But despite the boom times in Beverly Hills, the working stiffs of L.A. who keep the apps stocked with thousands of hours of new content every year find themselves in a surprisingly precarious position. “There has been an explosion in the number of shows that exist,” says Brian Tanen, the showrunner behind Hulu’s Love, Victor. “Because of that explosion, there ought to be an explosion in the number of jobs that exist. But it isn’t that simple.” Just as in every industry disrupted by a fast-talking founder with a Silicon Valley area code, Hollywood finds itself in a new status quo, one that’s forced the proletariat of writers, actors, and key grips into a never-ending hunt for their next job. And this perpetual hustle only promises to grow more frantic the longer Covid-19 maintains its grip on the nation’s throat.
At the year’s outset, simmering tensions over the discrepancy between how most television laborers are compensated for their work on streaming platforms versus what they can make creating cable and broadcast shows seemed poised to boil over. Contracts that govern the minimum compensation for writers, actors, and directors were all due for renegotiation. Studio heads, fearful of a repeat of the Writers Guild of America’s 100-day work stoppage that began in the fall of 2007 (a labor action that cost California’s economy an estimated $2.1 billion), reportedly had begun digging in for another long disruption. There was talk that executives had a plan to stretch out their existing stockpile of unscripted shows, foreign rights, and already-shot scripted programs to keep feeding the streams even as the talent supply ran dry. Adding to their urgency was the WGA’s successful campaign to disentangle its membership from the so-called big four talent agencies last year, a seismic shift in the business that seemed to signal the union’s willingness to play hardball.
And then, of course, the novel coronavirus landed. Production screeched to a halt in March, and nobody knows when it will fully resume. For producers, the disruption comes with a significant silver lining: Whatever momentum might have been building among writers and other laborers to strike for a better split has all but evaporated. “The pandemic softened things,” Sonja Warfield, a longtime TV writer, said when I spoke to her in late May. “People are more amenable to figuring it out.” However much pain a strike could have caused the handful of conglomerates that dominate Hollywood pales in comparison to what the pandemic has already wrought.
Meanwhile, the widespread protests elicited by the police murder of George Floyd have reinvigorated long-stalled conversations about how poorly both the industry’s workforce and the programming it produces reflect the diversity of its audience. Actor Meera Rohit Kumbhani told me she is hopeful that public pressure will force executives “to start hiring more diverse writers, diverse actors, diverse directors—because the people want it, not because they’re following some inclusivity rider.” The work-stoppage forced by the pandemic may even create the space for those concrete changes to actually be made. “If production has paused, then there’s going to be a pause in new content we get,” Kumbhani said. “When things start up again, people are going to want to hear diverse stories.”
Other writers and actors I spoke with were warier about the future, pointing to the less righteous alterations to industry standards ushered in by the pandemic. Hollywood’s creative workers fear studios will eventually seek to make these provisional retrenchments permanent once business conditions return to something like normal. The shifting of writers’ rooms to Zoom in the past few months has led to numerous assistants—whose entry-level jobs represent the only real toehold in the industry for aspiring writers—having their pay cut. Actors have been asked to self-tape auditions, a change that many observers fear will deter casting directors from giving talent they’re not already familiar with a shot at the big time. Sarah Peters, who spent June in one of the virtual writers’ rooms, is alarmed by what these changes may portend. “How many jobs are we eliminating?” she wonders. “Especially lower-level jobs in all departments, if we’re like, ‘Oh, we don’t really need the P.A., we don’t need camera assistants—we did it during coronavirus!’ Who’s going to be able to afford to work in the entertainment industry after this?”
To understand why Hollywood’s current convulsions are so foreboding to the industry’s laboring class, it’s important to recognize that getting by in the television business has always looked a lot more like gig work than a nine-to-five job. Aside from studio suits, everyone on a TV set is employed on short-term contracts, meaning that the more limited a series order, the less money your average script coordinator or makeup artist gets to work on it. Before the onset of the streaming era, a huge number of television jobs still came from broadcast shows that ran 22 episodes every season, a volume that required nine months of shooting. That meant writers like Sonja Warfield, who worked on Will & Grace in the early 2000s, would typically staff on one show per year, with the time left over reserved for polishing up a film script or brainstorming a pilot.
By the end of that decade, season orders of only 13 episodes became common thanks to prestige cable dramas like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, the idea being that film-like production value and drama could only be achieved through a more concentrated form of storytelling. Once Netflix and Amazon got into the original content game, in 2013, their ambivalence toward the traditional television model led to episode orders dropping yet again. Today, many shows receive only six- or eight-episode orders, requiring writers’ rooms to be held only for a few months.
“The game has changed,” said the writer Kimberly Ndombe. “You have to be able to jump around. There are more shows to staff on, but I think it’s harder to make a living.”
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