Once the writers strike ended in late September, president of FX Entertainment Nick Grad and his colleagues began to clear their schedules. After a 148-day stoppage, the second longest in Writers Guild of America history, surely there would be a deluge of writers with fresh ideas and new spec scripts coming through, and Grad and team were ready.
But here we are, nearly two and a half months later, and that deluge never came. Not for those FX executives, or, as an informal survey of the television industry suggests, their rivals across the landscape. “It’s eerie, nobody’s buying anything,” says one top producer, echoing a chorus of sources who express surprise at how quiet the marketplace has been since Hollywood’s writers went back to work.
Everybody seems to have a theory, of course. Some are adamant that writers took the “pencils down” mandate more seriously during this strike than they did the last. And while technically they were allowed to pen spec scripts, the consensus is that very few did. “In my circle, I don’t know anybody who wrote something during the strike to take out,” says One Day at a Time producer Mike Royce, a self-described “unicorn” because he has been able to get a few projects going. Grad is one of many who suggest that for writers, “It was hard to tune out the noise and be creative.”
Others say that writers and, more notably, their reps are concerned about putting material out there in a considerably softer marketplace. After all, executives across Hollywood have spent the better part of the past year bemoaning a broken model and warning of more belt-tightening and contraction to come. “Everyone is afraid the market is drying up, and nobody wants to whiff” with their one shot before buyers, explains an exec at one of the big streamers. Adds an agency partner, whose writer roster has largely been laying low: “There are enough places that are not buying aggressively that going out with competitive new stuff has a relative high bar — and anybody who’s sat on anything for nine months isn’t really in the mood to clear the decks and get it passed on. There’s a little bit of, like, ‘Do you dip your toe in the water without knowing its temperature?’ ”
Still more write off the crickets as customary for the end of the year — even if nothing else about this year has been customary — and say writers are simply holding off until early 2024, when the various streamers and cable networks might have a better sense of their budgets and pipeline, and perhaps more of an appetite for new fare. Among the projects rumored to be on the runway is a Tina Fey adaptation of the 1981 Alan Alda-Carol Burnett vacation comedy The Four Seasons.
“Right now, the focus at these places is on getting shows that were paused back into production before we turn to new ones coming in. It’s not about them not buying, it’s about prioritization,” says one studio chief, who suggests what happens at the top of the year will ultimately be more telling. “If come January and February, it’s still crickets, then we have a problem.”
What this moment has provided is a potential shift in leverage that reps and their independent studio partners are, by their own admission, eager to take advantage of. “These buyers have had the ability to just tell us what the market looks like all day, every day through these years of ramp up, and now they’re all going, ‘Oh, well, we’re going through this thing and we don’t know how many slots we have and blah, blah, blah,’ ” explains one top agent, who notes that now, rather than simply be dictated to, he and his fellow reps have been putting together compelling packages — with writers, directors and, more recently, talent — outside the studio system, relying instead on independent backers like A24, MRC, Wiip and Fifth Season. He adds, “So, there’s more activity than buyers think, we’re not just going straight to them. Our feeling is like, ‘Let’s finance a script, let’s package it together, let’s tell them what we want to do.’ ”
Indeed, many of those who have gone to market with pitches in recent months share stories similar to Howard Gordon’s. Since the WGA strike ended, he and his Homeland writing partner Alex Gansa have shopped a few ideas, but little has come of them. “They were well received, but we’ve heard nothing,” says Gordon, more baffled by the degree of uncertainty in the marketplace than anything else. “And then everybody who we’ve told that to has said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s what happened to us, too.’ ”
There have been exceptions, of course, led by Cape Fear, a Nick Antosca-penned series reimagining the classic Universal thrillers with both Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese attached as producers. Though there were conversations about holding the long-gestating pitch until the new year, Universal Content Productions (UCP) and the other stakeholders decided that it had the goods (i.e., the pitch, the pedigree and the IP) to cut through. The group took it out in mid-November and it quickly ignited one of the first high-profile bidding wars in months. Even two sides of the same company — HBO and Max, both under Casey Bloys — made offers. Other exceptions include a Hannah Waddingham-Octavia Spencer assassin series (think Thelma & Louise meets Jack Ryan, according to sources) and a propulsive Amy Adams thriller from Academy Award-winning screenwriter Graham Moore, both of which ginned up multiple offers.
Still, what seems to be unanimous is that the strategies across the board are shifting and the yeses won’t be as plentiful — certainly not at the Hulus and HBOs, for instance. (The latter, which has made some offers, is said to be encouraging writers to hold their pitches for the new year.) By all accounts, Apple and Netflix remain the “most open” for business, as one seller describes it, though multiple sources say that Amazon will still spend (very) big for projects it wants. Nevertheless, the 600-series era of simply expecting a sale is over. As Universal Studio Group chair Pearlena Igbokwe puts it: “It’s the quality-over-quantity era now.”
This story first appeared in the Dec. 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.