A trio of top media execs talked up unscripted with gusto today and they have a right to be upbeat, the format is huge. Decades old Dancing With The Stars — the ABC series based on BBC format Strictly Come Dancing — is coming off one of its best seasons ever with its highest rated finale in nine years. Juggernaut Love Island USA just renewed for Season 8 at Peacock, after Season 7 of the U.S. remake of the British series became its most-watched original season ever.
“We treat it like sport in a way,” said Sharon Vuong, EVP Unscripted NBC, at a SXSW conversation Saturday.
“It’s a daily show. It’s real time. It’s happening on Monday. it’s happening on Tuesday. And when we produce the show, we’re producing the content for social at the same time, so it continues the story. And we do that six days a week, plus we have Aftersun [weekly companion podcast], and I think that super-serves the fandom. And we’re constantly evolving and testing ourselves to try to get new ways to deliver that content.” she said at the panel Unscripted Gold: Turning Real Life into Global Hits, alongside Jilly Pearce, SVP of Unscripted for ABC and Hulu, and Ryan O’Dowd, President of Unscripted at BBC Studios, a prolific producer of the format.
In a landscape of declining linear viewing, live is a key draw as are shows with relatable human stories, and evolving plot lines with winners and losers They generate massive online engagement. Social media is basically unscripted and its rise has backstopped the once humble entertainment genre and is helping propel it. Older shows must stay fresh and one way is for talent to crossing from show to show with a multiplier effect.
“Reality was always the original, authentic place to see real people be themselves, whether they were celebrities or not,” said Vuong. Social media is “super serving” unscripted content, “the big content, like episodic television, unscripted competition type shows. We are just in this era now where you are getting unscripted content across all social media as well as in long form and there’s no other place that you can really do that.”
“The net for us is wider and wider and we’re just diving in,” And the way I think about it is we are inviting each show’s audience over to the next show by giving them more of what they want and love. And in our ecosystem, it’s now incredibly complex. You have Taylor Frankie Paul about to be our next Bachelorette [Season 22]. So Season 4 of Mormon Wives will take you all the way up to Taylor going into The Bachelorette. And then Season 5, for the first time ever, will show you what happens next,” said Pearce.
“We also have Vanderpump Villa, which is kind of our White Lotus, where all the guests are reality stars from our ecosystem … Brooks Nader, who came out of Dancing With The Stars is now doing Love Thy Nader Season 2.”
Added Vuong, “I think the more we can super serve the fandoms, whether it’s a Bravo universe popping into Traders, Love Island popping into Traders, going into The Voice, Ariana hosting Love Island, coming from Vanderpump. I think that’s the idea of discovery and rediscovery … and you’ve got kind of a winning formula, because you get to see everyone.”
It’s become a “reality universe,” said O’Dowd at the panel, moderated by Variety’s Emily Longoretta. There was a time when “we were not willing to do that, and the networks were very protective over that. ‘That feels like it’s a NBC talent, and they’ve been discovered on NBC. We can’t be seen to take someone like that and try to make them [at] ABC or a Disney.’ Now it’s one giant ecosystem where we all kind of superserve each other.”
O’Dowd said a big advantage is “being able to be really nimble and act quickly. When I think of Dancing With The Stars, we always reserve one slot where probably two weeks, sometimes even a week before, we are announcing our entire cast on GMA, we’ve yet to book that final cast member. In part, it’s very stressful at times, but we’re able to wait to the very last minute, because inevitably, there’s going to be a big story that drops where someone comes out of obscurity and becomes the talk of the nation, in a way, we want to be able to, two weeks later, announce that we have that person on Dancing With The Stars. And that ability to be so quick and topical is something that we have the luxury of being able to do.”