Exactly. No need to hire actors, even. People will humiliate themselves on screen for free, just for the chance to be on a reality show! Disposable: no one is going to go back and watch seasons 2 and 3 of The Bachelorette. When I was looking this up, years ago, I read some things that suggested first run syndication collapsed because of the fin-syn rule, which had something to do with networks not being able to own the shows they showed, or something like that. So other companies would produce the shows, and then the networks would license them to show them. And so when the fin-syn rule changed, the networks were able to make as much programming in-house as they desired. I think that makes sense with reality shows: the networks can produce them, in-house, for cheap, and they can fill many hours of programming without having to pay other companies for pre-existing syndicated content. So it's cheaper for them to produce a lot of their own disposable reality shows, than to license shows produced by other people.
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