Is US unscripted “the bleakest part of the industry right now” or ready for a much-needed upward curve and a whole load of opportunistic M&A activity? C21 went to RealScreen Summit 2026 to find out and learn about factual’s latest coping mechanisms.
Cori Abraham
When you do good, I use the green pen; when you do bad, I use the red pen
It’s so unbelievably lazy to lead these columns in with the weather, but when you land in Miami Beach with a suitcase packed for Miami Beach to find it’s the coldest day in Miami Beach for 100 years and there are frozen iguanas dropping from the trees it’s hard not to draw comparisons.
When I started this gig 12 years ago (ahem) the RealScreen Summit was in Washington DC (where they know how to do cold) and thousands of execs queued to hear industry heavyweights talk about the state of the unscripted nation.
Fast forward to the Intercontinental Miami this week and one commentator described US unscripted as “the bleakest of all the sectors right now” while another distributor took time out from meetings to tell tales of buyers offering $14,000 an hour for projects, or smaller streaming services bidding $1,000 an hour for library content. That used to be the cost of a lunch here.
One of the big things at RealScreen over the years has been everybody talking about a big unscripted show – Pawn Stars, Storage Wars, Dance Moms, Duck Dynasty, Making A Murderer, Milf Manor, Beast Games… The one everybody is talking about here this week is Heated Rivalry, an erotic, gay, ice hockey drama from Canada. We may wish that was a documentary, but I’m afraid…
One UK producer also drew the weather comparison: “A cold wind is blowing, but there is some sun peeking through. The usual buyers aren’t buying, some came, some didn’t come, some sent one, some came but were nowhere to be seen. Some offered Zoom meetings the week after Realscreen. I really don’t need to come to Miami for that. The brands and the brokers, the copro partners, the creators, the AI merchants and the innovators all made it worthwhile. You’ve got to be in it to win it, and new deals will definitely come from this market. The cold winds will blow the trees but it only takes one coconut to fall out to make it worthwhile.”
The brightest sunlight came from the nascent, independent, Versant group of cablenets which were out in force looking for absolutely the sort of project that used to get shovelled out of this event by the wheelbarrow load. “We’re still focused on producing scripted, unscripted, live and sports content for our platforms, still very focused on our linear networks and very focused on our digital platforms,” said Val Boreland, president of entertainment. Cori Abraham, senior VP of development for unscripted content, is just about the most popular person here this week.
Versant had a Real Housewives reboot to announce and put multiple pitching calls out to producers on the traditional pillars of a catchy title (Killer Grannies does well, perhaps not surprisingly, Buried In The Back Yard, likewise), and high volume returnable true crime, celebrity obs docs etc.
“Low cost and high volume is a huge priority for us,” says Abraham. “We also love premium docs on Oxygen. We’re looking for a case that makes you think differently about it because of access, or we have or a box of evidence from an attic that’s never been out before. I love a box of evidence.” Don’t we all?
So, perhaps don’t be shoving the women and children into the lifeboats just yet, however chilly it may feel on deck.
Jane Turton
Coping strategy number one: safety in numbers
To that end, the moneymen haven’t given up either.
On Wednesday the suits turned up: Jared Frandle, MD of Oak Tree Capital Management; Alex Iosilevich, co-founder and managing partner of Alignment Growth; Xavier Kochhar, CEO & general partner of XKE Capital. Put your smart shoes on guys and listen to the message – if you’re small or mid-range, on the broadcaster or the production side, you need to partner and scale up quickly or that’ll be the end of you.
“M&A is back,” said Iosilevich. “We’ve redefined what scale means in this industry on the distribution size over the past decade. A deal in Philadelphia used to get you 30 million subs, today Netflix will get you 320 million subs, YouTube and TikTok will get you 2-3 billion monthly views. Scale has been redefined and that means the content supply side has to follow. It’s a race to scale and these M&A deals everybody is reading about are a by-product of that. It’s probably the most fun time to be in the corporate development department of a media company because status quo is not an option. If you’re small you have to get bigger, or exit.”
Frandle added: “Any time you see industries consolidate there will be, as a by-product of that, forced divestitures as company’s re-evaluate legacy media assets. They will look to potentially sell those off and depending on where you sit in the investment scheme of things you can pick up interesting opportunities at an attractive valuation. A lot of people have made a lot of money over the course of time investing in legacy melting ice cubes – phone books made money well after everybody thought they would die. There are absolutely good deals available in this market.”
Kochhar said: “We see what’s happening at the top, that’s what’s in the news. The stuff that often gets lost is the consolidation that not only needs to happen but will happen. Supply side consolidation on the mid- and small-size market. Anybody can create content now, however any time there is a studio distribution entity or network investing real production dollars they need trusted producers and suppliers. The problem is there are too many independents. On the supply side you will experience this or feel this – licence fees are coming down.
“The key on the supply side for the small and mid-market, you have to figure it out and lock arms in partnership or use currency to become one entity. There needs to be mini scale created. Independent one-off production companies, unless you have a hit (and you can’t build a hit into your forecast) then you will have to consolidate. Partner, do deals with brethren, save costs on the op-ex side. Figure out how to use tech and other people to bring down costs. If something was costing you $100k for a half hour, figure out how to do it for $50,000.
“Where I see a tremendous opportunity and where we’re working is the mid-cap areas that will then feed into the larger Netflix, Warner Bros Discovery…”
Predictably All3Media CEO Jane Turton wouldn’t be drawn on her own proposed mega-merger with Banijay, but she did say her business was back in the acquisition market “with a vengeance”.
Alex Piper
Coping strategy number two: “Let’s make a show for YouTube”
As at every event currently there’s been huge focus on creators and YouTube this week as a potential way out.
There were some really practical tips from a senior exec at the video sharing platform who pointed out “we’ll make something for YouTube” is about as broad a brushstroke as “we’ll make something for Time Warner Cable”, and that traditional producers should treat ‘creators’ as kindred spirits rather than on screen talent for hire.
Alex Piper, who left US broadcast network Fox to return to YouTube last year, said: “We need to look at creators as producers too.
“A lot of times we look at creators as the on-air talent because that’s the way we’re used to constructing projects, but a lot of creators have built their own media networks, not only in front of the camera but influencing everything behind the camera as well. When production companies want to work with creators they should approach them on a producer-to-producer level, not as ‘I want to drop you into my format or my idea and put it on your channel.’
“One of the things people come to me and say is they want to make ‘something for YouTube.’ Well, there is no such thing. In some ways we’re more like Time Warner Cable than we are Netflix. We’re a channel ecosystem. So, the first question I always ask back is ‘what channel do you want that to live on?’
“One thing you have to realise is if you want to try and make content for the YouTube ecosystem you have to spend time understanding the YouTube ecosystem. That’s not memorising every creator, but how distribution works, how monetisation works, how you want to approach creators as collaborators rather than saying ‘we know how to do this better than you, so we want to grab you and pop you into a format.’ We’ve seen that doesn’t really work.”
Jason Sarlanis
Coping strategy number three: “Let’s make it a Vodcast”
Prepare to be absolutely inundated with vodcasts. Popular with audiences, incredibly cheap to make, super quick turnaround times, what’s not to like? The UK’s Goalhanger has a deal with Netflix for the World Cup and investment from The Chernin Group on the basis of Micah Richards doing his big belly laugh at Gary Lineker’s jokes.
One would think Jason Sarlanis, who among many roles at WBD is president of ID, would be all over this given the popularity of true crime in the audio space. Serial, launched in 2014 (God, I’m old), really heralded the dawn of podcasting in the unscripted TV industry. However, he’s concerned about the direction of travel rather than jumping on the bandwagon.
“My biggest fear, where this medium is growing up and changing, is the wrong incentives will be put in place and therefore the very thing I like about premium audio is going to be bastardised by the skew towards incremental revenue in the video space,” Sarlanis said.
“When you look at where this medium really took off with Serial and great narrative podcasts, businesses will want to get incremental income wherever they can and the siren’s call of slapping on a few video cameras in order to get a couple more bucks out of AdSense might skew the medium in the wrong direction. I think we will see an explosion of chatshows and I think the audience ultimately is going to pull back because inherently the quality is going to go down.
“I do worry that some of the best things about a pure audio experience will get lost in the next couple of years.”
Dan Jones
Coping strategy number four: “Let’s get AI to do it for us”
There’s been much hand-wringing and brow furrowing over whether AI is friend or foe, coming to eat our lunch or take our job or sleep with our wife, but Little Dot CEO Dan Jones this week gave a fascinating insight into how it’s being used at a company that is succeeding in this landscape, and could benefit many others.
Jones says: “A lot of the focus and headlines is on gen AI and production, I think we underestimate the wins you can have in the background of improving the ways you work.
“Because we do self-commissioning we built a commissioner bot. It takes every single piece of feedback that our in-house commissioning team had ever given producers and now, before they send a script up to our in-house commissioners, the bot will predict what the feedback is going to be and gives a round of feedback to the producer before it even makes it to the commissioner. It’s all in-house at the moment but the principal is there, it’s made our team so much more efficient. All the basics are done… our in-house commissioner can focus on the nuance. One of our editors built that and coded it over a weekend.”
In a world where it’s taking more than a year of development to get a show away with the BBC, and producers are being subjected to “pre-greenlight meetings”, this could be very handy.
Commissioner bot, get one in your office now.
