Hot Farmers, Trad Wives, and an Immigrant Reality Show: Welcome to TV’s MAGA Era

Julia is a 22-year-old model, student, and self-proclaimed “princess” from Malibu, California, with one nonnegotiable: She refuses to shovel cow shit. But she’s down to play the part, she tells Farmer Jay, handing him a framed black-and-white photo of her in a bikini and cowboy hat. Grace, 23, dreams of being a stay-at-home mom with four kids. Jordyn, a 29-year-old country singer who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, says she would relocate across the country for her partner.

The three women are among 32 contestants on the most recent season of Farmer Wants a Wife, Fox’s rustic spin on The Bachelor. They come from different backgrounds and have all sorts of interests, but their goals are ultimately the same: to settle down, get married, and have kids.

While the women don’t explicitly talk politics, their focus on traditional values fits into a genre of entertainment that is rapidly reshaping the industry: Welcome to Hollywood’s MAGA reboot.

Hollywood is in the midst of another evolution. Studios are releasing fewer movies every year. Broadcast and news ratings are in decline. Screenwriters are struggling to sell scripts as salaries for studio heads have skyrocketed. Television and feature film production in Los Angeles shrunk by 30 percent in the first quarter of 2025, compared with the previous year, according to a report by FilmLA.

At the same time, Hollywood is also undergoing a resurgence in anti-woke conservative content thanks to the Trump administration’s anti-DEI agenda.

“More conservative projects are getting greenlit,” says Colin Whelan, a former studio executive at TLC and founder of Conveyer Media, which has produced reality shows for Netflix, HGTV, and Investigation Discovery. “People are pitching more shows like that because they realize that’s what’s selling.”

Maybe you’ve also noticed the subtle changes on your TV screen—content that favors Christian values, heartland themes, or law-and-order style programming. Yellowstone, the Paramount drama about cattle ranchers in Montana, gained a massive audience during Trump’s first presidency, routinely breaking ratings records, and has since spawned successful spinoffs. Tim Allen’s Shifting Gears, about a grumpy widower with manosphere viewpoints, is a ratings hit for Disney’s linear broadcast audience, with “more live viewers on average than The Conners season 7 and Abbott Elementary season 4,” according to ScreenRant. It pulled in 3.7 million viewers for its season one finale. Farmer Wants a Wife has held steady ratings, averaging 1.5 million viewers weekly, and works as easy counterprogramming to more raunchy dating fodder like Temptation Island and Too Hot to Handle (both on Netflix).

In 2024, Trump Media and Technology Group launched a streaming service called Truth+, and the company made clear that it would prioritize “news, Christian content, and family-friendly programming that is uncancelable by Big Tech,” a mandate that now seems to be shaping the look of Hollywood more and more. (The streaming service also features at least one documentary—included among its most watched programs on the platform in May—peddling conspiracy theories about “serpent or lizard-like aliens who are secretly wielding influence over the human race,” according to an investigation by Talking Points Memo.)

In Trump’s version of Hollywood, old-fashioned values are in vogue again. The Christian drama 7th Heaven, about a Protestant minister and his seven children that aired for 11 seasons on The WB (later The CW), is in early development at CBS Studios and will “focus on a diverse family,” though it’s not clear what that means. Jessica Biel, who was in the original cast, is executive producing the reboot alongside Devon Franklin, a producer of faith-based films. Roseanne Barr, whose namesake show was canceled in 2018 after she posted a racist tweet about former Obama White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, is shopping a series that “saves America with guns, the Bible, petty crime, and alcoholism,” she told Variety.

Duck Dynasty, a duck-hunting reality show that ended in 2017, is also returning to television screens this summer on A+E, which experienced its first big hit of the year with Ozark Law, a show that followed multiple police departments in the Missouri region. Duck Dynasty producer Rob Worsoff is in talks with the Department of Homeland Security about a reality show where “immigrants compete to prove they are the most American,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Potential challenges include mining for gold or working on a Model T assembly line in Detroit.

What’s happening is a “cultural recalibration,” says Carri Twigg, a founding partner and head of development at Culture House, the production company that created Ladies First: A Story of Women in Hip-Hop and Hair Tales. The recalibration has led to a “generalized chill” in the industry that has caused more diverse projects to suffer.

“I’ve heard from multiple executives that there’s a noticeable hesitancy around content perceived as too progressive, especially if it centers non-white leads or tackles social issues explicitly. Even projects with mild inclusivity are getting flagged in internal discussions,” Twigg says. “Colleagues have expressed frustration that kinds stories they were encouraged to pitch just a couple years ago are now getting passed on as like ‘too niche’ or ‘not resonant right now’ by the same execs who once called them ‘visionary’ and ‘universal.’”

Twigg says there are two key reasons for the hesitancy.

“The political climate has emboldened executives who were always uncomfortable with the industry’s post-2020 shifts. The power that DEI-era storytelling offered to historically excluded creators was unfamiliar, and in some corners, unwelcome.” The second, she says, is fear of reprisals from the administration.

In February, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr, who previously said he would end the agency’s DEI initiatives if appointed, opened a probe into NBC parent company Comcast, and later Disney, promising to take action if the investigation uncovered “any programs that promote invidious forms of DEI discrimination.” Carr has since said that the FCC plans to look into broadcast network affiliation agreements to help “constrain some of the power of national programmers.” According to Variety, Disney, Amazon, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery have all rolled back programs aimed at increasing diversity.

Talk shows are also being encouraged to shift their programming. In a recent meeting with the cohosts of The View, the popular morning gabfest with Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar, ABC News president Almin Karamehmedovic urged the women to soften their criticisms of Trump, saying “the panel needed to broaden its conversations beyond its predominant focus on politics,” the Daily Beast reported. Disney CEO Bob Iger also suggested that the show “tone down” its political rhetoric.

One former executive at Amazon MGM Studios tells WIRED that Trump’s anti-DEI agenda, whose impact on film and TV only seems to be growing more pronounced, is a part of the administration’s Trojan-horse playbook to roll back civil rights. “It’s just the rhetoric they’re using to articulate what they really believe and who they really are.”

The White House did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

The anti-DEI backlash threatens to make Hollywood even more out of touch than it already is to younger audiences, who increasingly prefer TikTok and YouTube to traditional viewing formats. An estimated 50 percent of Gen Z identifies as non-white, and nearly 30 percent identify as LGBTQ+. “These audiences aren’t just asking for representation—they expect it,” Twigg says. “If the industry starts backing away from inclusive storytelling, it won’t just be regressive—it’ll be a bad business decision.”

Original, inclusive storytelling is trending right now, as Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s vampire drama, proved by becoming the biggest box office success story of the year so far, earning $316 million globally. Hulu’s Paradise, about residents of a postapocalyptic town, and HBO Max’s The Pitt, a medical drama that follows an emergency-room crew over a 15-hour shift, have also felt like watercooler moments at a time when the industry is starved for them.

Beyond the cultural and commercial risks of a less diverse Hollywood, Twigg says there is a strategic one: Film and TV take years to develop and produce.

“Hitching your content strategy to a political moment that may not last through the next election—or the next news cycle—is short-sighted,” she says. “The stories being greenlit today will premiere in a future that may have swung back toward the very audiences currently being sidelined. If anything, the smartest strategy right now would be to build with resilience and relevance in mind—not reactionary politics.”

Whelan says that in over 20 years as a television producer, he has taken the same approach, regardless of the political and social climates of the time: to create shows that “entertain and inspire and maybe teach.”

In 2014, following stints at Syfy and TLC as a network executive, he applied that mindset to New Girls on the Block. It was the first follow-doc reality show with an all-trans cast. The series focused on a group of women in Kansas City, Missouri, who faced changing relationship dynamics in a society struggling to make space for trans women. The reality project he just wrapped probably sounds like a complete 180. It focuses on a Christian family who runs a ranch and takes in at-risk youth. But there’s more to it, he says.

“What’s interesting to me, having done it for so long, is I don’t see a huge difference between a show about a group of all transgender women and a group of ranchers trying to help at-risk youth,” he says. “It’s two groups of really amazing people trying to change their lives for the better, and change the world around them for the better as well.”

Tonality aside, fewer projects overall are moving forward this year, Whelan says, but that hasn’t stopped genuinely good ideas from finding an audience—no matter who sits in the Oval Office.

“Ozark Law would have sold regardless of the administration. The Netflix scripted series is all about breaking the law, so you know someone’s gonna come up with the idea of enforcing it. That’s how we pitch reality shows,” he says, before admitting, “I wish I had thought of that.”