Salary Confessions: Group Therapy at Year's End
I share your final, anxious snippets about working in TV on the eve of awkward conversations with family: 'It's not the business of freaks and weirdos I flocked to'
Elaine Low covers TV from L.A. She recently covered where the jobs are (and aren’t) in 2025 and the massive cache of scripts used to train AI. As a paid subscriber to Series Business, you’ll receive richly reported dispatches from both Elaine 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 columns from Richard Rushfield, you can subscribe here.
Happy holidays, Series Business fam! Just two days until both Christmas and Hanukkah, aka a true calendar Chrismukkah. The agencies are closed, out-of-office auto-replies have been set and seemingly half the town has trudged through LAX’s security lines.
Before we all log off for the year, I should mention that I did an AMA (an Ask Me Anything, for the not-chronically online) for our members of The Ladder, an invite-only club for early-career Ankler readers. We had a nice hour-long chat about the TV market, FinSyn (throwback!) and other fun wonky stuff. (If you’re interested in joining, and in the first decade of your career, you can submit an application here.)
The overwhelming question that Laddies (as they call themselves!) asked — about six different ways — was: The future looks really uncertain. Is there a place for me in Hollywood?
I’m not exaggerating. Here’s a sampling of the AMA questions:
It feels like “doing your time” doesn’t get you anywhere anymore. Does it make sense to go to law school/business school/any grad program to unlock more opportunities in the entertainment industry?
Recognizing the practical realities of it right now and seeing where things are going, can you honestly recommend pursuing a career in entertainment to middle class college/HS students today?
I’ve just been accepted into law school, what advice do you have for an aspiring entertainment attorney with the industry facing so many unknowns?
I wish I could offer a concrete piece of direction. “The world will always need entertainment” is the singular thing I hear most when I’m the one asking similar questions of industry folk. Although it’s a truism (and yes, a bromide), it’s not inaccurate but it certainly doesn’t feel substantial.
Last week an executive recruiter told me that “enthusiasm” would help job candidates stand out from their peers — a bit of advice that, while sound, might likewise leave you with little comfort in this cutthroat environment where jobs are scarce and laddering up on merit alone seems impossible.
So in thinking about how to approach this question, I looked to the scores of you who have written to me through our Salary Confessions portal this year to tell me about your careers, inner financial lives — and personal and professional hopes for the future. A lot of it was bleak, but I would be remiss in not giving voice to those subscribers even as I tell you that there are buds of optimism going into the new year.
So as many of you head into small talk with your families this week about “How’s work?” and “When will you get promoted?” and “Have you thought about switching industries?” or worse (“What is it you do again?”), I thought I’d spare you the teeth gnashing, dread and forced smiles and use today as a year-end group therapy exercise to at least let many of you know you are not alone: