TRADE: THE HARSH REALITY OF REALITY TV – Newspaper

In December 2018, John Legend, along with then-newly elected U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, criticized the exploitation of congressional interns on Capitol Hill, most of whom worked without pay.

Legends timing was ironic.

NBC’s The Voice had just announced that Legend would be joining as a judge. He was reportedly set to make $14 million per season in his third year on the show. Meanwhile, all of the Voice contestants except the winner earned $0 for their time, aside from housing and food stipends — just like those congressional interns.

The fall 2023 TV lineup will mostly consist of low-budget reality shows like The Voice. For the networks, this is an end to the ongoing strikes of TV writers and actors.

Whether it’s The Voice, House Hunters, American Chopper or The Bachelorette, reality shows thrive on a simple business model: They pay millions of dollars to big-name celebrities to act as judges, coaches or hosts, while contestants work for free or for a pittance, under the guise of pursuing their dreams or gaining publicity.

Reality TV show candidates are more like unpaid interns than Hollywood stars…

These contestants are the unpaid interns of the entertainment industry, yet it is their stories, personalities and talent that draw viewers.

Dreams collide with reality

To conduct research for my book Getting Signed: Record Contracts, Musicians, and Power in Society, I interviewed musicians across the country.

The book was about the exploitative nature of record deals, but during my research I kept coming across singers who had auditioned for or competed on The Voice.

In The Voice, singers compete in teams led by a celebrity coach. After a blind audition and several elimination rounds, the live broadcast begins with four teams of five members each. These 20 contestants work in Los Angeles for months and are given only their room and board. Every week, at least one player is eliminated. At the end of each season, the winner receives $100,000 and a recording contract.

While some viewers see reality shows like The Voice as a springboard to a career in music, many of the musicians I spoke to were discouraged by their experiences on the show.

Unlike American Idol, where a number of winners from Kelly Clarkson to Jordan Sparks have gone on to make it big, no winner of The Voice has become a star. The closest anyone has come to “making it” on The Voice is controversial country singer Morgan Wallen, who was infamously dropped by his label and country radio after video surfaced of him using a racial slur. And Wallen didn’t even win The Voice; in fact, he barely made it through the blind audition.

Former contestants repeatedly told me that the television attention did little good for their careers.

Before joining the show, many musicians tried to make a living by touring or performing, putting their developing careers on hold to pursue their dreams.

However, the show’s contracts stipulate that contestants are not allowed to perform, sell their name, image or likeness, or record new music during The Voice. (The Conversation reached out to NBC to ask if this would apply to the current season, but has not received a response.)

This leaves the 20 finalists without a way to sell their music, even if they compete for up to eight months. When the losers of the show return, many have little new material to promote. By the time they release a new single or album and announce a tour, some of them told me they have lost a large portion of their followers.

There is one group of people who get meaningful exposure from these shows: the coaches and judges. Several singers, like Gwen Stefani and Pharell Williams, have used The Voice to boost their flagging music careers. While they make millions as coaches and judges, these stars even use the show to promote their music — something the contestants themselves are not allowed to do.

It is feasible to pay these contestants. If Legend were to earn $13 million instead of $14 million, that extra million dollars could be split between half the contestants, each getting $100,000 — an amount currently reserved only for the winner of the show.

If the salaries of all four coaches were cut by $1 million each, enough money would be freed up to pay all 20 contestants $200,000 each.

A goldmine for networking

The Voice isn’t the only reality show benefiting from the genre’s low overhead costs.

Over the past two decades, shows featuring Americans looking to buy or remodel a home have become extremely popular. HGTV captured this market by creating popular shows such as House Hunters, Flip or Flop and Property Brothers.

Viewers may not realize how profitable these programs are.

Take House Hunters. The show follows a potential home buyer as he visits three homes. Home buyers on the show have said they earn as little as $500 for their work and that episodes last three to five days and take about 30 hours to film. The show’s producers don’t pay agents to participate.

The low pay for people on reality TV shows is matched by the low budgets for these shows. One former contestant wrote that episodes of House Hunters cost about $50,000 to film. By comparison, primetime sitcoms have budgets of $1.5 million to $3 million per episode.

Bypassing the unions

The huge budget gap between reality TV and sitcoms isn’t just due to the lack of star actors.

Many scripted television shows are set in Los Angeles, where camera crews, stunt doubles, costume artists, makeup artists and hair stylists are unionized. But shows like House Hunters, which film all over the country, will recruit crews from right-to-work states.

These are states where workers cannot be forced to join a union or pay union dues as a condition of employment. For these reasons, unions have much less power in these states than in places traditionally associated with film and entertainment, such as California and New York.

That’s one of the reasons why television production moved to Atlanta, often called the “Hollywood of the South,” where series such as The Walking Dead and Stranger Things are filmed.

But in my research, I also learned that Knoxville, Tennessee, has become a reality TV mecca. Like Georgia, Tennessee is also a right-to-work state. In Knoxville, many working musicians join the city’s low-paying entertainment apparatus by taking odd jobs on TV and film production crews between shows and tours.

As TV writers and actors strike, it’s important to realize that the entertainment industry will seek to exploit workers for profit whenever possible.

Reality TV is a way to undermine the influence of striking workers, for example by not using unionized actors or by using non-unionized production staff.

Contestants, casts and crew are starting to catch on. Many reality TV contestants have said they feel like strikebreakers, and Real Housewives’ Bethenny Frankel is reportedly trying to organize her reality TV coworkers.

Reality TV could become the next labor war in the entertainment industry as it caters to candidates desperate for attention.

As John Legend put it, “Unpaid internships ensure that only kids with resources and privilege gain valuable experiences.”

Reality TV does the same with aspiring actors, musicians and celebrities.

The author is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Arlington in the US.

Republished from The Conversation

Published in Dawn, ICON, July 21, 2024