ABOUT

Co-founded in 2009 by creatives and executive producers Matthew Ostrom and Laura Palumbo Johnson, Magilla Entertainment is one of the unscripted industry’s biggest suppliers of reality and nonfiction content.

With more than 1,800 hours of programming produced to date (1,600+ episodes), Magilla’s diverse portfolio houses powerhouse franchises including Discovery’s Moonshiners, TLC’s Long Island Medium and HGTV’s Beachfront Bargain Hunt, as well as History’s seminal The Cars That Built the World.

All told, Magilla series represent 150+ seasons of television across the content landscape, and Magilla continues to be in production and development on myriad projects for a range of networks and streamers.

Principals Ostrom and Johnson met in 2004 as work-for-hire producers, and saw their respective skill sets in creative development and production management as highly complementary. While Ostrom went on to develop and produce hit series like Swamp People, Dual Survivor and LA Ink (he was a VP at then-production company Original Media) as well as what would eventually become Magilla’s long-running Discovery series Moonshiners, Johnson focused on production management, operations and international sales at a TV start-up.

As reality television proliferated across cable and broadcast, the two joined forces, working on key series like Jersey Couture for Oxygen and Long Island Medium for TLC, which launched their still fully independent production company, Magilla Entertainment.

With Moonshiners and Long Island Medium premiering at essentially the same time (2011), followed closely by Bayou Billionaires and Celebrities at Home (2012), Magilla was soon in high demand among commissioners as a company that could produce across genres, for both male and female-skewing audiences. Their next big success, HGTV’s Beachfront Bargain Hunt – now in its 29th season – cemented Magilla’s reputation for creating engaging, repeatable and high-volume formats across virtually any genre of unscripted television.

 That “sweet spot” for Magilla has spawned such franchise hits as Moonshiners: Master Distiller, Moonshiners: Smoke Ring, and Moonshiners: Secret Summit; Lakefront Bargain Hunt and Beachfront Bargain Hunt: Renovation; and Diesel Brothers and Diesel Brothers: Monster Jam. Other top series include I Love A Mama’s Boy, The Cars That Made America, Dirty Mudder Truckers, American Ripper, The Gossip Game, Rise Up: The Movement that Made America, and many more.