Less than a year after the end of Hollywood’s double strike, it’s clear that reality TV has taken a major hit as Hollywood struggles to stabilize itself.

For both newcomers and award-winning veterans, the well of jobs and freelance work has dried up, and many have switched to food delivery, sold their homes, or even given up the business altogether.

FilmLA’s TV and Film Production Report for Q2 2024 aptly sums up the severity of the situation. The report recorded a total of 868 shooting days for reality TV productions in LA, which represents a 57% decrease for Q2 (868) from the same period last year (2,013) and 50% from the five-year average (excluding a three-month production pause due to the pandemic).

Most importantly, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes did little to encourage reality TV production, even though unscripted filming was possible without breaking the picket lines.

When you pull together all of FilmLA’s available data on shooting days, you get a better sense of where the TV business is at and why reality TV is doing so poorly right now. The genre recovered the fastest from the COVID-19 production pause between March and June 2020, going from 30 shooting days in the second quarter of 2020 to 1,159 in the following quarter.

Unscripted productions flourished especially during the pandemic years because the format was budget-friendly, adaptable to COVID-era restrictions, and able to keep up with the increasing demand for content during quarantine.

But shortly after the explosion came the downturn that seemingly affected everyone in Hollywood, from assembly line workers to executives. The whiplash of the post-Covid production boom, followed by strikes and industry-wide austerity, caused television production to decline as quickly as it had risen.

The biggest question, of course, is why the current state of reality TV contradicts the supposed precedent set during the last writers’ strike in 2007: When scripted production ceased, unscripted shows flourished to fill the gaps in programming, ushering in a new era for the format.

Recent reporting on the 2007 strike has revealed that the reality TV boom story is only partially true. While a flood of reality and competition shows were approved or aired more quickly during the strike, this flood was probably not expected anyway, as reality TV was already massive in 2007. Shows like “Survivor,” “American Idol” and “Dancing With the Stars” had already been on TV for several years and had their highest ratings before, during and after the 2007 strike.

The reality TV boom of the late 2000s was more a reflection of the then-sustained popularity of television and the years-long rise of cable television than the direct result of a strike. The idea that traditional TV could thrive in a post-SVOD world may be unthinkable, but Nielsen data shows that viewership grew steadily for nearly two decades, reaching an all-time high in the 2008-09 broadcast season.

For context, Survivor, the show often credited with being the catalyst for modern reality TV, debuted in May 2000. By that time, its per-household ratings had grown to over seven and a half hours — 26 minutes more than in the early 1990s. In 2003 — the year American Idol began its eight-year run as the highest-rated show in the U.S. — its ratings exceeded the eight-hour mark.

Cable channels like TLC, Discovery and MTV had success with reality shows in the late 2000s, and other networks would follow suit: Just weeks before the 2007 strike, E! invited its viewers to Keep Up with the Kardashians.

But just as the dominance of traditional TV waned in the years of streaming, cable cancellations, corporate mergers and strikes, so too did the stability of reality TV. A look at FilmLA’s data shows that reality TV shooting days began to decline in the mid-2010s, the same period that streaming began to gain traction.

Today, streaming and television studios are stingier than ever, relying on established properties to drive viewership and greenlighting fewer new shows. Nielsen data shows that 9 of the top 10 reality shows in 2023 have been around for a decade or more or were recent spinoffs of well-known properties.

And despite some successful unscripted shows that are still inextricably linked to LA (“American Idol,” “Selling Sunset,” “Vanderpump Rules,” to name just three), those productions are increasingly being filmed elsewhere as studios invest more in international content.

In addition, most of the casual workers have no union representation to help them weather the storm. Including casual workers in the WGA was taken off the table in negotiations in 2007, and efforts to form a union have been unsuccessful since then.

While not being unionized may have been an advantage in 2007, when studios were happy to fund and air crazy concepts to see what stuck, today’s unscripted workers are forced to fend for themselves in a far tougher industry that will only get tougher in the future.