The Cost of Reality TV.

  I discovered my Amazon Prime includes a few interesting reality shows.  The ones I  love are the cooking competitions.  Over the past few days, I've been watching tons of the shows. I am addicted to them.

In addition, many cable channels are moving from regular fiction shows to "Reality" or non-fiction television because people are attracted to these.

I've heard Reality shows are cheaper to produce than the usual scripted ones such as NCIS or Hawaii-5-0. 

Lets start with a few stats on reality television before we look at the cost.  In 2001, these types of shows accounted for 20% of prime time programming. It jumped to 40% in 2013 on average but for some stations reality television accounts for 90% of their programming.  In the 2012-2013 year, four of the top ten and eight of the top twenty-five top rated prime time shows were reality shows.

Due to the low production costs, the profit margins can be so much larger than with scripted shows. Several cable station's for profit margin (those with reality programming)
1. TLC with 60%
2. The Discovery Network with 58%
3. National Geographic with 52%
4. Investigation Discovery with 35%


The average cost for a reality show is between $100,000 and $500,000 which can be so much less than a scripted show.  To show the difference, Royal Pains, a scripted show, runs between $2 and $2.5 million per episode.  One reason reality shows cost less is because they use fewer writers and employees but the cost can be made up in paying the 'talent' hired for the show.  For instance, Sarah Palin wanted to be paid $1,000,000 per episode for her reality show.  That is the same amount James Gandolfini received his final year of the Sopranos show.

On the other hand, the girls in "Jersey Shore" a reality show, only received a few hundred per episode and eventually were paid $10,000 per episode as compared to Charlie Sheen in 2009 who earned over $850,000 per episode in Two and A Half Men.

Furthermore, these reality shows allow smaller or emerging cable stations can produce a full season for between one and three million because everything can be shot in one day.  If its a bigger network with more complex shows, which can cost quite a bit more.  For instance, one episode of Survivor can cost $2,000,000 per episode or a price of $30 million for the whole 15 episode season.  Each episode of Survivor takes 3 days to shoot with a pre and post production which runs most of the year.

Although I looked for math activities created to use information on the cost of reality television, I was unable to find any.  I wanted to share some of the differences between scripted and reality shows so you can share it with your students.  If you have ideas other than creating graphs or figuring out the difference in cost as a percentage, I'd love to know.

Much of the information come from this paper.  I found that one of the pie charts on page 12 had percentages that add up to more than 100% so there is a mistake.  This is the perfect opportunity to have them read the graphs and figure out what is wrong with it.

Let me know what you think.  I'd love ot hear.