Did the onset of reality shows affect TV dramas?
Reality shows are the bane of existence for many writers, for some business reasons as well as creative reasons and programming reasons. From a business point of view, it’s been a long, hard struggle to get the reality show writers covered by the Writers Guild and fairly compensated. Everybody who works in the business knows that those shows are not unscripted. They are scripted. There are scripts. You can see the scripts. People sit down and write them. The people on those shows are not anonymous guests; they are actors. These are scripted material shows. Reality shows have been a problem because they are low cost for the producers, which means that companies wanting to save money would bump off the air a show, a fine drama, where you really have to pay real money to the writers and the actors, and tell stories, in order to do a cheap reality show. So they’re taking up time. That means there’s less time to place another kind of show. You’re just using up territory.
