Hi.

Hi. Hi, baby. Oh, my God.

No barking for you. No barking. Well, do you want to see where the.

Magic happens? Absolutely. We're inside the palace with the once reigning queen of reality TV.

This is the glam room. Oh, my gosh.

Bethany Frankl, the Grand Dam of Bravo's iconic real-house wives of New York, has had a busy retirement since leaving reality TV. It's exactly as I would.

Imagine, Bethany's closet. Really? Yeah. It's perfectly organized. Thank you.

It's perfectly curated. Trained as a chef in her early days, she's even become a lucrative TikTok food critic.

Have you ever tried cottage cheese and caviar?

And beauty influencer, exposing the bargain jewels from the pricey dudds.

Some beauty products that are at the level. This is excellent. And that's where you put your phone? So you put your phone here. I've tried every high, low foundation. This is the side of the Mississippi. I was like, look at this side. Looks like this side. The expensive looks like the cheap. It got 15 million views.

With 1.5 million followers. You tell it like it is, unfiltered. That's always been.

Your brand. I do, I do. But even to say it's a brand feels like it's not being honest.

If somebody came to you and said, You know, Bethany, I'm thinking of signing up for a reality show.

What would you say? They think it's going to be the fun next chapter. They don't realize that it could put them in a detrimental situation.

Is that the price of fame?

It might be the price of fame.

When it comes to The Real Housewives franchise, there's perhaps no one more famous than Bethany Frankl. After nearly two decades in the reality game, nearly 400 episodes across four networks, Bethany leveraged all that reality TV fame or infamy and launched an empire. One of her most famous products, Skinny Girl Margarita.

Hi, I'm Bethany, creator of the Skinny Girl Margarita, the Margarita you can trust.

Bethany is essentially an elder statesman of the genre, and now she's trying to launch a revolution, the so-called reality reckoning.

Reality television exploits, affairs, bankruptcy, falling off the wagon, saying something inappropriate, risking cancelation every single time the camera goes on.

You called it the reality reckoning. Yes.

It was okay to do things that one day we all woke up and said, How is that okay?

This isn't about you crying for money.

I haven't asked for one thing. I don't want one thing. I want to be respected and I'm going to change the entertainment industry. I myself have generated millions and millions of dollars in advertising and online impressions being on reality TV and have never made a single residual.

And other reality stars are rallying, too. Lea McSweeney from The Real Housewives of New York and Love Is Blind's nick Thompson and Jeremy Hartwell. They say the chaos that makes these shows so addictive comes at a high cost to their real lives.

This group of talent is the most overworked, over-exploited, and least compensated. There's no group that has a greater risk.

They're clearly being exploited. Exploiting the reality TV star is the whole point of the show. But they are absolutely signing up for that. These people want to be on TV.

The benefit is that people who are on reality shows, it's become a reality show career for people.

It's Game of Thrones. You're killing or you're being killed. There is no middle. There is no gray. Gray are women that become friends or women that become fired. Watching things like that normalizes bad behavior. These shows normalize substance abuse. They normalize physical violence with the cat fights that break out, and it normalizes emotionally abusive behaviors.

But some would argue that behavior is exactly the thrill of reality TV. And some fans wonder, would changing the industry kill the genre? A lot of people think, well, are you biting the hand that fed you?

That hand didn't feed me. We fed each other. And that hand that did feed me, deserves to be bitten. It's time.

Bethany's trademark brashness that put her at the forefront of this fight also helped spark her television career in 2005 on the Martha Stewart spin-off of The Apprentice.

You're looking for a star and someone who has total potential.

She parlayed that into a role on the original cast of The Real Housewives of New York.

I want to be a household name like a modern, healthy Martha Stewart.

Her unfiltered and unapologetic persona, a ratings bonanza for Bravo for years.

Mention at all. Mention at all. May my heart be your shelter and my arms be your home.

Her wedding back in 2010 at the time was the highest rated event Bravo had ever broadcast.

I went through a 10-year horrific divorce, and that marriage is being exploited and monetized and sold to so many different entities.

Early on, Bethany says she knew nothing about business. In her first contract, she agreed to a season-long salary of $7,250 and no residuals.

I know that my content is all over the world that I did 15 years ago. Before I ever knew that there would be a peacock streamer or any streamers or gifts or memes or anything, YouTube clips, social media. So we signed our lives away, not realizing where it would be distributed for decades to come.

The idea of residuals is every time your episode plays again, you get a little tiny bit more money. And the more popular your show is, the more it's going to get played again. Rich Schoenstein has an expertise in entertainment contracts. He doesn't represent Bethany, but says that the old ways are outdated.

The person who comes on a show in the first instance is not given residuals. And I bet at the start of reality television, nobody thought that was strange. The industry has changed. The technology has changed. So it does create a new landscape. Those original contracts will still be enforced according to their terms. They have to be renegotiated or amended by the parties if the parties want to change them.

Bethany still managed to strike gold during her time on the show.

I've never been great at contracts, but I've always been good at concepts, so I agreed to the money, but crossed out the part where they could take a percentage of my future business. Little did I know that I was the only one who crossed that part out. I mean, really cashed out big time.

That savvy move allowed her to keep all of the reportedly $100 million payout from her sale of Skinny Girl in 2011. The now 53-year-old single mom was living her best life in her cozy, suburban home when the writers and actors in Hollywood went on strike. What is it that makes labor issues so hot.

Right now? There's a big thing going on in society about exploitation overall. People just are starting to open their eyes and realize what's okay and what's not okay. Reality television needs a systemic overhaul and a governor and possibly a union. I was just talking about the strike in general that was going on.

You have to think about your work. Work as work, you have to think about the fact that you are being exploited, that your conditions could be better, and that somebody has the power to make your.

Conditions better. A lot of these entry-level reality show contracts, they don't pay very much at all. Surprisingly, little. I think the performers are saying, That's not right. We should be paid more. And if it takes a union to get us that, then that's what we want to do.

Page six showed the moment at BravoCon this year when Andy Cohen, host and executive producer of The Real Housewives franchise, was asked about the reality Reckoning.

We need to talk about reality, Reckoning, and beckoning- Oh, I don't want to.

Talk.

About that. What I think is.

I live in the joy that these shows bring.

People, and I think we all do.

You were good friends with Andy Cohen. He literally made you a star.

He didn't make me a star. He made himself a star on the backs of all of these women. I'm sure I've surprised and disappointed Andy Cohen, and he really was a big fan of mine as a housewife. Andy knows that I'm right on so many levels, otherwise, he wouldn't all of a sudden be making this whole franchise about joy.

Impact reached out to Andy Cohen. His team declined to comment. How much do you think the industry has.

Responded to you? I think that Bravo is now seeing it very clearly. They're making a lot of changes. And not just Bravo. This is the entire entertainment industry. They've awakened. And no matter what, a change has been made and will continue to be made.

You can stream the full episode of Impact by Nightline: Reality Reckoning on Hulu.

Hi, everyone. George Stephanopoulos here. Thanks for checking out the ABC News YouTube channel. If you'd like to get more videos, show highlights, and watch live event coverage, click on the right over here to subscribe to our channel. And don't forget to download the ABC News app for breaking news alerts. Thanks for watching.