This is part of a series of accounts of the strike from Hollywood writers at different levels in their careers. The diarists have been granted anonymity to encourage candor. You can read previous entries by ‘Well-Known Creator’ and others here.
I wasn’t in production when the strike started nor was I running a writers room. For the last half year I have been solely “in development” and paying for my own Sweetgreen like a fucking Pilgrim. No one likes to hear how many projects I am currently Sisyphusing at various networks, streamers and studios because it either sounds like bragging or makes it clear I don’t really have a solid game plan for my career. I’m not even sure at this point which would be accurate because I suppose it’s all a matter of perspective. Is the person dating numerous people at once living the dream, nightly sampling from the romantic bounty or caught in a pathetic, frenzied search for The One, doomed to a life of awkward sex with little true intimacy? That said, while there seems, for those who hustle, who have a track record and a fairly good reputation, to be, in the streaming era, a bevy of opportunities, my experience of late has shown, to use old an Hollywood term: shit is crazy out there. I will describe the typical modern television development process…
A production company has a piece of I.P. and after eight other showrunner-level writers passed, they brought to you because they knew you would be perfect for it and were the first person they thought of. You are flattered because you are vain and willfully stupid, and you read the book or watch the Swedish series or check out the children’s drawing you’ve been brought in to adapt and you convince yourself it’s ripe for a reimagining and they are right, you are the exact person to do it!
You fake a deep, personal connection to the material and work up your take. The producers love your take because everyone else has passed and they are about to lose their deal and also because your ability to conjure enthusiasm where none actually exists is sort of all you have, so you absorb their wildly unhelpful notes and suddenly pitches are set up all over town (on Zoom, of course, because no longer having to have writers in their offices is, for executives, the single greatest thing that has ever happened to them and sort of worth having lost their great aunt to COVID).
Two minutes before the pitch, a handful of executives across town groan and tell their partners they have to hear some stupid pitch and log on, smiling like fearful children, making awkward small talk until the producers fumble an intro and you start talking, trying hard not to focus on the one executive who, from the reflection in their glasses, is clearly watching Love Is Blind while you pitch. You finish and each executive asks a very perfunctory question to show their boss how hard they were listening and after the Zoom ends, everyone waving goodbye like parents watching their children on a ferris wheel, you tell your agent you think it went, “Really well, they seemed really engaged and asked a lot of super-intelligent questions!” A few days later you hear, to your shock, they are buying it! But instead of celebrating, you obsess on why it took a few days and are they really just buying it because they have a deal with the producers? But those thoughts eventually go out of your mind because six months have somehow passed and the company’s business affairs finally close your deal for much less than your quote.
You finally have your kick-off meeting with the company, and three of the faces on the Zoom are new, the true champion of your project having departed the streamer four months ago to run DJ Khaled’s new production company. These complete strangers tell you again how much they love your project, then a junior executive tells you their core demo has proven to actually be 13-year-old females so could you set the show in junior high instead of at a newspaper?
You contort the premise of the show to fit all the precepts the algorithm has identified as necessary components for success on their platform, including now making the story engine completely episodic, because “attention spans.” And after only seven drafts of the outline, you are finally sent off to script. You finish writing on the year anniversary of your initial pitch and send it in on a Friday because they are “dying” to read it. Four weeks later a notes Zoom is set on which now all of the executives are new, the two most experienced of them having left to start Waze’s new streaming service; the junior executive is now running Freeform.
They spend one minute telling you about the four jokes from your draft that they love — one of which wasn’t in your draft but was actually from the Succession finale — and then inform you that it’s “totally your choice” but their latest software update on the algorithm revealed that in fact serialized shows create more emotional investment in audiences and also that 13-year-old females have been trending down and thus their new target demo are 48-year-old men.
So you completely rewrite the draft, turning it in on a Monday because they are “literally hyperventilating with excitement” over reading the new draft. Five weeks later a notes Zoom is set on which only your agent’s assistant appears to tell you the executives all had emergencies and the call will be rescheduled. Two minutes later you get an alert on your phone that Waze has just greenlit a show starring DJ Khalid set at a newspaper. Your show is now soft dead, which is just dead but without a body or a confrontation. Three months later your lawyer sends you the start paperwork.
Obviously, I’m downplaying the actual chaos and confusion of the current development landscape, but despite all of the frustrations, compromises and uncertainty of industry right now, I miss it desperately. Morale and solidarity within the WGA remains incredibly high, almost even more-so as the weeks have dragged on, but the impact of what we have lost is starting to really settle in. No matter how tedious it is to push a rock up a hill, no matter how many callouses develop or how much dirt gets under your fingernails and how deflated you feel as you time and time again watch as the rock begins its inevitable journey back down to the bottom, it is your ridiculous job and you deserve to be paid a fair wage to do it.
