Last Thursday, on a balmy night in Santa Monica, Netflix took over the pier to prove that it too has a phalanx of reality stars that can compete with anything that Disney or NBCUniversal’s Bravo can throw into the water.
The lip fillers, bodycon dresses and quilted t-shirts were out in force as around 100 stars, including Selling Sunset’s Chrishell Stause and Building The Band’s AJ McLean as well as the casts of shows such as Perfect Match, Love Is Blind, Squid Game: The Challenge, Love on the Spectrum and Temptation Island, paraded the boardwalk.
The event highlighted one of the latest battlegrounds within reality television. It’s not just enough to make plenty of shows, networks and streamers also have to figure out a way to encourage fans to want to stay for an entire universe of shows.
Watch on Deadline
Thus, the Netflix Reality Universe is competing with Disney, which similarly promoted its wares earlier this year with the likes of Alex Cooper and the Kardashians, and NBCU, which has been dousing Las Vegas in white wine over the last few years at Bravocon.
Jeff Gaspin, who oversees unscripted at Netflix, told Deadline, “It’s this idea that the stars of our reality shows appear on other shows and we create this fandom around this talent. When you do as many shows as we do and you have the ability to push them from one show to the next, the fans really love it and it create this universe that very much gets associated with Netflix and it helps you define your shows.”
Gaspin, who became President of Bravo when NBCUniversal acquired it in 2002 and it started making shows such as The Real Housewives of Orange County and Million Dollar Listing, says such a move creates stars “almost in the old school way”. “Audiences might like someone on one show but then they might not see them again on something else. But some of these [people] are on their way to becoming stars and they have way more respect now than they did. If you think about how the whole industry has evolved – when you think of podcasting and content creators – three or four years ago, we called them influencers. Now we’re calling them content creators. The truth is there’s some great content being created by these very young novices,” he said.
He compared it to the acting pool in the UK where you regularly see the same actors in different shows. “What this reality universe has now created is fans love certain talent. They love certain actors. They love certain reality stars. So, use them and put them from one show to the next, just like in the UK or even in other smaller territories where the acting pool isn’t as great.”
Netflix may be creating a rod for its own back given that it is making them famous, when they might cost more to cast in the next project. But Gaspin said that the benefits outweigh this. “You know what you get with reality stars that you’ve seen before. You know what their personalities are. You know who plays a good villain, you know who plays a good ingenue. You know who you know. For the most part, the thing you like about reality stars is they are who they are and they’re not really trying to be something that they’re not. The ones that seem to have staying power, their personalities are genuine,” he added.
He pointed to the success of certain Real Housewives such as NeNe Leakes, who became a star on The Real Housewives of Atlanta before getting her own wedding spinoff and appearing in series such as Glee, as well as Selling Sunset’s Stause, who became a star overnight when the real estate show launched, despite having previously been on soaps such as All My Children and Days of Our Lives.
The streamer is now launching two new reality shows – Calabasas Confidential and Members Only: Palm Beach – as part of its latest slate of unscripted originals, which also including docuseries Simon Cowell: The Next Act, dating show Age of Attraction and Let’s Marry Harry starring Too Hot To Handle’s Harry Jowsey (who may or may be dating Sia).
Calabasas Confidential, which comes from Spoke Studios, is set in Kardashian country and follows a group of childhood friends, exes, and rivals as they return to their hillside mansions after four years at college.
“When someone in their 20s comes to visit Los Angeles, there’s two places they want to go, and it’s not Disneyland or Universal, it’s Calabasas and Erewhon. It kind of blows my mind. I’m not a Calabasas native but I moved here when I moved to LA in 2001. It used to be a pumpkin town and everyone would say ‘Why are you moving all the way out there’ but then, of course, a certain family moved in [to Hidden Hills] and put Calabasas on the map,” Gaspin said.
Gaspin previously worked at MTV, which had shows such as Laguna Beach and The Hills. “There’s no real service that’s doing those kind of shows and it felt like now is a good time to see if we can bring some of that magic back,” he added.
Members Only: Palm Beach, which comes from 3BMG’s Superluna Studio, follows a group of women navigating the unspoken rules, inherited traditions and high-stakes hierarchies of America’s most rarefied social circles, also known as Trump land.
Is it essentially The Real Housewives of Mar-a-Lago? “The easy answer is to say yes, but I think it’s actually more than that. We have passed on a lot of shows that could have been the Real Housewives of some other town or city, but honestly, what attracted me to this group was they made the housewives look like Disney characters. They were so loud and big and brash and the personality of the city was a big part of it,” he said.
Expecting a lot of old money and upper crust types, Gaspin said he was surprised that there were so many transplants from the northeast. “We like to talk about the familiar with a twist. The familiar is a bunch of women but you add in the town of Palm Beach and that gives us the little twist in its perspective,” he added.
Meanwhile, it also has a number of these reality shows returning; Perfect Match returns in August for season three, season nine of Love Is Blind and Selling Sunset premiere in October, Squid Game: The Challenge is back for season two in November, Selling The OC comes back in November for season four, Owning Manhattan returns for season two in December and The Ulimatum: Marry or Move On, Temptation Island, Million Dollar Secret and Love on the Spectrum have all been renewed.
Elsewhere, Netflix is doubling down on the creator economy and Gaspin is still searching for more broadcast-style formats.
Its latest in this world is Building The Band, which is hosted by Backstreet Boy McLean and features Nicole Scherzinger, Kelly Rowland and the late-Liam Payne as judges.
The show follows 50 singers as they first listen to each other in pods without being able to see each other – making choices based only on connection, vocal talent and vibe – before forming bands and subsequently aiming to impress the judges. Six will be victorious.
The series, which is produced by Banijay’s Remarkable, premiered on July 9 and has an interesting roll-out pattern, launching with the first four episodes, followed by three more on July 16 with the final three episodes premiering today (July 23). It doesn’t appear to have torn up any trees when it comes to ratings with only the second batch of episodes making it to number ten in the U.S. earlier this week and not turning up on its global charts.
However, Gaspin is pleased with both the format and the quality of singers.
“What I really responded to in Building The Band is it felt like a fresh take on those [other music competition] shows. I love that the cast is who’s choosing who goes forward, not the judges. You’ve not seen that on any competitive reality show, let alone a music one. That’s the hook that makes it a Netflix show and I don’t know that a broadcaster would have done a show like that. They were really comfortable with three judges picking. With the era of Tiktok and Instagram and social media, so much content and so much success is being decided by the fans themselves. It’s not a network executive or agent who’s anointing who’s best, it’s the cast themselves,” he added.
Gaspin would still like more music pitches from producers but admits that it’s difficult to find shows that don’t feel like another version of American Idol or The Voice.
He is also keen for more live projects, having been behind dating show Pop The Balloon and Dinner Time Live with David Chang. “There was never a lot of [live] in broadcast. These reality shows, these music competitions, were the ones that kind of brought it back. It created a time for families to just go to the TV and watch together, because there was a result that you wanted to know before you read about it or heard about it from friends. I think there’s still a real value there,” he added.
The next stop for these projects is interactivity and voting. “We hope to approach it in a slightly different way. Fans go crazy for these show so they immerse themselves in them. How can we give them a chance to immerse themselves even further? Live is the first step. I don’t think it’s the end of it. We now have to create functionality that uses live and makes it valuable. But for us, the first step was to get live to work on the service. That’s why some of our early experiences with live like David Chang or Pop The Balloon, there’s not a ton of interactivity yet. That’s stuff that we have to continue to work on and continue to build out,” he said.