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In the age of streaming, reality TV is still going strong. The Secret Lives of Mormon Moms, a show spinning out of a bizarre scandal on TikTok, is back for a season 2, while Netflix continues to make more and more spinoffs of Love is Blind. And don't remind me of the uniquely depressing spectacle that is Beast Games on Amazon's Prime Video. 

You may have noticed that these reality shows are pumped out faster than your regular scripted, narrative television show. And there's a reason for that: reality TV is cheap to make and delivers high viewership. For studios and streamers like Netflix alike, they offer too much of a financial boon to ignore. But at the LA Times's Festival of Books, Rachel Lindsay from The Bachelorette and writer from The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum, revealed concerning reasons for why costs are so low for reality TV. It's because there's virtually no worker protections for their stars. 

"The category that reality cast members are in is a labor category called 'bonafide amateurs...' Bonafide amateurs is like a carve-out at the beginning, I hope I'm remembering this correctly, at the beginning of unionization where essentially, it's not scripted performers, but it's not unionized non-scripted performers, like hosts. And it's separate from documentary, which is to say, it's nowhere. It's like a category that has zero protections," Nussbaum said. 

Rachel Lindsay, who was the lead on one season of The Bachelorette, shared some of her experiences. Lindsay was an attorney before competing on The Bachelor, and eventually joining The Bachelorette, and even she had difficulty navigating her new normal. "If you look at these contracts... they own you," Lindsay said about the studios making these reality shows, where contestants have very little freedom. Cast members have to sign numerous NDAs where they can't talk about how a show is made. And when abuse occurs, they're forced into private arbitration. 

Beyond the people who star in reality shows, there are also ways that crew members who work on these shows suffer from a lack of protections. "I am very much in favor of there being much better protections for people on both sides of the camera. Because it feeds into one another. Like when people are working terrible reality jobs, I think they tend to be crueler to the cast members because it has kind of a prison guard environment," Nussbaum said. 

Nussbaum noted that reality TV began as "a strike breaker," and it's only continued to proliferate because studios are emboldened to not spend money on providing the same protections for reality stars that they would for regular union scripted actors. "The genre is dependent upon not putting out that kind of money," Nussbaum said. So can there ever be a more ethical version of reality television? Maybe, but that would require the entire production pipeline to be transformed for the genre. 

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