Unscripted Changes

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The Traitors has been a massive hit and everyone involved has come out on top right?

Well, no, actually. There is a bit of a power struggle going on in reality TV right now and this one hasn’t been happening at the roundtable.

Come on in and let me tell you about the arms race in unscripted television.

When streaming services first came on the scene, their original scripted drama series were super popular and a huge focus. But it appears that in the last couple of years, Netflix, Peacock, and Prime have all seen the dollar signs in something that you already know: unscripted television can be incredible.

While I’m not a fan of the dystopic nightmare that is Prime’s Beast Games, it supposedly had 50M viewers in 25 days.

Netflix added almost 20M subscribers in 2025 and has plans for a variety of Traitors-like crossovers featuring casts from its existing unscripted hits.

And The Traitors season three is Peacock’s biggest reality debut ever. Which brings me to the drama that happened away from Alan’s banishments…

Corie Henson, NBC Universal’s Executive Vice President Unscripted Content, Competition, and Game Shows, and the person responsible for NBC/Peacock’s versions of The Traitors, Love Island, America’s Got Talent, Deal or No Deal Island, and more, is leaving the company.

What does leaving the company mean? We don’t know, and we won’t, but there are clues as to what went down and how she got banished.

Donna Langley, chair of NBCUniversal Entertainment and Studios, is bringing all the different pieces of NBC’s scripted and unscripted shows together. Instead of having Henson oversee all unscripted programming, Langley has a new head of NBC programming and Peacock scripted, Pearlena Igbokwe, as well as a new head of NBC-owned Bravo and Peacock unscripted, Frances Berwick.

Between Igbokwe and Berwick, the new NBC squad has a major focus on reality television; Igbokwe will likely be overseeing America’s Got Talent, Deal or No Deal Isalnd, and The Voice, as Berwick oversees The Traitors, Love Island, and the Bravo reality world. Langley’s three-headed alliance is merging the scripted and unscripted worlds to take advantage of unscripted’s resurgence.

NBC sees the dollar signs in unscripted and so do other streamers. And they’re right to. While CBS’ Survivor and Big Brother and ABC’s The Bachelor have been running for many years, their traditional model hasn’t changed much. The shows air at a certain time on a weekly release and international distribution is complex, limited, and infrequent. Meanwhile, Netflix can release a show in almost 100 countries simultaneously while Survivor 48 will be distributed in just a few upon airing.

The thing is, NBC is a traditional broadcaster. They’ve just been more successful innovating in unscripted.

It’s not like ABC and CBS aren’t trying to get involved in the arms race. ABC is a division of Disney, where Disney+ and Hulu are already in the reality streaming game, while CBS has Paramount+. The Traitors broke through for Peacock, while the other network streamers have been trying their best. Paramount+ has had The Challenge exclusive seasons streaming there and actually has had a decent library of reality TV since its inception. It’s just that nothing has captured the zeitgeist in the same way The Traitors has for Peacock.

In some ways Big Brother is the most innovative of the CBS shows, yet it still falls behind. Big Brother: Over the Top (OTT), a streaming-only version debuted in 2016, likely a little prematurely. Three seasons of Celebrity Big Brother and one of Reindeer Games provided the kind of all-star style accelerated gameplay that Traitors gets all the credit for and Netflix is copying, although these shows only released on CBS and its app.

It’s also hard for the other traditional networks to compete with NBC’s aggressive expansion, part of which Henson originated. She did work with the BBC on Traitors, and also set the groundwork with them to release the upcoming Destination X. Complex partnerships mean that these shows can be released globally and fast.

This is a key point because when the broadcasters’ streaming services usually acquire content, they might only acquire the rights to that content in certain regions. Streaming a series in an OTT environment (meaning streaming via digital devices) is a lot less complicated when the streamer also owns the production from start to finish.

To take it further, when companies have unscripted and scripted reality TV combined, they can jump on a huge hit and make spinoffs. The scripted Squid Game season one was massive? Great.

Netflix’s unique structure allowed it to make Squid Game: The Challenge, which was another hit, release it in 93 countries, and is reportedly filming season two of that show right now, likely to be released between scripted Squid Game seasons 2 and 3. It’s a feedback loop that makes their wins bigger as they have to deal with far less red-tape than many shows that air at 8pm weekly on traditional broadcasters.

It is worth noting that some of these big wins need to be taken with a grain of salt - or a small piece of Feastables. When Prime says that Beast Games did 50 million viewers, what does 50 million actually mean in their context?

They won’t even tell us!

Amazon declines to go into detail about whether the number entails active subscribing households, people pressing play, or another formula to make 50 millions. These streaming services aren’t beholden to report numbers to anyone but their execs so although Beast Games seems like a huge hit, they could be just yelling big numbers at us like Jimmy does.

The funding models are getting more sophisticated and complex. In many non-US countries, like Canada for example, shows have to acquire sponsorships to pay for their runs, especially on the traditional networks, which are having their own issues in Canada too.

Henson’s genius with Traitors was seeing the global potential and partnering to make it happen. Streamers could carry English language versions of shows from different countries so that when someone watches The Traitors, they might stumble onto the UK version along with the US one - and eventually AUS, NZ, CAD, and more.

If you speak a language, as many readers of this newsletter know, you might find a compelling reality show from the other side of the world in that language. No one who watches Survivor Australia can argue that it isn’t fantastic. But CBS and Australian 10Play haven’t figured out how to integrate their brands together like NBC and the BBC have with The Traitors and with Love Island.

So why did Henson leave? I don’t have definitive answers whether it was voluntary, she was forced out as part of the restructuring, or if she was crushing it so hard that the NBC bosses got upset. What is clear is that her impact has created a battle across streaming services and across networks to keep up, to work together, and to let great unscripted content cross borders and share fans.

Streaming services are in the lead and as they keep growing, the networks will be forced to innovate.

Hey, at least Survivor has an official podcast now, I guess.

BBOTT season 2 anyone?

-Kevin Jacobs @ The Confessional

Kevin is the winner of Big Brother Canada 10, a film nerd, and a go-to-market tech guy. Find him on all platforms @kevintedjacobs where he talks about competitive reality TV and good movies.

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