MTV announced this month that “Jersey Shore Family Vacation,” a revival of the booze-soaked early-2010s reality series, was ending after its ninth season. A few months earlier, the network said it was ending another long-running reality series, “Catfish: The TV Show,” after nearly 300 episodes.
HGTV has been on a cancellation spree as well (“Christina on the Coast” and “Bargain Block” among them), as have the Food Network, TLC and many other cable networks.
All TV shows have an expiration date, of course. But these days, reality TV is running into the harsh realities of the fast-changing TV business.
The annual number of unscripted and reality series with season premieres in the United States has plummeted by a third since 2022, according to Luminate, a research group. It fell 15 percent just last year, to 794.
The entertainment industry has spent a lot of time reflecting on the sharp decline in scripted shows. The changes to reality television are just as stark as an era of unscripted television quietly vanishes, but have received much less attention.
The declines have hit every subgenre, from cooking, design and home shows to travel and crime, according to Luminate.
“There are fewer channels greenlighting fewer shows, and it all seems to be moving unstoppably to the bottom,” said Mark Cronin, a longtime reality producer and one of the creators of the “Below Deck” franchise for Bravo. “Everything’s contracting, and there are no new shows right now.”
Some success stories in unscripted television remain, including runaway hits like “The Traitors” and “Love Island USA.” Thoroughbreds like the “Housewives” franchise, “Below Deck” and “Survivor” remain popular, too.
But networks have become far more cautious about how many shows they produce. And they are doing whatever they can to keep existing shows relevant, sometimes with good results (“Dancing With the Stars” has had a TikTok-fueled ratings renaissance) and sometimes not. A casting stunt for “The Bachelorette” backfired so spectacularly last week that ABC executives decided to shelve an upcoming season.
In interviews, executives attributed the steep drop-off in total series to three issues: the rapid decline of cable, the continued momentum of YouTube and other digital outlets, and the industry’s nearly endless consolidation.
“There are so many things converging to squeeze the money for all practitioners,” said Paul Telegdy, a former chairman of entertainment at NBC and a longtime unscripted-TV executive.
The decline in cable ratings and revenue over the past few years has been the most significant culprit. Even though reality series cost less to produce than scripted shows, vast budget reductions at all the cable networks have curtailed ambitions.
In 2019, HGTV, the home of “Fixer Upper” and “Property Brothers,” had as many as 78 original unscripted series. That number fell to 35 last year, according to Luminate. Food Network used to make about 70 reality shows a year. That figure has been halved.
The output for networks like Lifetime, E!, MTV and Oxygen has also crashed.
Streaming services have not made up the difference. The number of reality series on those services have mostly held steady. Hulu’s and Amazon Prime Video’s series totals have increased over the last few years, but Netflix’s total declined last year.
Chris Arundel, a longtime postproduction supervisor on reality series like “Ghost Hunters” and “Wicked Tuna,” said he noticed that something seemed off in the industry about three years ago when screenwriters and actors went on strike. His assumption — one widely held in the industry — was that studios would buy a bunch of reality series to help fill the maw, much as they did during a labor stoppage in 2007-8.
But no buying craze ever arrived. Then Mr. Arundel began to notice that colleagues who were always working suddenly could not find a job. Some people left the business altogether.
“The industry seemed to be changing,” he said. “You get a bad feeling, you get a pit in your stomach and you think to yourself: This isn’t trending upward anymore — this is trending downward.”
Mr. Arundel, who was a postproduction vice president at Lionsgate, was laid off last year. He recently took a job with a YouTube content creator. “I feel like I need to pivot if I’m going to try to stay active in the industry in some capacity,” he said.
YouTube’s growing dominance in streaming seems to be offering a gravitational pull for some talent.
The producers of the Netflix food and travel series “Somebody Feed Phil,” starring the television producer and restaurant owner Phil Rosenthal, announced this month that the show would move to YouTube next year.
Yolanda Hadid, the former “Real Housewives” star and the mother of the models Gigi and Bella Hadid, is poised be the star of a new home design series that will be on YouTube as well.
A few years ago, Ms. Hadid’s show probably would have wound up on a network like HGTV, said Jad Dayeh, a senior partner at the WME talent agency, who represents the producer of the show. Instead, Mr. Dayeh is negotiating with companies and brands to sponsor the series, which would then be distributed via the YouTube and digital channels of the Hadids and the brand.
A deal like that is more “interesting and financially rewarding,” Mr. Dayeh said — and it sends the show to a powerful distributor like YouTube in the process.
“There is a huge YouTube focus,” he said. “YouTube’s presence at the center of the media ecosystem is becoming undeniable.”
YouTube is obviously awash in unscripted content already — some of it well produced, some of it not, but all of it capturing more viewing time than any other streaming app.
Executives also said repeated mergers had taken a toll, such as Discovery’s $14.6 billion purchase of the Scripps media company, which was the home of HGTV and the Food Network, in 2018 and then Discovery’s merger with Warner Bros. in 2022. (Paramount recently reached a $111 billion deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery.)
But the consolidation is happening among production studios, too. This month, Banijay Entertainment, the Paris-based production company behind “MasterChef,” announced its plan to combine with All3Media, the British company behind “The Traitors.”
“There is just an inexorable march toward fewer ideas from fewer companies,” Mr. Telegdy, the former NBC executive, said.
Shaun O’Steen, a veteran graphics supervisor, said his career went “sideways” after the production company he worked for “was bought and sold and bought and sold” multiple times.
Mr. O’Steen used to managed a group of visual effects experts at “Naked and Afraid” who carefully and methodically did all the blurring of contestants’ private parts so the show could be suitable to air on Discovery. But after the production company started to change hands, he said, he eventually had to let people go, and “they wanted the same product under the same deadlines but we had to do it with half the people.”
Finally, the group was disbanded, and Mr. O’Steen was let go in September. Given the stress of the job these days, and the difficulty in even finding one, he may leave the business, he said.
“It’s become a headache,” he said. “When I first got into doing this, I wanted to make cool things, and I got to do that for a long time. Now, the stress and anxiety that’s behind a lot of it, I don’t know if it’s worth it anymore for me personally.”
John Koblin covers the television industry for The Times.
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