A Creative Exec Survival Guide
As roles get squeezed, a guide to standing out, what you're up against, red flags to avoid and what to highlight on your resume
Elaine Low recently reported on how Trump’s tariffs are impacting production and interviewed WME digital strategy head Chris Jacquemin and leading animators about Hollywood’s cautious embrace of AI. As a paid subscriber to Series Business, you’ll receive dispatches from Elaine, Lesley Goldberg and Manori Ravindran on the TV business. This is a standalone subscription separate from The Ankler. For access to Series Business and everything The Ankler publishes, including Sean McNulty's The Wakeup and Richard Rushfield, subscribe here.
There’s a scene in the first minutes of the pilot of Apple TV+’s The Studio where Seth Rogen’s character, a high-level film exec, is summoned to the top boss’ office after the reigning studio head gets unceremoniously canned. Rogen’s Matt Remick turns to his assistant, Quinn Hackett (Chase Sui Wonders), and marvels:
Matt: “I’m about to get promoted or fired. But if I get this job, I’m bumping you up to creative executive.”
Quinn: “Holy shit, I thought you only said that so I wouldn’t quit!”
Matt: “I did. But I also meant it.”
The average American viewer might not know what a creative executive does, but it’s clear from this scene that this promotion would be a Big Deal — and that’s all the more true in a climate where these roles have become increasingly rare and demanding. The Studio is part sendup, part homage to Hollywood, a heightened version of the reality no doubt many of you experience on set and on studio lots, and it captures some of the joys, but especially the anxieties of making film and TV in 2025. (One studio exec I called told me they were cringing while watching Matt’s gaffes in the second episode — “because I’ve definitely seen people commit those sins as creative executives in my career,” this person said.)
“Creative exec” is a bit of an amorphous title, one that can span work at a TV or film studio, production company or streaming service, across both scripted and non-scripted divisions, in development or current programming, etc. It’s also a job whose ranks have dwindled these last few years as entertainment companies slashed budgets and eliminated roles. The “do more with less” mentality has creeped into the tastemakers’ arena.
For the uninitiated, a CE is “a position that is essentially half creative and half business,” says Michael Garcia, who became president of Noah Hawley’s production company, 26 Keys, a year ago. “It’s not purely one or the other, and that’s what made it so attractive to me as somebody entering the industry.”
CEs are the stirrers of the secret sauce, the people who know how the sausage gets made — at our panel about the new boom of the broadcast procedural at NAB Show in Vegas last week, CBS Studios’ Bryan Seabury and CBS Entertainment’s Yelena Chak broke down how they decided to spin off Fire Country and how they approach the development process from both the studio side and network side.
Joined by Fire Country and Sheriff Country creators Tony Phelan and Joan Rater, Chak and Seabury demonstrated some of the core competencies of the creative executive right there on stage: great relationships with writers, a strong point of view and a sense of the market. Even when it comes to expanding a successful series into a franchise, “the core of the job has to stay the same,” Seabury said. “It has to be identifying a new show that I think the audience will really come to and get excited about.” (You can hear our whole conversation on a bonus edition of The Ankler podcast.)
A lethargic 2024 has given way to some hiring this year, as evidenced in part by a rare LinkedIn posting for a role that typically would be advertised by word of mouth: Legendary Entertainment recently listed an opening for a VP or SVP-level scripted TV development exec, “a creative executive with strong industry relationships, a sharp eye for great material, and a track record of developing compelling scripted series.” (Salary range: $120K-$325K.)
Joanna Sucherman, an executive recruiter and the founder of JLS Media, has witnessed this small uptick in hiring, despite the barren environment. “I don’t want to oversell it, but we’re seeing some people bring extra people on and say, ‘We actually need a little bit here and a little bit of help here,’” says the headhunter, who has found VP and SVPs of current programming and development for major entertainment companies. “Sometimes it’s not full time, sometimes it’s contract players.”
In this week’s Series Business, we’ve got a guide to standing out among the large pool of talented creative execs and nailing the job once you’ve got it. We’ll cover:
What CEs jostling for their next gig should put at the top of their resumés
What a creative executive really does
Why one successful CE looks at Hollywood as a “manufacturing business”
How hard it is to get one of these jobs
The qualities of a great creative exec
How to know what current shows are working, and why
Why some execs place as much value on the projects that didn’t see the light of day as the ones that got made
How to hone your own taste and POV and know when not to follow them
Red flags to avoid in seeking a CE role or hiring for one