Development Execs in Development Hell Too

A viral post about the creation of the new Netflix Bear Grylls reality series reveals industry agita about recognition and future job prospects

IT’S COMPLICATED Netflix’s Celebrity Bear Hunt, starring Bear Grylls, is at the center of a debate over credits on reality series. (Photo illustration by The Ankler; Netflix)

Manori Ravindran writes about int’l TV from London. She recently reported on the surge in Japanese co-productions and Ireland’s “conveyer belt” of unscripted production.

When producer Emma Young posted to LinkedIn about her husband’s missing credit on Netflix’s new Bear Grylls-hosted reality series Celebrity Bear Hunt, she never imagined her post would hit a raw nerve.

Two years ago, while sitting in a South London pub, her husband, a development executive at the Fremantle-backed production company Talkback, had “shared this mad idea he and his team had come up with — ‘Bear Hunt’ — where Bear Grylls would hunt people down in a high-stakes survival challenge in what he called the bear pit,” Young wrote.

Young’s husband and his team then spent 18 months “tirelessly developing” the format for Netflix, which eventually commissioned the show with three indies as the primary producers: Talkback; Grylls’ Banijay-backed production shingle, The Natural Studios; and Banijay’s Workerbee. The slick survival series features British presenter Holly Willoughby and contestants including Spice Girl Mel B and former tennis star (and recent jailbird) Boris Becker.

But when it launched on Feb. 5, the team members’ names were absent from the end credits (a line for development merely cites “Talkback in association with The Natural Studios”). They also weren’t invited to the show’s splashy London premiere.

Young’s LinkedIn post in the past week has accrued thousands of likes and hundreds of reposts and commiserating comments from people across the TV industry — including several American execs and below-the-line workers. Some with experience in development detailed similar experiences of helping to craft the foundations of a hit show only to be left credit-less when the program aired. Many emphasized how undervalued development is in the industry, despite being the “beating heart” of production, as Young put it in her post.

“I actually had no idea that it would spread so far and wide,” Young, a well-respected executive producer with a 20-year career, tells me. “I posted it, then I woke up in the morning and went ‘Oh, my God. So many people have liked this overnight!’ That’s insane.’”

The post smashed open a long-simmering debate about the treatment of unscripted development executives — the vast majority of whom in the U.K. work freelance (also increasingly the case among U.S. reality TV producers). If directors, producers and editors can be credited, why can’t development teams?