For our first in a series of anonymous interviews with film and TV industry professionals, we spoke to the showrunner of an hourlong drama airing on one of the major networks. The first half of our conversation focused on the mechanics and challenges of showrunning. Here 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.
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.