Reality TV’s Overburdened, and Underrepresented, Workforce (Guest Column)

hollywoodreporter.com:

It’s 5 a.m., and my whole body is shaking. Not because I’m cold or having a caffeine or drug withdrawal, but because I have been up for 18 hours straight, six days a week, for the past three months, working on an unscripted TV show.

I am not a “veteran producer” yet, but with a decade of experience under my belt on projects for major networks and streamers, I’ve seen enough to know that behind the scenes, the postproduction world in unscripted TV has changed.

Story producers, most of whom are freelancers, are traditionally leaned on in reality formats to go through hours of footage and create a rough “string out,” a sequence of clips strung together in the order that an editor will later cut.