Crazy restaurant owners or something more devious....

[Husar]

It's more likely that they made a lot of the drama up just for TV.
After all there is hardly a reality show on TV anymore, it's all just "scripted reality" where they "spice up" the whole story a bit by telling people to act this or that way or even hiring people as layman actors or whatever that's called.

It's all made up to draw people who "like trashy tv from time to time" to make them watch it because just showing how it really is doesn't cut it. Here in Germany there was a case where they auctioned off a hard to sell house for a family on TV and once the cameras were off it turned out that all the buyers at the auction were bought, the auction was completely fake since they found no buyers and the family was left sitting on their house while the TV channel could present itself as some kind of charitable entity...