Unscripted shoot days are down two-fifths in a year and the genre is not eligible for the state’s tax credit, and its decline says something about the business that employs screenwriters too

The Decline of Reality Television

For two decades scripted writers regarded reality television with a mixture of disdain and unease. It was cheap. It needed no writers’ room in the union sense. In lean times networks filled their schedules with it. During the 2007 strike it was what stayed on the air.

So there is some irony in the latest production figures from Los Angeles, which show the genre shrinking faster than any other.

The Numbers

A data site’s summary of the regional permit office’s second-quarter report puts it plainly. Reality television continued its multi-year decline, posting 676 shoot days during the quarter. That was up from 463 in the first quarter of the year but 39.9 per cent below the 1,124 recorded a year earlier.

The trade press attributed the overall fall in Los Angeles location shooting largely to this. One report said the decline had been fuelled by reality television’s continued exodus.

The trend was visible earlier. Coverage of the figures for the third quarter of 2025 described a sharp drop in reality production, which recorded its second-worst quarter in fifteen years. The only worse one since the permit office began tracking in this way was the spring of 2020, when nearly everything stopped for the pandemic.

That report added a striking detail. Reality television was not affected by the 2023 strikes and accounted for nearly all television production in Los Angeles during them. Since then it had represented about half to sixty per cent of television production in the region.

So the genre that kept crews working through the strikes is now the one falling away.

Why It Is Leaving

Several explanations are offered.

Cost. Reality programming is made on tight budgets. Its producers are highly sensitive to the price of crews, locations and permits, and Los Angeles is an expensive place to shoot.

Incentives. The California tax credit is aimed at scripted production. Unscripted shows have not generally qualified. Other states and countries are less particular. A political figure quoted in coverage of the latest figures has called for the credit to be extended to competition reality television, which implies that it is currently excluded.

Mobility. A reality format can be made almost anywhere. It does not depend on standing sets or a particular pool of actors.

Demand. The same retrenchment that cut scripted commissions has hit unscripted. Streaming services that once ordered large volumes have pulled back.

Who Works in Reality Television

For those unfamiliar with how these programmes are made, a word on staffing.

They are called unscripted, and nobody is credited as a writer. But they are shaped. People called story producers, story editors or segment producers plan scenarios, conduct interviews, and assemble narrative in the edit from many hours of footage. Lines of narration and hosts’ links are written by someone.

That work is, for the most part, outside the Writers Guild’s main contract. Those who do it generally have no guaranteed minimums, no residuals, and no union health or pension plan through the job. Hours are long.

The guild has tried at various times to organise the sector, with limited success. The argument about whether story producers are writers was one of the unresolved issues of the 2007 strike.

So when reality production collapses, the people losing work are a large, mostly non-union workforce doing something close to writing.

Why Scripted Writers Might Not Care

One view is that this is somebody else’s problem, and perhaps even good news.

Reality television competed with scripted programming for schedule slots and budgets. Every hour of a dating show was an hour not given to a drama. If the cheap alternative becomes less attractive, companies may commission more scripted work.

And the latest figures do show scripted drama rising in Los Angeles even as reality falls.

Why They Should

The opposing view is more persuasive.

The decline of reality is not a shift of resources toward scripted. It is part of the same contraction. Companies are spending less on everything. The guild’s own figures show the number of members with writing earnings down by more than a quarter since 2022.

A healthy production economy needs volume. Stages, equipment houses, post-production facilities and crews all depend on a steady flow of work, and reality provided much of it. If that base erodes, the infrastructure that scripted production relies on becomes more expensive or disappears.

Unscripted work has also been a way in. Many scripted writers and producers began there. It offered a first job and a chance to learn how television is made.

And a large pool of unemployed story producers increases competition for whatever work exists at the margins of scripted television.

The Tax Credit Question

Whether to extend incentives to reality programming is a real policy choice.

In favour: the genre employs many people and has been the mainstay of local production. Excluding it hands those jobs to other places for no obvious reason.

Against: public subsidy is harder to justify for programming with lower budgets, lower wages and little cultural prestige. The credit is limited. Money given to a competition show is money not available for a drama that would employ more people at higher rates.

There is also a question of which reality shows. A large studio competition format with a crew of two hundred is a different thing from a small documentary series.

What the Figures Do Not Show

As with all the permit office’s data, these are on-location shoot days. Studio-based formats do not appear. And a show that moves from Los Angeles to another state has not ceased to exist. Some of the fall is relocation and not cancellation.

The quarter-on-quarter rise, from 463 days to 676, also deserves mention. It may be seasonal. It may be the first sign of a floor.

A Thought for the Guild

There is an argument that the collapse makes this a moment to revisit the question of organising unscripted work. Workers whose jobs are disappearing have little leverage. But a sector that is shrinking and consolidating may be easier to cover than one that is sprawling and new.

Whatever the answer, scripted writers have less reason than they once did to regard reality television as the enemy. It turns out to have been a neighbour.

This article reports published production figures and offers analysis marked as such. The London Prat has watched more reality television than it will admit and considers the genre in its English satirical news on reality television and its UK satirical news about unscripted shows with writers. Bohiney Magazine covers the American networks.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/