'Development is Wage Theft': Pilot Season Death Morphs Into Year-Round Hell
'Development is Wage Theft': Pilot Season Death Morphs Into Year-Round Hell
TV writers say the new buying cycle is yet another form of free labor; studio execs say it’s not so simple
Elaine Low covers the TV market from L.A. She recently wrote about the impact of the WGA writers strike, two words TV buyers are allergic to and the worries of Hollywood’s top earners. As a paid subscriber to Series Business, you’ll receive richly reported dispatches from both Elaine and Manori Ravindran for a global perspective 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 columns from Richard Rushfield, you can subscribe here.
The idea of pilot season is an old-fashioned one. Used to be that TV writers would spend the late spring and summer developing ideas, pitch in August or September, write scripts through the fall after getting a pilot script order, then turn them in so that executives could read those scripts on their flights to the East Coast for the holidays. Come January, you’d know whether that pilot was getting shot and by May whether you’d have a series on the air in the fall. By the end of upfronts in May, the cycle would start all over again.
Those were the days. Streamers don’t have any kind of set cadence for when they order shows, and even the traditional Big Three broadcasters — CBS, NBC and ABC — have now moved to a year-round development process. Only six out of 14 pilots were picked up during the early 2023 pilot season, a stark contrast to the 60 pilots that the broadcast networks ordered in 2020, according to Variety.
Studios and networks have increasingly touted the idea that all development, all the time is good for television. CBS, for instance, has become “more so than ever committed” to the notion, CBS Entertainment President Amy Reisenbach told Deadline in January. “We want our development to be a bit more bespoke moving forward, which is, certain shows are going to go to pilot and certain shows will go straight to series, certain shows may open a development room and then we’ll go to series. We want to be flexible.”
The end product, in theory, is higher-quality TV shows. Who doesn’t want better TV shows? But over the course of speaking with more than a dozen writers about the anniversary of the end of the Writers Guild of America strike, the topic of “how do we make this profession more sustainable?” often turned into a conversation about the many ways writers feel that year-round development has deeply messed with the stability of their careers and contributed to the fundamental problems the profession now faces.
“Writers didn’t create this situation. We didn’t make development a ‘year-round’ thing,” says Arrowverse co-creator Marc Guggenheim. “We didn’t decide that an entire season of scripts should be commissioned before production could be greenlit. We didn’t decide that showrunners should be treated like feature writers and made as interchangeable as lightbulbs.”
There are two sides to every story, of course. For today’s newsletter, I talked to yet more writers, many of whom would love to return to a schedule and — gasp — get paid for what’s now free labor as they develop ideas, but I also sought out development and creative execs on the studio side, some of whom tell me that it’s not quite so black and white.
In this week’s Series Business, you’ll learn:
The volume of work writers now have to put in before they have a shot at a series order
Two proposed solutions that could address the problems with year-round development for both writers and executives
What writers liked about pilot season, despite its flaws
Writers’ biggest complaints about year-round development
The chasm between development execs who like the current system or suffer within it
The “trickle-down effect” for everyone who works in Hollywood
The impact on young talent, women and people of color