Veteran Unscripted Producer Rachel Tung Renews Development Deal with ABC and Hulu

Veteran unscripted producer Rachel Tung has renewed her development deal with ABC and Hulu, extending a partnership that tasks her with creating original unscripted programming for Disney while also serving as showrunner — the top creative lead on a production — on select projects across both platforms.

Variety reported the renewal exclusively on 10 August 2026. The deal keeps Tung inside the Disney television ecosystem, where unscripted content feeds both the broadcast network ABC and the streaming service Hulu.

Tung's track record in the genre runs deep. She developed and served as showrunner and executive producer on the first season of Love They Nader, a Hulu reality series following model and actress Brooks Nader and her sisters as they attempted to break into the New York modelling industry. The show debuted on Hulu in August 2025 and was renewed for a second season later that year, though Tung exited as showrunner at that point.

Before Love They Nader, Tung was showrunner and executive producer on the second season of Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi, the food and travel docuseries that earned an Emmy nomination for outstanding hosted nonfiction series or special at the 2023 Emmy Awards.

Her producing credits stretch across some of unscripted television's most durable titles. Tung produced Hell's Kitchen, the Gordon Ramsay culinary competition that was preparing to enter its 25th season at the time of Variety's report. She also produced Kitchen Nightmares, which aired for seven seasons between 2007 and 2014 before Fox revived it for additional seasons beginning in 2023. On MTV, she produced Deliciousness, a three-season spinoff of the clip-show format Ridiculousness.

Tung co-created Homicide Hunter for Investigation Discovery. The true crime series ran for nine seasons beginning in 2011, became one of Investigation Discovery's longest-running franchises, and spawned a spinoff, Homicide Hunter: American Detective.

Prior to her work with Disney, Tung held the role of vice president of unscripted at Paramount. She is represented by UTA, one of the major talent agencies in the United States.

What makes the renewal worth noting is the breadth it covers. A single producer who has worked across food, crime, modelling and cooking formats — and across broadcast, cable and streaming — is now anchored inside a company that needs unscripted content for two distinct distribution windows. ABC reaches a linear broadcast audience; Hulu reaches subscribers on demand. Tung's deal spans both.

For viewers, that means the next round of unscripted series greenlit under this arrangement could land on either a traditional TV schedule or a streaming queue, depending on where Disney sees the audience for each project.