‘It’s a very tough time in Hollywood’: inside the shrinking world of the TV writers’ room

When a powerful earthquake struck near Los Angeles last month, it was a neat metaphor for a Hollywood film industry shaken in recent years by a streaming revolution, Covid pandemic, racial reckoning and crippling strikes. And nowhere are the aftershocks felt more keenly than in the writers’ room.

These are collaborative spaces where writers come together to brainstorm ideas, debate plot twists, bounce jokes off each other and punch up scripts so they are ready for production. The formula has produced TV greats from The Dick Van Dyke Show to Saturday Night Live, from The Simpsons to The Sopranos.

In the era when networks would commission a season of 22 episodes of a sitcom or drama, these rooms would often boast a dozen or more writers (dominated by white men) who would also assist on set if the actors needed guidance during filming – an exposure that many say was invaluable.

The rooms were precious training grounds for young writers to cut their teeth and build a network of contacts. But that was then. Today, with the rise of streaming platforms such as Netflix, studios increasingly rely on so-called mini-rooms with just four or five writers to create shows, often with fewer episodes.

“In most cases the writers’ rooms today are very different from 10 or 20 years ago,” says Matthew Belloni, an entertainment lawyer and former editor of the Hollywood Reporter. “Most shows have far fewer episodes. The days of 22-episode network sitcoms and dramas are mostly gone, with exceptions, and consequently the number of writers in a writers’ room is typically much fewer than it was. Now, there are more shows than there were back then but the number of shows is coming down from the peak of three or four years ago.”

These factors – and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) – were bones of contention during last year’s writers’ strike, which at 148 days was one of the longest in Hollywood history, compounded by actors downing tools at the same time.

The Writers Guild of America (WGA), which did not respond to requests for comment for this article, fought to preserve the writers’ room as an inherently valuable concept. At one point this prompted a retort from the studios: “If writing needs to be done, writers are hired, but these proposals require the employment of writers whether they’re needed for the creative process or not.”

The studios proposed that writers’ rooms should have a minimum of just three writers including the showrunner. The union managed to fend this off and reach an agreement that shows intended to run at least 13 episodes will have at least six writers on staff, with numbers shifting based on the number of episodes. Staff on shows in initial development will be employed for at least 10 weeks, while staff on shows that go to air will be employed for three weeks per episode.

Anton Schettini, 35, who has worked in 14 TV writers’ rooms and is the author of Breaking into TV Writing, says: “Because streamers have shorter seasons, writers’ rooms last a shorter amount of time. There’s fewer episodes – something like six to 10 – on streamers, whereas networks would do 22 or, in the days of cable, there would be like a 12-episode season.

“Your time working in a writers’ room has certainly shortened and we have seen up until the strike the writers’ room getting smaller and smaller, which is why the WGA fought for a minimum in the negotiation, which was implemented.”

The three-year contract also secured an increase in pay and future residual earnings of between 3.5% and 5%. That was a boost for those who can get work. But for many writers who endured the strike in the hope that good times were just around the corner, conditions remain brutal.

In a May article headlined “The Daily Terror of Being a TV Writer Right Now”, Gideon Yago, whose credits include The Newsroom and The Mosquito Coast, told Vanity Fair: “I just don’t sleep. These last couple of months have been the hardest. I haven’t had a single conversation with anyone in the industry that hasn’t expressed fear and frustration. That’s really, really bad when you’re in the enchantment and entertainment business.”

A screenwriter, who has worked on several high-profile shows and wishes to remain anonymous, tells the Guardian that some of his former co-workers are no longer getting hired. “These are people who are not breaking in – they worked on the same shows that I did right before,” he says in a phone interview.

“Now they’re saying, ‘We’re not getting any work. Our agents and managers are saying staffing is tricky out there.’ Partly it’s because the strike brought us a lot of benefits – salaries have increased, mini-rooms are much better paid than before – and as a result of that there are fewer of them.”

Despite the reduced episode count, writers argue that the workload remains just as arduous and, with shorter employment periods, they must constantly be on the lookout for the next opportunity to earn a living wage in Los Angeles. The current climate is forcing them to make difficult decisions.

The writer adds: “There are people I know that have been in the industry for a long time and they used to say, ‘I only work on the east coast, I’m not going to travel to LA,’ or, ‘I prefer Zoom because I’m a full-time single parent.’ But now they’re saying: ‘I need the money so if I have to pack up my kids and family full-time for 20 weeks with potential hiatuses built in, I guess that’s what I have to do’.”

Virtual writers’ room sprang up during the pandemic, although there studios are pushing for a full return in person. The screenwriter adds: “Remote work is dwindling a bit. It became very popular during the pandemic. People were used to rooms fully virtual but now things are starting to go back to normal.”

The writers’ strike began five months after OpenAI released its AI tool ChatGPT. The new agreement stipulates that scripts must be written by humans, not AI. Studios and production companies are obliged disclose to writers if any material given to them has been generated by AI in full or partly.

In addition, AI-generated storylines will not be regarded as “literary material” – a term in their contracts for scripts and other story forms a screenwriter produces – so writers will not have to compete with AI for screen credits. The companies are not barred from using AI to generate content but writers have the right to sue if their work is used to train AI.

For now, studios seem content to let writers do the work rather than spending more money on AI. The anonymous screenwriter comments: “Last year AI was the conversation of the moment: ‘Hmm, could we come up with a bit of content or an outline or treatment without hiring writers?’

“But once a room is fully up and running and you have access to all these creatives no one is going to look outside for additional AI content. Most people are like, well, we pay you guys, so come up with this on your own.”

He gave the example of fake newspapers or the fake crawls that run across the screen on a cable news channel on a TV in the background of a scene. “That’s something you’d think people would pay to use AI to generate but we write it manually.

“In the morning you’re like, let’s write the crawls that are coming on this fake CNN report that’s on the TV in the background. In that sense that’s been encouraging. All writers respect the process enough that it’s not part of the conversation; it’s not something you default to.”

Another upheaval for writers’ rooms over the past five years have been the racial reckoning that followed Black Lives Matter protests over the police murder of George Floyd, an African American man, in Minneapolis in 2020. Most studios have diverse writer programmes and some actively mandate that each writers’ room has a diverse element.

The unnamed screenwriter, who is Black, comments: “It adds a safety to my career in that there is an element of, if we have an all-male or all-white writer’s room, showrunners will feel the need to add some diversity. It’s crass to say they’ll pick from a pile but they will seek to rectify that.

“I do think, though, that role is limited. Some former colleagues say, ‘It’s easier if you’re a person of colour to get hired right now.’ I always bristle against that because there’s only one in my room and it is me. I know other writers of colour who are in rooms of two writers of colour so it feels like a checkbox that, once it is checked, people don’t look beyond that to fulfill that need.

“To me it feels like I’m not taking a spot that would go to other people; I’m competing with a lot of people who look like me to fill the only spot and, once that spot is filled, diversity has been ‘met’.”

Writers suffered financially even when streaming was booming as studios tried to compete with Netflix and, adopting a Silicon Valley mindset, prioritised subscriber growth and hoped profits would follow. The result was content saturation, with some expensive shows barely watched or even left on the shelf.

Studios have been grasping for a sustainable business model and writers now face even greater hardship as they scale down and consolidate. Earlier this month Paramount shut down its television studio as part of a cost-cutting measure to save half a billion dollars.

Belloni, the entertainment lawyer who is a founding partner of the website Puck, says: “When Netflix became the dominant streaming service all of the legacy media companies bolted out to try and compete. Now they are pulling back because they spent so much money and their investors are asking for profit, not subscriber growth necessarily.”

He concludes: “It’s a very tough time in Hollywood. The pullback in content and the bursting of the TV bubble has led to fewer jobs, more competition and tougher negotiating positions for these writers. All of it means it’s tougher than ever to be a working professional screenwriter.”