Robert Galinsky makes characters for a living. People come to him as themselves, leave as something a little… more. Galinsky invented and still runs the New York City Reality Television School, the first and only of its kind, preparing hopefuls for their cattle calls, like a Lee Strasberg reconceived for twenty-­first-­century ambitions. When I meet him, he’s guarded—­the only press coverage he’s ever gotten has been brutal. But after I tell him (sincerely) that I find his critics to be pearl clutchers, he becomes animated and jumps right into telling me about one of his best students.

“There was this girl I had come in,” he tells me. “She walked with a cane and she had a service dog. I asked her, ‘Who are you?’ She said, ‘I’m the girl who has a prescription pill addiction because I’m mentally ill.’ She asked me if that was okay, and I asked her if she was okay with it. And she said, ‘Oh yeah, it’s true. That’s what I’m bringing to the table.’ And so we went with that.”

Galinsky finishes his anecdote with a proud shrug and leans back into a leather couch. We’re in a coffee shop in Alphabet City that seems to serve as his home base. He comes out of experimental theater and improv, speaks in those terms, wears jeans with flip-­flops and red sunglasses that are a bit of a personal trademark. The barista kids know he always orders a macchiato.

For a long time he was just an improv coach. He started teaching reality when a Argentinian dog groomer called the number on his website and said he had a month to prepare for an audition for a show that would end up being called Groomer Has It.Galinksy lets that name hang out there like I’ll recognize it. Remarkably I don’t, but no matter. If I’d seen the show, I would have seen Jorge become the star. Out of all the groomers, it was Jorge whom everyone wished good things for. He played the whole damn season from hero position, just like an improv game, the way Galinksy taught him to, and he killed it. He didn’t win the show, but he won affection, he proved to be watchable, and after his season, he landed a roll on TLC’s Extreme Poodles.

“He was never the guy who threw the glass at the wall,” Galinksy tells me. “He was the guy who went up to the glass thrower and said, ‘Don’t do that; why’d you have to do that? What are you feeling that made you do that?’”

Galinsky figured out pretty fast that the same principles he’d always taught improv­ers applied to reality...