Reality tv is hit or miss depending on popularity and how old it is. Retention plays a part is this too, but most Usenet providers worth subbing to have crazy long retention times.

I personally use Sonarr for tv and it’s stupid easy to use (once everything is set up!), you just search for your show and it knows when it airs and auto-grabs new episodes. You can also tell it to look for past seasons.

The whole “getting Usenet setup and running” is a little more complicated than I’d like to get into with this post, but you’ll need the following: a Usenet provider, an indexer (both of these will cost money but it’s not a lot and annual payments, or lifetime, is usually the way to go), a newsreader (I use SABnzbd), and a web app to track shows and initiate searches (I use Sonarr, as previously mentioned).

I’m sure someone else here can post a link to a good guide to getting started with Usenet if that’s the direction you want to go.

TLDR: it depends on the show

I absolutely swear by Usenet. As long as you get on a few trackers, you can widen your net and find most of what you want. BTW, Drunken Slug is currently open to registrations. I found quite a bit of Amazing Race on there.

You’ll find varying retention spans on each tracker. Look at a few and judge from those. I have accounts on Drunken Slug, NZBGeek, NZB.su, NZB Planet, and BinSearch.

Idk if you are going to find what you are specifically looking for but if you do that shit is crazy fast.

As someone who uses usenet exclusively, it depends. Shit like survivor is a no brainer win. More obscure/older stuff can be harder to find. But if its new and at least semi popular, its 100% a find. Also old seasons of popular shows are easy to find to. Id give it a go. I love usenet

“treasure trove of reality tv” is like saying “most tasty shit omelette” or “incredibly valuable piece of dirty plastic”

Way way more reality tv on usenet. The issue with reality tv though is the networks say one thing but the scene says another and then tvdb says another so u end up with a clusterfuck of a mess sometimes. Some shows want to adopt a yearly season style but tvdb says naaaah we gonna do it this way and fuck peoples sonarr up.

Another issue is while usenet has way more reality tv the chances of getting the complete show can be slim at times. It took me 3 months of searching for all of honey boo boo getting mixed crap before i gave up and randomly decided to search again and low and behold someone uploaded the files to usenet all max quality. Now this isn’t always the case for example my extreme couponers show downloaded without a hitch

Yet another issue is finding them in 1080p. I wouldn’t even bother with the headache of that tbh for reality shows. Just take whatever is the highest available at that time and call it good enough.

If you are trusting sonarr with a reality tv show make sure 100% it’s the show AND the episodes are in order. This can be cumbersome so I use my family members as my test subjects whenever they come across an episode that’s wrong i fix it ezpz and less time wasted on my end.

Reality tv shows in general are a pain in the ass at times. If you hop on a new reality show keep up with it and see how long it takes the scene or tvdb to start fucking with shit and take it over into your own hands so you don’t get confused later down the road.

Now usenet is pretty much useless without an indexer and provider and having just 1 will make you think usenet sucks donkey balls. I personally use 3 providers and 5 indexers and have completely disabled my torrents as i no longer require them. The last time i opened my qbit was 2.3 years ago according to my unraid dashboard.

Edit: I also have a shit load of drunkenslug invites if you want one just pm me. The indexer is ok but not as good as some of the others that I can’t say out of respect for them. If you want to know those 2 just pm me.

i’ve found Usenet to be cumbersome at times, Debrid it is for me