We’re Not Making “General Audience” TV Anymore

Everyone in unscripted knows the term “broad appeal”—but spend a week in development or looking at ratings dashboards, and it’s clear: “broad” is an illusion. Viewers don’t just want mass-appeal formats, they want stories with specificity. Whether it’s dating, house hunting, survival, or food competition, what keeps audiences engaged is the resonance—and resonance comes from making the content sharper, not broader.

The challenge is: how do you carve specificity into your content in a way that scales? Especially when you’re shipping dozens of episodes a month, across multiple networks or platforms, with audience feedback loops that lag months behind production.

We’ve been designing systems to solve for that—first internally as producers, and now within partner teams. It’s not about guessing what your audience wants. It’s about implementing processes that reliably match what’s produced to what distinct audience segments actually respond to.

The Mistake: Treating “Audience” as a Single Variable

Most unscripted teams collect some version of audience data—ratings, social mentions, personality archetypes. But the biggest issue I’ve seen is the way that data gets abstracted into a single concept: “our audience” or “viewers like X.”

Here’s what that leads to:

• Development beats that serve internal alignment more than external demand

• Franchises that bleed uniqueness over time in favor of mass-market appeal

• Format notes that flatten standout elements into safer bets

It’s not that audience data doesn’t exist—it’s that it's used as a post-hoc justification, not a design input. And when content doesn’t land, teams back-solve with anecdotes: “That casting felt off,” “The format’s maybe tired,” “Promo didn’t push it right.” True or not, it means the next show starts with the same ambiguity.

Creating niche content isn’t about picking a more specific concept. It’s about building systems that surface where the interests diverge—before the show is built.

What We Actually Built

Over the last few cycles, we worked with a streamer and two cable nets to re-architect how they defined and served niche audiences inside unscripted. This wasn’t a brand positioning project—it was an operational strategy to answer, show by show:

“Who exactly is this for, and how does our process prove we know that?”

Here’s what we changed:

1. Demographic Profiles → Audience Clusters

We moved away from static demographic charts and toward behavior-informed clusters. These weren’t just “Females 25–54” or “Young Male Skewing.” They were clusters like:

• “Competency-Driven Escapists” — Viewers who watch for process mastery (building, survival, transformation)

• “Conflict-Comfort Loopers” — Viewers who rewatch because they enjoy interpersonal tension with clear resolution

• “Passive Friends of Format” — Viewers who want light background noise but still follow familiar structure

Each cluster was mapped using a combination of historical show performance, social engagement timelines, and third-party interest data (not social scraping—actual interest modeling).

We cut our masters’ audiences into 5–7 clusters across all non-scripted—then tagged each active title to 1–2 strategic clusters. It was actionable from day one.

2. Audience-End Goals into Development Gates

Instead of setting audience goals in pitch decks and forgetting them, we built them into the greenlight and post process. Every new concept had to answer three things:

• What audience cluster is this designed for?

• What is the primary emotional loop this audience seeks?

• How does this show structurally deliver that loop multiple times per episode?

We flavored promo testing and early cuts with real viewer notes based on those clusters. Comps and reference pulls were judged not just by vibe, but cluster alignment. That sounds squishy—but it naturally flushed out internal confusion early. We stopped holding meetings over “feel” and started cutting based on target feedback patterns.

3. Post-Mortems That Mapped to Input Decisions

Finally, we changed the way wrap data was analyzed. Instead of looking at ratings dips or performance deltas, we tracked whether the execution matched the initial audience cluster assumptions.

If it underperformed, was it because the intended emotional loop didn’t land—or because the show was serving a different cluster altogether? We started seeing that a lot of fatigued shows weren’t bad shows—they were mismatch shows: built for one audience, edited for another, promoted to a third.

We added feedback loops that helped development re-tool their initial assumptions more rapidly. Over two cycles, long-lead pilots started to hit their targets faster.

What Changed

Once the audience cluster system was embedded, the whole pitch-to-post chain ran smoother.

In development, teams stress-tested ideas more constructively. Producers could spot recycled concepts that wouldn’t deliver a sustained emotional loop before they got walked into budget. We saw fewer “Frankensteined” shows that tried to appeal to everyone.

In post, editors and story producers had clearer mandates. Instead of generic polish rounds, they were connected to what satisfaction looked like for their specific viewer. That didn’t kill creativity—it focused it. B-stories and runner lines didn’t feel random. They served a larger behavioral insight.

Across the network, content started matching intention. Renewal decisions were easier. Even the misses taught us more because they broke in clear ways: wrong audience ID, not wrong format.

And inside teams? Less second-guessing. Less backtracking. Fewer pivot weeks where we had to rebuild half the cut because a direction came in too late. It made space for better ideas upstream—because the guesswork had guardrails.

Clarity Doesn’t Mean Playing It Safe

Smarter targeting isn’t a creativity killer. It’s the opposite.

The minute we stopped acting like “unscripted viewers” were a single group, we gave ourselves permission to build for real appetites. We made niche content easier to justify, easier to design, and ultimately—easier to make well.

The structure wasn’t meant to narrow the work. It was built so that development, creative, and post could align without translating the same vague note over and over.

If it feels like everything your audience loves is just slightly different than what you’ve built—chances are, the gap isn’t in the content. It’s in the map you used to define who it was for in the first place. That’s fixable.

It just takes a little architecture.