The two-hour March 25 premiere featuring Usher, Shakira, Adam Levine and Blake Shelton averaged a 4.8 rating in the prized 18-to-49 demo and 13.6 million viewers overall, delivering stronger numbers than the fall season-three premiere by about 13 percent.
From left: Shakira, Levine, Shelton, Usher and host Carson Daly.
“We saw a diamond in the rough,” says A+E Television Networks executive vp programming David McKillop. “The Robertsons are real-life characters, and we were able to turn them into a reality sitcom.”
Objective: Entertainment industry domination
Experience: Television and Radio Host, Producer, Investor
Partnerships: Coca-Cola, Ford, Procter & Gamble
Education: University of Georgia (dropout), major: journalism
Dubuc’s portfolio features most of the top 10 reality shows on TV, including A&E's Duck Dynasty, History’s Pawn Stars (4.8 million viewers), A&E’s Storage Wars and History’s Swamp People and American Pickers (all average 4.3 million viewers).
Meanwhile, over at Discovery, group president O’Neill and her team have built a male-dominated destination with five of the top 10 unscripted shows in all of cable among men 25 to 54: Gold Rush, Moonshiners, Amish Mafia, Bering Sea Gold and Fast n’ Loud.
With her love-life drama and growing baby bump, E! star Kim Kardashian has graced 18 magazine covers in the past year (Us Weekly, 4; In Touch, 9; Life & Style, 5).
“Frankly, it’s no one’s business and it’s just a personal matter for me,” he says of his no-sex life. But the news Sean Lowe didn’t want the world to know may have been exactly what skyrocketed the ABC series to ratings success. The Feb. 18 Bachelor episode not only hit a season high of 9.26 million viewers, it also marked the Bachelor series’ highest non-finale ratings in nearly two years.
TLC’s Here Comes Honey Boo Boo has lured 2.4 million viewers into a unique subculture with its own vernacular and belief system.
"The beauty of working at Fremantle is that the world is our lab. We can take a show to Europe and then talk to all of our partners there and say, 'Hey, does this work?' It allows us to really beat out a show, as opposed to just guessing. There’s a little show right now in the Netherlands called Everybody Dance Now, and it’s kicking butt. They found a fresh approach to the dance genre, and it’s much more accessible and pedestrian. We’re already talking to the network guys here about it," says Beers.
Even in a crowded food space on broadcast TV — not to mention cable’s culinary free-for-all — with MasterChef, Hell’s Kitchen, Kitchen Nightmares and Hotel Hell, superchef Gordon Ramsay shows no signs of cooling down.
Survivor producer Mark Burnett says the longevity of shows like his proves there’s no substitute for reality’s most enduring and lucrative formats. “These are family-friendly shows,” he explains. “There is a much bigger audience for this programming than for the opposite.”
Deirdre and Scott Gurney founded Gurney Productions in 2005 under the most modest of auspices: They were just dating, working out of the Los Angeles condo they shared, and they’d filmed one pilot for ESPN. Upward of 40 TV series and one monster hit (Duck Dynasty) later, the pair sold a controlling stake in their operation to ITV for $40 million in 2012.
"It is unusual to have a star who provides great entertainment value but also has business-savvy,” says Alex Baskin, executive vp at Evolution Media, which produces Vanderpump Rules and two of the shows in the half-billion-dollar Housewives franchise. “Lisa has unerring instincts and is completely committed to what is best for the show.”
While every other performance series judges’ panel has seen swaps, shake-ups and mis-hirings (see No. 15), ABC’s Dancing With the Stars has maintained the same trio of experts for a record 16 seasons. The staying power of this triumvirate — Carrie Ann Inaba, 45, Len Goodman, 68, and Bruno Tonioli, 57 — is so functional and lacking in drama, it’s almost a mystery why they’re still so much fun to watch.
In 2012, the 31-year-old pop star, 14 years removed from her first hit, 1998’s “… Baby One More Time,” landed a plush $15 million gig to take a seat at The X Factor, where she judged pop-star hopefuls alongside competition kingpin Simon Cowell, Epic Records head L.A. Reid and singer Demi Lovato.
Her impact? She was instantly dubbed a casting misfire and the Fox series dropped in ratings by about 20 percent. (Her go-to banal performance assessment, “amazing,” likely didn’t help matters.)
You know you’ve impacted the common vernacular when your reality-show title becomes its own verb. For Nev Schulman, 28, that moment came in January when Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o revealed he’d been lured into an online relationship with a woman who was not the person she purported to be — nor even female.
Twelve years after publishing his gossipy kitchen tell-all Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain now boasts an impressive cache of cool, globe-trotting food-reality series: No Reservations and The Layover still are hot performers for Travel Channel, and on April 14 he will debut Parts Unknown for CNN, which finds him still feasting his way around the world, venturing into remote areas such as war-torn Libya and the Congo.
“Save your tears for your pillow!” dance instructor Miller shouted at then-7-year-old dancer Kendall Vertes during the first season of Lifetime’s Dance Moms. The show, which follows five mothers whose daughters train at Miller’s Pittsburgh dance studio, returned in January for its third season with more than 2.8 million viewers — who can’t get enough of the choreographer’s controversial (and effective!) motivational sound bites.
Born in an impoverished neighborhood in Naples, Italy, Rancic moved to the U.S. with her family when she was little (she taught herself English by watching TV). She started her career in Washington before joining E! News in 2002 as a correspondent. She has anchored the show — which reaches 8.5 million viewers a week — for eight years, six of which were alongside Ryan Seacrest. (“She has tremendous work ethic,” raves Seacrest.)
“I never thought it would go as far as it has,” says the 39-year-old real estate agent Reza Farahan. The series’ ultimate appeal: that the Persian-American experience is like that of any immigrant culture.
From left: Omid Kalantari, Asa Soltan Rahmati and Farahan.
NatGeo has Amish: Out of Order, Breaking Amish has been a hit on TLC (it has averaged more than 3 million viewers) and Discovery boasts edgy Amish Mafia. Says NatGeo’s Michael Cascio, “People find their lifestyle aspirational — or simply fascinating.”
“We’re the crack dealers of reality,” says Fenton Bailey, co-founder of World of Wonder — the factory that churns out addictive fare like RuPaul’s competition show Drag Race, whose season five premiere was the highest-rated in Logo history. Up next: Life With La Toya, debuting April 13 on OWN, peeks inside the world of Michael Jackson’s eccentric little sister.
The Kevin Hart-created spoof of Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise lured about 6 million viewers for its first-season finale March 21. The first quarter of 2013 also saw E!’s scripted reality series Burning Love — a Bachelor-format show born as a digital series on Yahoo in 2012 — pull in 7 million total viewers for the first five episodes.
Among the top-performing supernatural series is TLC’s Long Island Medium, which averaged 2.9 million viewers last season. “I think it gives hope to people,” says star Theresa Caputo, “knowing that there is more to life than just the physical world.”
Shows like Discovery’s Moonshiners, centered on a group of white-lightning brewers in Appalachia and the Alcoholic Beverage Control officers on their tails, and Weed Country, a six-part series (pictured, also on Discovery) that’s set on the California-Oregon border in the marijuana-growing nirvana that’s known as the Emerald Triangle, have seen steady audience growth, with Moonshiners’ season-two finale drawing a series-best 3.87 million viewers.
The specialized skill of judging talent is not one every megastar can manage — but for those who succeed, the pay is handsome. Just ask Simon Cowell, who pockets north of $35 million a year as judge and co-creator of The X Factor, or radio jock Howard Stern, who brings in a reported $15 million salary for America’s Got Talent. It’s a good gig for guys who — unlike the other club members — don’t have music talent to fall back on.
From left: Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera and Adam Levine