For Gretchen Kinder, there’s nothing quite like making reality TV. She worked her way up the ranks over two plus decades from production assistant to line producer and executive, using her skills to pull off dazzling logistical feats — like the time she was up at 4 a.m.
to get a boat captain to sign off on using his vessel so they could load in crew by 6. “Unscripted TV is incredibly challenging. Those challenges keep you on your toes more than scripted TV,” she said.
But the satisfaction Kinder once found in her professional life has been harder to come by lately: In the last year and a half, she has worked only four months, despite an impressive list of credits on shows like “Project Runway” and “The Apprentice.” Kinder finished her last big job in January 2023, when there was already “murmuring about the streaming platforms not doing well,” she said. She thought the strikes would lead to an uptick in reality TV production, as it had in the past.
“However, everything just slowed down and stopped.” During this period, she has also faced an array of personal struggles, including a breast cancer diagnosis that resulted in her having a double mastectomy and an ongoing divorce. “My joke is that I’ve been so efficient that I decided to have cancer when there was no work anyway,” Kinder said.
She is now healthy and has been cleared to return to work, but few new shows have been greenlit — and the ones that have are, increasingly, being made outside .