Op-Ed: How the slow death of broadcast TV hurts TV writers

This month a controlling stake of the CW network was sold to Nexstar Media Group. This followed announcements earlier in the year that many of the network’s superhero and youth-oriented shows were being canceled. The sale provoked plenty of dismay from fans worried about the future of their favorite shows. But as a working television writer for the last 20 years, I was alarmed for a completely different reason.

The death of the old CW is merely the latest sign of a television industry pivoting from the world of scripted shows on broadcast networks. The streaming system eliminates the jobs of many currently working writers and erodes the ability to train and mentor the next generation of staffers, leaving many unprepared to run their own shows. By trying to save a few dollars, the industry is, in effect, eating its own seed corn.

Here’s how the employment math works. A broadcast show with a full 18-to-23 episode season order typically has a staff of eight to 12 working writers, from staff writer up to executive producer. Additionally, a show’s assistants and script coordinators often get assigned a freelance script or story, which serves as a sort of audition for a future staff writer job.

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Working on a broadcast show that runs for multiple seasons can provide these staffers with a measure of financial stability in a notoriously feast and famine industry, and can offer a path to advance in title and responsibility as they gain more experience. As writers climb the ranks on a network show, they are also often set to work with the crew and participating in the pre- and post-production stages of making the show. This is how they can learn to handle production limitations, budgetary issues, actor egos and other critical aspects of creating television. On the CW superhero show “Arrow,” for example, Beth Schwartz began as a writer’s assistant and by its seventh season was running the show as executive producer.

Many of the most acclaimed writers and showrunners of the “golden age of television” cut their teeth in broadcast TV. One of the early jobs of David Chase, creator of “The Sopranos,” was writing on “The Rockford Files,” and before “Lost” and “Watchmen” came about, Damon Lindelof wrote for the Don Johnson cop show “Nash Bridges.”

What will happen if popular DC superhero shows migrate from the CW to Warner Bros. Discovery’s own streaming service? For one, a lot of writing jobs will go away. Although shows such as “Supergirl” or “The Flash” may employ as many as a dozen writers for their 22 episodes per year, the seasons likely will be shortened on a streamer. Many premium cable and streaming shows with shorter seasons operate with half a dozen or fewer writers on staff, often working under shorter contracts. And the eight episodes in the first season of HBO Max’s “Peacemaker” were all written by the show’s creator.

For established writers, jumping between eight-episode streaming shows, sometimes multiple times a year, is a more financially precarious system. And people new to the industry who do get a writing job have fewer opportunities to learn other aspects of the business. In the streaming model, all episodes of a show are typically written ahead of production, with the showrunner often being the only member of a writers room to stay on through shooting post-production.

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This means that writers growing up in the new system are getting senior positions often having written only a handful of episodes — without ever having set foot on a set, talked to actors and directors or dealt with a budget breakdown. Although experience can’t guarantee a good product and there are examples of newcomers who were brilliant showrunners right out of the gate, it’s increasingly common to hear stories of people with no production experience incurring huge cost overruns and delivering unusable episodes.

I worry about a future in which these systems are increasingly the norm. In addition to reduced opportunities for new writers, staffing the same people on multiple shows can have a homogenizing effect on what we watch. By cutting season orders and staffs, and severing the connection between writing and production to save on budgets, the people running streamers and entertainment conglomerates may end up destroying the training and advancement infrastructure that made the renaissance in scripted television possible in the first place.

Zack Stentz is a film and television writer who has worked on shows including “Fringe,” “The Flash” and “Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous.” @MuseZack