And what was most glaringly obvious to anyone looking at the books is that all those millions and millions being thrown at writers to develop actually resulted in very little. The next Friends, ER, and Seinfeld never did materialize from the laptops of kids sitting around the pool in Palm Springs. The companies never really got the grand success they sought from the many writers who took work simply because the “studio backed up the Brink’s truck and started dumping money until they just couldn’t say no.” The studios and networks suddenly and simultaneously realized that the business model did not work and they had had enough.
In August 2001, Mike Ovitz’s much celebrated Artists Television Group went belly up. Barely two years after pouring more than $60 million into writer development deals, the company abruptly passed out pink slips and shut its doors, wanting nothing further to do with the television business.
Studios immediately ordered their producers to trim budgets on all current shows. The studios opened new divisions dedicated strictly to producing scripted programming on the cheap. The nets slashed license fees across the board. They started ordering presentation tapes instead of paying for pilots. Rush messenger service, first-class airfare, holiday parties, business gifts, and employee lunches were among the line items quickly cut. Hiring freezes were implemented. Agencies let staff go. Law firms started downsizing.
And as the changes were picking up pace, terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11. The shock waves this sent through the overall economy were received like a tidal wave in Hollywood.
In October 2001, Fox laid off its in-house TV movie division. In December 2001, ABC told William Morris flat out that it was finished with these exorbitant packaging fees and simply would not pay a premium for Morris clients anymore. ABC said 3 percent tops, but refused the 5 percent that Morris had been receiving since the seventies. Other networks followed suit, and some started pushing to get rid of the fee altogether. With ad revenues way off, networks courted merchandising sponsorships, methodically sticking more and more product placements into scripted shows. And of course, many more reality programs went into development and production. Even the WB started making reality. Whatever the price of Bochco’s blood, Burnett’s was a hell of a lot cheaper.
When I was a kid I was intrigued with the movie Network, Paddy Chayefsky’s far-fetched satire of network television. But what I saw now in no way seemed far-fetched. NBC’s highly promoted Fear Factor, a reality show that featured models competing against each other in a series of stunts—such as dangling bikini-clad from helicopters and eating horse rectums—was becoming wildly popular. Similar types of programming destined for prime time were being cranked out all over town. Soon Wife Swap and Are You Hot?, Being Bobby Brown and Breaking Bonaduce, would become staples of the medium.
And left with few options, particularly in half-hours, audiences watched. And the more they watched, the less leery advertisers became about them. Soon, Survivor was taking in $425,000 for a thirty-second spot, close to a typical Friends episode. Merchandising and product-placement sponsorships quickly swamped the genre. And even if a reality show wasn’t a hit right out of the gate—unlike outrageously expensive scripted shows—they were given plenty of time.
Suddenly, unless you were Kelly or Sorkin or Whedon, the overall development deal became a footnote in the history of television. Studios no longer saw the merits or value in taking masses of writers off the market to think up new ideas for shows. Writers who were hired to develop were given one-shot script deals. And the relatively few writers who were offered these script deals were usually highly experienced. Just as Wall Street investors sought safety in clear, carefully picked value-plays at this time, so did Hollywood. About 30 percent fewer pilot scripts were purchased in the 2001–2002 season.
Naturally, staffs on new shows started shrinking. New series were picked up with much smaller orders. Networks would hire only one highly experienced showrunner, give him a commitment for six episodes, and then he would write all or most of them himself, with no need for a writing staff. The days of fifteen writers sitting around the table disappeared.
As former employers like ATG dropped out and long-term, high-paying development deals evaporated, many experienced writers suddenly flooded the contracting staff market. Concurrently, for the first time in many agents’ careers, they encountered something very strange: quotes were not being met. Studios had a set amount of money for a staff position. They would offer it to a writer they wanted, and if the agent turned it down, that was that. Agents weren’t getting called back by business affairs an hour later. Many writers started taking the “consulting” title, even though they were in fact providing full-time services simply to protect their quotes. So instead of earning $3 million to develop a script for a season, high-level writers were now earning $35,000 an episode, plus scripts, fees, and residuals, to write and produce. Instead of earning $35,000 an episode, supervising producers were willing to work for $17,500 an episode. Scores of writers who had sterling prime-time credits began accepting offers from not only Showtime, but also Spike TV and The Disney Channel. Many even started taking positions on nonunion productions—which meant reality shows. The aggregate effect of all of this put downward pressure on the entire writing market. Suddenly, all these relatively new writers who had recently poured into L.A. found themselves competing with much more experienced writers, in an atmosphere in which experience was now the truly valued commodity.
In a turn of the tables, where agents at the big firms once worked together synergistically to place their clients, they now worked against each other. During staffing season at this time, hundreds and hundreds of spec scripts flooded into Dawson’s Creek, which maybe had a couple or three positions to fill. If an agent was called about an individual client, the agent would often send not just that client’s scripts to the producers, but many writers on its roster. It was not uncommon for multiple agents at the same agency to submit multiple scripts from their own particular lists, competing with other agents at their own firm. Now it was the lit agencies, big and boutique, who were operating under the “throw it all against the wall and see what sticks” mentality. About this time I began to receive calls from writers with whom I had once worked, some who had trained me. They were looking for work.
In a matter of months, the TV writing market became a buyer’s market. The situation was only made worse by the effects of consolidation. After more than a decade of getting squeezed, after years of little independents driving up the cost of writers, the conglomerates’ entertainment executives were finally able to work together to drive down the cost of talent. And many on the receiving end of these take-it-or-leave-it offers felt that they detected something in business-affairs voices that could be characterized as glee. It was payback time.
However, even though the days of making deals for one writer to sit at home and think for more than a couple million dollars a year were gone, hundreds of writers were still doing this. That’s because many studios had created their stables of writers by signing long-term contracts that had not yet expired, most notably Sony.
Nearly all the recent series that Sony had spent so much money on and fought tooth and nail to get into production had been canceled. The Brian Benben Show, Maggie Winters, To Have & to Hold, L.A. Doctors, Martial Law, What About Joan, Pasadena, and The Tick were all unsuccessful outings, abruptly cleared from network schedules partially to make room for cheap reality shows. Only Dawson’s Creek and The King of Queens looked like they might have viable lives in syndication, but even if they did they would have a very hard time ever covering the studio’s investments in all the canceled series, failed pilots, and unproductive writer deals. In the fall of 2001, rumors began to circulate that Sony was thinking about doing something drastic.
On October 25, 2001, right in the middle of a pilot season in which Columbia TriStar had more than twenty-five projects already in development around town, Sony confirmed several days of spec
ulation and announced that it would fold its broadcast-TV production studio. “The numbers don’t match up even when you do it right,” Sony Pictures Entertainment president Mel Harris told Variety. “The mold we’ve broken is the large, roster-based, network prime-time deep-development, heavy-deficit, hoping-for-that-one-play-to-recoup-it-all mold.”
Brian Lowry reported that according to insiders at Sony, what prompted the decision to shut down Columbia TriStar was an internal financial review of all studio operations known as the “21st Century Project.” Top officials at Sony were said to be “chafed” at the amounts of money being spent by Columbia TriStar. Recent development deals, like the one with Danny DeVito’s Jersey Films for nearly $10 million, especially rubbed top management the wrong way.
About seventy executives and employees were let go, including Columbia TriStar’s president of television, Len Grossi, and the studio’s president of production, recently hired Tom Mazza.
Sony shopped its stable of writers around town as a complete package, to no avail. That was the last thing studios wanted right now. Some deals, like a recent one with producer-manager Gavin Palone, Sony settled for cash. Others were sold, some bought out, but in the end, most writers were simply paid as their deals were allowed to lapse.
What little remained of the division that once produced Bewitched, Mad About You, and Dawson’s Creek was folded into Columbia TriStar Television Distribution (CTTD), the studio’s in-house syndication arm, which also produced programming like the Pamela Anderson vehicle V.I.P., Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, The Ricki Lake Show, and Strong Medicine. CTTD president Steve Mosko was charged with developing similar kinds of low-cost programming for a newly formed and strictly scaled-down TV department. This would be the directive at Sony for several years, until it figured out a new disciplined business model that would allow it to once again produce scripted shows for broadcast network television. CTTD continued to produce the remaining Sony products, Dawson’s, Family Law, and The King of Queens, until those shows ran their courses a few years later.
On April 17, 2002, Dawson’s aired its one hundredth episode, meaning we had enough episodes for syndication. I marched into Paul’s office to congratulate him, but I was surprised at how reserved he was about the whole thing. On The Wonder Years this was huge. On most shows it’s a very big deal. It means success for a show and its studio. But Paul felt that given how the existing syndication market, which was also racked by the changes in the business, was responding to serialized character dramas like Dawson’s, it would have a very modest sale. He was right. The show eventually sold to TBS for about a couple hundred thousand dollars an episode. One hundred twenty-eight episodes were produced. Not exactly Seinfeld money, and given the costs, planned and unplanned, and the multitude of profit participants, it was hard to imagine that the series would ever be significantly profitable for Sony.
About this time, Tom and I had lunch at Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset. I confided that I was seriously thinking about talking to other shows for the coming season, what would absolutely be the last one for the series. As much as I liked working on The Creek, it was clearly time for a change. Tom thought this was a good idea. He also insisted that there was no way he would be coming back again as showrunner. I did not believe him. I’d learned a few things by this point, about both the industry and Tom. And I was right.
So I met with the usual suspects that 2002–2003 staffing season. The week of April 22 was ABC, Warner Brothers, CBS, and Touchstone. The next week was NBC, Spelling, and Touchstone. The next week was American Dreams, That Was Then, and Ed, and the meetings went on the next week, CBS again, and so forth. But nothing quite clicked, for the usual reasons and because of all the recent changes. Staffing needs were smaller. There were more writers on the market. And, most notably, there were far fewer scripted shows, let alone good scripted shows, being made. In early June, Dan tried to put me back on Dawson’s, but that didn’t work.
Thus for the first time in five years, I took another break from staffing. Dan did what agents do and tried to get me out there to pitch pilots. But all I wanted to do was take a deep breath and write. So over the next few months I wrote a pilot on spec, developed a couple more, and actually spent time around my house.
One night, I plopped down on my new giant leather sofa in my new giant family room and stayed up watching videos on my new giant big-screen TV. I watched birthday parties that I did not attend, first steps that I did not see, laughing and playing and crying, and my wife, in the middle of it all, a baby in arm, a nanny in tow, looking profoundly alone, like something was missing, which of course it was.
Determined to find a show that would be a bit more “family friendly,” I went back on the 2003–2004 staffing market. Once again, I made the rounds: NBC, Universal, Paramount, CBS, Touchstone, NBCP, FBC, Joan of Arcadia, and so on. My buddy Bernie Lechowick was developing a show with his wife and sometimes producing partner, Lynn Latham. Actually, “buddy” wouldn’t quite be the best way to characterize my relationship with Bernie. Hyperion writer-producer Wendy Goldman often hummed the theme to Courtship of Eddie’s Father whenever Bernie and I worked together.
A few years earlier, Bernie and Lynn asked for my notes on a pilot they had written, which I gave them, and which they found extremely helpful. So when it looked like their new show, Wild Card, might be a go, they asked for my help again. And when the show was picked up, they very aggressively worked to get me on it as their coexecutive producer. Because it was a cable show, I started very early, the first week of May.
However, by the middle of June, it was clear that they did not think I was a good fit, and by the second week of July I went home, just like Joe Dougherty and Tammy Ader had, continuing to collect my $25,000 an episode for the rest of the season. Several months later, the network decided that Bernie and Lynn were not a good fit, and while they continued to earn their massive salaries for another entire season, Wild Card came back with Doug Steinberg, the Dawson’s consultant, as its showrunner. The show soon collapsed and was canceled.
Even though this was just business in the TV business—something a former Lifetime executive later smiled about and characterized as ridiculous—I wasn’t able to shrug it off like that, partially because I genuinely liked the show—well, the pilot—a lot, and I felt that under different circumstances it could have been something really good. And partially because I felt that something fundamental was wrong here.
But the more I thought about it, and put it into context, the more I began to feel…hopeful. I know that on the face of it, everything that had happened in the business over the last couple years looked pretty disheartening. And believe me, a lot of people I knew certainly saw it that way. But I didn’t. For one thing, I seemed to have found myself, really for the first time in my life, with real perspective. Since coming to Hollywood in 1988, I had not only seen TV go through cycle after cycle, but I had lived in it. From the sitcoms of the Cosby era to the one-hour character dramas during the China Beach period, from the dramedies of The Wonder Years to the teen soaps of Dawson’s Creek, I had ridden the waves of television through its peaks of popularity and its valleys of flops. I had heard agents tell me that this kind of show was what everyone now wanted and that kind of show was now dead. And I had survived it all, and so had good TV.
While many writers around me felt that television was being destroyed for good, I was able to look beyond the last few seasons and see that the business runs in cycles, and we were simply in the middle of one. Just like the seasons of L.A., this was part of the rhythms of the business. How long this cycle would last, I did not know. How bad TV would be during it, I did not know. But every cycle I had seen over the course of my career always, inevitably, had the same endgame. Somehow, a writer with a good idea of what he or she was passionate about would ride or rise above the winds of fortune and start a new cycle. I watched that combination of talent, passion, and luck, which could not be bought, repeatedly find a way no matter what kinds of curves and
constraints the business threw at it. And some had been pretty damn formidable. So my reason to believe that quality television would not in fact be killed off by anything, including the great conglomerates of our times, was not merely due to faith, but to direct and substantive firsthand experience.
You see, the more I considered what had happened to television between 1988 and the beginning of the new millennium, the more I actually felt that upheaval was not only what the business had coming, but what television itself needed. While my colleagues and I were all beneficiaries of one of the greatest run-ups in corporate America—what was essentially the leveraging of Hollywood—I came to believe that the overall effect this had on the business had ultimately hurt the product we all loved so much. What quality television needed was a break, a chance, if you will, to reinvent its creative soul. And so did I. By the spring of 2004, with good TV already well into its break, I had my chance, and I took it.
EPILOGUE
In May 2004, partially because of the real estate market in Southern California, and partially because of those green envelopes, my wife and I left L.A. and moved into a lovely home on a magnolia-shaded cul-de-sac in a quiet suburban community in Georgia. Although that giant house in Valencia never actually made my father any more proud of me than he was the day he told me not to scab, it ended up being a blessing in many unexpected ways.
The same week that I moved my family east, the Desperate Housewives pilot tape started making its rounds through town. Hours after the movers had come, I sat by myself on the floor of my family room, surrounded by packing tape and empty boxes and the ruins left behind after a move, and watched the Desperate Housewives pilot on my television set, which had been enduringly built into the wall. In a world of reality shows and franchise dramas, Marc Cherry’s character-driven serial—which he wrote on spec—had a phoenixlike quality. Just like David Chase and Linwood Boomer, who created important revolutionary shows (The Sopranos and Malcolm in the Middle) on their own, not when they were on a development deal, not when they were at the pinnacles of their careers, Cherry once again proved how important passion and singular vision is to the creation of a hit. His new show rose up out of the ashes left behind by the last few years of conglomerate-directed development. When I finished watching it, I removed the tape and packed it in my carry-on bag, smiling to myself as I headed for the door, knowing that this really was the harbinger of a new cycle, a new era, of writer-driven quality television.
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