Broadcasters are losing patience with the old split between scripted and unscripted television, and Nicholas Sercombe says the market is already behaving as if that divide has been left behind. In a blog published on 27.05.26, the chief executive of Harry King TV argued that the most successful factual entertainment formats now look less like cameras capturing life and more like carefully built dramas with reality at their core.
Sercombe’s point is blunt: the genre boxes that once defined television no longer hold. He said broadcasters used to like a “drama” to be scripted, “Entertainment” to mean Light Entertainment with a shiny floor and at least one lighting rig, and “Factual” to be there to educate viewers as a Documentary. Unscripted, in that older framing, was supposed to be what happened when a camera was pointed at someone and everyone hoped for the best. Reality television, he wrote, did not really fit that world.
That is not how the medium works now. Sercombe pointed to Welcome to Wrexham, Jury Duty and LOL: Last One Laughing as proof that the biggest unscripted successes have thrown the rule book out the window. Those shows, he argued, are carefully structured, editorially controlled and built around long-term storytelling instincts more often associated with scripted series. Producers are shaping narrative, character and tone more deliberately, while borrowing tropes from scripted television and applying them to formats rooted in reality.
He said the change is being driven by commercial logic as much as creative ambition. The market, in his view, increasingly rewards formats that can sustain narrative momentum across multiple episodes, territories and platforms. A broadcaster or streamer commissioning a format today, he wrote, is investing in repeatability, scalability and the possibility of a returning franchise. The strongest co-viewing and family entertainment, he added, now tends to mix spontaneity with some kind of structure.
That balance matters because viewers want both authenticity and control. Sercombe said audiences are looking for personalities they can follow, story arcs they can invest in and emotional payoffs that feel earned. Push the structure too far, and the audience feels manipulated. Leave too little in place, and the format can drift into chaos. He put it another way in the blog, warning that there is always a trade-off with “and god forbid, unpredictability, which means risk (a broadcaster or commissioner’s least favourite word).”
The clearest example, he said, is Welcome to Wrexham, which works because Hollywood ownership and talent are tapping into the history and heritage of the football club itself. It is, he said, brilliantly constructed around real people, established relationships and years of emotional investment, with as much editorial development as a scripted show. Jury Duty succeeds for a different reason: its long, drawn-out hoax works only because someone behind the scenes is keeping an extremely close eye on the moving parts.
The broader shift has been building for years, but Sercombe’s argument is that it is now impossible to ignore. What once looked like a neat distinction between scripted and unscripted has become a continuum, with formats borrowing more openly from drama while still depending on the unpredictability of real people. For commissioners, that leaves a simple but awkward question: if the safest hit is one that feels both tightly built and genuinely alive, how much television can still be left to chance?
Sercombe did not answer that in the blog, but the examples he chose did. The future he describes belongs to formats that can feel spontaneous while being engineered to survive the demands of social media and streaming tran
