The sad future of Australian reality TV revealed as more shows face being axed

It appears that no Australian television show or network is safe following the recent axing of Channel 10’s The Bachelor, The Masked Singer and Gladiators – with many more cancellations set to come.

In the wake of so many shows being canned in such a short amount of time, Wade Kingsley, a leading media consultant and founder of The Ideas Business, has shared his bleak prediction for the future of free-to-air television.

“My prediction is a sad one, we have to enter the possibility space here that there’ll be fewer publishers by the end of the year. There may not be Channel 10 in its current form, there may not be regional television and there may not be as many radio stations,” Wade said on the latest episode of the Game Changers podcast.

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“We’re in a really weird time where there’s some structural decline in free-to-air media. We always hear about television suffering, and it is... it really is.” Wade said, explaining that it's a result of a “record decline” in advertising revenue, which he claims is slowly now starting to impact radio as well as television.

The media consultant went on to claim that Nine is currently “talking about job cuts” and Paramount, the owners of Channel 10, are “trying to break up [the network] in the U.S.” which he believes will “affect it here, and it might get sold.”

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It was announced earlier in May that popular reality programs The Masked Singer and The Bachelor would not be returning to screens in 2024, as well as Gladiators which failed to capture a strong audience after its relaunch last year.

Fears have then mounted for the future of other reality TV fan faves with concern that budget cuts will affect the future of more hit series in Australia.

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