Last week, a close friend of local attorney Phaedra Parks reached out to me via phone to ask, “Why are they saying Phaedra and Apollo broke up?”

She was referring to the blog chatter and Twitter rumors that reality TV personality Phaedra Parks’s husband, Apollo Nida, moved out of Phaedra’s house.

Phaedra’s friend wondered why the blogs were writing these things about Phaedra and Appollo breaking up when they are still together.

One blogger in particular, Michelle, of Straight From the A blog, wrote a post suggesting that Apollo is tweeting random groupies from an apartment somewhere in Buckhead. But Apollo doesn’t have a job, so how can he afford to pay the rent on an apartment?

And isn’t Phaedra Michelle’s attorney? Wouldn’t she know if Phaedra was changing the locks, or pouring gasoline on Apollo’s things on the front lawn?

The answer is simple: season 5 of Real Housewives of Atlanta is currently filming — and the show’s producers have run out of story lines.

So it’s likely that Phaedra and Apollo are pulling a NeNe and Greg — pretending to be split up when they’re actually not.

This is the tiresome method of scripted urban reality shows: they blur the lines between reality and fiction and hope their viewers are too gullible to know the difference.