Within the entertainment industry, reality TV has elicited a significant amount of concern for its exploitative labor practices. Deadline, an entertainment industry trade magazine, reported on employee grievances at FremantleMedia, the production company behind American Idol (AI) and other highly rated reality shows:
FremantleMedia continues to profit from AI and its other hit shows, while writers and other behind-the-scenes workers often face substandard working conditions.
FremantleMedia employees have charged the company with multiple labor law violations, including withholding overtime pay and failure to provide state-mandated meal or rest breaks, among other grievances. Currently, FremantleMedia workers do not receive industry-standard benefits guaranteed by a union contract, including pay minimums and health and pension benefits. (Finke 2008)
Similarly, TheWrap, another widely read online trade magazine, called reality TV “the invisible front in Hollywood’s labor wars.” Jeff Bartsch, a reality TV editor who worked on
America’s Next Top Model, Supernanny, and Blind Date, told TheWrap, “Reality TV is the Walmart of TV production. Networks pit production companies against each other and bid production budgets down so low that producers often feel that the added cost of union contracts would cost them, and their employees, their jobs” (Cunningham 2012).
The Writers Guild of America East conducted an online survey of reality TV writers and producers in 2013 and released a report stating that 60% of survey respondents worked more than 8 hours a day and 85% never received overtime pay (WGA East 2013). The report attributes exploitation specifically to reality TV’s low budgets compared to scripted TV. While the History Channel has a per episode budget of between $225,000 and $425,000 for its reality shows, Royal Pains, a moderately
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popular scripted show on the USA cable network has a per episode budget of between $2 and $2.5 million. Media outlets picking up on this report blasted reality TV, with
Cracked Magazine saying its “Business Model is Built on Exploiting Workers” (Brown 2014) and Salon offering the headline “Reality TV’s workers scandal: Shows accused of stealing millions in wages” (Eidelson 2013).
Academic studies have discussed how exploitative labor practices are not only common in reality TV, but are typical in the cultural industries more broadly. For instance, it is common in various creative fields, including music recording, book
publishing, and fashion modeling, for management companies to require talent to repay initial production and promotional expenses (Grazian 2010a). While modeling agencies typically pay for new fashion models to take preliminary test photographs, take catwalk lessons, and rent housing in new cities, the models must repay their agencies through their earnings, causing many to be in debt (Mears 2011). Organizations also offset costs by hiring workers on a short term and contractual basis, making employment in the cultural industries increasingly precarious and risky for individual workers (Gill and Pratt 2008; Neff 2012).
But while we know that exploitative labor practices are common in cultural industries and exploitation is an ethical concern among entertainment industry professionals, we know little about how cultural industry workers in managerial or supervisory roles dispel the moral stain of exploiting others. Zelizer (2012) defines
relational work as “the creative effort people make in establishing, maintaining,
negotiating, transforming, and terminating interpersonal relations.” She argues that in all economic action people erect boundaries between distinct categories of social
relationships and define certain sorts of economic transactions as appropriate and inappropriate within those boundaries. In her study of unpaid women who do aesthetic
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labor in VIP nightclubs, Mears (2015) draws on this concept to argue that women consent to providing free labor when their relationships with party promoters are successfully framed as rooted in friendship, fun, and leisure. For instance, promoters recruit women by portraying themselves as desirable companions, dressing meticulously and creating a friendly persona.
I propose that relational work is not only important for explaining why workers consent to their own exploitation, but also for how supervisors vulnerable to charges of exploitation make their morally questionable actions acceptable to themselves. I draw on the case of unpaid interns at Pinnacle Production to suggest that employees can feel morally clean and even great about their supervisory roles by defining their relationships with interns in terms of mentorship and friendship.
Unpaid Internships
While cultural industries are among the major users of unpaid interns (Frederick 1997; Neff 2012), internships are becoming increasingly common in general. An estimated 50% of American college graduates in 2008 held an internship (Greenhouse 2010). But despite the prevalence of unpaid internships in the cultural industries in particular and the growing importance of internships in general, little research focuses on describing in detail what interns actually do and what meaning employees and
supervisors make of their relationships with unpaid interns.
Frennette’s (2013) study of interns working at major and independent US record labels is one notable exception. He discusses internships as provisional labor, reflecting how they are temporary, conditional, and ambiguous. In the popular imagination, interns perform grunt work of little relevance or use for developing their professional training or education. However, Frennette found that record industry interns perform a variety of
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tasks, from the mundane and menial to professional duties similar to the high level work of their supervisors. For instance, low-level assignments included stuffing envelopes, ordering lunch or coffee, running errands, making photocopies, and answering phones. Higher-level work included doing research, writing press releases, managing artists’ MySpace profiles, and scouting potential bands.
Another exception is Mirrlees’s (2015) analysis of 20 job ads for internships at 19 different reality TV production companies. All but two of these opportunities were for unpaid internships. The job ads indicate that production companies look for applicants to have both hard skills (e.g. communication skills, software and hardware competence) and soft skills (e.g. etiquette, affect). The ads suggest that production companies expect interns to do a variety of skilled tasks: imagine, research, and develop new reality TV show concepts; write, review, and edit scripts; search for, attract, and interview cast; set up scenes, coordinate lighting, and film the action on set; and digitize, craft, and edit filmed footage. While the ads do not promise monetary compensation, they suggest that interns can hope for future rewards by gaining experience, networking opportunities, and mentorship.
In this chapter, I expand on these studies by describing interns’ roles and contributions at Pinnacle Productions. I begin the chapter by describing some general features of the internship program at Pinnacle and characteristics of the interns who worked there. Then I present two broad sets of findings. First, I describe how Pinnacle is certainly vulnerable to the moral taint of exploitation because the company relied heavily on interns’ unpaid labor. Especially for casting interns at Pinnacle, menial tasks were not the norm. Rather, as Mirrlees suggests is the case elsewhere, interns were an integral part of creative production at the company, contributing substantively to the television shows Pinnacle developed. Interns did creative and expressive work including
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video editing, acting on screen, writing scripts, inventing show ideas, and all steps in casting. I also explain why interns were valuable despite their relative inexperience: immediate supervisors reviewed interns’ creative work before it was shared more widely, employees grew to trust interns over time as they provided more training and guidance, some interns were older and had substantial professional experience in other realms, and many creative tasks did not require specialized knowledge.
In a second set of findings, I examine how employees dispel the moral taint of exploitation despite benefiting from the labor of unpaid interns. I suggest that
supervisors dispel this moral taint by doing relational work, defining their relationships with interns as that of a mentor providing valuable professional experience. I then focus specifically on the case of Mark, the Casting Director, and his group of interns to
describe the conscious effort Mark made to build friendly relationships and a creative community with his interns. I suggest that by framing his mentorship role as rooted in genuine friendship, Mark was not only morally cleansed from the taint of exploitation, but could also feel good about himself as a kind and caring person.
Who are Pinnacle Interns?
Interns at Pinnacle could work in development, branded entertainment, production, production management, postproduction, graphics, or casting. Some worked in multiple areas, switching between days or after a period of time. I was a casting intern for the entirety of my ten months working at the company, but also
frequently helped development associates on projects and assisted the production team on a few video shoots. During that time I saw many interns come and go. Most interns stayed at the company for at least three and a half months, the length of one college semester, and many stayed for about seven months or two semesters. Sally, who
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worked in casting and development, stayed for about one year. Beyond a couple of exceptions, interns worked at least two or three days a week and stayed the full
workday, from 9:30 am until 7 pm. During my time in the field, the company brought in over 55 unpaid interns. I worked directly with 13 other casting interns (see table below). On most days, there were two or three interns in casting, although on some days I worked alone with Mark, the Casting Director.
Interns varied in terms of age and professional experience. Many interns were college students, particularly those who began in the summer. Sally, for instance, was a bubbly 19-year-old Boston University student with long brown hair and a trendy style. She dreaded returning to school, and ended up staying at Pinnacle, first in casting and then as a development intern, for almost three semesters. Although she was unsure about her career path, she enjoyed the internship. Her well-to-do family financially supported her life in New York—she enjoyed sushi dinners—but they also expected her to “learn responsibility” and so aside from her internship she worked a part time retail job at a fashionable chain clothing store.
Some were recent college graduates. Tiffany was a loquacious young woman, with the ability to ramble about anything and everything, and loved to host dinner parties. She started as a casting intern at Pinnacle just after graduation from a public university in the Midwest. Her father was a successful businessman and paid for her spacious
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studio apartment in a doorman building on the Upper East Side. Cody, also a recent college graduate, came from a comfortable middle class background, his mother a grade school teacher and father a credit manager, but had to take out loans to attend a “cheap” (as he described it) local college where he majored in film. He was a hipster, wearing snug jeans and big, square, plastic framed glasses. At night and over the weekends, he waited tables at a hip restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Other interns had quite a bit of professional experience. Heidi was 25 years old and grew up in a working class Long Island neighborhood, where she still lived with her parents. She always carried a Nintendo 3DS in her purse and wore the same outfit almost daily, a big grey hooded sweatshirt, baggy jeans, and a red bow pinned in her short brown hair. Enrolled in a master’s program in screenwriting while interning, she was obsessed with all things Disney, and dreamt of one day working in their studios. Andrew was 27 years old and grew up in an upper middle class New Jersey suburb. He dressed fashionably and had long, floppy hair; Mark teasingly called him “Justin Bieber.” After graduating at the top of his high school class and then from an elite private
university, he worked at a hedge fund for several years. Feeling stifled and wanting to explore alternative career options, he applied to the internship at Pinnacle on a whim, without previously considering a job in entertainment. On the other hand, Desmond, who was 28-years-old, had been working in entertainment for years: acting in the national touring company of a major musical, doing development research for a cable news show, managing marketing efforts for theaters, among other jobs. Desmond also had a master’s degree from an Ivy League university and created and starred in his own award winning web series. At 33 years old, Sasha came to Pinnacle interested in a career change. Prior to joining Pinnacle as a development and casting intern, she was a fashion merchandiser, working in the corporate offices of a major clothing brand. While
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it was common for interns to come to the office wearing jeans and t-shirts, Sasha always looked stylish yet professional in blouses and slacks, her hair cropped fashionably short. She was opinionated and smart, eager to make a career in television.
Interns as Creative Labor
Despite being unpaid, interns in various departments played important roles in developing television shows at Pinnacle. In this section I describe how interns were an important source of creative labor, contributing significantly to the substantive content of the company’s shows. I then discuss why the company valued interns’ contributions and trusted their creative judgments, given their relative lack of experience.
Free Creative Labor
Interns sometimes performed menial, low-level work. For example, post- production interns helped organize video, transcribing dialogue and “logging” raw footage (watching and labeling it by content). Transcribing in particular was time consuming, tedious, and did not require critical or creative thinking. Likewise, interns in the production department worked as production assistants on set, helping to transport and set up lights, cameras, and other equipment. This work involved significant manual labor, loading heavy containers into and out of moving vans. It also included running errands and managing “craft services,” ordering and setting up food and refreshments for cast and crew. On several of the shoots I observed, one of the production interns sat alone without complaint for hours in the front seat of a moving van to guard expensive equipment inside.
However, interns also did creative and expressive work that contributed significantly to the content of the shows the company pitched. For example, post- production interns with knowledge of editing software from academic coursework
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created pitch tapes and edited online videos the company produced with minimal supervision. Interns also occasionally performed as actors on camera in pitch tapes. The company filmed a sizzle reel for a hidden camera prank show, for which I played one of the “victims.” In the staged scene, I pretended I was a furniture store customer trying out beds and was startled by a prankster suddenly appearing in bed beside me. They filmed several takes of my screaming and acting startled. When making a pitch tape for a show about people who want to leave their harried coastal lives for a more relaxed lifestyle in the Plains States, a development intern was interviewed at length on camera, for which she improvised and invented a story about her desires to move and details about her family life.
In the development department, interns helped come up with storylines and ideas for episodes of prospective series, wrote “soundbytes” or lines for cast to say on camera during interviews, and wrote drafts of paper pitch materials. However, their primary task was to generate ideas for new television shows. Either the director of development or development associates would occasionally brief the interns on what topics (e.g. cars) or sub-genres (e.g. makeover series) networks were looking to buy. If the company had impending meetings with particular network development executives, interns would be asked to generate ideas that would fit those particular networks’ brands and mandates. However, generating ideas was a continuous job for the development interns. Many reported that they were given little guidance and supervision, and spent entire days sitting in front of a computer entering whatever ideas they could come up with into the company’s “development slate,” an active list of ideas for shows and shows they were actively developing and pitching to networks.
Having interns generate as many ideas for new shows as possible was an integral part of Pinnacle’s development strategy. Ideas for new shows are the lifeblood
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of any production company, especially new ones looking to make a mark in the industry. After production companies gain a significant degree of success, television networks seek them out as production partners. Networks will approach them to either further develop or simply produce specific show ideas that network development teams generate in house. However, prior to gaining status as a network go-to, production companies must generate their own ideas and develop a reputation as creative and competent. The company sought to create as many new show ideas as possible in order to demonstrate to networks that they are creative and active. This is why development workers asked interns to brainstorm ideas for specific networks prior to taking meetings with those networks. Furthermore, generating as many ideas as possible is a useful development strategy because networks reject the vast majority of pitches they hear. Having a full slate of ideas on hand means that there is a constant stream of new “backup” ideas the company can draw on when other ideas are rejected.
In casting, interns were assigned responsibilities that assistant and associate- level casting workers might perform in other companies. Occasionally, casting interns retrieved papers from the printer located in the cubicle area or ran personal errands for Mark, the casting director. However, Mark was usually apologetic about asking interns to perform such menial tasks. Casting procedures typically followed four steps, and interns were integral to each of these. First, Mark and the interns would conduct various forms of outreach, locating appropriate candidates and sending out casting notices. Second, after receiving submissions, casting interns would individually call applicants and evaluate them over the telephone, determining who should pass to the next stage. Third, those who made it past the phone call were interviewed and video recorded over Skype. Mark was primarily responsible for conducting Skype interviews at Pinnacle during my time in the field. Interns conducted Skype interviews only in rare
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circumstances, usually due to a last minute scheduling conflict that took Mark out of the room.11 Finally, interns would edit down recordings of successful Skype interviews to
approximately thirty-second clips containing highlights of the conversation for further evaluation.
The important creative role that interns played in the company was reflected in the seriousness with which staff took their ideas and input. For instance, Cody, a