Reality TV (or “unscripted television”) is nothing new. While these days the term might hold the connotation of being a little over-produced, sometimes a little shlocky, and maybe with a hint of guilty pleasure with shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians or Kitchen Nightmares, the genre has a long history. Taking a broader, more literal interpretation of “unscripted” television, reality TV has been around since television’s inception, with the Texaco Star Theater variety show working as one of the popularizing influences in the medium.
Reality TV continued to evolve through new iterations of variety shows like the Ed Sullivan Show in the 70’s (which introduced Americans to The Beatles) or late-night talk shows like The Tonight Show. Game shows gained popularity in the 50’s and added another layer to unscripted television, but it wasn’t until the 90’s that the more modern style of reality TV started taking hold with MTV’s The Real World paving the way for smash hits like Survivor and Big Brother.
And then in the mid-aughts, things went crazy and reality TV was everywhere. What happened?
What Happened?
Though unscripted television has been around for a while and has always had some degree of popularity, most of the time the shows that have been bigger hits were the scripted ones. A talented writer crafts an engaging and compelling story that resonates with an audience and can sometimes have a profound impact on society, something you can’t quite get (usually) from an unscripted show. And with these scripted shows with their powerful moments came viewers, and with those viewers came advertisers.
Advertisers wanted their products in front of the Seinfeld audience, in front of the Lost audience, in front of the Friends audience. Shows like these drew in huge numbers and brought in massive amounts of advertising dollars for the network.
The thing is, to get those witty jokes and powerful dramatic twists, someone had to actually write those engaging and compelling stories. Those writers cost money, and if there’s one thing Hollywood hates more than an original idea, it’s paying out money.
How Writers Make Their Money
A long time ago (exactly when is a matter of opinion), a bunch of media writers got together and decided to negotiate as a unit for better pay and workplace conditions. Collective bargaining, workers’ rights, you get it. A union was born, and eventually named the Writers Guild of America (WGA).
The way writers typically get paid is an up-front fee for actually doing the writing (on a TV show, this typically means they get a salary). Later, if and when the media is shown again, the writers would get a type of royalty. This payment structure can help writers keep a steady income during the long stretches between a show or movie’s production. If that structure sounds pretty vague to you and you’re wondering if that might be exploited by studios who want to pay as little as possible, then you’re catching on.
Pay Dispute with Old New Media
The studios/production companies and writers have never quite seen eye-to-eye on what should be paid out as residuals. In the 80’s, the home video market was starting to take hold with VHS tapes gaining popularity, and the writers wanted a piece of the pie when their work was sold on tape. They went on strike for two weeks and eventually settled on 0.3% of VHS sales, which were then selling for around $100 each, and returned to business as usual. This was fine, until VHS costs lowered gross sales further and further, dropping the amount writers would get in residuals until the writers felt thoroughly burned.
When DVDs took over the market, studios and distributors saw a major boom in the lasting power of the home video market, but with the same VHS residuals applied to DVDs, writers’ incomes weren’t getting any better.
Then along came new media.
Pay Dispute with New New Media
Streaming. Downloads. Cable and on-demand videos. Anything that wasn’t a disc or tape you’d buy from a store and pop in a player was broadly classified as “new media”, and was more or less the Wild West as far as residuals were concerned. With the existing union agreements based on a percentage of media sales, there was no simple way to apply the 0.3% agreement to many types of new media, and in the mid-aughts, having spent the last 20 or so years feeling burned by the original VHS agreement, writers weren’t too willing to play softball with the studios and distributors (who were, as always, looking to pay as little as possible).
So, in 2007, the Writers Guild of America decided to strike over the issue to finally get what they felt they deserved.
It didn’t go as well as they hoped.
Unlike the previous strikes, where the networks largely just delayed regular programming until the strike had ended, they found a new way to keep content on-air without having a writer scripting content: our old friend reality television.
Old Dogs, New Tricks
Reality TV had evolved in the decades since it first struck gold with Texaco Star Theater. American Idol, Survivor, and Big Brother had recently been putting up huge viewer numbers, rivaling or surpassing even the most popular scripted shows.
The networks decided to go all-in on reality TV and filled their lineup by extending shows like Amazing Race or Big Brother while awkwardly shortening or canceling much of their scripted content.
The networks and studios didn’t get out of it completely unscathed and did see ratings drops from the holes left by shows with half-seasons or ones that dropped in quality from using unfinished scripts.
But the cat was out of the bag. If networks could order unscripted shows at a fraction of the cost without having to pay expensive actors, experienced directors, cinematographers, and writers, and still put up big ratings numbers, what exactly did they need scripted content for anyway?
Television saw a boom of reality TV, where every celebrity had a camera crew following them, every producer could get greenlit an idea of putting an eclectic and volatile group of people together, sometimes adding a twist or a hook to encourage drama and getting some fancy editors to manufacture drama if none arose. The popular reality TV mainstays of the time were given a major boost, and in the following years, more and more unscripted shows took over the slots from more traditional TV content.
The End of the Strike
Hollywood took the strike as a chance to resettle and reboot itself, canceling a few of their less-inspired shows and finding more avenues for the cheaper unscripted content. But viewers can’t get by on celebrity drama alone, and eventually, the networks did want their high-budget, award-winning scripted content back, at least in some way.
The writers and the production companies eventually reached a complicated agreement that gave them a little of what they wanted in new media and not much of what they wanted in old media, with cost estimates in unrealized revenue and economic impact ranging from millions to billions, and generally leaving no one really happy with the outcome. But it got the writers back to work (along with all the periphery jobs that halted) and left them a little better off.
Reality television had already been on an upswing through the early aughts, but if you’ve ever wondered why these days it feels like half the shows are unpolished (but sometimes highly entertaining) productions with little more than a camera, some fancy editing, and some big personalities rife with conflict, it’s because a decade and a half ago, production companies couldn’t agree with writers on how much they should get paid when you stream their show from Netflix.
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