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Documentary Business

Peter Hamilton Consultants, Inc

How to pitch a reality TV show

How to pitch a reality tv show? DocumentaryTelevision.com published a collection of highly original guides on:

How to pitch a Reality TV show

how to pitch a reality tv showThe consistent message is: How producers can improve their chances at earning and then winning reality TV show pitch meeting for their reality TV show ideas with commissioners of reality television series

Stephen Harris is a senior television executive and producer who has successfully developed and supervised Reality tv and other categories for multiple U.S. channels.

He is an active contributor to professional reality TV industry events by leading workshops on reality television statistics, including reality TV ratings. He is an expert on the reality TV show pitch and the reality TV talent deal.

Peter Hamilton’s DocumentaryTelevision.com regularly partners with Stephen on ‘how to pitch a reality TV show’ workshops and publishes these presentations in our newsletter. The highlights are republished here, with links.

What is the chance that a reality television pitch to a US network developer will make it from concept to series? That question was an attention-grabber at our Westdoc Workshop 2012.

Why does this question matter? It exposes the long odds of getting a reality TV show idea from series concept to green light. It reveals the filtering processes for reality TV pitches that are practiced by reality TV networks. And it raises our respect for producers and network development teams who succeed with the reality television show ideas that they champion.

I asked Stephen Harris to share his workflow as a network program developer and to estimate the ‘pitch survival rate’ at each stage of the reality TV pitch assessment process.

Warning: Flyover!

• This is a view of reality TV pitches from 30,000 feet.
• It covers character-based reality and unscripted series rather than single docs. But those odds are at least as daunting!
• Stephen cautions that workflows for how to pitch a reality TV concept vary from developer to developer and across networks.

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About Peter Hamilton, DocumentaryTelevision.com

Peter Hamilton publishes DocumentaryTelevision.com, a TV industry newsletter on how to produce a documentary TV special and reality television series. His expertise is unscripted TV, the documentary budgetfunding a documentaryselling a documentaryhow to make a documentary and how to pitch a reality tv show.

Sign up here to receive DocumentaryTelevision.com and its many studies about how to make a documentary.