Image via Netflix / E!
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House Of Cards, Orange Is The New Black, BoJack Horseman, Daredevil…. Netflix is killing it right now. And that’s not even mentioning their stand-up specials, documentaries and important programming. And other streaming services like Amazon Prime are starting to do the same.
Television is changing, and it is having one unexpected effect: it is killing off reality TV. Netflix and Amazon are the future of TV, and Bloomberg reports that are really not interested in making reality shows—with Amazon recently ditching the likes of Teen Mom and Storage Wars in the US. The thinking is that reality TV doesn’t have anything like the shelf life of scripted dramas—you’d start watching The Wire or lost even if they finished a few years ago, but you wouldn’t binge-watch all of The Hills from the beginning. And Netflix is all about the long game.
“The kind of disposable nature of reality, basically doesn’t have much of a long shelf life,” Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos was quoted as saying at an investor conference this month. ”It hasn’t been a great category for us.”
So is the end of reality TV’s near two-decade dominance? Or is there life in The Kardashians yet?