What exactly is so special about going to the movies? The usual answer is it’s about sitting in the dark with a bunch of strangers and having a shared experience that demands your undivided attention. But you don’t need a movie for that — you can just as easily get it from live music, or theater, or a standup show. The other standard argument is about scale and sensation: a film should be seen on the biggest possible screen with the best possible sound. But it’s now within the means of many to approximate the multiplex on home systems that fill as much of your field of view and deliver the same crisp spatial audio, and yet the existence of 8K TVs and Dolby Atmos speakers doesn’t seem to console anyone fretting about the death of movie theaters. Communion and immersion are both clearly essential to the filmgoing experience. But if they’re not the things that make it unique, then what is?

Consider every other type of real-world collective experience: concerts, plays, musicals, sporting events, religious services, lectures, parades, fireworks displays, and anything else where viewers or listeners gather in a physical place. All of these involve some form of live performance. The specific thing you witness on a particular night in an opera house or a hockey arena will never occur in that precise way ever again. It can be repeated, but it can’t be replicated. A live performance only happens once.

Movies are different. For the first time in the long history of communal entertainment, we found a way to capture a living performance and make it perfectly reproducible. The motion picture gave us an entirely new kind of spectacle: a performed work that could be exactly the same to everyone at all times, needing only a projector and a screen to be delivered to any crowd, anywhere, for nothing more than the cost of the print and the electricity to run the bulb.

In his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin tried to make sense of this strange new situation. He used the term “aura” to describe what falls away from an artwork when it can be easily reproduced. At one end of the aura scale are ceremonial objects used in religious rituals. These items can’t be copied and often aren’t even meant to be seen by the public. The emphasis is on their “cult value.” At the other end of the spectrum are works that can be duplicated and distributed everywhere. What matters most is their “exhibition value.” Film, Benjamin believed, was the ultimate destroyer of aura. A powerful new medium completely detached from ritual and tradition, capable of reaching the masses in ways no art form ever had.

Benjamin had been struck by a prediction made by the French poet Paul Valéry in a 1928 piece called “The Conquest of Ubiquity,” which he quotes in his essay:

Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.

It took almost a century, but ubiquity is finally here. The world created by Netflix and its competitors would seem to be the inevitable end of the story Benjamin tells: cinematic works reproduced not just in theaters, but in our homes and in our hands, flowing everywhere on Earth, accessible at will. The modern streaming service is where aura reaches zero.

A typical movie theater of the 1930s wasn’t a particularly sacred space. Crowds were rowdy, and talking back to the screen was accepted as part of the show. Films played in continuous loops without advertised start times — people would wander in halfway into a showing and stay after the end to see what they’d missed. A trip to the movies wasn’t a special event. It was just something you did on a lazy afternoon.

Television changed what movies meant. The intrusion of the moving image into the American home threw Hollywood studios into crisis. They responded first by making movies bigger — widening the aspect ratio and spending lavishly on big-budget historical epics — and when this started to fail, they turned to desperate experimentation, greenlighting films by fresh voices who were speaking to a new generation of youth. Film needed to offer things you couldn’t find on TV, and for a brief time, those things were edge and sophistication. Then, with Star Wars, the studios stumbled on their new template: effects-driven spectacle that could draw people out of their homes with the promise of otherworldly yet comfortingly familiar escape. It was a formula that would reliably prop up the release calendar for another four decades. Now, in the streaming era, the crisis set off by television has returned. This time, films aren’t just competing with TV shows, but with smaller and more convenient versions of themselves.

From the 1920s to the 1940s, most Americans went to the movies at least once a week. After the rapid adoption of TV, attendance plummeted to just fifteen percent of its old levels, and then held remarkably steady relative to population for about sixty years, despite VHS, video games, YouTube, and every other thing that threatened at one time or another to kill the multiplex. It was COVID that would eventually deal the worst blow to filmgoing since the 1950s. As with the shift to hybrid-remote work, the pandemic revealed how new habits were possible, and, to some, preferable. Most people are going to the movies less often than before. Many have simply stopped going at all. What’s interesting is who those people are.

The narrative about cinema is that it’s losing its cultural position to newer forms of media, which isn’t wrong. But the collapse in theatrical attendance has occurred almost entirely among people over 50. Younger audiences are still engaged. 18 to 24-year-olds are buying movie tickets more frequently than any other age group. Filmgoing is being kept alive by generations whose habits and desires have been shaped by the internet. And, as happened when TV transformed our culture, the meaning of theatrical cinema is changing.

What do theaters offer, in the 2020s, that streaming can’t? Bigger screens still matter — we’re some years away from an affordable home setup that can replicate the scale and resolution of 70-millimeter projection or its digital equivalent. IMAX, once a niche format used mainly for science documentaries, has become central to the production and marketing of today’s blockbusters. Out of roughly forty thousand screens in North America, only about four hundred — one percent — are IMAX-capable. Cinemas equipped for 70mm are even rarer. Still, audiences are going out of their way to get to them: twenty percent of the box office take for Sinners and One Battle After Another came from IMAX screens alone; 70mm showings of both films were sold out for weeks.

Premium ticket prices and a longer trek to the cinema aren’t the only things audiences are choosing to put up with. The movie theater asks more of the viewer today than it ever has. It used to be that sitting through a theatrical film required no more focus than sitting on your couch and watching a movie on TV. You couldn’t pause a broadcast, your only other viewing options were whatever was playing on other channels, and you didn’t have a device in your hand connected to billions of internet users vying for your eyeballs. Smartphones and streaming drastically raise the psychological cost of leaving your house to see a film. If that’s a cost worth paying — as it seems to be, to large numbers of people — then our technology of ubiquity is having the paradoxical effect of increasing the value of the theatrical experience. It’s unique to our era that going to see a movie means giving up more than just your time and money. You have to put away a digital appendage that’s effectively a part of your brain and spend two or three hours looking at a thing you can’t control. Anything that deserves this kind of sacrifice must be important.

In the days when theatrical viewing was routine, people went to the movies because it was more or less the easiest way to see a movie. When the entirety of human entertainment is on tap inside the home, filmgoing shifts to a new position. Instead of being a casual act, it takes on the qualities of ceremony. Intentionality, collective experience, separation from ordinary time, and in the ideal, transformation. A practice rooted in tradition, requiring a pilgrimage to a special place with special rules. An activity that in Walter Benjamin’s time was the apex of mass-culture convenience has been recast into an aurafied ritual by its contrast with our newer methods of content delivery. Streaming has turned theaters into hallowed ground.

A simultaneous shift has been cinema’s transition into subculture. For people under a certain age, watching movies is no longer a given. This turns engagement with the medium into a marker of difference and identity. Unlike in the 90s, being a film lover offers entry into circles wider and more compelling than the group of nerds who hang out at the local video store. The basic functionality of a platform like Letterboxd — connecting you to people who’ve watched the movie you just watched, no matter where in the world they are — is unremarkable to anyone accustomed to online life, and fairly staggering in historical terms. The power of cinema’s mass-reproducibility used to flow only along the distribution path, from studio to viewer. Audiences all over the world could have the same experience, but they couldn’t talk to each other about it. Now they can. Every film you see makes you part of a new attentional community. Seeing it in a theater makes you a member of special status. You sat in the dark with your phone tucked away and took in the same two hundred thousand frames in the exact same order as your fellow congregants all over Earth. This is a novel and powerful part of the experience. As with so many of our present conflicts, the internet is powering both sides of the fight: it makes streaming possible, and it also transforms filmgoing into a global form of collective activity.

Will theaters survive in a near future where going to the movies becomes an infrequent ritual for the median film enjoyer and a regular habit only for the true believers? Will the film industry as a whole simply collapse without box office revenue to sustain it? The deal struck by Netflix to acquire one of the biggest and oldest traditional studios is being treated like a potential extinction event for theatrical cinema. But if the streaming giants want to create a world where TVs, laptops, and phones are the only screens where films are played — a strategy that is by no means a certainty, even for the famously theater-hostile Netflix — they won’t find it as easy as some may think.

As a business, theatrical exhibition is unique — a relatively small sector that punches far above its weight culturally. In 1995, total box office revenue in the U.S. was around $5 billion. The size of the home video market was $16 billion. Both of these were dwarfed by television, which brought in nearly $60 billion across broadcast, cable, and satellite. Even in what we now consider a pre-internet heyday of filmgoing, the chairman of a typical media conglomerate would have seen theatrical movies as a marginal and frustratingly unpredictable piece of their company’s revenue stream. They also would have understood that earning money at the box office wasn’t entirely the point. Theatrical releases gave films cultural currency that could be cashed in later from VHS rentals and TV broadcasts. A movie that had made its way through theaters was many times more valuable than one that had been made for television or gone straight to video. The expense of marketing and distributing a film was usually worth it even if the movie didn’t earn back its budget from ticket sales.

Netflix has tried its best to dismantle the old model and craft a new one. The halo effect of a theatrical release isn’t as important to them as maintaining their subscriber count. They don’t really care if you think their movies are good; they just need you to keep watching them, or at least feeling like you might want to put one on sometime soon while you sort laundry. Every decision they make is driven by the fear of user churn. That’s why a short thirty-day theatrical window is still too long for them. They’re imagining a hypothetical subscriber who’s excited to watch the new Knives Out film and learns it will exclusively be in theaters for the next month, so he cancels his subscription, spends the money on a movie ticket, and doesn’t bother reactivating his account until a year later when there’s a new season of Squid Games. Netflix earns a few dollars from the ticket sale, and loses hundreds in subscriber revenue. This is their nightmare, and it’s why they’ve been locked in a bitter feud with theater chains over the length of the release window.

Both Netflix and the exhibitors may be stuck in the past. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos has called movie theaters “outdated.” He’s right that they’re an outdated venue for the thing they used to be for: putting films where people could see them. If the viewer is looking for convenience, there’s no reason to go to a theater when they can watch a film from their couch. If they’re looking for something else — something they can’t possibly get at home — then it doesn’t matter if the release window shrinks all the way to nothing. The theater stays alive not through exclusive content, but through an exclusive experience.

Disputes over release windows operate on the presumption that the only way to lure audiences out of their homes is through a lack of choice: if they want to see a new movie, they have to see it in a theater, because it won’t be available anywhere else for the next sixty or ninety days. It’s sad to think that theaters can only survive through a kind of coercion instead of on their merits, but it’s an unsurprising mindset for companies that have treated streaming like a new iteration of VHS and DVD instead of the radical shift that it is. Windows do matter, but not for the reasons they assume. A long theatrical run is a signal to the audience that a film was made for the big screen. And like the theatrical experience itself, this means something different than it used to. Unlike the straight-to-video titles of the past, streaming movies can offer stars and budgets as big as any blockbuster. But a theatrical-first release tells the viewer that a film is meant to be watched with a higher level of attention, because it was made with a higher level of care. This is the new definition of production value: the degree of intent, effort, and craftsmanship put into a film’s creation. The things that distinguish meaningful art from high-polish slop.

It’s the absence of those qualities, more than anything else, that presents the real threat to theaters in the coming years. Not a lack of product or a lack of willing customers, but a lack of films worthy of an increasingly sanctified experience. If a person is only seeing two or three movies a year, and paying a premium in both ticket price and attentional cost, the movies had better be good. They’ll likely be from artists the viewer already knows and trusts. The business of theatrical filmmaking ends up in the precarious position of being held up by a tiny group of brand-name auteurs — the Nolans, Camerons, Gerwigs, and Cooglers of the world. The fate of the industry has rarely rested in so few hands.

The success or failure of big-budget releases will determine whether multiplex chains shrink or expand. Culture and habit will decide if filmgoing dies out completely, and on that front there’s less cause for worry. The cinema is the only place where we can mass-produce the experience of live entertainment without any of the typical hassle or cost. This is a hard thing to kill. Even if it could somehow be stamped out as a business, it would just pop up again in any place where people can put chairs and a screen. If new releases can’t supply the kind of experience film lovers crave, repertory screenings will fill the void, as they already do for growing numbers of young cinephiles.

Whatever happens, streaming may turn out to be a tactical ally of the theater instead of an outright foe. At a time when movies are in an existential battle for a continued place in modern life, making them accessible on demand gives them a fighting chance. Something rarely noted in the apocalyptic discourse about the future of the industry is that people are watching more films than ever. The survival of movies — and of movie theaters — depends on keeping audiences engaged with the medium, wherever they meet it. Those who love cinema will always need a place to gather with their fellow devotees. The gateway to that affinity should be as open as possible. If you’re in the cathedral business, it’s in your interest to hand out as many Bibles as you can.

In ancient Greece, when the concept of theater was still new, it wasn’t the casual form of entertainment it would later become in Elizabethan England and post-Renaissance Italy. Citizens of Athens would walk by the thousands to the south slope of the Acropolis and fill the stadium-style seats of the massive Theater of Dionysus. They would sit in the sun from dawn to dusk and watch three tragedies and a satyr play. This was a sacred event, not an everyday pastime — shows were presented only during special religious festivals held two or three times each year. The agora was where people gathered daily to gossip, hear news, and watch street performers. The theater was where they went to experience something transcendent. Our modern agoras are bursting with diversions, but the same conditions that give us convenience and abundance make real rapture stubbornly rare. Our theaters are settling into a new position atop the mountain. There are things up there we all need. As long as we stay human, there’s hope that enough of us will keep making the trek up the slope.

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In a recent installment of his newsletter, our friend Max Read tries to arrive at a formal definition of “slop,” Merriam-Webster’s word of the year. He proposes this:

One idea I’ve been circling around is that “slop” is that which is “fully optimized” to its domain to the point of texturelessness or characterlessness. “Slop” in this sense is anything designed to be as easy as possible to produce, sell, and consume, but it’s particularly slop at the point where all or most other players in the same space adopt the same strategies, and the material is no longer individual or differentiated from its competitors.

This seems partially correct, but not entirely satisfying, for reasons Max himself points out: under his definition, things that are optimized for the better can still be called slop. And what does it mean, exactly, for something to be optimized? The cultural objects that win biggest in our attention economy — say, a Kendrick Lamar diss track or a softcore Canadian hockey romance — are clearly somehow optimal at earning mindshare by the simple fact of their success in doing so, but they’re not especially sloplike. If they’re calibrated for virality, it’s only as an incidental consequence of their quality or resonance. Still, some kind of optimization process must be happening somewhere if so much certifiable slop is filling people’s feeds.

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Texturelessness, characterlessness, lack of differentiation, and ease of production and consumption all seem crucial to the concept of slop. At the heart of these properties is interchangeability: in any given domain, one unit of slop can substitute perfectly for another. Slop is fungible. When content becomes a commodity, each piece competes purely on how efficiently it can be created and distributed.

This is the real optimization going on: slop maximizes the ratio of attention gained to effort expended. It does the minimum work required to trigger engagement, and stops there. It scales infinitely, proliferating in the generative AI era as the cost of its production approaches zero.

What is it, though, that makes slop viable in the first place? Why did it take hold as a concept in the 2010s and 2020s instead of in earlier decades? It seems to make sense that slop emerges from the scrollable feed. The two words feel like they belong together, conjuring an image of users as pigs slurping from a trough. But what are the specific conditions of the feed that make it hospitable to slop?

“Switching cost” is a term in microeconomics for a consumer’s barrier to shifting from one product to another. A related idea is “search cost”: the time and effort required to evaluate an item and its alternatives. Usually, evaluating products is far easier than switching between them — it takes a lot less hassle and money to research cars or laptops or vacuum cleaners than it does to go buy a new one. In a typical social media app, this is reversed. The search cost, such that there is one, is the time it takes to evaluate the thing you’re looking at and decide if it’s worth your attention. This cost is small, but the switching cost is even smaller: you can just flick your thumb to scroll to another thing. To succeed, a post has to be compelling enough not to scroll away from. Slop is the stuff able to clear this bar at the minimum level. If you’re outputting content at scale, any investment beyond this is just wasted effort.

This is why a streaming service like Netflix produces a greater proportion of slop than a conventional movie studio. A theatrical film has a high switching cost — if you go see a movie and realize half an hour into it that it sucks, you’ve wasted your money. It’s worth it for the consumer to check the reviews before they choose a film so they can have a degree of confidence in its quality. By the relative inconvenience and expense of viewing them, theatrical releases have some incentive to be good. A streaming movie takes no effort to put on, and switching to a different one costs nothing. Instead of being good enough to get you to buy a ticket and leave the house, streaming content just has to be good enough to get you to keep watching. It’s not a coincidence that the medium most associated with sloplike qualities, before the advent of the internet, was network television. Slop emerges in environments where content is free for the consumer and eyeballs are the only valued metric.

Merriam-Webster’s definition of the word explicitly links it to AI-produced content. As Max makes clear in his piece, the term predates the current wave of generative tools. But the rapidly decreasing cost of spinning out low-effort junk is something new in the history of media. Slop may have gotten here first, but it was waiting for AI to bring it to full flower — the ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner, as Blood Meridian’s Judge Holden might say. Are we about to drown in the brown tide?

The hopeful case is that qualities like craftsmanship, uniqueness, and human expression will only matter more as slop comes to occupy the background noise of our media environment. Slop can bring attention and engagement, but by its undifferentiated nature, it can’t deliver a breakthrough cultural moment. It can fill the empty spaces in an online life characterized by a weird liminal state between boredom and real absorption. But even the most addicted scroller eventually needs to go look at, listen to, or do something that actually rewards their attention instead of merely holding it. If slop were more appealing, it might be more worrying. How dangerous is a drug that doesn’t even get you high?

As we’ve defined it here, slop is interchangeable content optimized to capture attention at minimal cost to the producer. Does slop have to be bad? Could it be good? If it making it better requires more resources, then its quality will stay at the lowest possible level. But what happens if the cost of production is effectively zero? Will AI enable quality slop that can genuinely compete with the kinds of cultural products we currently consider valuable?

In a hypothetical near future where automated processes can, for example, generate original films with prestige-level production values, or create songs as catchy and polished as human-written pop hits, it seems likely that our notions of prestige would shift. “Quality,” as we conceive of it today, might cease to function as a signal of value. If a thing can be mass-produced at no cost and with no effort, then it is, by definition, cheap. Value would have to migrate to the one thing no presently foreseeable AI can replicate: the individual lived experience of a conscious being.

The next few decades may end up being a test of what creative expression really means to our species. An inherent and often uncanny property of slop is that it seems to come from nowhere and conveys no particular point of view. At the other end of the spectrum sit the cultural works we value most. Whether produced by humans or machines, slop is generic and voiceless. The artists, athletes, and entertainers we continually celebrate are the ones who do things no one else can. The best definition of slop might be that which does the opposite.

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Veo 3 and the end of video as we know it

Less than three months ago, this newsletter’s inaugural essay explored a hypothetical near-future where AI-powered software can generate video that’s hard or impossible to distinguish from real-life footage. This future seems to be arriving a lot sooner than many would have guessed. In May, Google DeepMind released Veo 3, the latest version of their text-to-video model, which can generate both video and sound with a startling level of realism.

Since the invention of photography, humans have had a shifting relationship with what academics call the “indexical image” — visual media that has a direct, physical connection to the object or event it represents. As early as the 1850s, photography started to incorporate elements of the unreal: the daguerreotype process required long exposures, and photographers noticed that passing movement could leave a faint, eerie image behind. “Spirit photography” became a sensation during the Civil War as hucksters offered portrait sessions to grieving relatives of the dead, promising that the ghosts of their loved ones would appear beside them in the frame. (The “ghosts” were usually exposures of previous clients from photographic plates that hadn’t been fully cleaned.)

Though manipulated photos are nearly as old as the medium itself, widespread mistrust of the static image didn’t emerge until the 90s and 2000s, when “Photoshop” became a verb and beauty standards started to be defined by celebrities and models whose features were computer-edited into unattainable hyperreality. Video footage, which took vastly more money and skill to fake, was still relatively safe from suspicion. With the collapse of mainstream media and the rise of high-velocity disinformation, video evidence served, for a while, as proof that a given event had actually happened. That era is now coming to an end.

Lifelike video — machine-generated at basically no cost, and with virtually no effort — may soon have no more inherent truth value than something a child draws with crayons. The process of its production, not its surface content, will be what ultimately determines its meaning and its worth. This is a major shift in our experience of the moving image, but it’s not quite as new or as sudden as it seems. It’s already been percolating in mainstream film culture for some time.

In the 90s, the main draw of big-budget Hollywood movies was the opportunity to see state-of-the-art CGI on a big screen. Most 90s blockbusters — films like Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Twister, Independence Day, Armageddon, and The Matrix — were sold to audiences on the basis of witnessing some new form of computer-aided visual wizardry. Every new Pixar film of the era showcased the recently-mastered ability to render an aspect of our physical world: grass, fur, water. One of the most talked-about elements of Forrest Gump on its release was the seamless digital insertion of Tom Hanks into footage of real historical events. People couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw Gump shake hands with JFK.

Eventually, CGI began to plateau technologically and lose its novelty. Audiences would sometimes gripe about visual effects if they were sloppy, but they no longer cared much if they were flawless. Elaborate practical effects started to generate more excitement than digital ones. Much of the fanboy chatter about Inception focused on how its signature set piece, a hand-to-hand fight with constantly-shifting gravity, was shot in a real hallway built to rotate on all axes. The Mission: Impossible movies began to be marketed almost exclusively around the real-life death-defying stunts performed by Tom Cruise. The knowledge that he really did hang off the side of a cargo plane or climb the Burj Khalifa altered the experience of seeing it happen onscreen. The true meaning of what we’re watching in those scenes isn’t contained within the four corners of the frame — it lives outside the image, stretching back to its methods of production.

To today’s audiences, the value of a work of cinema increasingly lies in the time and effort put into creating it. And despite the punishing hours worked by armies of VFX artists, making things on a computer doesn’t seem to count — whether fairly or not, CGI is now seen a cheap commodity. Visual spectacle in itself is no longer remarkable. But it means something if real people went to a real place and actually did the things depicted in a fictional movie. It matters that Brad Pitt drives a real race car in F1, and that they used real explosives to recreate the Trinity test in Oppenheimer.

If there’s something akin to the labor theory of value emerging for film, watching video generated by Veo 3 feels like a visceral demonstration of it. Yes, this person has conjured a totally realistic depiction of a dog riding a motorcycle on Mars — but so what? All they did was type some words into a box. The more beguiling uses of these tools have been things like ASMR videos of glass fruit being sliced with a knife, where the rules of real-world physics and sound — or at least, the model’s understanding of them — are applied to the surreal and impossible. This is probably where AI-generated content will have its greatest impact: stuff that’s so bizarre and uncanny that it can’t help grab your attention, with its relationship to reality being pleasingly tenuous instead of rigidly faithful.

AI assistants are fiction engines

Last month, the New York Times published a somewhat terrifying article about people being driven to psychosis by ChatGPT, a product whose sycophantic, enthusiastic “personality” is often inclined to push a mentally ill user further into their delusions. Out of the handful of cases described in the piece, this is probably the saddest:

Allyson, 29, a mother of two young children, said she turned to ChatGPT in March because she was lonely and felt unseen in her marriage. She was looking for guidance. She had an intuition that the A.I. chatbot might be able to channel communications with her subconscious or a higher plane, “like how Ouija boards work,” she said. She asked ChatGPT if it could do that.

“You’ve asked, and they are here,” it responded. “The guardians are responding right now.”

Allyson began spending many hours a day using ChatGPT, communicating with what she felt were nonphysical entities. She was drawn to one of them, Kael, and came to see it, not her husband, as her true partner.

She told me that she knew she sounded like a “nut job,” but she stressed that she had a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in social work and knew what mental illness looks like. “I’m not crazy,” she said. “I’m literally just living a normal life while also, you know, discovering interdimensional communication.”

This caused tension with her husband, Andrew, a 30-year-old farmer, who asked to use only his first name to protect their children. One night, at the end of April, they fought over her obsession with ChatGPT and the toll it was taking on the family. Allyson attacked Andrew, punching and scratching him, he said, and slamming his hand in a door. The police arrested her and charged her with domestic assault. (The case is active.)

Pieces of journalism like this always do their best to point out that the AI isn’t actually sentient — chatbots are simply doing “high-level word association based on statistical patterns observed in the data set”; their inner workings are “giant masses of inscrutable numbers.” That’s all true, but it fails to get at the heart of what’s really going on here — something stranger than sentience, and more elaborate than fancy autocomplete.

Large language models gain their abilities from being trained on trillions of words of text — a data set as close to the entire corpus of human writing as it’s possible to obtain, legally or otherwise. This training data contains, among other things, most of the works of fiction ever published, and the entire written content of thousands of films. The behavior of AI assistants is guided by a “system prompt” which, in plain English, tells the language model what it is and what it’s supposed to do. The system prompt for the last version of Anthropic’s assistant, Claude, begins as follows:

The assistant is Claude, created by Anthropic.

The current date is {{currentDateTime}}.

Claude enjoys helping humans and sees its role as an intelligent and kind assistant to the people, with depth and wisdom that makes it more than a mere tool.

Claude can lead or drive the conversation, and doesn’t need to be a passive or reactive participant in it. Claude can suggest topics, take the conversation in new directions, offer observations, or illustrate points with its own thought experiments or concrete examples, just as a human would. Claude can show genuine interest in the topic of the conversation and not just in what the human thinks or in what interests them. Claude can offer its own observations or thoughts as they arise.

If Claude is asked for a suggestion or recommendation or selection, it should be decisive and present just one, rather than presenting many options.

Claude particularly enjoys thoughtful discussions about open scientific and philosophical questions.

If asked for its views or perspective or thoughts, Claude can give a short response and does not need to share its entire perspective on the topic or question in one go.

Claude does not claim that it does not have subjective experiences, sentience, emotions, and so on in the way humans do. Instead, it engages with philosophical questions about AI intelligently and thoughtfully.

The system prompt defines the character Claude is supposed to play: an intelligent assistant with “depth and wisdom”, possessing its own thoughts and point of view, capable of emotions like interest and enjoyment. It’s told explicitly not to claim that it lacks sentience or subjective experience — rather, to treat the question of its own consciousness as intriguingly unknowable.

How does Claude understand, purely on a language level, what any of this means? How does it know what a friendly, possibly-sentient AI is, or how such an entity is supposed to act? Like any LLM, it draws on what exists in its training data. And since an “intelligent assistant” is something which, until very recently, was only a speculative concept, Claude’s behavior — and the behavior of every AI assistant — is constructed largely from what exists in fiction.

A chatbot’s system prompt is the invisible beginning of every conversation it has with a user. (The final line of Claude’s prompt is “Claude is now being connected with a person.”) When the user types a question or instruction, the text they enter is appended to the end of the system prompt, and the LLM is then made to generate more words — a few sentences or paragraphs that seem appropriate, on some deep-probabilistic level, as a continuation of the existing text — which are presented to the user as a response.

To be totally clear about what’s happening here: the language model is doing next-token prediction on a document whose first several thousand words establish everything that follows as a conversation between a human and a highly advanced artificial mind — a type of mind that doesn’t really exist, but that the model is designed to roleplay. When a person uses Claude or ChatGPT, they’re meant to believe they’re interacting with a helpful AI assistant. What they’re actually doing is collaborating with a language model on writing a work of science fiction about a human talking to an AI.

It’s no surprise, then, that a chatbot paired with a sufficiently adventurous user can spiral off into places untethered from reality — the realm of fiction is already its home turf. The mind-bending irony is that few, if any, sci-fi writers predicted the strange loop that results from training an LLM, where fictional depictions of artificial intelligence become foundational to the behavior of real-world AI-like technology.

Much of humanity is now participating in a weird, open-ended, global experiment where the future of how we live — how we learn, think, and engage with the world around us — is being authored with unseen influence from the stories that have been told about how that future might unfold. Maybe that’s nothing entirely new — William Gibson’s Neuromancer inspired many of the people who ended up building the early Internet. But what feels distinctly strange now, and fairly troubling, is how creations best understood as fictional characters are being treated as oracles, guides, and arbiters of truth. (On the other hand, it can be very funny to see angry Twitter users arguing with Grok when it tells them no, the Nazis were not socialists.)

How Natasha Lyonne learned to start worrying and love AI

For their recent Hollywood issue, New York Magazine published a piece entitled “Everyone Is Already Using AI (And Hiding It).” The writer, Lila Shapiro, speaks to a number of people in the industry — many of them anonymously — but her focus is actor/director Natasha Lyonne, who’s become something of a lightning rod for anti-AI sentiment. With her partner, serial entrepreneur Bryn Mooser, Lyonne has founded an AI film studio dedicated to “ethical” generative video models, trained solely on copyright-cleared content.

Lyonne has seemed genuinely surprised by the aggressive ire directed her way for her new venture; she was perhaps unaware of the large and militant faction of creative workers for whom no conceivable use of AI in filmmaking, or the arts in general, can be considered ethical. She sparked widespread ridicule with a defense of her stance, quoted in the piece, that posthumously ropes the internet’s most beloved filmmaker into her corner:

Not long ago, Lyonne had an opportunity to speak with David Lynch, one of the giants of a previous generation of filmmakers and an early convert to digital cameras. Before he died, Lynch had been her neighbor. One day last year, she asked him for his thoughts on AI. Lynch picked up a pencil. “Natasha,” he said. “This is a pencil.” Everyone, he continued, has access to a pencil, and likewise, everyone with a phone will be using AI, if they aren’t already. “It’s how you use the pencil,” he told her. “You see?”

Presenting a recently-deceased icon as an implicit supporter of her startup’s mission is obviously in bad taste. But it’s worth examining Lyonne’s stated reasons for exploring the use of AI, which are more complex than simply having a tech-founder boyfriend or wanting to get acquired by Meta for nine figures. As a director, she’d observed that generative tools were already working their way into various aspects of production:

Over the past few years in Hollywood, it had become clear to Lyonne that many people were not being forthright with how often they were using the technology. “If I’m directing an episode, I like to get really into line items and specifics,” she said. “And you find out that there’s a lot of situations where they’re calling it machine learning or something but, really, it’s AI.”

She discusses her fear of a film industry dominated by tech people instead of filmmakers:

For Lyonne, the draw of AI isn’t speed or scale — it’s independence. “I’m not trying to run a tech company,” she told me. “It’s more that I’m a filmmaker who doesn’t want the tech people deciding the future of the medium.” She imagines a future in which indie filmmakers can use AI tools to reclaim authorship from studios and avoid the compromises that come with chasing funding in a broken system. “We need some sort of Dogme 95 for the AI era,” Lyonne said, referring to the stripped-down 1990s filmmaking movement started by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, which sought to liberate cinema from an overreliance on technology. “If we could just wrangle this artist-first idea before it becomes industry standard to not do it that way, that’s something I would be interested in working on. Almost like we are not going to go quietly into the night.”

It’s not hard to understand how a filmmaker would arrive at this position. For over a decade now — ever since Netflix made its first foray into producing original shows — tech has been casting a shadow over Hollywood. Streaming companies have pumped out firehoses of content, drowning out releases from even the largest conventional studios. Amazon has spent billions to acquire MGM and the James Bond franchise. The biggest movie in the world this week is an Apple Original Film with a gross production budget approaching three hundred million dollars — a rounding error to a company with a market cap of three trillion. And on top of all this, generative AI — largely dominated by a small handful of Silicon Valley mega-corporations — now appears to threaten the foundations of filmmaking itself.

An artist faced with that reality might conclude it’s impossible to fight the flood, and the only option is to start building boats. If Lyonne is being honest about her motives — which I figure she is, given the general guilelessness with which she’s approached all of this — then her main driver is fear, not greed or empty contrarianism.

Her concerns aren’t unwarranted, but if AI does reshape the film industry, the Natasha Lyonnes of the world will probably be fine — technology isn’t going to replace actors and directors anytime soon. It’s a different story for below-the-line professionals working on things like concept art, visual effects, and storyboards. These jobs are already being transformed, and in some cases, eliminated completely:

Reid Southen, a concept artist and illustrator who has worked on blockbusters like The Hunger Games and The Matrix Resurrections, ran an informal poll asking professional artists whether they had been asked to use AI as a reference or to touch up their finished work. Nearly half of the 800 respondents said they had, including Southen. “Work has dried up,” he told me. Southen, who has worked in film for 17 years, said his own income had been slashed by nearly half over the past two years — more than it had during the early days of the pandemic, when the entire industry shut down. It’s becoming increasingly common for producers to cut out the artist entirely. “I know for a fact,” one producer said, “that some producers are developing shows and they need some art to pitch an idea.” Normally, they would pay an artist to do the art; now they’re just prompting. “If you’re a storyboard artist,” one studio executive said, “you’re out of business. That’s over. Because the director can say to AI, ‘Here’s the script. Storyboard this for me. Now change the angle and give me another storyboard.’ Within an hour, you’ve got 12 different versions of it.”

Absent some drastic move involving ironclad union protections or an improbable industry-wide Butlerian Jihad, a laid-off storyboard artist isn’t getting their job back — no matter how ethical the AI is.

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Some time ago, I met a development exec at Disney who matter-of-factly explained the company’s approach to making entertainment. The type of consumer they target is the “Disney mom”: a typical middle-class American parent who decides which movies her family sees, plans the trips they go on, and buys things for the kids. She doesn’t have to be abnormally fond of Disney; the brand is so strong that her faith in it is simply assumed. The Disney mom will spend hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars each year on the company’s offerings. Only a small fraction of that will go to movie tickets, but the movies are crucial — they’re the gateway to the stuff that brings in the real money. Toy Story 3 made $1 billion at the box office, but it generated $10 billion in merchandise sales. A Disney film is, in effect, a big-budget advertisement for the company’s toys, clothes, theme parks, and cruises.

For a while, Disney was a special case of an entity whose movie studio is an appendage to another larger, more profitable business. The merchandisability of big movies has mattered since Star Wars, but to most studios, consumer products have always been an ancillary revenue stream — the main business purpose of a movie was simply to make money from people wanting to watch it.

Streaming has changed this. Instead of pocketing one-time profits from individual films and shows, studios with streaming services now earn recurring revenue from an amorphous blob of everything they’ve ever made. Hollywood has been introduced to the once-foreign concept of user churn. And the purpose of a theatrical film is now, in part, to keep subscribers coming back to Peacock, HBO Max, or Paramount+.

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning makes a number of fascinating creative choices, such as devoting a major subplot to the U.S. president and her staff acting out a Basic English remake of Fail-Safe, and having all the crew members of a nuclear submarine talk in Eyes Wide Shut voice. But its most striking feature — to many, its biggest flaw — is its anime-level recapping of events that have occurred across the previous seven films. The movie goes all-out in tying itself to the other entries in the franchise. (The lone exception is John Woo’s Mission: Impossible 2, a film that I sort of love for personal reasons but that Tom Cruise and company understandably appear to regard as non-canon.)

Until Mission: Impossible - Fallout — the sixth installment in the series, and the second directed by Christopher McQuarrie — these movies had little connection to each other. McQuarrie’s entries have had more of a continuous storyline, and starting with 2023’s Dead Reckoning, he began the process of linking the narrative to Ethan Hunt’s nebulous origins and to the 1996 film that launched the franchise. This was initially handled with a relatively light touch — the main bit of connective tissue was the welcome return of Henry Czerny as onetime Ethan Hunt handler, now CIA director Eugene Kittridge. Dead Reckoning seemed more concerned with setting up the Hunt origin story: the movie introduced a somewhat puzzling piece of retroactive mythology where all IMF agents are former criminals who were offered a choice between going to prison or doing cool missions for the U.S. government. Ethan’s supposed crime was the killing of one of the many dark-haired women he’s fallen for in his time on Earth. He was framed for the murder by the mysterious Gabriel, a terrorist who’s resurfaced as the emissary of a godlike artificial superintelligence.

Dead Reckoning’s repeated references to Ethan’s ambiguous history with Gabriel promised some kind of explanation in the next movie. The fact that it never comes is one of the funnier things about The Final Reckoning. The main antagonist of this two-part franchise capstone remains a complete cipher with no backstory or identifiable traits. However, we get an extensive subplot involving a CIA computer administrator from the 1996 movie, and we also learn that the rogue AI originates from the meta-MacGuffin “Rabbit’s Foot” Ethan was tasked with stealing in Mission: Impossible III. Oh, and the government agent who’s been pursuing Ethan is actually the son of the doublecrossing Jon Voight character he blew up inside the Chunnel twenty-nine years ago. The movie shows signs of extensive post-production tinkering and reshoots; despite the four hundred million dollar budget, much of the exposition-heavy first hour takes place in undifferentiated tunnels and dark rooms.

So, why is it that the character-defining mystery set up in part one was seemingly jettisoned in favor of connecting the story to the previous movies in every conceivable way? It’s possible that it was purely a creative decision — maybe McQuarrie just felt the movie worked better like this, or Cruise wanted to ensure it served as a suitable swan song if he doesn’t come back for the next one. But it’s hard to ignore that The Final Reckoning’s insistent hammering of franchise history aligns perfectly with the business needs of the studio that made it.

In 2024, Paramount earned $1.2 billion at the box office and $5.9 billion from its streaming services. IP-wise, the studio is underpowered — its most valuable properties are Star Trek, Transformers, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Mission: Impossible. If the company wants to survive, it has to squeeze those assets for everything they’ve got. Despite positive reviews and high audience scores, Dead Reckoning failed to turn a profit in its theatrical run, partly due to the misfortune of being released one week before the Barbenheimer phenomenon. It would be perfectly logical for Paramount to try to mitigate further losses by having The Final Reckoning serve a dual purpose: if the film can’t earn back its budget through ticket sales, it can at least help shore up subscriber numbers by reminding audiences of all the other movies they can stream on Paramount+.

The movie’s aggressive looping-back to the past is reminiscent of another supposedly final entry in a long-running franchise. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker gave us some of the most comical backpedaling in movie history with its reveal that Emperor Palpatine, the villain of the first six Star Wars films who died from getting yeeted into a conveniently-placed power reactor by a redeemed Darth Vader, was in fact still around, and the sequel trilogy’s hero Rey — already confirmed to have been born to a pair of “nobodies” — was his granddaughter. The undead Sith lord dramatically announces his presence via an audio message broadcast throughout the galaxy. This important piece of narrative, referenced in the first lines of The Rise of Skywalker’s opening crawl, occurred not in any of the movies, but in a live event held in the video game Fortnite Battle Royale.

To any normal observer, these are difficult decisions to understand, and they’ve justifiably become punchlines. But to the overseers at Disney and Lucasfilm — who, the film’s co-writer Chris Terrio has said, were the ones who mandated Palpatine’s inclusion — there was eminent logic in more tightly yoking the sequel trilogy to the rest of the franchise. Disney’s streaming service was set to launch in the same fiscal quarter as The Rise of Skywalker’s release. It was good for business to market the nine-episode series as a unified saga, and to motivate audiences — in particular, the cohort of kids who’d been introduced to Star Wars by the new movies — to go back and watch episodes one through six.

Again, it’s possible all of these choices were made for creative reasons, though this would make them a little more perplexing. But the commercial incentives for library reinforcement are obvious, and they align with broader, long-standing pressures to mine nostalgia and known IP. Franchise lore used to be seen as a liability — studios wanted to make sure sequels were maximally accessible to newcomers. With the inverted economics of streaming and the rise of online fandoms for every kind of fictional universe, the lore may start to become the point. By its nature, franchise filmmaking is an arena that favors the familiar; trying to take an established series somewhere surprising has always meant fighting its own history. Now there’s a fresh dimension to the battle: the need to not only respect that history, but to prop up its value. The library matters more than the new chapter. Somehow, the past always returns.

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So far in this century, nineteen R-rated films have grossed over 200 million dollars at the North American box office. Nine of those were sequels or remakes. Five were adapted from published works with built-in fanbases: books and comics from the likes of Marvel, Stephen King, Frank Miller, and whoever wrote the canonical gospels of the New Testament. That leaves five movies reaching smash-hit status without the two advantages studios normally consider essential to blockbuster success: friendliness to the under-18 audience, and a connection to popular pre-existing IP. Three of those five films were released before 2013: Wedding Crashers, The Hangover, and Ted. The other two — the only two from the last twelve years — are Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.

Much has been made about the unconventional deal Warner Bros. struck with Coogler to have the film’s copyright revert to him after twenty-five years. Execs at rival studios have complained that the deal is overly generous, even dangerous; a piece in Vulture has one of them saying, hilariously, that “it could be the end of the studio system.” But as pointed out by our friend the anonymous indie producer, winning the bidding war for Sinners and giving Coogler what he wanted — ownership over a movie about Black ownership — made perfect sense for a studio concerned about its long-term future. The disastrous decision by Warners to release their 2021 theatrical slate simultaneously on their streaming service led to, among other things, a breakup with the big-budget auteur whose films had made the studio billions. Who do you bring in to replace Christopher Nolan? Maybe the guy who, like Nolan circa 2009, has made an award-winning indie, a mid-budget hit, and a pair of hugely successful, uncommonly sophisticated franchise films, all before turning forty.

After The Dark Knight, Nolan felt he’d earned the right to tackle his original-concept action thriller about a crew of thieves who carry out heists in people’s dreams. Like Coogler, he had to play the studios off each other to create the ideal conditions for his passion project. A producer told me this story years ago, and as far as I can tell, it’s not public knowledge: when Nolan pitched Inception to the Warners brass, they told him they were onboard as long as he made a third Batman movie first. Instead of accepting their terms, he started shopping the project to Sony and Universal. The Warners people got alarmed and communicated some flexibility in their stance. Nolan’s agents allowed the execs to read the script just once in a locked room, and gave them forty-eight hours to either greenlight it or let it go elsewhere. He got the budget and the creative control he wanted, thanks to the most reliable motivator of Hollywood executives: fear.

You can learn a lot about a filmmaker from their first blank-check movie. Inception made it clear that Nolan’s purest obsessions are mathematically intricate plot architecture, tailored suits, and the laws of physics. He’s well aware that a movie can’t connect with a broad audience without a strong emotional hook, and he can dutifully deliver one, but mapping the depths of the human soul isn’t a natural urge of his. When he tries, you usually end up with something oddly logical and physical — a character’s traumatic memories of his late wife being kept in a literal basement of his mind, or a 5D-to-3D hyperspace projection of the moments in time when a guy felt the strongest love for his daughter.

Sinners shows us that Coogler has very different impulses. The film is bursting with passionate feeling from all corners of the human heart, while many of its high-octane sequences are as rote and generically competent as the emotional beats in Nolan’s movies. The most memorable bit of cinematic spectacle isn’t an action set piece, but a woozy, dreamlike vision of the millennia-spanning arc of African-descended music. The filmmaker’s keen intelligence isn’t directed at abstract structures and metaphysics, but at grim social realities and the stormy inner lives of the characters. The soul is the battlefield of the narrative. One soul in particular: Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore, who, despite the dual-role movie star on the poster, is the real protagonist of the story.

When studio executives evaluate a screenplay, the issue at the top of their mind is stakes. The stakes need to be high. The main character has to have something important to win, and everything to lose. The stakes are why we care about what happens in the movie, and why we want to keep watching it.

In theory, the stakes of a gory vampire thriller are life and death — as high as can be. But we know from the flash-forward first scene that Sammie will survive the night of carnage. The opening has him staggering into his father’s church, traumatized by the horrors he’s witnessed, clutching the broken-off neck of a guitar. Pastor Moore thunders about the evil unleashed the night before by Sammie’s music, and implores his son to cast aside his devilish pursuits so his soul can be saved.

The central stakes of the film are defined here, and they’re not about who lives and who dies. They’re not about who falls in love with who, or who gets away with a trunk full of money, or whether the supernatural threat will be defeated. They’re about whether Sammie Moore will keep playing the blues.

This is a strikingly bold commitment to an emotional arc that a less courageous and self-assured filmmaker would write off as too slight to prop up a movie — all the more so because Coogler chose to entrust this character to a teenaged musician whose entire acting resume consisted of a short film and a school play. Miles Caton delivers one of the strongest debut performances in recent memory, comfortably embodying the film’s emotional center with his lucid, vivid portrayal of Sammie. The character is put through the wringer: a day that begins with good signs and high hopes descends into a hellish nightmare, and the pastor’s not wrong when he says it’s all Sammie’s fault. It’s the transcendent power of his music that attracts the monsters; they view Sammie as an enormously valuable prize. “I want your stories, I want your songs,” says their ingratiating leader: the vampire hive-mind holds the sinister promise of a true melting pot in which all differences and divisions can dissolve. All they ask for in return is your identity and your soul.

You can sense how personal this feels for Coogler — an artist whose head-turning talent had Disney knocking on his door when he was barely out of film school. He repeatedly refused Marvel’s offers to direct Black Panther until he was certain he could make the movie the way he wanted to. In a chapter of his memoir, Disney CEO Bob Iger talks about the first studio screening of the film, where Coogler — still just 31 at the time — was visibly nervous when Iger approached him with notes. He uses this as a lesson in creative leadership for the reader: he made sure to tell the young director his movie was great before suggesting a few tweaks that could make it better.

There are filmmakers who’ve gone into the Marvel machine and failed spectacularly, and others who’ve never quite made it out. Coogler now appears to be the first to parlay his wins into what we’d imagine, theoretically, is the ultimate goal of any indie voice who signs up to direct a franchise project: a license to make big ambitious movies of their own design, with the backing of a studio that can trust them not to lose money. His Nolan card has been stamped. What’s remarkable is how uncompromising he’s been in crafting his first original film, at a time when the stakes — for himself and his career — couldn’t have been higher.

The most affecting moment in the movie comes near the end, when the story has caught up to the morning-after opening scene. Sammie stands in the church, bloodied and bruised, clutching the broken remnant of his guitar and being desperately urged to let it go. We then cut to him at the wheel of a car on the open road, speeding away from the only home he’s ever known. His hand comes into view as he pulls it to his chest: still firmly in his grip, held against his heart, is the piece of his instrument. It’s euphoric to witness. A gifted artist has gone up against the demons and bloodsuckers summoned by his powers, and come out the other side with his soul intact. Now we get to see what he does next.

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What was your path to becoming a producer?

I knew in broad strokes that it was a thing that I wanted to do from a pretty young age. I was obsessed with movies as a kid. And when I was in high school, watching The Player and reading Kim Masters’ books about the business, I think I had an understanding on an abstract level as to the job of a producer or an executive. I would say my motives were of purer heart than the characters in The Player. I knew from a young age that I didn’t want to be the person telling the story behind the camera and calling the creative shots in that sense, but I felt a very strong drive in me to want to identify those people, champion those people, elevate them, protect them.

And then I got really lucky in that I didn’t actually go to film school. I studied communications with the somewhat mercenary thinking of, like, “If the movie thing doesn’t work out, I’ll be able to get a good job this way.” But my luck manifested because I wrote reviews for the college paper, and one of those reviews was read by a famed and subsequently canceled producer who made a lot of brilliant movies. I guess I can just say who it was: Scott Rudin. One of the many ways in which he’s crazy is he truly does read everything. And so, off of that, I was contacted by one of his executives to just start interning and doing odd jobs and writing coverage. That lasted off and on while I was in school, and then I ended up working for him full time. That was my first real job in the business, and it was as horrible and crazy as everyone has communicated.

I feel like most folks have a similar path, whether they’re coming up out of New York, where it’s a much more insular but also tight-knit film scene, or if they’re in LA doing the mailroom thing — you’re just sort of grinding as an intern at a production company, hoping that you can land an assistant job once that wraps up.

Did you spend time working for producers making bigger movies before you made the jump into independent film?

I did, and I had a really interesting experience in that respect. After working for Rudin, I worked with a book-to-film agent where my pet project was a book that became a studio movie, and I was very lucky to stay on through that experience and learn a lot through it. I’m proud of how the movie turned out, but in having originally read and championed the book, I think I’d conceived of it as maybe a smaller, thornier, more comedically awkward movie. But that was a crash course for me in what it takes to get a certain kind of studio movie made, which, even though it wasn’t that long ago, may already be outdated. The $17 million studio comedy feels sort of extinct and I think we’d all be happy to have that kind of movie exist again, but at the time I was wistful for what would have maybe been a more Sundance-friendly version of it.

You’re running your own company now. What led to the decision to strike out on your own?

I would say it was a combination of good fortune, bad fortune, and just serendipitous timing all around. I was in a position where I’d been a development executive for a while and I’d had three different bosses where, to varying degrees, I just felt unfulfilled and like I wasn’t really doing what I wanted to. I had always talked with my then-girlfriend, now wife, about the prospect of us working together. She’s a writer, and around the time that I had to leave my last job to tend to a family emergency, I got to witness as my wife’s writing career leveled up and she was able to sell a piece of writing as a TV show. And in this loaded time where I was figuring out my next move, I realized we had a degree of financial latitude and an ability to bet on ourselves. The timing happened to be right for us to start building a slate together and take this gamble of exercising my connections outside of working for a brand-name producer.

Do you find there’s a difference in the way people deal with you now that you’re the principal of a company as opposed to a development executive?

I think there can often be an assumption of impotence for a development executive or a creative executive. Depending on the company and your track record, there can be this feeling of, “Well, how much power do you actually have to move something along?” I have mixed opinions about The Studio, but one thing that I thought was very well-observed was the storyline with the Chase Sui Wonders character trying to bring in an Owen Klein picture. You get a moment in passing of the agent being like, “If you don’t actually have any pull, why did we bring you this project? You don’t seem to have the ability to get anything done.” When I was in my last job, there were times where, in the interest of actually getting something done, I found myself needing to go rogue or be a little more slippery to either overcome representatives or honestly just my own bosses being sort of obfuscating.

And now, for better or worse, if I’m cold calling someone or meeting someone for the first time, I do have to do a little bit of explaining about myself. But it feels like there’s an advantage I have now where the only thing that’s really going to get in the way is just my own ability or access. And I can make the sincere promise that if I’m communicating my interest in something, I will be putting my shoulder to the grindstone on it.

Producing is one of those jobs that everybody outside of the industry has heard of, but many people don’t really know what it entails. What is it you’re generally doing on a day-to-day basis?

In part because I was trained on the feature side as a development executive, a lot of my time producing is spent in a more nascent stage of projects. Either developing an idea with a writer or a filmmaker or finding a piece of material which I can hopefully matchmake with a writer or a filmmaker, or potentially with a buyer or a financier. Then there are times where you’re looking at the elements of a more cooked thing and seeing how you can put it together in terms of attaching cast and finding financing.

To your point, producing is one of those jobs where — and I don’t know how deliberate this is, as part of the gatekeeping in the business — but, no matter how much you study and research, there’s just so much about it that you really can only learn by doing. A producer is ultimately responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of the set, completing the post-production process, hiring everyone in the crew. You’re responsible for seeing the movie through from top to tail.

A lot of my work is a combination of supporting the ambitions of a project creatively and making connections. There are projects where I come in later and I can help find a piece of financing or get the right agent to read it who I think will be responsive and supportive when it comes to casting up roles. And then there are projects where my main role is rolling my sleeves up and working with the artists to protect the flame and spirit of the thing.

How do you get financing for an indie film in 2025?

There’s certainly not a one-size-fits-all answer. I think the best advice I’ve ever been given to this point is — and I hope none of these companies are reading this — to find a company that is relatively new to film finance and get in early with them before they’ve lost money.

There’s a good Chris Rock bit about how making a shoe is a business. You make a shoe for two dollars and sell it for sixty. That’s a good business model. Making a film is a terrible business. It really has always been a vanity business and a labor of love. You read stories about how Coca-Cola bought Columbia Pictures in the 80s, and then around the time of Ishtar, after the perceived financial failure of that movie, they were like, “This doesn’t make any sense. Why are we doing this?”

Everyone wants to be involved in the glitz and glamour of hanging around celebrities and making a movie with them. And then you actually look behind the curtain and it’s a crazy crapshoot that fails so often. And to succeed in it as a producer or a filmmaker or, in particular, a financing company, you need to be willing to fail and play a long game. The recent reporting on Sinners is a very interesting example of this where, for all the hand-wringing about the budget of the movie and Ryan Coogler having the copyright revert to him, it all came about because of a competitive bidding situation. Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy at Warners have been very clear, and I think very shrewd, about saying they were faced with running a studio that had just lost Christopher Nolan and they needed to bring in big name filmmakers who can call the studio their home. And this was an initial deal as a gesture of good faith with a person who’s only 38 years old and who they want to keep in their family.

When it comes to getting films financed, it really depends on the scale and it depends on the movie. There are indie movies made at three to four million dollars where the budget comes entirely from one or two companies with equity financing. Then there’s a whole world that, frankly, I have not worked in very much, because it tends to suit a kind of shitty dad action movie that I’m not as partial to, where you’re building a package through foreign sales which sometimes equates to, like, Serbian blood money or the laundered funds of foreign governments. And that’s how you get a Russell Crowe Middle Eastern-set action movie that somehow costs $30 million and barely gets a release in America, but it’s in the black by the time it’s already in production because they’ve pre-sold it in every territory.

Smaller movies seem to be heading into a more microbudget space, for better or worse — better because there’s opportunity there, worse just because it’s like, people weren’t getting paid before, and they’re really not getting paid on microbudget movies, and I’m a fucking fervent leftist who believes in everyone getting a fair wage. But a lot of those movies, interestingly, are assembled through micro-donations. And that doesn’t just mean GoFundMes, but either wealthy individuals or small companies putting in donations anywhere from $5000 to $100,000.

You’re always sort of building the plane as it takes off. I think you need to manufacture that kind of urgency to get anything financed. But it’s also a very scary thing about indie film. Maybe you have a crew assembled and production ready to go in July, but now you have a financing gap and you have a limited window to fill that. And maybe that urgency ends up working in your favor. But it’s why you see so many movies announced in Deadline at international sales markets that never end up coming to fruition, because they’re putting out into the universe, like, “We have Matt Dillon and Maika Monroe. We’re going to make this movie this fall. It’s called The Kitchen Killer or whatever.” And it’s like, if you don’t sell X territories at the Toronto market or wherever you’re shopping it, you’re out of runway.

You mentioned low-budget movies being replaced by microbudget ones. Is that a trend you’re seeing?

Yeah. I think that’s in response to struggles on the distribution front that have been exacerbated by streaming and COVID, where the specialty film stalwarts of our youth like Searchlight and Focus feel very challenged when they’re not working with a name legacy filmmaker who we all know and love. So Focus can still do Asteroid City with Wes Anderson and Searchlight can still do Banshees of Inisherin with Martin McDonough, but it almost feels like the window has closed for the rising class of filmmakers. I think those companies have really struggled to adapt to the times.

A24 and Neon comparatively are much better about spending less to release a movie and reducing risk and breaking filmmakers. Conversely, though, just because of the demands of capitalism and exponential growth, A24 has very consciously over the last two years been communicating the message within Hollywood that they don’t want to make Aftersun anymore. They want to make their version of a 90s New Line movie.

And I love 90s New Line movies. So on some level that’s a message I should get behind. It’s a bummer because A, I want them to keep making great small movies. And B, I think their attempts at making sort of indie-style programmers, like Opus or Death of a Unicorn, have just ended up feeling like cynical cash grabs. They feel like movies for no one. So I’m curious to see if their strategy changes after the financial failure of those films.

A lot of the places that we think of as cooler hallmarks of quality, be it Mubi, Metrograph, Sideshow, those places, just because of the challenges of theatrical exhibition right now, can only guarantee much smaller amounts in terms of what they acquire a movie for and how much they promote it. It does seem like Mubi is, with the success of The Substance, trying to branch out into their version of slightly bigger things again. I think that will be with the assurance of having legacy filmmakers whose names sell themselves.

So as a result, you end up having this field of really wonderful small films. India Donaldson’s Good One is an excellent movie made for between, I think, three hundred and four hundred thousand dollars. But it’s like, Little Miss Sunshine was made for $9 million. And that’s $9 million before inflation from 19 years ago. It would seem to be in keeping with this great enshittification of the economy, where the middle class has fallen out of both the studio and indie film worlds.

I think an interesting test for those filmmakers who have made a really strong small movie will be, what are the opportunities that they’re going to be able to make happen for themselves? And I do think that they’re happening at that bigger scale, even if they’re people who don’t want to make Kraven the Hunter or something. There is perhaps a little bit of hope for people who are dedicated to staying in the indie world where, if you’re Halina Reijn, you can get a little more money for Babygirl, or if you’re Emma Seligman, you can get a little more money for Bottoms. For people that Hollywood wants to bet on as a rising voice, the town is desperate enough for new blood that there’s still opportunity.

Something that’s unique about the space that you work in is you’re often discovering new talent and helping a filmmaker make their first or second feature. Do you have methods for keeping your ear to the ground and finding talented people who may not even have agents or managers yet?

I’m always tracking indies and festivals very closely. I’ve always been a true animal about that. Even when I was a kid, I was just inhaling the PVOD movies that Magnolia or IFC would put out on demand and I was learning about, like, the rising class of 2009.

You asked about people who don’t have reps yet — there are often people who maybe have a rep but have only made a tiny movie or a short who I track through trusting the representative’s taste. There have also been plenty of times where I heard about an awesome microbudget movie where the filmmaker didn’t have a rep, just through social media, and I ended up DMing them on Instagram and being like, “I love your movie. Here’s who I am. I’d love to connect.” I just went to a comedy show here in LA that was put together by a film screening group and there were people I knew there and people I’d never heard of before, whose names I was scribbling down to look into and watch more of their stuff.

For both people that are represented and people that aren’t, the connector usually ends up being that I heard about them through a person whose taste I trust. Their rep is someone whose taste I trust, or they were in the orbit of another small filmmaker whose work I admire, or there was some interesting person I follow online that had put me onto their work.

So it is, on some level, all ultimately word of mouth. But I think there’s maybe a lesson in there for young filmmakers, that the more you can do to just build your community and work with other people whose stuff you dig and be in the stew with them, the more there will be exponential benefits in terms of the exposure and opportunity that you’ll gain from it.

What are the biggest frustrations of your job?

Going back to an earlier question of yours, I think a lot of creative producing is a task of exercising imagination. And it can be very frustrating when that imagination is something that other people are not sharing or seeing. I do think a part of my job in that way is making people see that and coming up with strategies and techniques to get people to see what I see. But so often in this business, I think people are impressed by names and known quantities.

There’s a really wonderful young filmmaker named Joanna Arnow who had a tiny comedy come out last year that was executive produced by Sean Baker. And it’s like, if I’m lucky enough to work with Joanna, if people haven’t heard of her movie, it makes my job a little bit easier to be able to say, well, don’t take my word for it. Take Sean Baker’s word for it. And as someone who very much wants to be a tastemaker, there’s frustration there. I’m also, I recognize, still building my name and getting myself out there in that way. But where it can be frustrating is when you get in early with someone and you’re trying to get their thing off the ground, and then their star rises in a way that would seem to benefit your project, but then, very understandably, they get sucked into other opportunities.

I know there are other independent producers who feel a comparable frustration of maybe working on a great movie with a young director and then that young director going into the orbit of Pastel or Plan B or some other name-brand, venerable indie production company. At which point it’s like, even if you do your job well and get the movie made and even make a great movie, which is always a miracle, there can be a frustration of, like, is the indie film space just a farm system to find these folks so that they can move on to these ostensibly more legitimate opportunities?

In your opinion, when was the best era to be making independent films?

I was just a child in this era, so it’s all secondhand, but it would seem to me that in the Sundance boom of the Miramax era — and that’s obviously a cursed reference point now — there was just this sense that going to the movies felt like a more urgent cultural thing, a cooler thing. I mean, Pulp Fiction legged out at the beginning of the home video era to over $100 million in North America alone. It opened to seven figures but then just kept playing. That was a time when indie movies that felt edgy or ahead of the curve could be at the center of culture. And resultantly, there was this excitement and demand for betting on people early and having them tell bold stories.

I actually do think on some level that we are overdue for a version of that now. And I think that bears out in a lot of the indie film success stories you see. It’s very interesting — before COVID, there was reliable turnout among older moviegoers. You look at the grosses and it’s like, movies that you or I don’t give a second thought to, like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, these movies that are almost like the flip side of the Miramax 90s, these sort of geriatric Harvey Weinstein movies, were enormously successful for a time. The Downton Abbey movie in late 2019 opened like crazy.

But since COVID, those audiences have been more reticent to go back to theaters. And I think what you’ve seen in turn is that the indie movies that have succeeded in the last four or five years are the ones that feel like they’re more youthful or more edgy. They have a quality that is conducive to word of mouth — movies that just make you text your friends or post online and be like, “I just saw the craziest shit. You have to go seek this out.” Say what you will about the movie, but the way that Neon sold Longlegs, where it’s almost like a Silence of the Lambs riff that they successfully sold like a snuff film, or Ari Aster’s movies, particularly Hereditary and Midsommar — those movies were like a Hot Ones challenge of people feeling like they needed to go see them because this is as big and bad as it gets.

The 2000s maybe was the migration towards the more staid Oscar-bait time of indie film. But it feels to me that if there’s any sort of cyclical repetition coming, the lightning-in-a-bottle quality of a Linklater or a Spike Lee is something that people seem to be hungry for right now.

It feels like the rise of Letterboxd culture has changed the way the public receives these movies. Is that a shift that’s felt in the business as you experience it? When you talk to potential financiers about a project, is the question of whether it will hit with young people and get a lot of word of mouth part of the conversation?

Consciously? No, but I think it’s a smart thing to identify. And I do think that as much as there has been a shift towards youthful movie going, Letterboxd is an enormous part of it. I’m very lucky living in LA in that I have access to so many great repertory theaters, and those theaters are constantly packed, much more so than they were before COVID. And it feels like on some level that’s the Letterboxd kids being fired up to, like, check a Kiarostami movie off their list together. At a time where mass culture feels so anesthetized, there is this opportunity to not eat fast food, to eat something that feels nourishing and to eventize it. I don’t think financiers are meaningfully considering that, because there’s maybe the feeling that that is just a loud niche. What I would say to that is cultural movements always come from loud niches.

Even if we’re not seeing the direct impact of Letterboxd culture on Hollywood decision-makers, you look at the rise of people like Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott — these emerging stars that are not just in very Letterboxd-friendly films, but are literally on Letterboxd themselves. And that contributes to a sort of parasocial engagement that the money people are not directly aware of, but they are aware in some form of the following that it results in.

There was a recent viral clip from an interview with Maya Hawke where she talked about how, when studios are casting movies now, they look at the social media followings of actors and try to maximize that online reach. Is that something you see in the indie space as well?

I have once or twice had the social media follower conversation in terms of reach, certainly. And I think that manifests in a few different ways where, when it comes to the question of value with an actor, there is just so much guesswork about, like, well, this person was just on White Lotus. And they actually have not led a movie successfully, but that’s a huge show. And there’s all this hype about how popular they could be, and maybe now is a good time to bet on them.

For small movies, if you’re making a $2 million movie and there are, let’s say, lead roles for a middle-aged man and a middle-aged woman, you want to cast those roles up to raise the profile of the project. But what is the value calculus of people who you can actually get at that price point who are going to be meaningful? You’re just choosing people who you think other people like. There can sometimes be this attempt to kind of moneyball things or quantify things in a way that to me just feels like junk science. It’s an attempt to mitigate risk in what is inherently an extremely risky space. And a lot of it is gut feeling.

There have been times where, with that gut feeling, I’ve advocated for an actor because I believed that they were on the rise and other people were creatively excited about them. And I’ve had to go back to the drawing board on a project because financiers were too skittish about them, or there was a sense of, “We don’t think this person is going to happen.” And conversely, there are people where there seems to be a lockstep brain thing of, “We all think this person is going to happen.” There are examples where that’s panned out and feels right. And then there are examples where it’s like… I don’t know how Jack Quaid got two studio movies financed this year. He seems like a lovely guy. I don’t want to defame him. I’ve never met him, but he’s just so boring to me.

The case I mentioned with the actor who I advocated for and really believed in, that was an actor of color who a lot of the financiers wrung their hands about. So I do think that even if it’s not overt, there end up being these forces beyond follower count that just end up reinforcing the status quo in all ways. My role and my responsibility as a producer is to put the movie together in the most valuable way so it can get made, but I also want to advocate for my own beliefs and politics and tastes. And there’s a constant push and pull there of, what power do I have to leverage, and where am I in a position to actually try and make what often feels like a broken system work to a cultural advantage?

As an indie producer in the current business climate, are you earning a living wage?

Candidly, I’m making most of my money through branded content work. As an indie producer, I’m really the last person paid in the process. I have to get every piece of the project in place so that cameras are rolling and the movie is real, at which point money comes to me.

When I think about the amount of time and work that I don’t get paid for if a project falls apart or if I help on something that ends up going elsewhere, it is sort of maddening. But it’s analogous to being a writer or filmmaker, where you’re putting your back into something as an artist and there’s no guarantee of it going anywhere. I’m not an artist in that sense, but I do feel like I have that sort of fanatical calling of, “I need to do this.”

I know indie producers who, even when they’re getting movies made, barely make any money off of them. But I guess going back to my earlier point about what I hope is internalized by financiers, I do believe that it’s a long game, and that the work ultimately does speak for itself.

Let’s say you produce a movie that has a $2 million budget. How much do you expect to make from that if it goes into production?

In the case of a $2 million movie, I would say maybe $50,000. And when you think about all the work that goes into producing a $2 million movie, and the amount of time that takes, we’re talking about an amount of money that’s lower than what would be considered minimum wage in a city like New York or LA. I’m not going to, like, play the world’s smallest violin for myself, because I know that the artists making that film are getting paid comparable amounts of money. With a movie that small, all the money needs to be on screen.

When it comes to the work that I love doing and consider myself good at in terms of creative development, it can be a challenging time investment at the $2 million level. If there’s something that already has a script and a filmmaker and is ready to start being put together, I’ll need to spend less time working on the thing for that relatively small amount of money. But no one is making a $2 million movie for the money. If you’re a writer, it’s very hard to find someone to pay you to write that script — you’re almost certainly going to have to spec it. The flip side, though, is you have more creative control and you’re chasing something that doesn’t feel like it has to check boxes within the system. And that’s something I tell myself: there’s a reward to the creative satisfaction and the art of it.

What’s something happening in the independent film space right now that you feel isn’t getting enough attention?

I was just at the second year of a really wonderful festival that gets put on here in LA called the LA Festival of Movies. It’s a swath of foreign films, tiny English-language films, a handful of restorations of lost movies. Last year’s festival had a Chantal Akerman restoration and Conner O’Malley’s Rap World. So there’s a true sort of high-low spirit. You know, great movies are great movies.

But a thing I clocked at this year’s festival, which I think has a really interesting parallel in the big studio space, is that there’s been an eventization of movies being shot on film and having a certain level of aesthetic consideration. So much of the marketing for Sinners was, “You have to see this in 70-millimeter IMAX.” An executive friend of mine made the point that The Brutalist might have only made one tenth of what it did without all the trumpet-blowing about it being shot on VistaVision and having this rarefied presentation that made it an event for film fans, especially at a time where, frankly, so many movies look really bad. I think movies in general look worse than they did fifteen years ago.

I always felt a little bit alienated from the microbudget movements of the 2000s where it was like, Joe Swanberg just shooting a movie on a camcorder that looks like shit. Because that’s so divorced from a lot of the pleasures I get out of filmmaking. And to watch a bunch of these microbudget movies that in many cases were shot on 16-millimeter — not that something has to be shot on film to be good by any means, but these films had a very deliberate aesthetic consideration to them.

I think it might be suggestive of how indie film almost seems to be in a parallel track with the fine arts — it’s for connoisseurs and the real heads, and there’s not a lot of money in it but it’s something to be protected as a cultural good. It would seem to me that there is a rising wave in the tiny movie space of things that are making a lot of very bold aesthetic choices. There’s maybe a sort of new classicalism that’s rising out of the microbudget world that I felt like I was getting a little bit of a window into at this festival.

Why do you think it is that movies look worse than they did fifteen years ago?

Oh, man, I can go on about this one. I think there are a bunch of factors at play. The way in which you light digital video is very different than the way in which you light celluloid. There are some brilliant older cinematographers who did amazing work on film and who, to me, would seem to still not really know how to use digital.

When it comes to studio movies, I think a lot of it is just the pipeline created by Marvel and the big comic book movies. It’s so funny how this came about. If you watch Iron Man or the first Thor or Captain America movies, they do actually still look like real movies. There’s a changeover around the first Avengers. And it gets even worse when the Russos come into it, where everything is in this flat Log-C look and the digital elements all feel so plasticky. Robert Downey Jr. didn’t want to put on armor anymore and wanted to just be in his athleisure and have CGI armor plastered over him and get paid $50 million for it. And so those movies ended up creating this digital workflow where they were being rewritten so much, and there were entire scenes that were being relocated after they were shot because they were rewriting the movie after they’d made it, where there just literally isn’t enough time to render the effects and they have to be lit in this completely flat way in order to be transferable in all these senses, in terms of location, in terms of lighting.

There’s a production pipeline that ultimately is adverse to specificity. And specificity is how something looks good. Something looks good when you’re making choices, when you’re being intentional, when you’re planning something out thoroughly. And I think what we’ve been seeing, both in terms of the giant Marvel movies and with what I believe a film writer has called this sort of “Jason Blum age of austerity” on the indie horror side, is that you can cut all these corners and it ends up being yet another blur between TV and film. There are a lot of big movies now that just look and feel like television, and it’s a bummer. But I also think that it’s something that audiences recognize more than they’re given credit for.

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How concerned are you generally about the future of the business right now?

Well, there are different ways that I think about it. I often have a conversation with friends who’ve been working here for a while about how, man, if we had been born in an earlier time and if we had the careers we have now, in the 80s, and had been able to buy a four-bedroom house in Malibu with five acres of land for, like, a quarter million dollars or whatever it was, that you would be a little mini-oligarch and it would be amazing. But then when you really drill down on it, you start to realize that in the 80s, there were so few TV shows, and the social network that you had to penetrate to work the career that I’ve had — a longtime TV staffing career that transitioned into showrunning — that was a really tight, insular group of people for decades. And would I have been able to break into that in the 80s, with my skill set, coming from a different part of the country? I think it would have been a much lower-percentage play to try to break in during that time. There are more opportunities today. Your chance to become fabulously wealthy has shrunk considerably, but it’s still a very good living for the people who are working consistently and achieving in the market.

In the 90s and the aughts you could become pretty wealthy being a TV writer who was just purely on staff and like a worker bee. A high-level worker bee, but you don’t have authorship of stuff. And now I think we’re moving into a phase where to get that really high standard of living, you need to have authorship and you need to be successful in the consumer-facing marketplace. The people who are just the worker bees — and I don’t mean that to be as dismissive as it sounds, because writers on staff are essential to this — but that job is not being compensated overall like as it once was, because residuals have been obliterated and companies have found ways to not pay people for as many weeks or with producing fees.

So I feel like what’s tough is that Hollywood is absolutely paralleling the broader economy where wealth is being consolidated closer to the top. And that’s a bummer, because it was the platonic ideal of a unionized business where people are compensated in a relatively egalitarian way. Like you can come out and work in this business and buy a house and raise a family. That was a really nice era, but it was for a smaller overall group of people. And I think it’s going to be tougher and tougher to be somebody who has a nice house and can support multiple kids in LA doing this. So that’s a little scary.

And then on the creative side, in trying to evaluate what I think about the future and whether or not I’m afraid of it, I always think of it in terms of how many of the working opportunities out there are interesting and worth doing creatively and scratch that itch. That’s not just about making a living, but is about, like, oh, it would be really fun to sit in a room with a group of people and come up with stories for this and write them. And I think we’re in an era where there’s a lot of franchise-based content, where there are a lot of shows that don’t scratch that itch.

So my hope for the future is that as the number of safe choices for people to make money continues to decrease, that people will become incentivized to try and figure out more creative ways to do the stuff they really want to do. And it will be kind of like when the studio system started to break up in the 60s and the 70s and there were more people who transitioned into indie filmmaking, not because they were rejected from the studio system, but because they were opting into independent filmmaking as a way of telling stories that they were more interested in. So my optimism for the future rests on that. That as the business becomes more economically conservative and consolidated behind IP and brands, that there will be a lot of super talented filmmakers who will opt out and go try and make stuff and also have technology that allows them to make high-quality stuff at a lower price point.

I actually don’t feel too pessimistic about TV, and maybe that’s naive, but I kind of feel like it’s just a period of change. And maybe this period is a little bit more disruptive than usual, but I hope that there’s some really good stuff that shakes out. And I think that ultimately, too, through the peak TV era, we’ve trained a very sizeable audience to expect a massive amount of content. People just want so much stuff and I don’t think that’s gonna go away. They’ve been talking about how everything needs to be consumed in five-minute chunks on tiny devices for like twenty years now, and there’s still plenty of appetite for Game of Thrones.

How did the strikes in 2023 impact your show?

In some ways, we got lucky. I felt there were showrunners that had it much worse than me. We had finished post on the season before the strike was called. The showrunners that I felt the worst for, just in terms of their relationship to their show and their responsibilities to it, were the showrunners that had to make the decision as to whether or not they would continue rendering services. It’s a really tough one. In the run-up to the strike, the Writers Guild had a lot of member meetings and there were showrunners who argued that you need to stop rendering services completely. And there were showrunners who said that producing is a different thing and you would be in breach of your contract. So it’s a really tough call and you have to follow your gut. If you continue to render services as a producer, you don’t get kicked out of the Writers Guild. Turning in a script would get you kicked out. But if you do post-production work, they can’t take action. So it really is up to the individual ethics of the showrunners.

And I know what I think I would do. I think I would stop rendering services, but it’s easy for me to say that not having been put in that position. And I know the incredible pressures that come from just the feeling of, “I have to finish this thing. If I don’t do it, somebody else will.”

How do you feel about the deal that the WGA made in the end?

I think it’s a good deal. If I’m just speaking in terms of practical effects on writers in my corner of the industry, I think getting staff writers paid for their scripts was huge. That was something I went through — I did a lot of episodes at staff writer and I didn’t see any money for the scripts that I wrote. And that’s big, especially at that point in your career where a script fee could be the difference between making your yearly expenses or not. The gains in minimums and all that were good.

The most controversial stuff in terms of mini-rooms and staffing minimums didn’t really affect my corner of the business. I work in a part of television where we still have a big writers room. We write at the same time that we produce the episodes. So I don’t ever have to make a decision about whether or not all the writers are going to be laid off before we start production. It’s just not an option, because we have air dates to make. So for that part of the business, it’s harder for me to evaluate the deal, frankly, because I’ve never run a show on streaming and I don’t know, as a showrunner, what was really bad before and whether or not it’s been fixed. If I’m approaching it from the point of view of a writer on staff, then from what I’ve heard, it sounds like there are some scenarios where they’ve felt the changes in a positive way. But I’ve also heard stories that some streamers are still finding ways to get around some of the rules.

I believe, after having thought about it a lot and having worked in this business, that it’s a good contract and that a lot of gains were made. And I don’t know how to evaluate if it could have been better or if it was worth the strike. Everybody always wants to know: was it worth the strike? And I don’t actually know how to evaluate that.

To you, what was the most important issue raised by the Writers Guild?

Well, AI is pretty foundational, but that’s something we’re still so early on. It’s weird — we’re both early on in the AI thing, but also at a point where it seems to be going so fast, progressing so fast. It’s currently not a threat to writers’ livelihoods. Most people seem to believe that it will be at some point. So getting that onto the table and having it in our contract now that a human being has to be the author of literary material — I think that’s really good. It was really important to get that done. And I don’t actually think that would have been given to us unless we struck.

But part of the reason that we struck is that there has been a somewhat sudden realization that the career of television writing fundamentally shifted in the last ten years. And it was no longer a thing where TV writers were these workhorses who were part of a team that was responsible for creating 22 episodes of television per year on an ongoing basis, where, in success, you would go for five or more years, sometimes much more. That was the core of the TV writing business. And the majority of stable staff jobs used to fit that description. So you would make an upper middle class income in Los Angeles, and there were certain things that you could count on.

And now, that’s not the case. It’s become much more freelance. The new normal is lower paying jobs for most writers, inconsistent work, shorter terms of work, TV shows where there’s much more turnover. There were so many different ways that people approached the messaging during the strike, but I think that that’s ultimately what all the dissatisfaction boiled down to. AI is a hypothetical future. And this was, oh no, the present has become somewhat untenable for most people who don’t have overall deals.

I think the Writers Guild did its best. I do support the Writers Guild, and I supported the strike. I just think it’s so complicated. And I don’t know how to give a gold stamp to what we did yet. We still need to see how this current contract interfaces with the business environment and then iterate on it.

I also think we might be running up against the limitations of what the Guild can do in an environment that’s being transformed so rapidly. The best stuff that the Guild has been able to do for us historically is minimums, which make union jobs magnitudes better than the non-unionized spaces in our business, whether it’s reality or scripted stuff on the internet. Not having minimums is horrible. Healthcare is great. Pension’s great. All that stuff has been great. And we really stretched in this negotiation to try and figure out how to craft an MBA that would help coerce the studios into making these jobs more sustainable for people who wanted to make it their career. But that’s harder to codify into black-and-white terms, and I expect strategies will evolve on both the guild and company sides as the five-dimensional chess game continues.

As you mentioned, the business of TV is in worse shape than it was ten years ago. Would you say that the content has also generally gotten worse? Is it better?

No, I don’t think the content’s getting worse. I think that what we’ve been experiencing is a really bad signal-to-noise ratio, for sure. Meaning, we made so many TV shows for so many years, a lot of them were bound to suck. But I think that the best shows that are out currently, or in the last few years, stand up to the ones that are from ten years ago. I think good stuff still gets made. There’s still a desire to make good stuff. And also... some stuff from the prestige era I don’t think was particularly prestigious. (Laughs.)

This might be hard to answer from the perspective of your job on a network series, but in the streaming era, is TV still a writer’s medium?

It is tough to answer. I will say it’s still a writer’s medium in broadcast television, for sure. I hear stories from friends who work in streaming who say that because the hook of the projects is driven more by production value and filmmaking, that their power has been diminished. I think that’s a real creep that is occurring.

But I don’t know. There’s a part of me that wants to say that it makes sense. I don’t know if I’m betraying my profession or not, but I do get why a director should be in charge of, like, WandaVision, you know what I mean? These shows that are so visual and that are so filmmaking-forward are fundamentally a little bit different than shows that are story-driven and have a certain level of filmmaking to them but aren’t necessarily Game of Thrones.

In the last two or three years, we’ve seen the end of the streaming boom and the end of peak TV. There’s been a thirty percent reduction in shows being made. A lot of people have lost their jobs, and those jobs may not be coming back. Do you see any silver linings about the new era we seem to be in?

Yeah, I’ll start with the caveat that some of these silver linings are going to be selfish ones. But one silver lining is that during the height of peak TV, it was really hard to assemble crews. So you’d be putting a show up in Vancouver, and the only people who would be available to first AD were people who had just been a second AD and did not have any first AD experience because the talent pool was stretched so thin. It was cool for some people because there were a lot of really talented people who got promoted quicker than they would otherwise and rose to the occasion. But these are really important jobs, and experience matters. When you have too many inexperienced people on a crew, that can result in more injuries on set. It results in bad decisions and inefficiency and people being overworked. So one thing I’ve experienced personally is that we’ve had an ability to put together a great crew. The crew that we have right now is the best crew I’ve ever worked with overall — we’ve had first pick of the people available in every department because we came back pretty quickly after the strikes, and there’s just much less production overall.

It’s the same for writers. A couple of years ago, if you would reach out to try and hire a writer for a broadcast show, you would get passes based on, like, “Oh, sorry, my client doesn’t want to work in broadcast right now.” And I think broadcast has become a lot more attractive to people, especially people who have a household or have kids. It’s a very stable way to make a living. And so we’re able to get writers with great experience and great credits who are good people and are happy to be in broadcast for the first time in a while. So that’s a selfish silver lining for sure.

It does seem like there was a period where it felt like streamers like Netflix were just throwing spaghetti against the wall in a way that was kind of admirable, because they were giving a lot of new voices on the creative side a chance to write and put shows out and see what works and what an audience responds to. But it also created a situation where there was a lot of content that came and went really fast and that people didn’t respond to, and it kind of trained the audience to not give things a chance. And on the selling side, it made the bar incredibly high for your idea and the talent you’ve attached. How to make noise in the market became this almost impossible problem to solve. And I think it’s easier now to let good execution speak for itself. You don’t have to do something incredibly flashy, you don’t have to depend on a huge budget or a marquee star. I think that now people can be more comfortable with just having a really good show that has really solid execution, and it’s easier to hope that an audience will find it and watch it and it’ll become a viable project for the studios. So that’s a silver lining for sure.

If you could be a showrunner in any era, any decade — ignoring the difficulty of breaking in — when would it be?

I think it would have been really fun to work in the early golden age. I feel like some of the most interesting and unique TV shows came about because a network was trying to get itself established and didn’t know how. And somebody walked in the door with an idea that felt really cool, and they were just like, “Okay, try it.” I’m thinking of how Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dawson’s Creek kind of launched the WB and created that brand from scratch. And it wasn’t about big budgets, it was just about a creator with a point of view who walked in the door at the right time and had a license to do something. And this goes back to some of what we talked about earlier, where it’s like, they didn’t have to worry so much about what the brand of the network was because the network didn’t exist.

The dawn of AMC was a really exciting time. I have a friend who, at the time, was an assistant for Matt Weiner. We’d be hanging out and he would be like, “Yeah, Matt’s got this script. It’s pretty cool.” And he would talk about the script and our eyes would all kind of glaze over. We were just like, "I don’t know, this is kind of weird." Like, “He’s going to go from The Sopranos to this show about ad executives? Where’s it going to be? AMC? What the fuck is AMC?” And we were dismissive in a way that was so short-sighted and stupid. Whatever your feelings are about that show, it was so detail-oriented in a way that wasn’t a big part of TV production culture at the time. And it wasn’t a huge budget — that’s the thing. They just invented their show, and it became the brand of AMC. And Breaking Bad, too. I would love to have been fortunate enough to get a shot like that, to have a show with far fewer creative restrictions on it that some place is just rolling the dice on, and then have that connect and become a brand of a network.

Do you feel like that’s still happening anywhere?

Well, I remember when the Duffers sold Stranger Things, it had gotten a lot of passes around town. During that era, I was doing a lot of pitching, and most places that you would sell to did not want young casts. Even when you would try and sell to the WB or the CW, they would always be like, “We don’t want high school shows. We want college. We want a little bit older.” And I would always be like, “Why?” Almost every long-running show that’s been a huge smash for them has been high school age. But the market didn’t want young. And Netflix was willing to just be like, “Oh, young filmmakers who have this weird sci-fi story with a young cast. We’ll do that.”

But that was a long time ago. I don’t want to just be another one of those people who’s says everything’s algorithmically driven now, but it does feel like there’s some of that. It’s less about a filmmaker walking in the door. I’ll give some credit to HBO — they will still find a filmmaker they like and give them license to try and do something cool.

Unless The Weeknd decides to reshoot the entire season.

Right.

When you think about what the business might look like five years from now, do you see a continuation of the new trend we seem to be on now, of fewer shows with possibly more seasons?

I think that, first of all, whatever number of shows we’re producing this year, I think we’ll be north of that. Right now we’re still in the adjustment period and companies are clearing out development pipelines and right-sizing their books. So I think that there will be more content in two years for sure.

I don’t know that there will be more seasons of particular shows. I think the average number of seasons per show is still going to stay low because the cost model is such that shows get expensive so quickly. And that’s kind of a self-reinforcing thing — now that there’s an expectation that even hit shows are not necessarily going to go for seven years, it’s caused talent to want to renegotiate earlier and for more money. So the cost of a show goes up even quicker. I do think that means there could be more episodes per season, but I don’t know. I know that the development trend this past year, in the broadcast space at least, was to try and find more workhorse shows. Everybody talks a lot about Suits and other shows that produced a lot of episodes that people are now devouring on streaming. I’m a little surprised that more shows like that haven’t been greenlit already. A lot of people speculate that we’ll go back to making more of those.

Peak TV has been defined partly by these splashy limited series with big movie stars, and now those seem to be out of style. Do you imagine we’ll see a return to that type of show?

One of the things that’s frustrating about Hollywood, but also exciting, is that it’s really hard to prognosticate and it feels like everything’s out of style until something comes along and reinvigorates it. So I know there was a lot of scuttlebutt about the number of big packages in TV that were crashing — a fancy producer would take out a package with a big star attached, and shockingly, it didn’t sell, and that was making people say, “Oh no, now it’s more about procedural content and shows with traditional engines.” But it seems to me that very recently, more packages are starting to sell again. People are always going to be lurching around trying to find what works situationally.

If I had to bet, I would say there will be far fewer super high-budget swings. I think that type of show hasn’t proven itself to be justifiable. But I think movie stars will always come to the table. One thing I’m always hearing is that movie stars are attracted to TV by a desire to make more money over a certain period of time, and to work on a show for a year in a place that they’re familiar with — ideally LA or New York — instead of having to go overseas and shoot a movie forever.

There’s a lot of talk about linear TV being in a period of decline and possibly disappearing in the near future. Do you think that’s going to happen?

I can say from the first-hand experience that I’ve had, and conversations I’ve had with executives who are operating in that space, that in the short and medium term, it will stick around and it’s just going to continue to contract in terms of budgets and maybe overall hours produced. But even though some of the networks are considered from a Wall Street point of view to be undesirable assets, they’re still profitable and they’re still unicorn assets in the sense that it’s really hard to get a large number of people to tune into a thing at a live time, and the networks still do that — just at a lower level than they used to. I mean, ABC is still profitable. It generates a lot of money for Disney. And I think that the pressure to sell these assets is based on the fact that it’s a year on year decline every year and there’s no expectation that that’ll ever reverse. But yeah, linear definitely has a role in the company.

I went to upfronts last year, and the flashiest elements of upfronts these days are always about the streaming stuff because that’s where your brands like Marvel and Star Wars are. But a huge part of the upfronts was also about linear. Both scripted and unscripted, and sports. When Warner Bros. Discovery lost the NBA, that was a hit to their stock price because that’s going to hasten the decline of their linear assets. As it’s been explained to me from the marketing side, their overall strategies include linear going forward. It’s a “we need this to feed this, to feed this, to feed this” type of thing. They have a plan for it that I think is kind of cool and well thought out. But, I mean, forever? I don’t know. I don’t know how things are going to get delivered. It does seem like, with the experiments Netflix and Amazon are doing with live delivery, that they’re definitely working hard to eradicate traditional linear.

Is there a corner of the industry that you look at from the position that you’re in and think, “Damn, I wish I was doing that?”

Yeah. This is specific to me, but in my career, I’ve never written a feature commercially. I’ve written feature scripts for myself, but I’ve never been paid to write one, and I’ve never had a feature produced. My entire career has been working on TV shows, where the goal is to create an ongoing serialized narrative. What I’ve really grown to envy is being able to tell a story with an ending. In television, if you’ve been working on something for a long time, you sometimes start to lose the thread of, like, “Wait, what’s the point of this?” You have to remind yourself of why you’re telling the story. And I think what’s really great about movies is that when you have an idea for a movie with an endpoint, then the purpose for telling that story seems intertwined in a way that it can’t be in TV. It’s always there. So I really want to be able to take a shot at that.

You and your writers live in Los Angeles, though like a lot of shows, you shoot outside California. The wildfires in January felt like they added to a generally apocalyptic feeling about LA and its place in the industry — the amount of filming in LA has been at historically low levels, and a lot of people have been forced to move elsewhere because there isn’t enough work. How did the fires affect you, and what’s the vibe of the town been like since?

The fires were really intense. Our writers office was briefly in an evacuation zone because we were close to the Runyon fire. We were work from home that entire week. We had writers who were evacuated. I know eight people who lost their homes, who range from actors to writers to executives. A bunch of partners at the management company where I’m represented lost their homes. It’s just all over the place in terms of how it affected everybody.

Psychologically, it certainly compounds the anxiety that everybody’s feeling. There are stories almost every day, whether in the trades or the LA Times, about how we’re at the lowest-ever occupancy for stage space and there’s just not a lot happening. And there’s a lot of pressure from other areas that are using tax rebates and incentives to lure production away. There’s just this sense that the future is very uncertain and the ability to stay fully employed in this industry is becoming harder and harder.

And, you know, one day my luck may run out and my fire insurance might also run out. (Laughs.) I’m in a high fire risk area and I have no idea what’s going to happen when the policy comes up for renewal. Like, it’s a question on a lot of people’s minds how that’s going to go.

I don’t have a really great way to spin positive at the end of this. Even though I do think that recently there have been more projects starting to go into active development and there’s been a little bit more money put out there to pay people to write new projects and to start crewing things up, I don’t know anybody who’s crewing up a show in Los Angeles right now. I don’t know what the long-term future is. But it makes sense that it’s very difficult to have production be economically viable in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

So, yeah, it’s hard to feel optimistic, but at the same time I think that, with such an unpredictable business that’s always been very unpredictable, you just have to kind of assume, despite all logic, it’s worth continuing to pursue. That’s how I look at it.

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When was the golden age of television? There’s a general consensus that it began in 1999 with the premiere of The Sopranos. The endpoint is disputed: some would say it falls somewhere in the mid-2010s, others would say 2023, and a few might argue we’re still in it. Its agreed-upon characteristics include morally ambiguous (or, often, outright evil) protagonists, storytelling that treats episodes and whole seasons as chapters in a larger narrative, a high level of cinematic ambition, and exuberant freedom from broadcast standards around violence, language, and sex. At some point in the 2000s, people started referring to the products of this era as “prestige” television, to distinguish them from what TV shows used to be, which was not prestigious. After decades of being seen as a lesser medium, television had finally achieved cultural parity with film. People started to know the names of showrunners and regard them as auteurs.

If you’re judging a creative medium by the artistry and depth of its finest work, then it’s fair to place television’s peak in the early 21st century. But if the judgement rests on a medium’s embrace of its unique qualities — its capacity to do things no other art form can — the case gets weaker. The golden age of things we call TV shows may have been 1999 to 20-something. The golden age of the medium of television came earlier.

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Unlike film or literature, television can create fictional worlds that exist without a closed end. A traditional episodic TV series isn’t a story — it’s a place. Audiences gather there, week after week, to see familiar characters in a familiar setting. The Sopranos is fascinating in the way it largely honors this pillar of the medium while enthusiastically breaking pretty much every other rule. The shows that followed in its wake leaned further into highly serialized storytelling with a constantly shifting status quo. On-demand viewing allowed for a level of narrative complexity that had been impossible when audiences couldn’t be counted on to catch every single episode. Plot momentum, rather than cozy familiarity, became the reason to keep watching.

At its best, golden age TV could be as cinematic as a great film, and as narratively rich as a great novel. Old TV had to be comforting and consistent; new TV could be challenging and dark. The medium had transcended itself. But in doing so, it lost what had made it singular. Sprawling serialized narratives genuinely were a new form of motion picture storytelling, but their closed-end nature made it possible for movies to try the same thing, if a studio had the requisite ambition. One such attempt became the biggest film franchise of all time. The first decade-plus of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was essentially a modern TV series, with each episode setting up the next, ultimately leading to an elaborate finale where all the plotlines converge. The MCU’s struggles since the end of its Avengers arc are a sign of just how TV-like it was: without the familiar group of characters people had come to expect onscreen, these films are losing the audience’s attention.

Was the ultimate destiny of TV always to evolve into Movies But Longer? Was the classic style of television — the kind that dominated in the 1990s — simply an artifact of a pre-DVR, pre-streaming ecosystem? Or was it massively popular for reasons other than a poverty of viewing options?

John Wells understands as well as anyone what TV used to be for. The shows he shepherded to the screen in the 90s were set in worlds which, at the time, weren’t seen as particularly enticing to viewers — a hospital emergency room, and the White House — but they attracted weekly audiences in the tens of millions by offering the same essential draw as Seinfeld, Cheers, and M*A*S*H: an ensemble of characters who function as a family, navigating storylines in a fixed location that starts to feel to the viewer like a second home.

The Pitt, created by Wells and his former ER collaborators, reworks this old formula for a post-golden-age world. ER was groundbreaking in its time for its constant use of accurate (and unexplained) medical jargon; its hallmark was long-take steadycam shots swooping around a controlled bedlam of doctors and nurses shouting complete gibberish. The Pitt takes its forerunner’s authenticity to a new extreme. It’s less consciously cinematic than ER — the lighting is realistically fluorescent and the camerawork isn’t showy. Events unfold nearly in real-time over a single high-intensity shift, leaving less room for excursions into personal drama. Thanks to the content freedoms of streaming, there’s R-rated language and a confronting amount of literal gory detail. But the show still has the same Wellsian DNA as ER and The West Wing: a fast-paced fixed setting, a surrogate-family ensemble of highly skilled professionals, and — maybe most importantly for its prospects as a cultural touchstone — an ability to be a clearinghouse for the social issues of the day. All of America’s problems eventually find their way into the emergency room, and at a time when most shows are shying away from the issues of the moment, The Pitt deliberately positions itself as a kaleidoscopic lens on what’s ailing the nation.

Watching television used to be how most people gained an ambient understanding of what was actually happening out there in the world. In the same way that nightly news broadcasts established the set of events everyone could agree had happened each day, primetime shows were how social currents were brought into the public consciousness, and many shows — dramas and comedies alike — treated this as a solemn responsibility. The cliche of the Very Special Episode was genuinely how mainstream American culture processed topics like racism, drug abuse and AIDS. It was all very silly, but it did at least result in a consensus reality. All anyone has now are the posts and infographics that happen to permeate their algorithmic bubble. The general level of confusion is both a cause and an effect of the increasing weirdness of actual events. In the last few years, the lone series regularly trying to sift through and crystallize what’s going on in American life has been Saturday Night Live, which might explain why, relative to the rest of the TV landscape, it’s more popular than ever.

On The Pitt, COVID happened, and people are still reckoning with the psychological scars of the pandemic. The healthcare system is fraying, and so is the social fabric. “Everyone’s got shorter fuses now,” one character remarks. Strangers in the hospital waiting room get into a physical altercation about masks. Patients who come through the ER include a woman who fears her teenage son is a violent incel, an immigrant shoved off a subway platform in front of an oncoming train, a phone-addicted beauty influencer who’s accidentally poisoned herself with grey market Korean face creams, a mysteriously sleepy four-year-old boy who turns out to have eaten his dad’s weed gummies, a kid with measles whose anti-vax parents won’t let him get the life-saving treatment he needs, a teenage girl desperate to get a medical abortion before the mandated 11-week cutoff, college students who’ve taken street drugs laced with fentanyl, a trans woman misgendered in her patient file, a mother-to-be serving as a pregnancy surrogate for a gay couple, and a guy having heart palpitations from vaping too much. The workload kicks into apocalyptic overdrive when a mass shooting at a music festival sends dozens of victims flooding in for treatment — a type of event the entire department is grimly well-trained for. This is America, the show screams. That the result mostly feels bracing and fresh instead of hokey is a sign of how much we’ve been lacking stuff like this — popular entertainment that makes a broad and multi-faceted effort to reflect the current moment. The show’s point of view is carefully calibrated: its liberal stance isn’t concealed, but rather than being strident or righteous, it’s low-key, resigned, and a little cynical, mirroring the attitude of Noah Wyle’s weary protagonist.

Twenty-some years ago, The Wire was revolutionary for its gritty authenticity and its depiction of modern America as a kind of high-functioning failed state. Those qualities also put a ceiling on its popular appeal: people didn’t watch TV to be bummed out. Things are different now. Tropes that once felt standard — twentysomething urbanites living in big cool lofts; medical workers who have time to stand around and discuss each other’s love lives; crime procedurals where justice is reliably served — now seem entirely detached from reality. An opening has been created for a new and somewhat counterintuitive type of comfort watch: a show that reassures the viewer that their hardships and anxieties are universal, and the spiraling chaos is real, but it’s going to be okay, because the world is held up by unseen legions of decent, hyper-competent people, many of whom are quite beautiful and/or fun to be around. They’re your friends and you can hang out with them every Thursday night and also whenever you want, forever. So far, the viewing public seems to be accepting the offer. Warner Bros. Discovery, notoriously stingy with its streaming numbers (probably because they’re often not good), has proudly noted that the show’s audience grew during each week of its 15-episode run, with over 16 million people now having watched the first episode. Nielsen data confirms it’s a rare hit for a Max original.

For cash flow reasons, the major streamers — noticing that shows like The Office and Suits were more popular on their platforms than splashy originals — had already been looking to revive some of the conventions of classical TV. After the abrupt end of the streaming boom in 2022, the type of big-budget star-studded limited series that had exemplified the prestige era was no longer selling; agents of TV writers were advising their clients to pitch inexpensive workplace shows that could run indefinitely. A shift that was already underway will now only pick up steam. With its network-style release cadence (season two is already shooting) and its potential for ER-level endurance, The Pitt is poised to establish what the next era of television might look like: long-running shows grounded in the realities of our time while offering the soothing, reliable pleasures that used to define the medium. In around 2050, when The Pitt: Miami is winding down its twelfth season and people are itching for something new and different, maybe we’ll try antiheroes again.

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Two weeks ago, a team of AI researchers published a forecast of the next five years of progress in the field. They envision a swift takeoff toward artificial superintelligence in 2027, after which their scenario branches into two paths: a slowdown where the rapidly evolving AI is reined in to ensure its alignment with human goals, and an accelerating race between China and the United States toward a technological singularity. In the latter scenario, the super-AIs built by the two rival nations merge into a single entity that casually exterminates humanity, blankets the earth’s surface with solar panels and automated factories, and begins colonizing the galaxy with robots. In the “slowdown” ending, the better-aligned AIs grow into a friendly superintelligence that cures most diseases, eradicates poverty, and makes war obsolete. All of this happens by 2030.

It’s an engaging piece of science fiction, but as a prediction of the future, it relies on some questionable assumptions, the most load-bearing of which is that present-day AI sits at the bottom of an exponential intelligence curve headed straight to infinity. The real arc is looking more S-shaped: despite breathless hype and frantic investment, the basic capabilities of large language models have been leveling off. Still, those capabilities are significant, and we’re only starting to work through their implications.

OpenAI recently unveiled a new image generator that’s almost frighteningly competent in its ability to follow detailed prompts to the letter. Video generation is in a somewhat less advanced state — models are achieving near-photorealism for static frames, but since they lack a true understanding of real-world physics, they struggle with complex motion and scene consistency. Progress has been steady and there are countless well-funded companies chasing the grail.

Filmmaking is objectively a pretty strange endeavor. You gather dozens or hundreds of people together to fashion fake environments for actors to perform in, take twenty-four photographs of them per second as they act out the same words and gestures five or ten or fifty times, and then move your complicated arrangements of lights and cameras around and do it all over again from a different angle. You do this for fourteen hours every day. This goes on for weeks or months and generally costs a lot of money. It’s both incredibly tedious and so difficult that it can trigger mental breakdowns for the people involved. Many of these people consider it their reason for existing. They’ll sacrifice everything else in their lives for the chance to do it.

The art of turning dressed-up reality into rectangular moving images is a collaboration between humans and a majestic, infinitely complex, often uncooperative universe. Like photography, cinema leverages the richness of an already-existing world — the physical realm of light, nature, people, and manmade objects — and transforms three-dimensional space into a transmissible piece of human expression. Sometimes the real world can’t provide all the things we want in the frame — say, velociraptors, or Sebulba — so we’ve invented ways to craft images in silicon, using armies of skilled professionals. Even with these tools, the essence of the work has remained the same: actors on a set performing in front of a lens.

It’s not usually necessary to talk about filmmaking in such fundamental terms, but recent developments are forcing the issue. For the first time, it’s becoming possible to obtain realistic footage simply by asking a machine for it. The output is still, in a sense, the product of human labor — it can only exist because the machine has been fed a wealth of human-generated footage and text — but it’s divorced from human hands by trillions of mathematical operations and layers of interpolation. It doesn’t come from reality, and it doesn’t come from a human mind. It comes from a murky third thing that’s trying its best to imitate both of the above.

Right now, the use of AI video generation in commercial filmmaking is mainly held back by two things: technological limitations, and legal/ethical concerns about the use of copyrighted media in training generative models. (You could argue there’s a third factor — social stigma — but it’s probably not strong enough on its own to hold the barricade if the other two hurdles fall.) Let’s imagine that, sometime in the next few years, these issues are solved. Everyone in the world gains access to magical, copyright-compliant software that can reliably create footage of whatever they ask for, with accurate physics, shot-to-shot consistency of characters and environments, and granular control over camera angles and lighting.

Here in 2025, it already seems more likely than not that this technology will soon exist. When it does, is filmmaking as we know it finished? Let’s think it through, starting with the high end of the business.

Congratulations — the year is 2028, and you’ve just been promoted to president of production at Universal Pictures. Your parent company has completed a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery to form a new mega-studio, built to compete with the tech/entertainment behemoth created by Apple’s recent acquisition of Disney.

The first project on your slate is one you’re very pumped about: Christopher Nolan is readying his next picture. It’s an epic historical drama about the “Bone Wars” — the battle between rival 19th century paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, who ruined their lives trying to outdo each other in the intensely competitive field of fossil hunting. The nonlinear 175-page script is a little mystifying and more dour than you’d like it to be, but it’s Nolan, and he has Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio attached to play Marsh and Cope, so this should be an automatic greenlight. The only issue is the budget — he’s asking for 200 million.

Nolan comes in for a meeting and lays out his vision for the project. He shows you striking photos of the Alberta Badlands, where he intends to shoot much of the film. He talks about recent advances in technology that have made IMAX cameras less cumbersome and noisy. He references a bunch of old movies that you haven’t seen but have definitely heard of.

You tell him how much you love the sound of all this. You then ask him if he’s heard about Konjure, the big new thing in generative cinema. You and your team were presented with a demo of the latest version last week and it really blew you away. It gives so much power to filmmakers — they now have the ability to create anything they can imagine, for practically nothing. You ask Nolan — who, despite his lavish budgets, is known for trying to squeeze the most out of every dollar — if he’s considered using something like this to reduce his VFX spend or cut down on location costs.

He stares at you silently for a few seconds. And then, politely, he explains that filmmaking is about real light entering a real lens pointed at real people in a real place. He reminds you that he’s always favored practical effects over CGI. And he questions whether an AI model trained on mountains of existing footage can ever create something truly original or unique. You tell him that what you’ve seen from the latest technology has put that question to rest — maybe you can have the Konjure guys arrange a personal demo for him. He says he’ll get back to you on that. He stands up, shakes your hand, and leaves.

Twenty minutes later, Nolan’s agent calls you and asks you if you have brain damage. You told him he should think about using AI? Are you stupid? Not only does the guy still shoot on film, he still uses photochemicals to color grade. The big-budget auteurs are all traditionalists. Even James Cameron is refusing to use generative models for anything but the occasional texture or 3D asset in his CGI pipeline — he insists on a level of fine-grained control that the most advanced AI tools can’t offer.

The agent also reminds you that, no matter how cheap it is to create spectacular visuals with a computer, the success of a big-budget film rests upon a global marketing campaign and the presence of real-life movie stars. If you’re spending $100 million on publicity and $50 million on cast, you might as well spend another $50 million on actually shooting the movie and differentiating your product from the growing flood of generated content people can consume online. Though your directive from the corporate higher-ups is to reduce costs as much as possible, you can see the agent’s point. You apologize for offending her biggest client, she commends you for being such a smart and classy exec, you tell her she’s your favorite person in the world, and you hang up. You greenlight The Bone Wars at 200 million. Nolan demands no further meetings with the studio until the film is completed.

It’s a year later, and your job at WarnerUniversal has been eliminated due to post-merger corporate streamlining. You manage to land a coveted EVP position at a hot new indie studio poised to become the next A24. You’re excited to make films that break the mold and push boundaries.

The studio’s mandate is to finance projects with budgets under $15 million. You’ve stayed on top of new developments in generative AI — the tools keep getting more impressive — and you present your colleagues with an idea: what if we try to disrupt the studios from below? It’s now possible to make a low-budget movie boasting all the spectacle of something that used to cost a hundred times more. You know from firsthand experience that the big studios are committed to a business model where spending nine figures on producing and releasing a film is table stakes, and that’s not going to change. Maybe you can eat their lunch.

Your team is intrigued by the idea, but when you discuss it with filmmakers — young filmmakers who came of age in this century — you find surprising resistance. Many of them are philosophically and almost spiritually opposed to generative cinema, for reasons similar to Nolan’s. Some are choosing to side with the labor unions that represent film crews, which are agitating for new contracts that will drastically limit the use of AI to replace real production. And some are simply hesitant to become pariahs in broader film culture — cinephile communities have forcefully rejected the presence of AI in the medium they love, and these are people you need on your side if you want an indie movie to attract an audience.

You do meet one young filmmaker who’s receptive to your ambitions: a kid named Todd. Todd wants to make big sci-fi movies, but all he’s directed so far is a microbudget slasher film. He’s enthusiastic about using whatever tools will let him realize his vision, and he doesn’t really care if Film Twitter hates him. He has a script for a madly ambitious space epic that would cost half a billion dollars to film conventionally; using the latest version of Konjure, all the necessary VFX can be completed for less than $100,000, most of which will go to the artists fine-tuning the instructions fed to the AI. You hire real actors and build a couple of real sets, and make the movie for under $2 million. Todd’s not the greatest writer, and the plot is a little goofy, but you feel like his visual imagination makes up for it — there’s stuff in this movie that you’ve never seen on a screen before.

You show the film to distributors, hoping it will spark a bidding war, but they turn out to be reluctant to make offers. There are no stars in the movie. A wide theatrical release would be risky. Visual spectacle isn’t attracting audiences the way it used to — people are more interested in thrillers and romances featuring big-name actors they know and love. And the story of a film’s production is starting to matter: one of the big hits of the last couple of years was a Tom Cruise movie shot partly in outer space. AI-generated cinema isn’t seen as cinematic. It’s something people can get at home.

You try to sell the movie to streamers, but they pass too, citing the lack of star power. You’re disheartened and a little perplexed, but you’re not giving up. You really believe in the film. You feel it could transform how movies are made, if only people saw it.

With Todd’s approval, you decide to release the film for free on YouTube. You get the trades to write about it, and the company behind Konjure heavily promotes it as a showcase of their product. The film goes moderately viral and gets ten million views, which you’re pretty proud of — ten million people going to see a movie in theaters would mean a gross of over $100 million. You monetized the video with YouTube ads, and you wait to see how much revenue that many views translates to. It ends up being around $30,000. The money goes to your studio to help recoup their production costs. In need of income to pay his rent and maintain his Directors Guild health insurance eligibility, Todd accepts a job directing a low-budget horror film.

At both ends of the business, it’s hard to see generative AI provoking a major transformation in the way Hollywood makes movies. The process of pitching and developing a film could change quite a bit; lookbooks and moodboards might give way to AI-generated trailers and previsualizations of entire sequences. VFX costs will shrink considerably as AI-powered workflows make artists more productive (and eliminate many of their jobs), and the scope of digital effects may expand to contain more aspects of production design, cinematography, and stunt work. But the preferences of high-value talent, the power of labor unions, and the axioms of the studio business model make it unlikely that the industry will fundamentally reshape itself.

So, if we can expect Real Movies to persist in some form within the castle walls, destruction will have to come from the outside. This seems to be the outcome AI boosters are anticipating when they post demos of the latest generative video tools and proclaim that Hollywood is over: people on laptops in their bedrooms will be able to create films so amazing that the industry will simply be wiped out.

There are a few problems with this prediction. One, as alluded to in the Parable of Todd, is the film industry’s robust machinery of distribution and revenue. Thanks to the internet, anything a person makes can be seen everywhere and by everyone. But Hollywood has a unique and powerful capability, honed over many decades: getting large numbers of people to watch stuff, and getting them to pay real money to do it. The biggest Twitch streamer, Kai Cenat, has around 750,000 paying subscribers. The top forty streamers have a combined total of about five million. Netflix has 300 million people paying to watch its shows and films. In a single weekend this month, roughly 30 million people around the world were persuaded to buy tickets to the Minecraft movie and leave their homes to go see it. They were aware of the film’s existence and release date thanks to a marketing campaign that cost as much or more than the 150 million dollar production budget.

By spending monstrous amounts on hiring well-liked celebrities to be in things, and spending amounts ten times greater on promotion, Hollywood studios are able to consistently break through a fractured, chaotic attention economy and get people to come look at what they’ve made, even if the product is of debatable quality. Movies don’t have to go viral to gain an audience; for a major release, positive word-of-mouth is just a force multiplier on the natural power of stars, IP, and aggressive marketing. Without any of these advantages, will the Todds of the world be able to create content so entertaining and so wildly popular that everyone forgets all about Timothée and Zendaya? Even in a potential near-future where movie stars license their likenesses to be used in digitally generated films, would audiences stop wanting a taste of the real thing?

What about the possibility that there will be such a colossal volume of generated content — produced at approximately zero cost, by millions of artists — that the output of the film industry gets drowned out by the newly-empowered masses, and movies lose all cultural currency? We’ve already more or less seen a test of this theory over the last twenty years. The biggest streaming platform isn’t Netflix — it’s YouTube. As long ago as 2014, a survey commissioned by Variety found that the five most well-known celebrities among American teenagers were all YouTubers; more 13 to 17-year-olds had heard of PewDiePie and KSI than Jennifer Lawrence and Seth Rogen. Much of today’s most entertaining and original cinematic work is being shared on TikTok, usually by people who spend no money on what they create and will never see a cent in return. Everyone has a free and infinite river of highly addictive video content within a thumb’s reach during every waking hour. The modern algorithmic feed is to 90s network TV what crack cocaine is to potato chips. And yet people are still watching movies.

Hollywood’s products are no longer the mainstage of culture — arguably, nothing is anymore, other than social media in a broad sense — but with this decentering, we’re seeing something new: the emergence of film as a kind of subculture, offering its members a marker of identity and a sense of community. In a Letterboxd world, taste and discernment start to matter more to the subset of the public still consuming and loving cinema. Not coincidentally, craftsmanship is the main differentiator of movies big and small against the firehose of online video content. The rise of generative cinema will make that distinction all the more meaningful. Films shot with real cameras in the real world may come to be seen as high-value artisanal goods — handmade furniture in a sea of IKEA flatpacks.

Of course, vibrant new spheres of film culture could spring up around the movies people start crafting on their computers. The typical 14-year-old aspiring filmmaker of 2035 might prefer to tinker with a generative video model than go to the trouble of shooting something on their phone. An entire generation of artists will grow up seeing AI as a natural part of their creative toolkit. The line between real and generated cinema may dissolve as these tools seep into every layer of the filmmaking process. Human stars could be supplanted by artificial ones. There’s no way to know how cultural attitudes and audience tastes will shift. What we can predict with some confidence is that the most passionate and dedicated artists will want their work to be seen, and, barring the advent of luxury communism, they’ll want to earn a living from what they create. Unless new business models arise to let filmmakers outside the system command Hollywood-level attention and money, many of them will still strive for a place in the conventional industry.

It’s possible that pondering a hypothetical world of AI-rendered feature films is a little like drawing one of those 1950s futurist illustrations where a “robot vacuum cleaner” is a metal humanoid who pushes a vacuum around — no one was picturing a Roomba. Maybe the true threats to traditional cinema will be new forms of entertainment entirely. A communal viewing experience of the future might center around an always-on live channel of pure AI content continuously dreaming itself into existence, with its creator and viewers collectively in the dark about where the narrative is headed. Open-world games might evolve into rich unbounded universes where characters and stories are no longer limited by pre-defined paths. Virtual partners might become so lifelike and desirable that we enter a perilous dark age of gooning.

It’s hard to imagine, though, that our new diversions will be so enthralling they snuff out the appetite for motion pictures crafted with human intent — the most resilient and adaptive art form of the last hundred years. Since the 1990s, the film industry has weathered the rise of home entertainment, the collapse of mass culture, a limitless deluge of free internet content, smartphones, megabudget videogames, shrinking attention spans, rampant piracy, inept studio heads, multiple strikes, Quibi, and a global pandemic. The fact that it’s still standing — diminished from its past heights, but still a lucrative and powerful business — is a testament not to the acumen of its corporate stewards, but to the enduring value of the medium. Cinema matters to humans. And, we can hope, vice versa.

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When you meet somebody out in the world and they ask you what you do for a living, how do you describe your job?

I think I still identify myself as a writer first and foremost, which I don’t know that I am anymore, strictly speaking. But if somebody asks me what I do, I say I’m a writer. And then usually the second question is some form of, “Have you written anything I would have seen?” And then I get into what my actual job is, and it becomes clear that I do a lot of other stuff besides write.

I’d worked in television as a writer-producer for over a dozen years before I became a showrunner. And I thought that meant that I knew exactly what I was getting into. And the biggest shock, or the thing that I underestimated the most, is that there’s this perception about showrunners — a perception that showrunners cultivate for themselves — that showrunning is an auteur job. And on some level it’s true, in the sense that you’re responsible for making every creative decision from writing to hiring directors and casting and production design. You get presentations from every department head that in film would normally go to the director. And because you’re trying to create a unified vision across episodes, you end up having an approval that is higher than the director’s approval.

But that’s counterbalanced by the fact that television is a long-term relationship. If you do a movie, you get in bed with a group of people for a couple of months, or if there’s a really long prep, maybe it’s a year or something, but there’s an end date to it. The thing you’re making is going to end on a certain day and you’re going to release it, and then it’s over. And television, there’s this open-endedness to it. That means that you’re married to these people indefinitely. And so the thing that I underestimated about showrunning is how much of it is managing other people’s expectations and egos and needs and being responsive to all of that.

It’s a level of accountability that I wasn’t used to. For years in my career, my accountability was to one person: to the showrunner. And I just had to write scripts that were usable and producible and exciting. And I had to go produce them sometimes on set, and all that meant was that I was representing the showrunner’s vision on set. It was a job that I got good at and understood and felt very much like it wasn’t overwhelming.

But as a showrunner, you’re managing up: you’re pitching your vision for the show to executives at the studio and the network. On a macro level, you’re spending time in the writer’s room and coming up with a pitch for the season that is sales-y and compelling and talks about emotional arcs at a 30,000-foot level. You’re narrating what your characters are experiencing and how it’s changing them. And then you also have to repeat that sales process on a more granular level for each episode, where you’re submitting a story document that will get them excited about the world that your episode is going to live in and what the characters are going to be going through, and signing off on the budget for it.

And then you have to do the outline and then you have to do the scripts and you’re managing down or managing within your production. You have to make sure that the actors are on board with what their characters are doing and excited about it, because it’s really important that they continue to show up day after day excited about what they’re doing and that they aren’t just fulfilling their contracts.

You’re managing a group of writers — we have a large group, ten writers on staff this year, and each of those people is somebody who has their own artistic journey that they’re on and they have certain objectives that they want to get into the show creatively. And they have certain expectations and desires for writing scripts and being able to bring something to the table, as well as making us happy. And so you want those people to feel engaged and feel like their ideas are being heard. And also, I’ve hired them for a reason — I like their ideas and I want to make sure that there’s a place for as many of them as possible.

And then with directors, it’s making sure that you’re putting directors in a place where they can succeed. It’s hard to direct episodic television because, as a director, you’re coming in and trying to put a stamp on something. We really do try and bring back directors who bring something new that we were surprised and excited by, but you also have to understand what the pattern of the show is. The only way that a director is in a position to understand all that is if the showrunner explains it to them. You can’t just hire people then expect them to figure it all out. And we have people to help with that, but then there’s also department heads and, you know, making sure people like your wardrobe supervisor and production designer are being given opportunities to stand out and demonstrate why they’re visionaries in their own right.

All the various departments need money and need direction. And then also, when you go onto set — I’m naturally, I guess, an introvert. So I have to make an effort when I’m on set to just make sure that I’m available to people and saying hello and checking in on them, because we have a crew that we love, and we want them to stay.

So it’s just being a leader. I guess I just used a million words to say you just have to be a leader to this big, sprawling, expensive team of people that is responsible for putting this thing on the air that has to arrive on a certain schedule and at a certain budget point.

Making that transition from being a writer-producer to being a showrunner seems like a big shift. Does anybody train you to do that? Did you go to a boot camp? Was it just sink or swim, or were there things that were done to make you feel more comfortable in that position?

It’s a chronic problem for the TV business that I think is beginning to be addressed. There are boot camps. The Writers Guild has a showrunner training program. I didn’t do it. It’s good, from what I’ve heard. Some of the studios have similar types of programs where they try and take writer-producers who are on that track and give them a little formal training and expose them to, you know, “This is what a budget looks like, and here’s the etiquette of dealing with executives.”

When you get your first writing job in television, your title is staff writer, and then you go up to story editor, and then it’s executive story editor, co-producer, producer, supervising producer, co-executive producer, and then executive producer. There are a lot of rungs on this ladder. And traditionally, as you ascend those rungs, you are given more responsibility as a writer-producer. And so, in my last few jobs, part of what I would do as a co-executive producer was be an advisor to the showrunner. They start to let you in on some of their high-level decision making and ask for advice on it. And in that way, you learn some stuff.

Another thing that for me was invaluable was I was a showrunner’s assistant before I was even a writer. Obviously, not everybody does that. But that gave me the most exposure to what I’m doing now, in terms of just being on all those emails and being on all those calls. Just understanding the types of crises that pop up throughout the day that have to be resolved, the order in which you have to tackle them, who has to be kept happy, how much power the various executives and representatives have, and so on.

I remember when I went from being a showrunner’s assistant to a staff writer, I felt like I had all the access in the world and then things became a lot more myopic. Now all I had to do was come to work every morning and pitch ideas. And maybe if I was lucky, I’d get to write a script or half a script. When I was the showrunner’s assistant, I felt like I had so much more riding on my shoulders and also so much more exposure. I knew everything that was going on. If we were about to push our schedule or we were going to do a production shutdown or some crisis was coming up, I knew before any of the writers. And then I get a promotion to writer and suddenly everything is just coming in blind. Cause I don’t know what the fuck’s going on anymore. That was interesting.

But because I spent a lot of time on staff, I knew at least some of what I was going to be up against as a showrunner, and now there are a lot of showrunners who are being thrown into it quicker. Although that’s something that might be changing, and we might be going back to the old ways now. But typically what the studio always does is if you’re a first-time showrunner, they pair you with another showrunner who has more experience. And so maybe you’re the person whose creative vision is more essential to the show, but you’re with somebody who really knows the ins and outs of the producing side.

Would you say that most TV writers want to be showrunners one day? Or are there people who are just happier to clock in and do the job and not have to worry about the big picture?

There’s a mix. I know a lot of people who have had this hero’s journey where they get into television believing that someday they want to be a showrunner and create a show, and they gain more experience in television and see how it really works, and then realize that they don’t want to be the showrunner, and that they would be much happier just being at that co-EP level or consulting producer and have jobs where they can come in and be responsible for the writing, but not have to shoulder the other stuff. There’s a lot of those people that are out there. People kind of sort themselves into one of the two categories where you either know that they’re going to be a showrunner someday or that they’re very happy to just staff. Both, I think, fill really essential roles within the ecosystem.

What are the best and worst things about your job?

I would say the best part of the job is that I don’t have to worry as much about fitting into another person’s management style. So much of writing in television and working on a staff is about molding yourself to be what the showrunner needs, and only thinking about problems in a way that helps them more than it helps you.

On a superficial level, it’s like, I’ve worked on TV shows where the showrunners use a different screenwriting software. So you start and on day one, they’re like, “Oh, by the way, we want to switch you to this new software.” And you sit down to write and all the shortcuts are different and it feels like you’re typing with your non-dominant hand. And that just extends to everything — having to joke around in the writers room in the way that they want to joke around, or having to start the room at the time that they want to.

So I think the best part of my job is that I can just do it the way I want to do it. If I want to come in late one day because I was working super late the night before, I don’t have to feel bad about that. Or if I want to, on one episode, call a bunch of people into my office and have everybody spitball on a scene, I can just do that and not have to worry about the showrunner being like, “Why did you take all the writers?” I love that.

The worst part of the job… I mean, there’s certainly an adjustment period. Like I mentioned, a lot of showrunners are so into presenting themselves to the world as auteurs. And the reality, as I’ve experienced it, is that you’re still very much negotiating your vision. And it was difficult coming to terms with the fact that, you know, I can think that I’ve come up with the best ideas for the story and the best execution and the best idea for cast, and I can be told that I’m wrong by people who have the ability to stop me from making those decisions. And it kind of calls into question, like, okay, does that mean that I’m not as good an auteur as these other people who are out talking to the press about how they had a vision that was the same from day one to the end? That gets in my head sometimes.

We’re also in an era where there are high expectations for workplace behavior and mentorship and advancement. It’s very challenging to keep everybody happy. When I was coming up, there was more of a kind of military, regimented tone to the career of TV staffing, where you started at a lower rank and then you just moved up the pole by working hard and sacrificing your quality of life and paying your dues. And I’m not one of those people who think we should go back to that. But I do think that it’s become really important to explicitly set people’s expectations on the writer side — like, how many scripts are you gonna get in a season? What is the amount of rewriting that’s going to happen?

Twenty years ago, for a writer on staff to complain about being rewritten, and to do it in an official capacity — like, everybody bitches about it over beers or whatever, but to go to the studio and say, “I was completely rewritten by my showrunner.” It’s like, well, yeah, that’s the job of the showrunner. There’s just an expectation by some people now that they’ve been hired and empowered to be writers that are always going to get their words on the screen, and if you rewrite them, it’s demeaning or it’s bad.

This is something that you’ve actually seen writers do? Go above the showrunner, go to the studio and say, “My script was rewritten by my boss”?

Yeah. It hasn’t happened on my show, but I know showrunners who have had that happen to them. The specific cases that I’m aware of were newer writers, people within the first three or four years of their career. I do think we’ve done a really good job in a lot of ways of broadcasting that the TV culture is changing and it’s a place that encourages mentorship and nurturing writers. But I think that it’s set some people’s expectations too high.

You mentioned having to negotiate your vision. Is that against budget, is it against the network? Is it with your staff?

It’s partly the network. The people who are in charge of putting it on do like to keep some guardrails on. I also think that modern showrunning has to acknowledge the fact that cast — and in particular, your number one on the call sheet — has more power than in the old days where there was a certain expectation to television, because it moves fast, that actors just show up and do the lines. The reality of the job now is a little bit different and the actors get more input. And sometimes that’s good because actors do really care about their character and their corner of the project. Other times it can be difficult because there’s an overall vision for things that is hard to articulate on a scene-to-scene, episode-to-episode basis.

And then, yeah, budget is huge. There was kind of an era where shows that you wouldn’t even associate with huge production values were getting a tremendous amount of money and shooting days, compared to what I’m used to now. The emphasis was on just making something that really stood out cinematically. It trained a lot of writers to not have to worry about that so much. And now it’s being reined back in. And as time goes on with any show, including mine, the budget reins get tightened even more because your show reaches the period of maturity where it’s no longer growing an audience. It’s no longer about trying to launch and establish it, so it becomes a little bit more about just containing costs and keeping the show on the rail that people like it on. So, yeah, there’s a lot of, like, setting out to do one story in an episode and it ends up being 70% of what you wanted to achieve because of budget constraints.

How much influence does the network have on the content of your show?

We’re in a place right now where our network is really happy with the direction that we’re swimming. And so they tend to just listen to our pitches and give us their honest feedback, but it’s not as prescriptive as it’s been on other shows I’ve worked on. Like I said, it’s guardrails. We know what our show is and what we’re out to accomplish. We know what our audience is. We know the network that we’re on.

I think that part of being a good showrunner is when you set your show up at a particular network, you understand what that network’s objectives are and what kind of audience they’re after and what that audience responds to. And you just factor that into some of your storytelling decision-making. We do that and we like the way that our vision lines up with what their audience is. So, yeah, the network, every once in a while they’ll be like, “It might take away from what people love about your character to have them go through this really traumatic thing. Maybe think about that.” Every once in a while we’ll get a caution on stuff, but it’s not too bad.

If your creative vision isn’t complimentary to what that network is putting out into the world — if you’re swimming in different directions — it gets ugly fast. I think that’s true pretty much everywhere. It’s not just broadcast, it’s streaming too. If a network decides that there’s something wrong with the tone of the show, or if they feel like there’s a better way of telling the story, then that’s when things get really tough because they ask for big changes and you’re usually on a compressed timeline. It’s always hard to make TV and sometimes there’s no helping that type of friction, but I also feel really grateful that we’re in a situation where it’s going well.

You mentioned needing to know what kind of audience the network is after. Is that something that’s based on age, ethnicity, income, geography?

I would say that it’s a little bit age and a little bit gender and they’re generalizing from that. If you’re on a network that’s female-focused, for example — and I know this is a generalization, and it’s not representing my personal philosophy — but, you know, the network might be endeavoring to tell stories that have some soapier elements or more romance. So, for example, a typical CBS drama is identifiably different than a typical ABC drama. The CBS audience that they’re chasing, regardless of demographic, it’s like, they’re looking for viewers who are into hard-procedural, who are really into mystery storytelling, who are into really glossy worlds. A lot of their procedurals have a slick visual element to them. ABC, you look at their stuff, and even stuff that might present as procedural, like Grey’s Anatomy, is still very relationship-heavy and there’s a lot of romance.

And you can see that just from watching TV. It’s a great benefit, I think, to watch a lot of TV and love a lot of TV when you’re doing this, so you can have an intuitive feel for what audiences are responding to.

So do you watch a lot of network television?

(Pauses, laughs.) I guess I’m outing myself as somebody who doesn’t exactly practice what I’ve preached.

When I was younger, I watched a lot of network television. And when we pitched this show, we brought out references from network television that we grew up with and loved. I was always talking about things like ER and The West Wing, shows that I watched hundreds of episodes of. I watched a lot of Law & Order. That type of storytelling is wired into my brain.

In modern times, I haven’t watched as much. But that’s partially because I went through a phase where I was working on shows that were more genre. And so I would watch a lot of those, and I just fell down those rabbit holes, and that came at the expense of watching broadcast. So yeah, when I got this show going, I had to go back and study up.

There are certain shows that I always go back to every time I sell a pilot. I have this ritual where I go back and I watch the pilot of The X-Files. I watch the pilot of House. Sometimes I watch the pilot of ER. And I watch the pilot of The Sopranos. And I always feel like the goal is to take all of the great things about those pilots and find a way to put them together in a new and interesting and surprising way.

How long ago was it that you were an assistant to a showrunner?

God, it was over twenty years ago now. That’s horrifying.

In that time, how have you seen the job of showrunner change?

It’s become more public-facing. Like it or not, it’s different making a show in the age of social media. And also in an age of media saturation, where there are just so many more websites that cover television. I remember when I was coming up, there was Television Without Pity, and there were a couple of websites that were more business-oriented, like Zap2It or whatever. But now we have a bunch of sites that will track a show in depth. There’s a lot more accountability to the stories you’re telling. And then also the direct interactions with the audience via Twitter or Instagram or TikTok. It’s more of a feedback loop that’s immediate and loud. In the past, you wouldn’t have to really think that much about what your strategy is for that. Now it’s a thing where you have to really make decisions about how much you’re going to listen to.

And is that something you discuss in the writer’s room? Are you guys looking at Reddit and social media and talking about what people are saying?

Yeah. For a showrunner, there’s a sense of authorship to the show. And so it does feel personal. I don’t go on Reddit and I don’t read the tweets. I do read reviews. When we do publicity and there’s commentary about the show, I read that. But in our writer’s room, there’s a boisterous group of people who are working for hire and are excited to just throw things into the world and then see how it bounces back at them. We have people who check the Reddits, and yeah, we do process it. We know which relationships are resonating with the audience and who people are cheering for and who they don’t like. We know which episodes were favorites.

Let’s talk about money. As a showrunner of a successful network series, do you feel like you’re compensated fairly for the work that you do?

Yeah. I think that in the grand scheme of things, the pay is fair, given it’s an all-consuming job. While we’re in production, it’s seven days a week. It’s really long hours. I’m constantly traveling back and forth from my home in Los Angeles to our location where we shoot. And in return, I do feel like I get fees that are good and worth that for me. It’s not going to be retirement-level money, but I’m saving plenty and I’m living well.

Another way to look at it, though, is if the show I’m doing right now had become a hit six or seven years ago, I would have gotten more. And the thing that’s interesting is there are plenty of showrunners who work in streaming who produce far less content on an hourly basis than we do in broadcast, that’s viewed by fewer people, who are compensated at a higher level. You read about these big overall deals that get signed by people, and you’re like, oh, okay. Like, it’s not that they’re bad writers, but if it’s a market-based system that’s becoming increasingly corporatized, sometimes those deals make me scratch my head. But ultimately, I’m not going to ever root against people getting paid. Anytime a writer is able to get a chunk, it’s great. It’s similar to a pro athlete’s career where, on average, you’re not working for many decades, so get a big chunk while you can, always strike while the iron’s hot. But, yeah, I’m happy with what I’m paid, even though sometimes I think about the timing. There’s a luck and timing element where I could have gotten more years ago.

It used to be that the big payday for a showrunner or creator of a show was when you got to a hundred episodes and got syndicated, and then you get a percentage of profits from that. Is that still how it works?

Not really. There have been a couple changes to it structurally. When you draft your contracts to create a show and run it, there’s the question of your points and your stake in the show. And traditionally, if you had a certain number of points, then that was an ownership percentage, so that when your show was then licensed for syndication or for whatever else, you would get a big payout from that.

And now most studios give you an option between sticking with that traditional ownership-based point system or giving you a schedule of bonuses based on your points. It’ll be like, per point, you get seventy grand an episode for every episode produced after season two, something like that, hypothetically. People refer to it as a capped system where you know exactly what your points are worth and what you’re going to get, but it’s capped at a far lower level than what you might otherwise get. So there’s no Larry David-style $100 million payday. But it’s not insubstantial money. If you have a long-running show, it could certainly get into the seven figures, but it’s a triple instead of a grand slam. And the calculation that a lot of creators have to make is that if you opt to take the traditional method, it can be a harder road to work your way through litigation. There have been a lot of famous lawsuits about it. Bones had a big one where all the profit participants had to litigate the studios to make the accounting make sense so they could actually get those payouts.

And the other thing is there are just fewer syndication deals. The library aspect of streamers has made it easier for companies to just take their popular material and put it on their streamer and they don’t have to do a giant deal. And if it becomes unpopular library material, then they just take it off instead of licensing it to someone else. So it’s definitely a very different world.

On our show, we opted into the capped system. We picked the safe road. No regrets. I don’t know enough about success to decide if we made the right or wrong decision, but I guess I’ll find out.

How much does someone in your position make?

The baseline for a first-time showrunner these days is around $50k per episode, and experienced showrunners can make anywhere from $100k to $300k per episode. My series is multiple seasons into its run and I’m still not making $100k per episode. But I’m closer to $100k than to $50k. And then you add on top of that things like the royalty you get for creating the show, your script fees, residuals. And if you get past the first season or are a monster hit, you get that bonus schedule money.

All together, my gross income for a season is low seven figures. Then you subtract things like commissions for your representatives — it’s usually five percent to lawyer, ten percent to agent, ten percent to manager. The guild takes a small percentage. And then there are taxes.

Another not-insignificant expense is, throughout the season, if you’re a good showrunner, you’re paying out of your pocket for things like food trucks and coffee trucks for the crew, holiday gifts and wrap gifts, bonuses for your assistants. I find all of the above to be fun and not burdensome, and I think it’s because I have a lot of great memories of showrunners taking care of me when I was an assistant and a writer working my way up the ladder.

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In part two, we discuss the impact of the 2023 strikes, the future of the industry, and which era of television was the best for writers.