Most status reports are written defensively. The author lists everything they did so that, if something goes wrong, there's a record they flagged it. The reader learns nothing and stops reading by the second bullet.
An executive has thirty seconds. Give them the answer first: are we going to hit the date, yes or no, and if no, what changed. Everything else is support for that one line.
I keep the format brutally consistent. One line on overall health. A short list of decisions I need from the reader, with a date. Then risks, written as risk plus consequence plus what I'm doing about it, in one sentence each. No "on track" without a number behind it.
The decisions section is the part people skip and it's the most valuable. A status report that only reports status wastes the one moment you have a senior person's attention. Ask for the thing you need while you have them.
The honest test: if your update could have been sent last week with the date changed, it isn't a status report. It's noise with a timestamp.