a long day that when the scene had been staged before, one other person had tried to stop the “drunk” couple’s son from getting on the boat. “The most anyone [else] did was call 911 or complain to the bartender,” Stammers said.