“The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” executive producer Jeff Jenkins knows his morning news diet isn’t healthy, but it’s a function of the life that he’s chosen. “My alarm goes off, I pull out my laptop and the first thing I do is go to TMZ,” he says. That’s how he learns what his cast members were up to overnight — and how his day might go.

“It gives me a little head’s up before I get to the office,” says Jenkins, who notes that it’s not a new practice. A few years ago, as EP of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” the tabloids were his first stop to see what his then-lead Kim Kardashian was up to. Now, it’s “Mormon Wives” star Taylor Frankie Paul who’s creating the headlines.

The legal troubles surrounding Paul — which has led to the temporary production stoppage on Season 5 on “Mormon Wives” — has been weighing heavily on Jenkins, even as he celebrates a big expansion of his company, Jeff Jenkins Prods. (which marks its eighth anniversary this fall).

Among those new projects, Variety has exclusively learned that Jenkins has partnered with Bell-Phillip Television Productions to develop “The Bold and the Unscripted,” a new reality competition series in which contestants compete to appear on “The Bold and the Beautiful” (with the ultimate winner receiving a recurring role on the soap). And he’s working with Tori Spelling and her brother, Randy, to create the series “Reunited: Tori & Randy Spelling,” in which the estranged siblings go on a cross-country road trip in an attempt to reconnect.

Also in the pipeline is a new unscripted series starring and produced by Cedric the Entertainer, which comes as part of a first-look deal Jenkins has with producer Shondrella Avery and her Glass Slipper Pictures. (Cedric’s deal is also with his and Eric Rhone’s A Bird and a Bee Entertainment.) Jeff Jenkins Prods. previously worked with Glass Slipper on Peacock’s “Tiffany Haddish Goes Off,” which premiered last November.

Jenkins also has the new Hulu dating format “Love Overboard” (hosted by Gabby Windey), which he’s producing with Alex Cooper’s Unwell. And now, besides the smash “Mormon Wives” mothership, Jenkins is producing the spinoff “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: Orange County.” And he says he has three more “Mormon Wives” spinoffs in the works.

Variety recently spoke with Jenkins about the Orange County spinoff of “Mormon Wives” — including some of the online chatter about whether the cast really practices the Mormon faith. (Jenkins says the O.C. cast is actually more devout than the stars of the Utah-based mother ship.) He also addressed when production will resume on the original “Mormon Wives,” whether Paul and ex-boyfriend Dakota Mortensen will appear — and what the show’s other stars think about that.

There’s also the issue of “Vanderpump Villa” star Marciano Brunette and his lawsuit against Jeff Jenkins Productions and “Mormon Wives” star Demi Engemann. (Brunette’s complaint, filed in Utah federal court, alleged that Engemann and the production company destroyed his reputation by branding him a “sexual predator” and accusing him of sexual assault.) The last time Jenkins checked on TMZ, “Mormon Wives” star Jessi Draper was dating Brunette — and if that’s the case, Jenkins says he’d still consider including Brunette on the show. His lawyers might not be so keen on that idea, however.

Here’s an edited Q&A with Jenkins about all of that, and more:

The question for the longest time was what the “Secret Wives of Mormon Wives” spin off might be, and when were you going to expand the franchise. How did you settle on going to the O.C.?

Hulu and the creative team over there, led by Rob Mills, enabled us to search all across America for different groups of the Mormon faith. There are a handful of pockets in America that are really the home base for LDS, and one of them was Orange County. I think one of the little exciting threads is that Mayci from the mothership, her sister is right here in Orange County, and she’s a dedicated member of the LDS faith. We all wanted to present a world of LDS that was kind of at least a 90 degree pivot away from the mothership. When you’re in Utah, that’s a very specific type of culture. LDS in Southern California is a little more relaxed, a little less intense, a little more forgiving. So, I think when subscribers see this, they’re gonna have some familiarity with some of the themes, but it’s also going to be radically different. I would say three more potential spin-offs in the pipeline right behind this one. It’s a really rich community when you have the luxury of looking all across the country.

So, would all the spin-offs also be LDS? Or could there be a “Secret Lives of Catholic Wives”?

Right now we’re sticking with the Mormon faith. I suspect that every producer in town is out there pitching “Lives of Catholic Wives,” “Lives of Jewish Wives,” “Lives of Islamic Wives.” But I go back to storytelling. I came up in the story department, and I guess I’m tooting our own horn, but I think we’ve collected the best storytellers in the business of unscripted, from our showrunners to our lead editors to our lead story people. We pride ourselves on creating an emotional response in the audience and telling an actual story with a hero and a beginning, middle, end, and a turn. We’re not just throwing plot at you.

This is a different kind of cast, though, right? Aren’t there a number of “O.C.” cast members who aren’t Mormon or no longer Mormon? How are you balancing that?

It’s funny because social media has really run with that, like “there’s a bunch of people who aren’t Mormon.” The irony is that on the mothership in Utah, we’ve only got one or two Mormons left. Most of them have kind of shed their association with LDS. In this group, we actually have more devoted LDS members than in the mothership. Everyone on that show is connected to Mormonism in some way. Either “I was raised Mormon, and now that I’m adult, I’ve just left,” or in the case of Bobbi [Althoff], her brother is a Mormon, and he loves it, and he’s been nudging his sister to try it. So she’s open to converting, but doesn’t want to be pressured. Imagine if you had seven or eight women who are all LDS hardcore. Well, that’s one perspective. I like having multiple perspectives… We get distracted by all the noise of all the salacious stuff, but really to me they’re heroes and warriors, because they really are trying to have a positive impact and help nudge this faith forward into the next century. Even if it’s just a micro change. I think they’re succeeding.

When you say salacious, I think about your new “O.C.” cast member Aspyn Ovard, who is in a throuple. But she’s also a social media star. How important is it to cast influencers, who have a built-in fan base?

For better or worse, absolutely, I think the better. If you have a cast member who’s got 2, 3, 4 million followers, some healthy percentage of those followers is going to come and at least check out your new show. The flip side of that is, they are watching, and because they love that person that they follow on social media, there better not be any fakery or trickery or bullshit with this show. So it challenges us to be very transparent with everything. These influencers who are making the jump from short form to long form, the show continues on their social media after every episode. It continues when we’re on break between shooting seasons. There’s almost no distinction between the show and the immediacy of the social media. So it’s forced us to be even more pristine and transparent about the way that we’re documenting these lives.

Where do things stand with “Mormon Wives” production after the shutdown?

I went through on Season 1 of “The Simple Life,” when a sex tape was released very much against Paris Hilton’s wishes, and that was a certain kind of nightmare. I went through Kim Kardashian being robbed in her apartment, tied up and held at gunpoint, and thrown into a bathtub. We paused after that. But this is new and different. I haven’t really been through something like this before, and it has been a challenging couple months. But I’m very happy to say, as [Disney unscripted boss] Rob Mills recently shared, we got the green light to start moving towards shooting the mothership again. We’re very close. The cast members I’ve talked to are excited to get back in there and get back at it. We’ve been on pause for almost two months, so I’m excited to get back at it.

Is there any chance that Taylor and Dakota will be seen in “Mormon Wives” Season 5? Where do they fit as production resumes?

I’ve talked to Taylor, and she wants to come back, and I want her to come back. So I’m really hopeful that that’s going to happen. She’s amazing. I mentioned Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. Taylor Frankie Paul has that thing, like her two predecessors do, where she’s just made for this. To share her life on camera, she does it like breathing air. She doesn’t edit herself. She’s really built for this type of lane. So I’m very hopeful that she’ll be back very soon, and I’m hopeful we can do all sorts of other projects with her as well. If you watched the live feed from the judge’s courtroom, both Dakota and Taylor have stay away orders now that are official, so fortunately or unfortunately, whatever your perspective, we won’t be able to shoot with them together, ever again, or at least for a very long time. But I’m very hopeful that we’ll be shooting with both of them or either of them very soon.

What about the rest of the cast? Are they OK with that?

I think everyone in the existing cast has strong opinions about the last two months, and those opinions are every perspective you can imagine. So it’s going to be very interesting when we start back up any day now. How does that sort out? We’ve got to shoot together to sort it out. But once that all sorts out, how is that going to impact the friendships, the relationships, and MomTok as a whole? I don’t have the answer. I’m excited to see. I don’t have a lot of detail on where each woman’s head is at. I’ve just heard through the grapevine. We all know Jessi’s really supportive. Some of her comments were actually used in the courtroom that you saw on the live feed.

Speaking of Jessi, we know she’s spending time with Marciano, and that’s another issue. Despite his lawsuit against the “Mormon Wives” producers, can you still shoot him? And if so, would you film him? How does that work?

That’s a really good question. Sometimes our attorney at JJP does not have the same opinion — and sometimes the legal department at Hulu/Disney does not have the same opinion — so I can only speak from my perspective. If Jessi is spending time with Marciano, then I would like to have the ability to cover it, despite what I think or what my company might be going through with Marciano. It’s part of the story. Will Marciano’s team and reps allow him to shoot with “Mormon Wives?” I don’t know. Will my attorney and Disney’s attorney allow the mothership to shoot with Marciano? I don’t know. But the first thing is when we got cameras up again, if she is hanging out with him, I hope we get those blessings. If you wrote it as a screenplay, no one would believe it. That’s how I feel with these “Mormon” ladies. I just can’t believe the zigs and sags of their lives. If you wrote this as a screenplay, the studio would say, “Come on, that’s preposterous.” But it’s true!

What has the success of “Mormon Wives” meant for you and Jeff Jenkins Prods.?

I feel very lucky, because every time I experience one of these lightning in a bottle moments, you’re like, ‘that’s never going to happen again.’ When I worked on “The Simple Life” 20 years ago, I remember Mary Ellis Bunim telling me, “Enjoy this success, because it’ll never happen again.” And then we had “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” and it was, “Enjoy this, because it’ll never happen again.” Then we had “Bling Empire,” which at the time was the highest-rated, most-viewed docuseries on Netflix. So we got lucky with “Mormon Wives.” I think I have to start accepting that we really do know how to tell a story in a satisfying way, because we keep finding that we are blessed with these lightning-in-a-bottle situations.

My goal right now in this tough market is keeping our doors open and keeping growth happening at the company. I wanted to keep all of these fantastic, talented folks working — the showrunners, the camera ops, the audio mixers, the folks I’ve worked with for 25 years. I really feel like I’ve been able at my own company to cherry-pick the best of the best and pay them what’s appropriate.

Tell me about the Tori and Randy Spelling show. How did that idea come about?

I’ve been friendly with Tori for a few years, and I look to her as an absolute GOAT in unscripted. She’s had half a dozen unscripted series, and she always delivers. All I knew of her brother was that he grew up as the prince of Hollywood. If America has a royal family, the Spellings were certainly in the aristocracy, and he had a run-in with drugs and alcohol as a very young man. He moved away, got himself healthy and is now a life coach with a family. But in that reordering of his life, he and Tori fell out of contact for almost 20 years. They just last fall came back together, and so it is relatable to anybody who has an estrangement from a sibling. How do we bring it back together, support each other and be a family again? That’s the relatable part. The part that is fantastical is that they grew up in the biggest private home ever built in America. It’s just an extraordinary backstory, and to see them reflect on that… my producing partner watched the sales tape for this project and reflected on the fact that he was not speaking to his brother. I really do think the viewer is going to see this fascinating look into this family then and now, and be able to take away tools and inspiration for how to make things better in their own life.

And then you’re going the competition route with “The Bold and the Unscripted.”

“The Bold and the Beautiful” has been doing what they do for 40 years, they just launched their app, with 3,900 episodes available to watch. So we’ve partnered with Brad Bell on this format that we’re taking out. I think it’s going to be such a fun show, very unexpected. I’ve never seen anything like it. And frankly, that’s also what gets me out of bed, taking buyers’ opportunities that they haven’t heard before. I don’t want to bring you the 300th version of “Real Housewives.”

I feel like the perennial question in the unscripted world is, how do you survive this day and age? The business keeps changing. A few years ago, the streamers were really aggressive and buying so much, it seemed like boom times. Then things got tough again.

I think it all goes back to very basic tent poles that we all know. It comes back to storytelling and characters you want to spend time with. The challenge now is, how do we find them? Because the pond has been very fished. How do we find new subculture or character types, and how do we match that with the kind of zeitgeist interest that the public has? An example might be “Bling Empire,” which came after “Crazy Rich Asians.” Same with “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” all those ladies are kind of at the intersection of faith and feminism. What does it mean to be a woman in America who’s a breadwinner and a wife and a mother, and how are those roles changing? Sure, there’s been other unscripted series having to do with Mormonism, but not in this way, not through this lens.

What are people’s appetites now? What are they looking for?

There’s always that celebrity family follow. If there’s a famous family that hasn’t done it before, I think a lot of buyers are looking for that. I’ve had the same dream project for a decade, which is to follow Madonna and her six children. They’re also looking for zeitgeist subcultures, some topic or group has captured the imagination across the country. The other thing that is really interesting right now, a few years ago a lot of producers were rushing to do put a bunch of influencers in a house — and none of them worked. I think everybody realized that influencers may be able to successfully curate 30 seconds of content, but to carry even a half hour of content, that equation just didn’t work. But now it does seem if you find the right influencers, some of them, especially in an ensemble, can carry an hour of content. Our “Mormon Wives,” many of them were like baby influencers, and I was like, oh boy, are they going to be able to make the jump to light speed here and give me more than 30 seconds? And they’re doing it.

I’m so grateful, and I feel lucky that we have had such a positive response from buyers over the last eight years. We’ve done three series for Netflix, I think we’re on our third series for Hulu, we’ve got some work now with Paramount and Fox, we’ve got our great series running on Bravo. We had a series with Peacock this year with Tiffany Haddish, and we’ve got all sorts of really exciting opportunities for buyers coming up the rest of this year. COVID threw everybody off, but putting that aside, our growth has been really steady.

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Here’s the logline for “The Bold and the Unscripted” (working title): “Jeff Jenkins Productions has partnered with Bell-Phillip Television Productions, producer of legendary soap opera ‘The Bold and the Beautiful,’ to develop a new reality-competition format, anchored to the long-running series. ‘The Bold and the Unscripted’ (wt) will bring together a group of reality TV stars, all with thespian aspirations, on the iconic soap opera’s actual studio lot and soundstages to compete for weekly opportunities to secure speaking roles and guest spots on ‘The Bold and the Beautiful.'”

And the logline for “Reunited: Tori & Randy Spelling”: “Jeff Jenkins Productions has partnered with actress Tori Spelling and her brother, actor-turned-life coach Randy Spelling, for a new series that will reunite the siblings. “Reunited: Tori & Randy Spelling” (wt) brings Tori and Randy back together to mend their fractured relationship via an epic cross-country road trip. Throughout their trek, they’ll participate in various once-in-a-lifetime experiences that will test their self-imposed boundaries, all in an effort to accelerate personal growth and reestablish their sibling bond.”