The Death of Reality TV: With Ratings Plummeting, What This Means for the Future of Unscripted Television

Reality TV is not exactly everything it's made out to be. On top of that, trouble is brewing amidst budget cuts, job cuts, and worse. Could this spell the end of unscripted television?

The post The Death of Reality TV: With Ratings Plummeting, What This Means for the Future of Unscripted Television appeared first on TV Fanatic.

I always had a sneaky peak feeling that not everything is on the up and up where reality TV is concerned. Roughly a month or so into earning my BFA in Creative Writing for Entertainment, my feelings were vindicated.

I learned the unholy truth about unscripted television—it’s not really unscripted. Or maybe that’s a little too specific to be entirely accurate. It’s safer and more “realistic” to say that unscripted television is not unwritten television.

The entire series is planned, from almost every shot to every eventuality. Its design maximizes drama to drag in the viewers.

The scenes and dialogue may not exist in the form of written copy, but the scene and the end result are pre-planned.

Think about it. How many people will sit on a couch and stare, completely enraptured, in your day-to-day life, or anybody’s, for that matter?

We’re talking about 30 minutes to an hour of reality TV, where every piece of dialogue and every event is entertaining. Does anyone on the planet live like that?

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Hollywood’s best actresses and actors may be famous, but they still have to pull their underwear out of their ass cracks in the morning, brush their teeth, and go through the motions of being social animals.

In fact, even the most rich and famous lives are probably as regular as yours and mine. The only difference is that they show up on a set and play pretend for a day.

No, for something to be entertaining for an entire season, it requires careful planning, crafting, and guidance. The formula is a success—or at least it’s been a successful formula since the inception of ‘unscripted’ television in the 1970s.

Apparently, nothing lasts forever. Producer Patrick Caliiuri thinks it’s worse than worse can get, claiming that multi-Emmy winners are working for Doordash and pulling independent contractor gigs to make ends meet.

The brutal reality of the aforementioned economics is busy frog-marching smaller to mid-size production companies to the guillotine. Most of these are in the business of creating reality TV series for the masses.

Many of the problems unscripted TV faces are immediately attributable to forces outside its sphere of influence, such as industry-wide cost-cutting measures, continued fallout from the pandemic and the writer’s strike, and the entertainment industry getting too far ahead of itself with massive budget failures.

Jobs are scarce, and the platforms that make their name in the reality TV business are not ordering new shows.

“I’ve worked in the industry for 20 years, and all of a sudden, the faucet just turned off.”

— Patrick Calilguiri

It’s not just reality TV, however, as all of the ailments listed above are industry-wide, which definitely includes scripted television. The problem is that unscripted TV is a smaller part of the overall pie, and the damage looks correspondingly more devastating because of it.

When a contraction like this comes into play, it has the trickle-down effect of Reaganomics, only in the reverse. As budgets are cut, hiring decreases, salaries plummet, and fewer jobseekers make the cut.

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You’re either a part of a long-term, highly popular franchise, or you’re eating on the floor with the rest of the kids.

If it’s painful for the veterans, it’s downright devastating for the small-time gig workers trying to break into the business by creating new concepts for unscripted TV.

“I’m writing all day. I’m writing scripts, I’m writing half-hour pilots, I’m writing features, I’m creating reality shows, but at the same time, I can’t help but think that for the most part, it’s over for me.”

— Wendy Miller, Unscripted Producer

For the average TV viewer, all is quiet on the western front. It’s not like these happenings are front and center, especially when you can turn on the TV and see Catfish, The Bachelorette, Jersey Shore, Naked and Afraid, The Challenge, etc.

But does ‘contraction’ mean ‘death?’ Is reality TV dying, or is it the equivalent of an economic or stock market cycle? Hopefully, it’s cyclical, but it’s not easy to say one way or the other just yet.

Unfortunately, there’s potential for the problem to continue and get even worse. I brought up the whole “reality TV isn’t real” subject because it’s applicable here.

“Maybe this slowdown is karma for creating TV that is as far from reality as you can get. We’ve all been instructed by network executives to amp up drama — cheat this, make her say that at this moment, make that argument look more epic.”

— Timothy Hedden, Reality TV Editor

There is no such thing as drama on the scale that reality TV presents. If there were any truth to it, relationships, family, and socializing in general would go away in a hurry.

No one needs that kind of stress in their lives with everyone they meet. Not wanting in your life and enjoying it on TV are two different things, however.

The problem lies in the extensiveness of its proliferation. It’s becoming too much. When you go to the movies, you expect entertainment. The movie fails if there are scenes within that break immersion.

Reality TV is breaking immersion in a bid to draw in more advertising dollars, go viral on social media, and put more butts in seats for each new release.

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But people aren’t stupid, and too much of a good thing is bad. The amount of drama the industry is forcing editors to insert into reality TV shows is quickly reaching absurd levels.

Even if the audience doesn’t believe what they are watching is real, there is still a fine line, and crossing that line breaks immersion. Ultimately, the combination of two things is dragging the industry down.

The first is the downward trend in terms of budget, job cuts, and trimming the fat in general. The second is forcing irrational levels of drama into these shows.

Cutting production time in half, episodes in half, and editing time in half is one thing. Forcing false content into “reality” is a disastrous combination.

The result is a sinking viewership rating that coincides with an industry downturn. Major companies that control a plethora of smaller networks are predictably sharpening their knives, with major cuts on the agenda.

The sad thing is that reality TV is far more chummy and receptive to the gig economy, which is filled with thousands of writers trying to carve their way into the industry.

While Hollywood will survive based on its enormous bedrock, those thousands of writers have no such luxury.

The good news is that there are challengers to Hollywood’s throne, and they come in the form of independent studios cropping up throughout the U.S. and opportunities overseas, where burgeoning companies are more receptive.

Hollywood may believe itself to be the lone king on the hill, but other tides are rising.

With them, perhaps more opportunities will open for freelancers trying to break into the reality TV gig.

What do you think? Are reality TV’s better days behind us? Is that a good thing, or do you hope it continues? Share your thoughts in a comment below!

The post The Death of Reality TV: With Ratings Plummeting, What This Means for the Future of Unscripted Television appeared first on TV Fanatic.