The program is still in its infancy
The program is still in its early stages of development. / an editor and you put it together and you add music and sound effects and color and then it goes out to the world
Thank you. What has gotten us to this place is the rug being pulled out from under writers and two degree actors in the last 10-15 years. It is the advent of streaming and the Golden Age of Television - one of the first streaming original shows being House of Cards. When they pushed Kate Mara in front of that train, it seemed like groundbreaking television and it was fast-paced and it looked beautiful and it had huge stars. Artistically, it has opened up the world - there used to be 80 shows in a year, now there are 500-550 shows in a year.
For writers, this was good because it gave people entry and a lot of those people were diverse young voices who Hollywood said come out to LA or New York, places where the cost of living is extremely high and you have a seat at the table that for years created careers for people. Now, it doesn’t exist like that anymore.
What is the difference between a network show and a streaming show? Network is the TV we all grew up with - ABC, NBC, CBS - and it’s the season that begins in September and runs 22 episodes and ends in May. As that’s a season, especially for procedurals that everyone knows like Grey's Anatomy or CSI, TV seasons always began in September and that had something to do with auto sales, by the way. The new car seasons came out and they were going to advertise heavily, so you wanted new TV. The network model worked for a very long time, providing people with a stable career.
The upside of streaming creatively was that you didn’t have to worry about commercial breaks. If you wrote an SVU, you have five commercial breaks in an hour of TV - something has to happen at the end of that act to make sure people come back. Your writing has to conform to the advertising that pays for it. If you write for streaming, you don’t have to worry about commercial breaks - you get to write a different structure, maybe it’s just an organic three-act structure to an hour. Now you’re down to 8 episode runs, 6 episode runs, shorter seasons where you can arc a story across 8 episodes, you can go a little darker, you can go a little deeper.
That part of it was great, and writers from movies, flat to it, novels flock to it. But as the episode orders have shrunk, what used to be 20 weeks, you have to go from finding one job a year to finding multiple jobs a year to maintain the same status quo that you previously had. It’s tough.
I don’t think anyone is asking to go back to 20 episode seasons, but the stability and the longevity of those jobs is the model that we’re asking for and that we think is best for writers and best for the product.
Can you explain what has changed, how the writer’s room looks different in each model?
The function of the writer’s room is the exact same - it is a group of writers coming together to break story, to craft a season and to write episodes of television. When you get your first job writing on a TV show, you’re almost always a staff writer, which is the lowest level in the room. The next rung on the ladder is story editor, from story editor to executive story editor, co-producer, producer, supervising producer, co-executive producer and then executive producer is the highest - showrunner.
The creative process is people coming together, having a conversation about the dark comedy, is it one hour, is it a half hour, breaking story and really writing your whole season. The next phase is production, when you bring all of your crew together, bring all of your actors, grab your directors and you shoot the TV show. Then comes post-production, when you take that thing you shot, you sit with an editor and you put it together and you add music and sound effects and color, and then it goes out to the world.