Is Reality Syndication’s Next Big Thing?

The hurdles to producing a hit in daytime television are so enormous, both financially (with shows costing up to $40 million their first year) and creatively (with only one new personality to emerge as a draw for viewers the past few years – Steve Harvey on Debmar-Mercury’s Family Feud and NBCU’s Steve Harvey Show), that studios, stations and distributors are wondering whether network TV’s and cable’s successes with reality TV the past decade may be worth tapping into for broadcast syndication.

This already is happening to some degree, notably with Harvey bringing elements of dating shows to his NBCU daytime talk show, according to panelists on today’s NATPE session “Reality Shows in Syndication: The Next Big Arena … Or Not?”

“Steve Harvey brings to daytime a sense of humor, a point of view and a focus on dating and relationships, which brings a new way to do daytime talk,” said Valerie Schaer, EVP of creative affairs at NBCUniversal Domestic Television Distribution. (The other panelists were Stephen Brown, EVP of programming and development at Fox TV Stations, Lonnie Burstein, EVP of programming at Debmar-Mercury, and Hilary Estey McLoughlin, president of creative affairs at CBS Television Distribution. Atlas Media Corp. president and executive producer Bruce David Klein moderated.)

Reality’s influence also is likely to soon trickle into daytime TV with the melding of news and comedy, much like Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

“From Rosie to Ellen to Steve Harvey, funny will always work — people want to laugh,” said McLoughlin, who speculated that an upcoming daytime format may be funny news programs.

Funny news will have a few things working in its favor. One is that it can lead into or out of stations’ lucrative daytime news. And the news hybrids are cheap to produce, compared to big-name, big-budget shows like Sony’s Queen Latifah and Disney-ABC’s Katie, both of which were canceled after two seasons.

“I don’t see us continuing to do the same things we’ve been doing,” said Brown. “Of all the big names the past three years, only Steve Harvey has been a success.”

Funny news programs also tap into one of broadcast syndication’s hottest trends: funny, whether it’s funny game shows like Family Feud, talk shows like Warner Bros.’ Ellen or newsmagazines such as Warner Bros.’ TMZ or Twentieth Television’s Dish Nation.

Meantime, reality TV’s influence on daytime TV will be limited. Reality shows on broadcast and cable networks, for one thing, often air just a handful of shows with serialized storylines each season. Neither of those work in daytime syndication where studios produce some 180 or more episodes of shows each season.

“In order to do that, you have to have a format that is very easy to produce with many episodes, with a structure or arc throughout [all those episodes], versus building one episode [on cable] for a few weeks,” Schaer said. “Not everything that is successful on cable TV can work in daytime.”

The demographics of daytime viewers are also quite different from viewers watching realty shows in primetime.

“It’s a lower socio-economic pool; it’s an older pool,” said Burstein. “Primetime cable strives for an adult 18-34 or adult 18-49 audience, which our stations don’t care much about. That might establish a nice base for the future, but you can’t survive on that.”

Moreover, daytime viewers, who not too long ago tuned into five-day-a-week serialized storylines on network TV daytime soap operas, no longer watch TV that way. Younger viewers are tuning out TV all together in favor of streaming services, games on their phones and social media.

And even older daytime TV viewers often watch just two or three episodes of daytime shows each week.

“It’s very difficult to bring a new, successful talk show to daytime,” Schaer said. “The digital component [of a daytime show] becomes more important to reach those viewers.”