Yahoo Lifestyle I Edit Reality TV Shows. Here's What I Wish Fans Knew About The Industry.
Reality TV is dying. I know it’s hard to believe with social media users yapping about Season 21 of “The Bachelorette” and the upcoming season of “Love Is Blind.” But on the other side of that black mirror, the people who make these beloved reality shows are being starved out of the business.
Unscripted TV production has slowed dramatically. Reality TV production dropped 18.6% in the first quarter of 2024, according to a recent report from FilmLA, the official film office of the City and County of Los Angeles.
“Since the first week of January people have called FilmLA to say, ‘I am still looking for work. The phone isn’t ringing. Is the industry back?’ FilmLA president Paul Audley said in the report. “Unfortunately, production is still slow, and things are not as they were.”
In the most recent quarterly report from ProdPro, a crewmember job portal, the news isn’t any better.
“Looking at the last 12 months, production volume and spend are down 50% compared to the prior period,” the report states.
I am a reality TV editor, and I know firsthand how dire the state of the industry is right now. Eighteen months ago, I started getting random calls from producers and editors I hadn’t worked with in years, asking me if I knew of any jobs. The calls became more regular; one or two colleagues a month looking for work turned into two or three a week. Sadly, I could not help them. Nobody could find any work.
Those of us with jobs were beginning to notice changes as well. Budgets were being slashed, staff was being cut, and airdates were being pushed up so more ad dollars could flow into networks. Yes, I was thankful to be employed, but having to post-produce and edit the same content in less time — with fewer people to help — became a Herculean task.
In December 2023, my contract was ending on a very popular prison love story series that I had worked on for three years. I had just finished my first novel, which took forever to write while I was working 50-plus hours cutting shows, and I was burned out. Instead of renewing my contract, I decided to take some time off to get my manuscript ready to send out to agents. My superiors and coworkers warned me that this was not a wise move in the current state of the reality TV job market, but I decided to do it anyway.
Over the past eight months, my phone has not stopped ringing. Almost everyone I know is out of work and looking for a job. Even if I wanted to go back to work right now, I couldn’t get a gig. And nobody seems to know why.
It’s unsettling.
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.
In our business, the talent could always be replaced based on the whims of social media buzz. The production and post-production crews were the ones who turned those shows into reality TV gold. Until now.
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.
Audiences should know by now that what they’re watching is about 20% reality and 80% tricks of the trade. The drama is amped up, with perfectly placed sound effects, strongly percussive music tracks, stolen looks from 10 minutes prior — edited to make you think she’s pissed at her enemy when, in actuality, she was rolling her eyes because the sound guy had to pee. We’re even instructed to cobble together scraps of footage to create entire scenes that never happened at all.
If audiences saw the raw footage of reality TV stars, you’d fall asleep in front of your TVs or go to another app on your phone. Editors have been instructed for years to feed you counterfeit drama to keep you watching so the networks could get more money from advertisers — so network executives could show more profits and give themselves higher salaries.
But now there’s been a noticeable shift.
“Cable networks that used to order 16 episodes are now buying eight,” Deadline’s Peter White reports in an article about the grim reality of unscripted TV. “Eight weeks of pre-production has turned into four, and ten weeks of editing has become seven.”
In the same article, Kathleen Finch, chair and chief content officer of Warner Bros. Discovery’s U.S. Networks Group, admitted that last year had been a “rough” time in the unscripted market.
“The Bachelorette” is a perfect example of how tough it is now. The franchise, a major network primetime show that normally averages 13 episodes, has cut its order in the last two seasons to nine episodes.
Newer shows are getting short runs, too. This summer, Lisa Vanderpump and Jimmy Kimmel had new reality shows premiere on Hulu; Conan O’Brien had a new reality series that premiered on Max, and Orlando Bloom’s new unscripted series premiered on Peacock. “Vanderpump Rules” has proven itself time and again, with an average of 24 episodes ordered and produced over 11 seasons. But the new spinoff, “Vanderpump Villa” was only a 10-episode order. Kimmel’s “High Hopes” and O’Brien’s “Must Go” premiered with only a six- and four-episode order, respectively. Bloom’s “To The Edge” premiered with only three episodes.
As I searched for the reason behind this slowdown in reality TV production, I kept talking to unemployed producers, writers and editors in the unscripted television industry. I quickly realized the why doesn’t matter to the people who are out of work.
Reality TV editor Steve Pomerantz has been lucky enough to work consistently as a freelance editor for the past 11 years, but his current gig is about to end.
“I’ve applied to about 20 different job posts and have heard nothing,” Pomerantz said. “I called a few companies that I worked for in the past, and they all said the same thing: ‘I’d love to hire you, but we have no work.’”
Richard Mailman, a Los Angeles-based reality TV producer and writer, said another factor for the slowdown has to do with the massive amount of programming these companies already own.
“Every day, network execs try to figure out how to repackage the content they already have,” he said. “You want to watch only ’80s sitcoms all day, they can do it; a month of home renovation shows, no problem. So there’s no rush for any of them to order new programming.”
Charlie Cusumano, a New York-based editor, has only worked five days in the past four months. “I’m bartending and driving an Uber,” he told me. “I am trying to switch careers, but what would I do? What kind of job would be a lateral move?”
Los Angeles-based producer Patrick Caligiuri, whose impressive resume includes “Big Brother,” “The Amazing Race” and “American Idol,” has just recently gotten work after being unemployed for over a year. He posted several videos on TikTok to sound the battle cry about the lack of production work available.
In this emotional video, Caligiuri called upon his unemployed colleagues from scripted TV, unscripted TV and film production to share their stories about losing their homes, not being able to feed their children, problems with health insurance and, of course, the inability to find any work.
I also spoke to almost a dozen TV executives I’ve worked with before to see if they could give me any insight on what is going on, and not one of them would give me a quote on the record.
“I can’t risk being quoted in this job market,” one of the executives told me.
Here’s something that we have to remember: Television networks are owned by huge corporations. ABC is owned by Disney, which owns Hulu, the History Channel, ESPN, the Marvel franchise, 20th Century Studios and over a dozen other media companies. NBC is owned by Universal. Universal owns more than 15 media companies; CBS is owned by Paramount, which owns about 18 other media companies.
“The recent decline in production dates back to late 2022, when the entertainment industry began to feel the consequences of studios’ overspending during the streaming wars of the early 2020s,” entertainment reporter Christi Carras wrote in a May article in the Los Angeles Times. “Since then, companies have been cutting back on staff and content in an effort to make up for their financial losses.”
Unscripted TV is a business built on the backs of freelance workers. Aside from the absence of health insurance and a 401(k), the jobs could be fulfilling because there was always so much work.
In other words, large companies whose TV networks were built on and have solely relied upon advertising dollars to survive were not able to stretch that revenue to sustain both network TV programming and commercial-free streaming platforms with a small monthly fee. So now, major corporations that own dozens of networks cannot afford to populate them with new original content.
This is the most likely scenario for why an entire industry has so many people who are out of work. It is a truly lopsided equation where we, the people who make the product, who literally entertain the masses, are getting screwed because of executive mistakes. And of course, it all comes down to the money.
In a brilliant New York Times article, James B. Steward and Benjamin Mullin recently interviewed the top five media moguls in the entertainment business. Steward and Mullin paint a pretty clear picture of what streaming services have done to the bottom line of these massive companies.
“Paramount lost $1.6 billion on streaming last year. Comcast lost $2.7 billion on its Peacock streaming service. Disney lost about $2.6 billion on its services, which include Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+. Warner Bros. Discovery says its Max streaming service eked out a profit last year, but only by including HBO sales through cable distributors.”
The ridiculous thing is, reality TV’s success was based on the fact that it was far cheaper to produce than scripted television — and yet, the foundation is crumbling. The excitement of getting into the streaming market did not work out for these companies as it did for Netflix and Amazon, and now the people who do the work of feeding the ravenous demand for amped-up, high-stakes drama are unemployed — and a billion-dollar industry has turned its back on us.
Unscripted TV is a business built on the backs of freelance workers. Aside from the absence of health insurance and a 401(k), the jobs could be fulfilling because there was always so much work. The one constant in our business was the work.
New York-based editor Brian Kushner worked six months last year and has only worked two weeks this year.
“I’m dealing with so much depression because of this,” he said, though he remains hopeful. “I don’t think it will ever be the same, but I think it’s about to bounce back.”
“All of my friends were saying, “We just have to hold on till 2024. Now they’re saying, stay alive till ’25,” he continued.
Carras does offer a glimmer of hope in her LA Times article.
“While production for the big and small screen has been sluggish this year so far, ProdPro reported that ‘a significant number’ of TV series and feature films are currently in development and on track to start shooting in the third and fourth quarters of 2024.”
There is promising news from the NYC Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment. Two new state-of-the-art TV and film studios are being built in Manhattan and Queens, which is great for the future — but production and post-production people won’t benefit from that for years. And yes, the number of permits for filming in New York has begun to increase over the last year, according to data from the NYC Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, but the number of productions are far from what they were in 2019 and the first three months of 2020.
The universe seems to be telling us to just hang on, tough it out and have faith. But, as my sainted Irish grandmother used to say, “Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one gets filled first.”
Perhaps when this is all over, our industry will emerge stronger, with more protections for its workers, and we’ll all get health insurance and 401(k)s. But my guess is that it’s not going to get easier for us.
As the royalty-free music builds and we, the people who have actually entertained you for years, head toward the edge of the cliff, screaming for someone to help, the billionaire executives change the channel.
But that’s probably because they don’t know what real drama looks like.
