Federal Film Bill Now Covers Unscripted Reality TV

The proposed 20 percent incentive, unveiled Thursday, could pull reality competition shows back from Ireland, Australia and Canada if it clears Congress.

Reality TV finally got a seat at the table. The Motion Picture, Television, and Entertainment Revitalization Act, introduced Thursday by Sen. Tim Scott and Sen. Adam Schiff, folds unscripted series into a proposed 20% federal tax credit, with uplifts pushing the total rebate as high as 30%. According to Variety, the bill sets a minimum spend of $1 million per season and requires at least 75% of production days to happen on American soil.

For a sector that's spent years watching its budgets fly out of the country, that's a big deal. Deadline reports the inclusion wasn't accidental. A coalition of unscripted producers and trade bodies spent much of the summer pushing lawmakers to stop the exodus of competition shows and reality series to Australia, Canada, Ireland and Portugal, where crews are cheaper and local incentives sweeter.

The list of runaway productions is long. Netflix shot Wonka's The Golden Ticket in Australia and its Monopoly series in the UK. Fox makes MasterChef and Fear Factor in Canada, and sends Don't Forget the Lyrics and Next Level Chef to Ireland. Jay Pharoah, who hosts Fox's The Quiz with Balls, told Deadline his show has filmed in both Australia and Belgium, and he wasn't sold on the Belgian food. Rob Lowe reportedly called it "criminal" that it's cheaper to fly a hundred crew members to Ireland for The Floor than to shoot in Los Angeles.

NPACT, the association representing producers like Bunim-Murray, Kinetic Content and Studio Lambert, fed economic data into the lobbying push alongside the MPA and Film USA, per Deadline. Shawn Moffat of My Entertainment reportedly rallied a wider producer bloc, including Fulwell Entertainment, Peyton Manning's Omaha Productions and Mark Wahlberg's Unrealistic Ideas, to keep the pressure on congressional offices through the summer.

Not everyone gets in

The bill isn't a blanket win. Deadline notes game shows, news and talk programming, awards telecasts and live sports are all excluded, which means Pharoah and Lowe are probably still booking flights to Europe. Why game shows specifically got left out isn't clear from the bill's text.

There's a regional angle too. The legislation offers a 5% uplift for productions shot in rural areas, and Los Angeles County, still classified a federal disaster zone after last year's Palisades and Eaton fires, gets that bonus extended through January 2030.

This all lands on top of a state-by-state scramble that's already reshaping where American TV gets made. Georgia has picked up American Idol and could land America's Got Talent. New Jersey now hosts The Masked Singer. California's own unscripted tax credit under AB1138 has so far landed exactly one show, Mark Rober's Netflix series Schooled!

None of this changes anything yet. The bill still has to survive committee, floor votes and whatever horse-trading Congress attaches along the way. But for an industry that's spent years losing ground to Dublin soundstages and Gold Coast backlots, Thursday was the first real sign Washington's paying attention.