What is the impact of reality TV on scripted TV shows?
The impact of reality television on the television industry has been that because it's a low-cost way to tell entertaining stories and get big audiences, it has forced scripted television, I think, to become more creative and to try harder. Scripted television, if it can be grouped together like that, had become complacent. Sitcoms had become monotonous and repetitive and dramas had become repetitive and formulaic, and reality television shook things up quite a bit. I think the reason you see shows like Lost, which is a big departure for what dramas were in the past, is because reality television forced scripted television to plough new fields and break new ground and try more creative formats and techniques. In one way, reality television has been good for scripted television because it's forced it to become better. In another way, it's been bad for scripted television because reality television is taking up so much programming time that there's not much time for scripted television, and it's really hurt the writers and the directors and the people who produce scripted television. There's a lot less work to go around for those people. The other side of that coin is it has reconcentrated the talent. For a long time, there was so much scripted television and when there was a blossoming of many, many new channels and cable channels, writers were spread very thin; whereas in the old days, in say the seventies, a sitcom might have twelve of the best writers in town on one show. It soon became in the eighties and nineties that if you had one good writer on your sitcom, you were in pretty good shape, and then you tried to limp through, and it brought down the overall quality. Now that there's less to go around, the writing is concentrating again on a few projects and you're getting higher quality scripted television again.
