CBS reality shows

Season preview: relentless reality

(This has been updated.)
Ready or not, TV viewers are entering an autumn of relentless reality.
In past seasons, the big broadcast networks tossed in occasional reality shows. They were big ones – “The Voice,” “The Bachelor,” “Survivor” – adding variety to a sea of dramas and comedies.
But this season, amid the writers’ and actors’ strikes, it’s almost non-stop reality,
CBS is launching three new games (including “Buddy Games,” shown here) and giving two classics (“Survivor” and “The Amazing Race”) an extra half-hour apiece …. Fox will be non-stop reality, from Mondays through Thursdays .… ABC has retrieved “Dancing With the Stars” from Disney+ and will even have generations of romance – an hour of a 71-year-old “Golden Bachelor,” followed by two hours of frisky folks in bikinis and such. Read more…

CBS has a clever August/autumn plan, but …

So now CBS’ late-summer surge has begun.
It’s a clever strategy, an attempt to make do as the writers’ and actors’ strikes crush any hopes for a normal fall season. The network delayed four reality shows until August; that lets them sprawl into the fall, to be joined by … well, more reality.
It can work … IF those shows are well-liked. For one of them (the awful “Superfan,” shown here), that’s a big if.
First, let’s look at the overall plan: Read more…