LAS VEGAS, Jan. 30 - It was inevitable that a reality television series would encounter too much reality for its own good: that a star would die, leaving producers in the lurch and viewers groping for unsavory details.
The logical candidates were shows like "Fear Factor," where contestants are put in physical danger, or "The Real World," which throws occasionally unstable youngsters together. Instead, the first notable casualty of reality television was the 33-year-old manager of a boutique hotel who did nothing riskier on camera than reposition and fluff couch pillows in the lobby.
When the Discovery cable channel's "American Casino" begins its second season tonight, it will be without Michael Tata, who ran the hotel side of Green Valley Ranch. The hotel-casino, in Henderson, a suburb of Las Vegas, gave Discovery's cameras the run of the grounds last year, figuring that at worst it would trade a few warts for free publicity.
Mr. Tata, a perfectionist who looked at cigarette butts in hotel ashtrays the way a drill sergeant looks at sloppy push-ups, quickly became the lightning rod of a show desperately seeking human drama in the mundane details of managing a resort.
Mr. Tata's nagging and his sarcasm-laced relationship with his assistant, a former Miss Nevada, Ninya Perna, touched a nerve with any viewer who ever hated his or her boss. As the episodes played out, some viewers sensed that the bantering between the two might be as affectionate as it was mean-spirited.
Then last July, halfway through the first season, Mr. Tata was found dead in his bedroom. A month later an autopsy report concluded that he died of a combination of alcohol and an accidental overdose of the powerful painkiller fentanyl, which the police said he obtained without a prescription.
Discovery executives faced more than the loss of a good story line. They also had to decide how quickly and how much to tell viewers about Mr. Tata's death, and how liberally to show his co-workers working through their grief in future shows.
Craig Piligian, the show's creator, had his cameras (one or two crews circulate throughout the resort about 20 hours a day) take a few days off, then began taping testimonials by the stunned executives.
But it was two months before the audience saw any of this. During that time, Discovery confounded viewers by simply placing a terse "in loving memory" announcement at the beginning and end of each episode. The reason: adherence to chronology. There were several episodes that had yet to be broadcast and others still being edited.
"There's real time and TV time," said Mark Finkelpearl, Discovery's executive producer for the show. "In TV time, Michael's death was ahead of the curve. There were other story lines with him that had yet to play out."
He said the show considered whether to excise Mr. Tata from those episodes but rejected that after consulting with Mr. Tata's family. Meanwhile, fans of the show - some sympathetic to Mr. Tata, others hostile - traded speculation and rumor in Internet chat rooms.
Only in October did "American Casino" broadcast an episode in which Mr. Tata's death was confronted. Titled "Tragic Loss," it began by showing Mr. Tata on his last day at work, beaming about a vacation he was about to take. It showed him complaining to Ms. Perna that his new office was a long walk from hers. "Are we having a little separation anxiety?" Ms. Perna asked with mock concern. She allowed that the walk was difficult in four-inch heels. Mr. Tata suggested she wear lower shoes. "No," snapped Ms. Perna, who towered over Mr. Tata, "because then I'd be your size."
With that, the managers began to recount what Green Valley's vice president, Joe Hasson, called "the nightmare." It was Mr. Hasson who had to break the news to Ms. Perna. Describing it on camera in an interview two weeks after Mr. Tata's death, Ms. Perna sobbed uncontrollably: "Joe said, 'I have some tragic news.' I never would have guessed in a million years what was about to come out of his mouth. He said, 'Ninya, Michael has passed on.' "