When the writers’ strike came to an end in September, there were hopes that jobs would be available.
However, an article by the Hollywood Reporter’s Lesley Goldberg found that not only is that not true, but that the struggle to secure a job in the writer’s room happened before the 2023 strikes.
In fact, Goldberg told KNX chief correspondent Charles Feldman the shift began with Wall Street.
“There were 600 TV shows…US scripted originals, English language made in 2022,” she said. “And what happened before the strikes was the industry – Wall Street specifically – shifted from a point of focusing on subscriber gains to focusing instead on profitability. And what that did is it forced the entire television landscape to start rethinking their spending and right-sizing their content slates.”
She said networks, streaming services, and others went from giving money to writers in order to “feed the beast” to focusing solely on profits.
“When Wall Street made that shift to focusing on profitability, all these companies that were spending billions of dollars on programming just sat back and said, ‘well, wait a second. This is how are we going to be profitable for spending literal billions?’” she said. “So, it really became this huge turning point [in] our industry. Now we’re at the point where the industry has contracted so much because of this focus on profitability that you’re starting to see shows that were previously renewed…all of a sudden, they’re like, ‘no, we’re not going to make season two.’”
It is a shift Goldberg believes would have happened regardless of the strike, but that the idea of companies “cooling” was exacerbated by it.
“If you’re a broadcast network…10 years ago, you were ordering near 100 pilots for all five broadcast networks,” she said, “Instead of doing that, they said, ‘you know what, we’re just going to pick things up straight to series and we’re going to do this a year in advance and we’re going to focus on year-round development. So we have stuff that’s ready to go during the strikes and we don’t have to worry about making 30 or 40 pilots and spending millions of dollars when we’re only going to make and really need three or four shows.’”
As for what the future holds for Hollywood writers, she believes the outlook is only going to get darker and that the landscape needs to shake out.