The Competitive Reality of Writing for Television

So the television networks are going broke (“TV Chiefs Yell ‘Cut’ on Costs,” by Corie Brown, Column One, Dec. 18). Puh-leeze. Out of which poverty-stricken budget did NBC pull Katie Couric’s $65-million deal?

To handle diminishing revenues and rising costs, writers’ fees are being cut back. That should keep all those darn rich writer guys from writing all those scripts for those unscripted reality shows and game shows that are draining the coffers. Those huge writer/producer deals must have taken a terrific bite out of the paltry stipends for GE’s Jack Welch and Viacom’s Sumner Redstone, as well as Michael Eisner and Rupert Murdoch, all with packages of tens of millions of dollars and more.

No wonder Rupert’s Dodgers couldn’t re-sign Chan Ho Park.

Have show runners (writer/producers) been making too much money? Well, since I am not, nor have I ever been, a show runner, I’d say, “Perhaps.”

But because I may want one of them to hire me one day, I’ll add, “... but they deserve it.” However that’s such a small part of the story. The fact is most TV writers are scratching just to cover rent for their North Hollywood apartments. (Who can afford the Brentwood rentals that Brown mentions?) It hasn’t been a good year. In fact, the entire millennium’s been pretty nasty.

Earlier in the year there was the threat of a writers strike, but they had to go and settle the deal. Whew. We writers were finally able to get back to work. Right? Wrong! How do you strike against something by which you’re not employed? Even after staffing season was over, most of us writers remained unemployed.

At least a strike gives the writer a splendid rationale for unemployment. Do you know what it’s like to have your 75-year-old mother (she had me when she was around 50) calling from Philly every other day: “How are you making it?” “Have you heard anything from that Spielberg boy yet?” “Why don’t you become an exotic dancer like your sister? She makes good money.”

Sorry, been there, done that.

Brown wrote: “The livelihoods of thousands of writers are likely to be hit hard.” Don’t those thousands of writers first need to actually be hired before they can have livelihoods to be hit? It’s pretty difficult to have zero income affected too negatively.

It’s different from most industries, but the only time television writers are hired is when new shows are picked up to fill in for other shows going bust, with their writers hitting the streets. It’s not like they add new hours to the schedule. They just replace the dead. No severance. No golden parachutes.

Here are some numbers from a Writers Guild of America insider. There are about 150 series per year with about an average of 10 staffers each, or about 1,500 staff writer/writer-producer, prime-time jobs per year.

There are a required two freelance scripts given out per series for a maximum of about 300 freelance scripts per year.

That’s 1,800 possible jobs being fought for by over 10,000 active WGA West members (not including East Coast WGA members) and the additional how-many-more tens of thousands more non-guild members attempting to break in. The security of any work garnered, due to the many cancellations, is precarious at best.

Most TV members of the WGA are pitching their little literary hearts out just trying to sell one of those freelance scripts a year so they can qualify for health benefits. The minimum fee for a prime-time half-hour network sitcom script is just less than $19,000. In reality, a freelancer is not going to sell any more than one.

Even if he did, that’s one less for another writer. Not bad for two or three weeks of work, if you can get it. But when you spread that 19K over a whole year, that’s, um, 52 divided into $19,000....

This is not to say that anyone should feel sorry for the writer. We selected this career, and we can just as well unselect it, but to focus on the few writers who are getting the big money deals to fix TV’s problems is to ignore the real problem--the quality of the shows. As Brown says, “One percent of the shows pitched get made into shows.” Actually it’s a much smaller percentage.

Even so, once the network likes a pitch and money exchanges hands, the show is no longer the writer’s alone. From this point on and continuing until the show is no longer palatable, it becomes everyone’s show. That means it’s note time.

From the head of the network and its bevy of development people, down through the production company VPs, to the votes of some focus group in Glendale, the writer’s original idea goes through every nonwriter who wants to put his or her stamp on it.

Here’s a crazy idea: Since this process effects a 99% failure rate, why not alter the process? The network originally buys a show because it believes the writer had something. Go ahead, pay the show runner less, but, in return, don’t take his creation away.

Allow the creator to carry his vision all the way through to air. Notes should only be about keeping the writer on the path of the original story pitch that initially inflamed hearts all atwitter, much like HBO’s Chris Albrecht does.

Would it work (e.g., “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City,” “Six Feet Under”)? Networks can’t do much worse than what they’ve been doing up to now.

And who knows, maybe one day Murdoch will be able to sign Texas Ranger Chan Ho Park.

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Steve Young, contributing editor at the WGA’s Written By magazine, is a Prism Award winner and a Humanitas Prize nominee for his television writing. He can be reached at theothersteveyoung@juno.com.