(Los Angeles Times photo illustration; photos via Getty Images)
For Gretchen Kinder, there’s nothing quite like making reality TV. She worked her way up the ranks over two plus decades from production assistant to line producer and executive, using her skills to pull off dazzling logistical feats — like the time she was up at 4 a.m. to get a boat captain to sign off on using his vessel so they could load in crew by 6.
“Unscripted TV is incredibly challenging. Those challenges keep you on your toes more than scripted TV,” she said.
But the satisfaction Kinder once found in her professional life has been harder to come by lately: In the last year and a half, she has worked only four months, despite an impressive list of credits on shows like “Project Runway” and “The Apprentice.”
Kinder finished her last big job in January 2023, when there was already “murmuring about the streaming platforms not doing well,” she said. She thought the strikes would lead to an uptick in reality TV production, as it had in the past. “However, everything just slowed down and stopped.”
During this period, she has also faced an array of personal struggles, including a breast cancer diagnosis that resulted in her having a double mastectomy and an ongoing divorce.
“My joke is that I’ve been so efficient that I decided to have cancer when there was no work anyway,” Kinder said. She is now healthy and has been cleared to return to work, but few new shows have been greenlit — and the ones that have are, increasingly, being made outside of Los Angeles.
With three young children to support, Kinder said she has depleted her savings, maxed out her credit card and borrowed money from family. She’s now considering leaving the industry altogether. “I am very concerned that that these shifts are going to be permanent,” she said.
Kinder’s experience — maneuvering through a steady stream of gigs to now face an uncharacteristically sluggish job market — is a stunning reality that many workers across the entertainment industry have reckoned with amid a widespread Hollywood slowdown. Work in film and scripted TV hasn’t bounced back since last summer’s writers’ and actors’ strikes. Entertainment companies, which were scaling back even before the strikes, continue culling slates and slashing budgets. And unscripted TV, historically TV’s trusty and economical gap filler, is facing many of the same headwinds as scripted TV, including an oversaturation of media, corporate consolidation and runaway production from California to regions with lower costs. Despite efforts to organize, many workers in reality TV are not unionized, adding to the instability.
A snapshot of the slump can be felt in the epicenter of the entertainment world. Reality TV production in Los Angeles for the second quarter of 2024 was down by 57% compared to the same period last year, according to a recent report from FilmLA, an organization that tracks shooting days in the region.
Workers in the unscripted space who spoke with the Times describe the slowdown as unprecedented, and agree that the job market became especially bleak in the last two years. Many are struggling to make ends meet. Some have considered relocating from Southern California or leaving the industry they love to forge new careers.
2023’s dual strikes by writers and actors created a dry spell for everyone in Hollywood. Crew members are still feeling the aftershocks.
For most of his three-plus decades in Hollywood, Cliff Birbrower worked as an editor for reality TV shows. In a typical year, when things were good, there was regularity to the job: He would spend his days paring down hours and hours of footage into compelling episodes of unscripted programs, including “The Voice” or “The X Factor” — making roughly $4,000 to $5,000 per week. Even as the streaming era ushered in shorter seasons, necessitating Birbrower to line up work on multiple shows a year, there was at least some stability — until there wasn’t.
In the last year, Birbrower has managed to line up one small job that lasted less than a month. Last week , he began teaching English literature at a middle school in Brentwood.
“I can’t depend on Hollywood anymore to earn a living,” Birbrower said. “The industry changed under my feet. Back in the day, you could get on a show and you could stay on it for seasons and seasons and seasons. Then it became an industry of catch-as-catch-can, you’d work in fits and spurts.”
And now, he said, it’s a desert.
“At my age, I can’t do that anymore. It gives me heart palpitations,” Birbrower said.
One of Birbrower’s last major gigs was with Netflix’s revival of “The Mole,” the reality competition that originally ran on ABC for five seasons beginning in 2002 and was hosted by Anderson Cooper. The revival was produced by Eureka Productions and filmed in Australia. After an initial cut was produced in Australia, Birbrower said he was enlisted to help re-edit episodes of the show remotely.
“It was a success,” he said of the show, which launched in Oct. 2022 and was renewed for a second season. Birbrower told producers he was excited to work on Season 2 but was informed that the editing role would be based in Australia — because “those guys make half of what you make,” Birbrower said he was told. He rejected the prospect of remaining with the show at a reduced rate, though he now says he might approach the situation differently.
“At the time, I said no. But now, if they had asked me — I mean, I haven’t worked in 12 months. Everything’s different,” he said.
A representative for Eureka Productions said the company does not comment on individual contractual negotiations.
“The Mole” is one of a growing number of reality shows being made outside the United States, often for reasons that have little to do with scenic locations or local flavor. Like their counterparts in scripted TV, reality TV producers have also pivoted to making shows abroad to cut costs. But as streaming platforms and increasingly vast multinational companies seek to raise their global profile and take advantage of cheaper labor markets, runaway production has become a growing threat to U.S. workers.
Fox, a network known as a reality TV pioneer thanks to shows like “American Idol,” has in recent years leaned into “shiny-floor” programming — studio-based game shows and reality competitions like “The Floor” and “Beat Shazam.” In an earlier era of TV, these types of show might have been produced on a lot somewhere in Los Angeles. Now, many are made overseas. There’s virtually no indication of their provenance — unless you happen to read the very fine print on casting notices informing contestants they must have valid passports. “The Floor,” “Beat Shazam,” “Name That Tune” and “Don’t Forget the Lyrics” film in Ireland, as does “Next Level Chef,” which relocated from Las Vegas. According to the Irish Times, Fox programming has created more than 300 jobs in Ireland as of mid-2023. “The Quiz with Balls,” another Fox game show, shoots in Australia. Production on the next season of “MasterChef,” the long-running cooking competition show which was previously filmed in Los Angeles, will also will also be down under.
The network has a partnership with Bigger Stage, a Dublin-based production company that says it has produced more than 100 hours of prime time programming for American TV in the last three years. Fox declined to comment on this strategy, and Bigger Stage did not respond to a request for comment.
Fox is not alone in hunting for bargains overseas. When Netflix decided to make a reality competition series based on the hit Korean drama “Squid Game,” it was filmed in the U.K. And after the success of “Love Is Blind,” the streamer has aggressively expanded with international versions of the dating reality show. Peacock’s breakout reality hit “The Traitors,” which is based on a U.K. format, is made in Scotland.
Kinder recalls a time in the early seasons on “The Apprentice” when the industry was so L.A.-centered, producers would have to fly crew into New York. Now it’s possible to shoot, for less, in states like Georgia and New Mexico — and internationally.
“Los Angeles doesn’t give any incentives for productions to remain here, and I think that’s a huge issue,” she said. “The networks are looking at the bottom line and can see the benefit of filming anywhere but here.”
Domestic film and TV production in the second quarter of 2024 was down 40% from the peak TV era, according to a new report by ProdPro.
In California, incentives are available to hour-long scripted television programs only, which means reality shows and even most sitcoms are excluded. Meanwhile, Georgia offers tax credits up to 30% on a range of productions including reality TV, and New Mexico offers upwards of 25%.
Media consolidation has accelerated the problems plaguing the industry, said J. Rupert Thompson, a director and producer whose career in reality TV dates back nearly to its inception: he worked on Season 2 of MTV’s “The Real World,” set in Los Angeles. The business is now being run by “companies that are publicly traded and have to report profits to their shareholders,” he said, and reality TV is just another product churned out by massive corporations looking to streamline their operations. In one stark example of the effects of media consolidation, the unscripted TV division at HBO Max, as the streaming service was then known, faced deep cuts after Warner Bros. merged with Discovery.
“We’re being looked at as making widgets, and it’s cheaper to make the widgets in Georgia or Canada, which is why we’re seeing so much runaway production happening,” Thompson said. “It’s killing people.”
Some say this downturn was inevitable. Over the last decade, the so-called era of Peak TV brought a dizzying increase in production and spending as streamers, namely Netflix, battled for dominance over traditional networks. With streaming platforms paying exorbitant money for prestige content and marquee talent, inexpensive unscripted series helped to fill out original programming slates that could entice subscribers. And it intensified the battle for programmers to stay in the game.
As the former vice president of content for Magnolia Network, the lifestyle network from HGTV superstars Chip and Joanna Gaines that was launched by Discovery, Andrew Strauser was familiar with this scramble and its ripple effects. The approach has placed pressure on small production companies, which make the bulk of reality TV, to deliver more content with leaner budgets. The result is workers are paid less and crew sizes are smaller, resulting in longer hours and combining of duties.
”We’re killing them to make these beautiful shows,” Strauser said of the production companies. “If you’re making a show that used to cost $200,000 an episode, we’re trying to make it now for $150,000. The production company is making no money off that, so you’re really squeezing them.”
Indeed, the spaghetti-at-the-wall approach is no longer sustainable. Show orders began to drop around 2022, while strategy shifts and company disruption took hold. Strauser was laid off in the fall of 2022 after the Warner Bros.-Discovery merger. Distressed over the bleak job market in the U.S. — “I stopped counting at over 300 applications. You’re sort of like pissing in the wind with these online applications.” — he moved to the U.K. where he currently works as a chief content officer for a European conglomerate.
So, can streaming-dominant companies course-correct and find a business model that supports the infrastructure? That’s the question, says veteran reality producer Justin Hochberg, who is part of the team behind Netflix’s luxury real estate series “Buying Beverly Hills,” which was canceled just last week. After swearing off ads for years, Netflix implemented a lower-cost, ad-supported subscription in 2022. That same year, Disney+ introduced an advertising tier for $7.99 a month. Meanwhile, the shift to streaming has wreaked havoc on the cable television business, which is where a lot of reality TV lives. During its second-quarter earnings report, Warner Discovery said that its networks, including CNN, TNT, HGTV, Food Network and Animal Planet, were worth $9 billion less than they were just two years ago.
Some entertainment companies are commissioning more shows again, but the comeback remains incredibly slow. When will Hollywood workers struggling to find work get some relief?
“If you think about what happened during the streaming boom, basically platforms — Amazon, Netflix, all these streamers — went and started paying for all the content they put out,” he said. “But nobody else was supporting it, except for subscribers.”
Hochberg said subscription revenue was unlikely to outpace production costs, except at places like Disney, Netflix or Amazon. But, he adds: “As streamers now convert to offering advertising [tiers for subscribers], that may unlock growth over time.”
But many thought growth, and therefore relief, would come sooner for reality TV workers. As Hollywood grappled with last year’s actors’ and writers’ strikes, some predicted that the work stoppage would accelerate reality TV production, as it had during the 2007-08 writers’ strike. But that didn’t happen. There was already an abundance of content — unscripted and otherwise — for viewers to watch. And the pandemic had created a backlog of shows that networks and streamers hadn’t even launched yet, weakening any urgency to bank new content because of the strikes.
“When the strikes were happening, it was like, ‘OK, that’s horrible for them,’ they’re our cohorts, our colleagues. But it’s also like, ‘Thank God we’re in unscripted. This is our time to shine,’” said Katie MacIntosh, who has two decades of experience in casting and development working on shows like “Big Brother” and “Real Housewives of Orange County.” “I think we thought unscripted was going to save the industry at some point. But there was another hole in the boat. And it was like, ‘Wait, hang on, us too?’”
Determined not to get bulldozed by the slump, MacIntosh is in the process of rebranding her casting and development company, Mac Worldwide Inc., by branching into the speaker circuit and educational courses. “This is not where my story ends,” she said. “This is not how I go out.”
Eddie Bernard is also trying to make sense of where the unscripted industry is headed. As a freelance camera operator based in New York, he had grown accustomed to a rigorous work schedule with a resume that includes “The Real Housewives of New York City” and “My Unorthodox Life.” It was typical for him to line up three shows a year, with each show in production for about two to three months. Even during the pandemic, he lined up work on three unscripted projects for Max. With the dearth of crew jobs, he’s turned to acting, which is how he originally became interested in filmmaking, to help stay afloat. Some recent credits include Showtime’s “City On a Hill” and a commercial campaign for Google Pixel.
He’s bracing to end this year earning roughly half of what he’s used to bringing in: “I am for the first time going into my savings,” he said. It has Bernard reckoning with how much he’s willing to lower the cost of his work to get work.
“You’re paying for my expertise, my knowledge. As soon as I bring my rate down, that just brings everybody’s rate down,” he said. “You can’t start undercutting people. If you understand the economics, you understand you’re saving money by hiring me to do it right the first time.”
But the supply of workers remains greater than the demand.
“This is the worst it’s been in in my time in this business,” says Joy Tenenberg, a casting producer with two decades of experience on shows including “Intervention.” It’s a job that is crucial in the personality-driven world of unscripted TV, taps into her passion for research and, as with “Intervention.” can change people’s lives for the better. But it’s one that is undervalued by entertainment companies as they look to slash budgets, said Tenenberg.
Tenenberg added that casting teams that once consisted of a half-dozen people have now been reduced to a department of one or two, and that they are often the first affected when budgets are tightened. Nowadays, instead of scouting trips, casting producers are more likely to slide into the DMs of prospective contestants for shows like “Love Is Blind.”
As scrutiny mounts on reality TV, stars from Bravo’s ‘Real Housewives’ franchises, ‘Love Is Blind’ and ‘The Challenge’ say the industry needs to change.
“You’re still expected to find the same amount of people in a sometimes a shorter period of time with fewer people. And the rates are stagnant,” she said. “We have no union, we have no HR, we have nothing to protect us. We got no residuals. Everything that the writers were striking for is everything that we’ve dealt with our whole careers.”
Although some reality TV crew members are unionized, the workers classified as producers — from casting producers to story producers — are typically not. This means that pay can fluctuate wildly from job to job and there are few guidelines around work hours.
“This particular genre of television is a union-averse. That’s how it was born,” said Thompson, noting that reality TV grew out of the networks’ desire for “strike-proof programming.” But as the genre has matured — it’s now a pillar of TV programming — workers have been increasingly vocal about wanting protections like their counterparts in scripted television. “Their priorities are have changed,” he said.
Among workers’ complaints: low pay and grueling working conditions. As the dual strikes took hold last summer, Bethenny Frankel, former star of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” called for reality television casts and crews to unionize. Last September, creative consultants on MTV’s viral video show “Ridiculousness” unanimously voted to unionize with the Writers Guild of America West, underscoring how even so-called “unscripted” series require some writing. The staff now has a labor contract with its employer, Superjacket Productions.
For now, surviving the uncertain period in the ailing reality TV production landscape is plaguing both veteran workers and people who are just starting their careers. For others, it’s a time of transition.
“I’m really very lucky to have spent 34 years in the industry that I love,” Birbrower said. “I had a good run. I didn’t do all the projects that I wanted to, but life sometimes just is what it is. Hopefully I can be a good English teacher.”
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