Wheelhouse Entertainment and talent management-production hybrid Kismet Media struck an exclusive overall deal this week, the latest signal that unscripted production is reorganizing around creator-led shops with built-in talent pipelines rather than pure development mills.
The Big Story: Wheelhouse Bets on Talent Integration
Wheelhouse’s Spoke Studios division partnered with Kismet Media, the production company co-founded in 2022 by producers Ally Gasparian and Alex Rosenberg. The deal gives Wheelhouse first-look rights to Kismet’s slate and integrates the boutique firm’s talent relationships directly into Wheelhouse’s development engine. Financial terms were not disclosed, but the structure mirrors recent moves across the industry: aligning production capacity with pre-attached talent rather than pitching concepts cold.
Kismet already produces unscripted projects including Calabasas Confidential, and the company’s dual focus on management and production gives it advantage in a marketplace where casting with audience-ready personalities has become table stakes. For Wheelhouse CEO Brent Montgomery, who’s spent the past year launching Netflix titles and building out podcast-to-TV adaptations, the deal strengthens the company’s access to the kind of multi-hyphenate creators that streamers now prioritize.
The move comes as casting teams at major buyers—Bravo, Netflix, Amazon—actively seek talent with existing fan bases, particularly from digital platforms. The line between traditional broadcast talent and creator-platform personalities has blurred to the point where agencies, including United Agents in the U.K., are launching dedicated unscripted divisions to represent both. Wheelhouse clearly sees that convergence as structural, not temporary.
What it signals: production companies without direct talent pipelines are at a disadvantage when pitching in 2026. The shows getting made are the ones that arrive with casting solved, not casting TBD.
Banijay-All3Media Merger Advances Toward Close
The proposed merger between Banijay Group and RedBird IMI’s All3Media moved closer to completion this week, with early-stage integration planning reportedly underway ahead of regulatory clearance. The combined entity would control an estimated €4.4 billion in annual revenue and own some of unscripted’s most valuable IP, including Big Brother, MasterChef, The Traitors, Peaky Blinders, and Midsomer Murders.
The deal, first announced in March, consolidates two of the three largest independent unscripted producers globally. Banijay operates across 22 territories; All3Media adds 40-plus production labels. The resulting company would hold more than 207,000 hours of content and significant leverage in format licensing negotiations with streamers and broadcasters alike.
For U.S. producers, the practical takeaway is this: format rights conversations are now happening with fewer, larger counterparties. That changes the speed and terms of co-production deals, particularly for indie shops trying to access international pre-sales or secure multi-territory rollouts. The mega-indie model that dominated the 2010s is being replaced by something closer to mini-studios with true global infrastructure.
Meanwhile, ITV Studios—which produces Love Island, Hell’s Kitchen, and the Harlan Coben Netflix slate—this week secured a significant unscripted content package deal with Warner Bros. Discovery for Latin America, placing over 60 hours of programming across Discovery and Discovery Home & Health channels in the region. The move underscores that even as M&A concentrates the top tier, mid-sized players are fighting for distribution volume.
The Formats That Won the Decade
New data from analyst firm K7 confirms what pitch rooms already knew: The Traitors and The Floor are the top-selling unscripted formats created in the 2020s. The Traitors, with 47 adaptations, represents more than one-fifth of all new format launches globally since 2020. The Floor, from Talpa Studios, landed 32 adaptations.
Both formats share a common trait: they traveled easily across cultural and linguistic borders with minimal localization cost. That’s the holy grail for format creators in 2026—mechanics that require no explanation and social dynamics that work in any market. The Traitors’ success has been so dominant that All3Media this week announced the format has now been commissioned in 30 territories, including new deals in Ukraine and Mongolia.
Banijay Entertainment controlled 22 percent of the new format launch market in 2025 despite not placing a single title in K7’s top five most-launched formats of the year. That kind of breadth across a catalogue—rather than reliance on one or two breakout hits—is what scale buys you in the current market.
Bravo Stays in the NBCUniversal Fold
While not breaking news this week, the strategic rationale behind NBCUniversal’s decision to retain Bravo while spinning off other cable networks continues to clarify. Bravo ranks as a top-five cable entertainment brand, delivers seven of the top ten reality shows on cable, and commands the number-one position in key female demos for the second consecutive year. Crucially, Bravo content drives double-digit growth on Peacock, where next-day streaming has made recent seasons of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, Southern Hospitality, and Summer House the most-watched in each franchise’s history.
For producers, Bravo remains one of the few buyers willing to order multi-season arcs upfront and build franchises rather than one-off pilots. That model—expensive in the short term, but durable in the long term—is increasingly rare. It’s why the network’s slate this week includes renewals for Below Deck Med (season 10), Married to Medicine (season 12), Southern Charm (season 11), and five separate Real Housewives iterations.
Bravo’s integration with Peacock also offers a case study in how linear and streaming can function as complementary rather than competing distribution windows. The shows that perform on both platforms are the ones built for weekly social conversation and long-tail discovery, not binge-and-forget consumption.
Moves and Shakes
- Wheelhouse Entertainment and Kismet Media (co-founders Ally Gasparian and Alex Rosenberg) inked exclusive partnership and overall deal via Wheelhouse’s Spoke Studios division (Realscreen, May 7)
- Jilly Pearce, former president of Objective Media, named SVP, Unscripted Programming at ABC and Hulu, reporting to Rob Mills, EVP Unscripted & Alternative Entertainment at Walt Disney Television (Deadline, June 2025)
- ITV Studios restructured U.S. operations, folding ITV Studios America into ITV America group under CEO David George; Philippe Maigret departing as president after a decade (C21Media, December 2025)
- All3Media established new unscripted development label Seamonster TV, led by former Lime Pictures executives Mirella Breda and Sam Pollard, focused on licensing formats rather than in-house production (Realscreen, September 2025)
- ITV Studios closed Latin America content package deal with Warner Bros. Discovery, placing 60+ hours of unscripted programming on Discovery and Discovery Home & Health channels (ITV Press Centre, May 7)