October 30, 2024 6:00am PT

Latest Production Stats Paint Grim Picture for Reality TV

Photo Illustration: VIP+: Keeping Up with the Kardashians Courtesy of E! Entertainment; The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Courtesy of Michael Larsen/Bravo; Survivor Courtesy of CBS

Once an unshakable pillar of the TV industry, unscripted shows are facing headwinds, new FilmLA Q3 data shows
While reality TV weathered COVID and the strikes, Hollywood’s post-pandemic production contraction is hitting hard
With total unscripted shoot days in L.A. dropping by nearly 60 percent YoY, can reality TV survive the battering?

FilmLA dropped its latest production report earlier this month, and it appears reality television is feeling some pain, becoming the biggest loser in yet another overall rough quarter for Hollywood’s film and TV shoots.

After the writers strike ground most other productions to a halt in last year’s Q3, reality TV was in the pink, forging ahead to log 2,166 shoot days based in Los Angeles. One year later, the genre managed to eke out just 946 shoot days in Q3 2024, making for a nearly 60% YoY decrease — a drop, FilmLA said, “more than accounts for the entire loss seen in aggregate across all filming categories.”

Scripted production film shoots for dramas and comedies, on the other hand, saw massive YoY increases (drama up 5,508.3%, comedy up 2,700%).

The latest numbers add further concern to the state of unscripted TV, which for a while seemed to thrive despite the recent years of strikes and pandemics. By being budget-friendly, adaptable to COVID-era restrictions and able to keep up with the rising demand for content in quarantine, reality TV had a huge surge while the rest of Hollywood scrambled in the pandemic years.

Unscripted productions were back in business almost as soon as the COVID-19 production pause lifted in 2020, going from 30 shooting days in Q2 2020 to 1,159 by the next quarter.

But soon after the explosion came the post-pandemic contraction, which impacted even the historically adaptable unscripted world. Budgets became tighter across the board, which led to studios relying on established properties and shipping unscripted productions out of Hollywood.

Reality TV's stability was already slowly eroding as the rise of streaming and cord-cutting ended studios’ willingness to throw any zany unscripted show on cable to see what stuck.

As the Hollywood Reporter detailed in its recent report on LA’s disappearing productions, new places have become the new regular homes for unscripted shows. While states such as Illinois and Georgia include reality and game shows in their tax credit programs to attract film and TV productions to their respective turfs, California Governor Gavin Newsom just unveiled a $750 million plan to bolster California production that does not cover reality TV.

The result is that reality TV shoot days are now trailing pre-pandemic numbers. This last quarter’s 946 shoot days is just a 2.4% decrease from Q3 2019 but a 16% drop from Q3 2018 and a 43% decrease from its considerably pre-pandemic peak (1,646 days in Q2 2014).

Clearly, Hollywood has yet to stabilize from the past few years, but if and when it does, it’s likely unscripted TV will never be the unshakable pillar of the industry it once was.