At a sceney hotel in the Meatpacking District, Capt. Lee Rosbach glances disapprovingly at the waiter, who sports a severe undercut.
"How do people walk out of their house in the morning, look in the mirror and think, 'This hair looks good'?" Rosbach says once the server has delivered his coffee and is out of earshot.
This brand of unvarnished honesty has endeared Rosbach, a.k.a. "The Stud of the Sea," to fans of "Below Deck," now in its 10th season. Like a real-life hybrid of "The Love Boat" and "Downton Abbey," Bravo's compulsively watchable reality show follows the hard-partying crew members and entitled guests aboard luxury yachts in stunning locations around the world — and has introduced millions of viewers to terms like "aft deck" and "bosun."
As a gruff, heterosexual, 73-year-old white male who has never been implicated in financial crimes or launched a line of scented candles, Rosbach is not your typical Bravo-lebrity. He never wanted to be on TV in the first place.
"I'm just a blue-collar guy who does his job. I just happened to get filmed while I'm doing it," says Rosbach, who is in town for BravoCon, a three-day gathering for fans of the network's unscripted programming. But wearing a coral-pink zippered sweatshirt in a tropical print (and a large silver medallion) over his bare chest, he looks like he got lost on the way to Margaritaville.
"I don't really do anything any different on my boat than I did 30 years ago," he continues, "And if the camera doesn't like it, well, that's not my problem. But I guess people like it, because it's still going after 10 years."
Rosbach has been the sensible anchor on "Below Deck" since it premiered in 2013, outlasting dozens of lackluster deckhands, stewards and chefs along the way. Once an unlikely fit for Bravo, he now seems indispensable, much like "Below Deck" itself, which has become the network's most valuable franchise since "The Real Housewives." There are now four spinoffs, each with a different captain and a distinct flavor: "Below Deck Mediterranean," "Below Deck Sailing Yacht," "Below Deck Down Under" and "Below Deck Adventure," which launched last month. Over the last year, four of the top 10 programs on Bravo were incarnations of "Below Deck," which draw a larger male audience than is typical on the female-skewing network.
But in last week's episode, Rosbach dropped a bombshell, telling the crew of the motoryacht St. David — sailing in St. Lucia this season — he was leaving the boat because of nerve issues impairing his mobility.
On social media, fans responded to the news of their beloved boat daddy's departure with a torrent of tearful emojis. But the change is not necessarily permanent: Rosbach has repeatedly said he has no interest in retiring.
'There was nobody with gray hair on Bravo'
When Bravo bought the idea for "Below Deck" about a decade ago, executive producer Courtland Cox remembers thinking, "Oh s—. Now I have to figure out how to make this show."
As he and the team at 51 Minds, the company that produces four of the "Below Deck" shows, quickly learned, making a show set aboard a functioning yacht is a logistical, financial and legal nightmare.
Particularly in the early seasons, the learning curve was steep, and producers faced intense skepticism within the charter industry.
Rosbach, who gave Cox an informational tour of the boat he was helming at the time (and which appeared in Season 1 of the show) was one of those skeptics. "I could tell that he wanted nothing to do with us," Cox recalls. "Like, 'I'm doing this because the owner wants me to do it, but I can't wait until you get off my boat.'"
Originally, Rosbach was only supposed to play a behind-the-scenes role on "Below Deck," by transporting the boat to St. Martin, where a younger, more Bravo-friendly but less experienced captain would step into the role for TV. When it became clear this arrangement wasn't going to work, Rosbach was forced to take over. (In Rosbach's telling, his wealthy boss gave him little choice: Either do his job on TV, or lose the job.)
Rosbach barely watched reality TV — and still doesn't. He occasionally checked out "The Deadliest Catch" — "stuff that was actually real," he says. But the glossy shows on Bravo about, as he puts it, "rich, spoiled, never-grown-up little girls trying to act like they put their big girl pants on? "They didn't interest me at all."
"At the time, there was nobody with gray hair on Bravo. It was a very controversial thing," Cox says. But when the show premiered, people immediately responded to Rosbach's paternal presence, like a weary dad supervising a slumber party.
With his salty aphorisms ("I'm madder than a pissed-on chicken"; "I would rather drag my d— through 10 miles of broken whiskey bottles"), Rosbach is the tough-but-fair boss we all wish we had. After deckhand Ashton Pienaar was dragged off the boat in Season 6 — a potentially fatal scenario — Rosbach delivered a heartfelt safety lecture to his crew: "We need to really care about ourselves and our loved ones. 'Cause in the end, that's all you got."
Though Rosbach has yet to make it through a season without firing someone (often several people), "I have put up a concerted effort," he says, laughing. And he's pleased that "Below Deck" has introduced the industry to a wider audience of potential yachties — "especially people from the Midwest. We're just raised differently."
"What our fans have always loved about Bravo is the authenticity of our characters," says Noah Samton, senior vice president of current production at NBCUniversal Television, who oversees "Below Deck" for Bravo. Someone like Teresa Giudice, the "Real Housewives of New Jersey" star who served a year in prison for fraud, "may be as different from Capt. Lee as possible," he says, "but they both are incapable of being anybody but themselves all the time."
Unlike most of the 20-something crew members on "Below Deck," Rosbach got a late start in the business. In the mid-1980s, Rosbach was running a restaurant in the Turks and Caicos Islands that went under. Unemployed, with a wife and kids to support, Rosbach spotted an ad at the dive shop for a mate to help deliver a boat to Tortola — no experience necessary. He took the job and, in between bouts of seasickness, discovered a calling.
"I'd never been on a g— boat," he says. "I'd never even seen the ocean 'till I was 35."
After moving back to the U.S. and earning his captain's license, he worked his way up until he was running a superyacht. "If anybody tells you captains don't make good money," he says, "they're lying to you." (Salaries are based on the length of the boat.)
Kate Chastain was also a seasoned yachtie before she joined "Below Deck" in Season 2. By then, she'd already ascended to the role of chief steward — a.k.a. "chief stew," like the housekeeper and butler rolled into one — but she was getting bored.
"'Below Deck' was a perfect way to take what I'd been doing and do it a new way," says Chastain, wearing a pink gown and white sneakers as she relaxes in a windowless green room at BravoCon.
She ended up staying for six seasons, becoming a fan favorite for her ability to deliver both excellent service and wildly entertaining TV. (Known for her wicked one-liners, Chastain famously took revenge on a rude guest by folding his blanket into the shape of a penis, which she claimed was a rocket ship.) Still, she says, "I didn't fully realize at first how it is two jobs — a TV job and a boat job.
You have to learn which corners to cut to be able to do both jobs." After a few seasons, Chastain told her stewards to stop vacuuming so much "because the cameras only shoot from here up," she says, gesturing to her waist.
Cutting corners is one thing, but the stunt casting typical of other reality shows isn't possible on "'Below Deck" because the show takes place on a working yacht, Cox says: "You can't put someone on a boat that can't do the job. The lives of my production crew are literally in the hands of the kids on this boat who we are filming. If something goes wrong, they're the ones that have to get us off safely."
Besides, he adds, "If somebody is there for the wrong reasons. Lee's gonna suss that out immediately."
'This show is a terrible idea'
On a network overrun with people who spend lavishly but work infrequently, much of the action of "Below Deck" is manual labor: The yachties spend hours folding laundry, inflating slides and preparing 10-course meals in kitchens not much larger than an airplane bathroom.
And its greatest source of suspense is how much the guests, who rotate every few episodes, will tip at the end of each charter. To watch crew members trash talk about their demanding, boorish customers in confessional interviews is not only cathartic, but novel: "Below Deck" is a rarity in TV, the show that sympathizes with working people over obnoxious one-percenters.
"The audience loves different things about 'Below Deck' than they like about other shows," says Samton, the Bravo executive. "Our audience has this tremendous respect for workplace hierarchy. Who would have thought that would be something people were interested in watching on a reality show?"
Because of this built-in authenticity, "Below Deck" appeals to people who don't necessarily watch much Bravo — or reality TV in general. John Fetterman, the hoodie-wearing Senator-elect from Pennsylvania, has praised the show for its bipartisan appeal. Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh told Rolling Stone he finds "Below Deck" completely gripping because "it's a show about going to work."
Fittingly, "Below Deck" also takes a lot of work to make, says Cox, who once knew nothing about yachting but now understands the intricacies of watercraft insurance and maritime law.
"Below Deck" films around the clock for about six weeks. Cameras installed around the boat capture whatever the film crew can't. (When producers learned two Season 3 crew members were meeting for trysts in the laundry room because it didn't have a camera, they added one.) Producers deal with three different boat crews: the on-camera yacht crew, the crew who provides catering in a separate vessel and the water taxis that shuttle the production crew, which doesn't sleep on the boat, back and forth every day.
"This show is a terrible idea," Cox says.
Maybe, but the "Below Deck" format has proved surprisingly durable. With five yachting shows in the current lineup and more than 300 episodes in the franchise so far, there could be more on the way, says Samton: "It's an open question that we're talking about all the time over here."
The role that Rosbach will play going forward remains to be seen. In addition to his health challenges, the captain is also grieving his son, Josh, who died in 2019 of an opioid overdose.
"Some days are better than others. Other days I'm just a f— train wreck. I'll be sitting at a stoplight, something will trigger it and I just come apart like a cheap suit," says Rosbach, who carries some of his son's ashes with him in the medallion around the neck. "I stopped playing music the day he died, and all my guitars sit in the corner getting dusty. He left such a hole, and that's never gonna go away. The dumba— that said 'Time heals all wounds,' God, he was so full of s—."
Still, Rosbach's reluctance to retire fully from the rigors of yachting — and reality TV — points to why the franchise has made armchair nautical experts out of its legion of fans, buoyed Bravo through a time of transition for its "Real Housewives" juggernaut and silenced the naysayers who predicted "Below Deck" would kill his career.
"The phone rings and it's a lot of people I haven't heard from in 25 years," he says. "It's like, 'How do you like me now?'"
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