Possibly the most famous telegram in Hollywood history was sent in 1925, when Herman J. Mankiewicz, the future co-writer of “Citizen Kane,” urged his newsman friend Ben Hecht to move West and collect three hundred dollars a week from Paramount. “The three hundred is peanuts,” Mankiewicz assured him. “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots.” The rise of the talkies, for which Hecht became a prolific scenarist, soon brought a wave of non-idiot writers to Los Angeles, to supply the snappy movie dialogue of the thirties—a decade that, not incidentally, saw the rise of the Screen Writers Guild.
Writers have always endured indignities in Hollywood. But, as long as there are millions to be grabbed, the trade-off has been bearable—except when it isn’t. The past month has brought the discontent of television writers to a boiling point. In mid-April, the Writers Guild of America (the modern successor to the Screen Writers Guild) voted to authorize a strike, with a decisive 97.85 per cent in favor. The guild’s current contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers expires on May 1st; if the negotiations break down, it will be the W.G.A.’s first strike since late 2007 and early 2008. At issue are minimum fees, royalties, staffing requirements, and even the use of artificial intelligence in script production—but the over-all stakes, from the perspective of TV writers, feel seismic. “This is an existential fight for the future of the business of writing,” Laura Jacqmin, whose credits include Epix’s “Get Shorty” and Peacock’s “Joe vs. Carole,” told me; like the other writers I spoke to, she had voted for the strike authorization. “If we do not dig in now, there will be nothing to fight for in three years.” TV writers seem, on the whole, miserable. “The word I would use,” Jacqmin said, “is ‘desperation.’ ”
How did it come to this? About a decade ago, in the era of “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad,” and “Veep,” TV writing seemed like one of the coolest, best-paying jobs a writer could have. As with the talkie boom of the nineteen-thirties, playwrights and journalists were flocking to Hollywood to partake in the heyday of prestige TV. It was fun. “We were all just trying to figure out, like, where to live. How do we sublet? Do we buy a car? Do we rent a car?” Liz Flahive recalled. In 2008, Flahive had just had a play produced Off Broadway when she got hired to write for “Untitled Edie Falco Project,” which became Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie.” TV, unlike big-budget movies, was a writers’ medium, and it was undergoing a creative explosion. “The old-timey mentality was: you go work in TV, and it breaks your brain, and you learn all these terrible habits,” Flahive said. “But you didn’t. You were writing great scenes, and for really good actors.”
The “Nurse Jackie” writers’ room, Flahive recalled, “was half queer, majority female. It was half people who had done TV for a long time, and half people who had never done TV before.” But it was possible to learn. “I turned in my first script, and the co-E.P.s sat me down and said, ‘This is really great. But this is the most expensive episode of television ever written. It’s a half-hour show, and you have forty-one setups.’ I was, like, ‘What’s a setup?’ And they explained, ‘If you set this scene here, and you write this scene here, this is a whole company move, and this is a whole new set we have to build.’ And then I got to take that script and go sit on set and actually see what it meant when you write ‘EXT. SUBWAY PLATFORM,’ and why that’s complicated.”
Flahive rose through the ranks of “Nurse Jackie” and went on to co-create the Netflix comedy “GLOW” and the Apple TV+ anthology “Roar,” both with the playwright and producer Carly Mensch. But, in the intervening years, the profession has devolved. Streamers are ordering shorter seasons, and the residuals model that used to give network writers a reliable income is out the window. The ladder from junior writer to showrunner has become murkier, with some people repeating steps like repeating grades, and others being flung to the top without the requisite experience, in order to meet demand for new content. Studios are cutting writing budgets to the bone by hiring fewer people for shorter time periods, often without paying for lower-level writers to be on set during production, which makes it all but impossible to learn the skills necessary to run a show. On “Roar,” Flahive said, “we had to fight to budget for writers to prep and produce their episodes,” and some of her writers had never been to the set of shows they’d worked on, “which is astonishing to me.”
One point of contention in the W.G.A. negotiations has been “mini rooms”—condensed writers’ rooms that often take place before a show is green-lighted. Mini rooms give studios proof of concept while saving money, but they force writers to spread paltrier fees over longer gaps, working for shows that may or may not get made. “What you start to realize is that there is no advancing forward, because you’re constantly in these rooms where you’re being paid at a minimum,” the writer Janine Nabers told me. “If your contract ends, and that show’s not going to be made for another year, all of your work could just be erased.”
Like Flahive, Nabers began in theatre. After graduating from Juilliard, in 2013, she got staffed on Bravo’s “Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce.” The writers met at Sunset Gower Studios, in Hollywood. “It was more money than I’ve ever been paid in my life,” she recalled. “Even the stipends to go to set—I remember they would give you cash, and I would just make it rain on my bed and take videos and send them to my friends.” Most jobs she’s had since have been in mini rooms. Nabers wrote for two seasons of Donald Glover’s “Atlanta,” got an over-all deal with Amazon Studios, and co-created, with Glover, this year’s hit “Swarm.” That show had a fourteen-week mini room, all over Zoom, ending in early 2021. But it wasn’t green-lighted until the second episode was shooting, a year later. Nabers was pregnant during the interim, and she was left to finish the season alone. “So that’s a year of me by myself, writing scripts and begging the people that I was working for to allow me to bring in more help,” she said.
For people outside the industry, the woes of TV writers can elicit a boo-hoo response: it is, after all, a more lucrative form of writing than most, right? But the economics of streaming have chipped away at what was previously a route to a middle-class life, as the cost of living in Los Angeles has crept upward. “It feels like the studios have gone through our contracts and figured out how to Frankenstein every loophole into every deal, which means that, at the very best, you can keep your head above water,” Jacqmin said. “You can maybe maintain the amount of money you made the year before, but more than likely you will be asked to cut your quote. It just feels really grim.” She added, “I’m on Twitter every other day, and I’m seeing writers who are, like, ‘Please Venmo me some grocery money. I am desperate, and I have not worked in three months. Help!’ ”
Aly Monroe, a thirty-year-old writer who’d worked up from production assistant to story editor on Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” told me that she makes about ten thousand dollars a year in residuals, “and that’s certainly not reflective of what the studio is making.” In the long breaks between seasons, she relies on her wife’s more regular income while stretching out the money from “Handmaid.” Some of her friends are getting copywriting jobs or moving back in with their parents. “Before the strike demands came out, a lot of my friends were feeling really hopeless and essentially ready to give up, because it had just been such a hard road,” she said. “And they think that what the W.G.A. is asking for makes us all feel really good and like we’re working toward something that can make it back into a livable career for all of us. That’s certainly how I feel.”
At the same time that the money has tightened, original ideas have become harder to sell. The prestige-cable days of “Mad Men” and “Nurse Jackie” became the prestige-streaming era of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Stranger Things,” which has given way to the algorithm-and-I.P.-fuelled hellscape of superheroes, mergers, and HBO Max becoming plain old Max. More shows are headlined by movie stars, who come with large salaries and constricted schedules. Nabers doubts that “Swarm” would get green-lighted now, even though it just got through a year ago. “Right now, especially with the strike looming, people are afraid of weird stuff,” she said. “They want ‘Yellowstone.’ They want ‘This Is Us.’ Those shows are great, but not everyone wants to write that show.” Lila Byock, who has written for the HBO series “The Leftovers” and “Watchmen” (and had previously been a New Yorker fact checker), lamented, “What the streamers want most right now is ‘second-screen content,’ where you can be on your phone while it’s on. Or you can write an original script everyone loves, and then it’s, like, ‘Ooh, we can’t make this, but please take your pick of our upcoming Batman projects!’ ”
Wrapped up in the economic issues and creative stasis is a sense that TV writing just isn’t that fun anymore. “It’s become a grind at every level,” Jacqmin said. Most writers’ rooms have gone virtual—a pandemic necessity that has become a cost-saving norm—draining the camaraderie that used to help writers learn from one another, feel vulnerable enough to pitch personal story ideas, or just vent. “We always had a Ping-Pong table near the writers’ room, and on every break we would have these completely bare-knuckle tournaments,” Byock said, of her previous jobs. “That was part of what made it feel fun to go to work. It felt like we were really building something together. It wasn’t just a punch-the-clock job. And, when you’re on Zoom, working on a show that you don’t even know whether or not is going to be greenlit—it’s just a completely contingent situation—it’s very hard to get to that place.”
For newer writers, there’s a sense of having shown up at the party too late. Alex O’Keefe, who is twenty-eight, grew up poor in Florida and worked as a speechwriter for the senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey and as Green New Deal campaign director before getting staffed on FX’s “The Bear.” “It should be this beautiful rags-to-riches story, right?” he told me. “Unfortunately, I realized not all that glitters is gold.” During his nine weeks working in the writers’ room for “The Bear,” over Zoom, he was living in a tiny Brooklyn apartment with no heat; sometimes his space heater would blow the power out, and he’d bring his laptop to a public library. (He was never flown to set.) He thought that he was making a lot of money, but, after reps’ fees and taxes, it didn’t add up to much. “It’s a very regular-degular, working-class existence,” he said. “And the only future I’m seeking financially is to enter that middle class, which has always been rarified for someone who comes from poverty.”
Last month, “The Bear” won the W.G.A. Award for Comedy Series. O’Keefe went to the ceremony with a negative bank account and a bow tie that he’d bought on credit. He’s now applying for jobs at movie theatres to prepare for the potential strike. “A lot of people assume that, when you’re in a TV writers’ room, you sit around a table, and you just dream together,” he said. “With ‘The Bear,’ I learned from these masters that, if you are given a shit sandwich, you can dress that up and make it a Michelin-star-level dish. And they were consistently given shit sandwich after shit sandwich.” He recalled one of the executive producers apologizing to him. “She said, ‘I’m so sorry this is your first writers’-room experience, because it’s not usually like this. It shouldn’t be like this.’ I don’t even know the alternative. I thought we would be treated more like collaborators on a product. It’s like an assembly line now.” ♦
NEW YORKER
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