Here's Why Reality TV's City-Centric Craze Makes So Much Sense

VH1s Love & Hip Hop: Miami is just the latest of a string of reality TV shows that center on a particular city/region. Aside from VH1's other series in the hit franchise, Bravo's Real Housewives and HGTV's Flip or Flop are also part of this programming trend.

We wondered if audiences in various states across the U.S. are more likely to watch a show that stars a city in their state, so we turned to Inscape, the TV data company with glass-level information from 7.7 million smart TV screens and devices to find out.

On the heatmaps below, the darker the color, the more likely audiences in that state tune in.

Related: Love & Hip Hop Miami': Here's How Viewers Are Reacting and Which Brands Are Backing the VH1 Franchise Expansion

A few highlights:

- For the HGTV crowd that likes Flip or Flop, the Vegas and Atlanta versions are more likely to be watched by the respective home states than the Fort Worth edition is in Texas.

- A large chunk of Love & Hip Hop franchise-watchers are based in the southeast (Georgia and Louisiana in particular), even when it comes to the show's Hollywood and New York editions.

- The Real Housewives is the most prolific of the franchises we looked at, with eight separate spinoffs. With the exception of the Dallas and Potomac editions, the largest audience for each show comes from their respective states.

The bottom line: Networks that keep creating these shows not only get to keep refreshing their franchises - and adding diversity - with each new spinoff, they generally get to capitalize on a higher tendency toward viewership in each new territory they conquer. Because the data shows that city/region-based reality TV spinoffs mostly do benefit from increased heat in their home states.

A notable exception: Massive Texas, which, of course, has more well-known urban centers than either Nevada or Georgia. It makes sense that someone from, say, Austin would have a very different sense of their part of Texas than someone from Fort Worth.

HGTV: Flip or Flop

VH1: Love & Hip Hop

Bravo: The Real Housewives

LINK:	http://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/programming/heres-why-reality-tv...
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