Writers cramp

Scribes still sulking about shift in TV landscape

By JOSEF ADALIAN

Writers may still rule in TV land -- but their kingdom isn't what it used to be.

Even before the first pickets sprang up, a series of shifts in the smallscreen landscape had made life for TV's scribe tribe more challenging than it had been in decades.

Longtime writer-producer Marshall Herskovitz paints a bleak picture of how things have changed.

"In the last five to seven years, salaries have been slashed, backend has been slashed and creative control has been taken," he says. No wonder Herskovitz decided to launch his latest show, "Quarterlife," on the Internet (before it was bought and repackaged by NBC).

Former "Cheers" scribe Rob Long says it's "a terrible time to be in business if you're a working writer -- a staff writer with a mortgage in West L.A. and kids looking at private schools." He says the "country club" era of TV writing is over.

"We got paid a lot of money to work at a studio and try to get pilots made and scheduled. They compensated me well, not only by year and salary, but by profit participation," Long says. "But now it's a sales business. If you're a writer, you're also a producer, and if you're smart, you'll be a director, too. You've got to have your fingers in a lot of pieces of the business."

Scribes have plenty of reason to sulk, strike or no strike.

Previously plentiful overall deals, which paid writers to dream up new shows, have become the exception rather than the rule -- and now, post-strike, may be virtually extinct.

Staff jobs, particularly on sitcoms, have become harder to come by as studios shift the coin (and some power) once reserved for writing staffs to nonwriting producers and big-name helmers. Monies once spent on writers also are being diverted to pumped-up f/x budgets, in order to make network shows such as "Pushing Daisies" and "Bionic Woman" feel more like movies.

Nearly eight years after "Survivor" proved nets could prosper with shows sans traditional scripts, the reality genre shows no sign of fading -- with the strike only underscoring how easy it is to vamp without comedies and dramas. "Every time 'American Gladiators' gets big ratings, I want to put a bullet through my head," one veteran comedy scribe laments.

And while the explosion of original cable programming has offered new job opportunities for scribes, those gigs come with two big downsides: lower pay and smaller episode orders. Instead of getting paid for 22 or 24 episodes every year, most cable shows crank out just 13 installments per season.

For those who can still find work, there's been steady downward pressure on salaries, particularly for middle-range scribes. One agent estimates that per-episode fees for writers at the supervising producer level have gone from a range of $17,500-$22,000 in the 1990s to $14,000-$17,500 these days.

Then there's the matter of backend.

Consolidation of TV station ownership during the past 15 years has resulted in a situation in which just two megastation groups, Fox and Tribune Broadcasting, determine the size of the payday for off-network sales of sitcoms -- the traditional money-minters for studios -- and dramas. It's no wonder the big syndie backend paychecks, once a given for even modest hits, have virtually disappeared for scribes.

Cable's voracious appetite for off-network fare has helped prop up the market, but for rank-and-file staff writers, the residuals rate for reruns on cable channels is significantly slimmer than the fees for those same reruns on local broadcast TV stations.

"There's a sense that the business as it was -- that potential to hit it medium and still hit it big -- is probably over," says Josh Schwartz, the man behind "The O.C," "Chuck" and "Gossip Girl."

Or, as another veteran scribe puts it, "The money's down. Considerably."

But it's just not the coin that's shrunk. Power is slipping away, too.

TV scribes once took pride in the considerable sway they held in the production process, especially as compared with their feature brethren. A-list showrunners such as Stephen J. Cannell, Aaron Spelling, Steven Bochco and, more recently, David E. Kelley and Dick Wolf were able to build one-man empires on the strengths of a few hit shows, and they used their sway to get deals that gave them broad creative control and even a say in how and when their shows would air.

That was during an era in which studios and networks were frequently separate entities.

Now, the studio and network production teams often are indistinguishable from each other -- leaving the writer with no strong ally during the development process, and no defense when some webhead wonk decides it would be "fun" to incorporate Taco Bell's new Gordita Supreme into an episode of "CSI."

"There's no protection from a studio any more," one top agent says. "Even when you've got an unaligned studio like Warner Bros., they're so beholden to the networks, they don't have the same power in the marketplace they once had. The studios simply serve the networks."

Herskovitz says the network-studio monolith has shaken up the long-established order of things.

"The networks didn't used to own the shows, so it didn't occur to them to start telling showrunners how characters should dress or what the walls should look like," he says. "The shows were made by the producers, and if the networks didn't like something, they'd complain later. But now they just tell the writer-producers what to do. And they have no choice to obey, or they're fired."

With one side holding so many of the cards, it's no wonder writers are getting squeezed at every turn.

As recently as a decade ago, a smallscreen scribe who managed to break through and land a staff job on a primetime series could count on a pretty comfy career trajectory.

If you were good, steady (and well-paid) work was easy to come by. If you were good and a little lucky, one modest hit could yield millions.

"There was a little more of a sense of 'the sky's the limit,' " says one scribe who made his mark in the 1990s and is still working today. "It used to be, 'I made it to the majors, if I hit a triple or a home run, I could be set for life.' Now, people are lowering their expectations."

Studios seemed to hand out rich overall deals to anyone who walked by the writer's room of any of the couple dozen sitcoms that populated primetime.

"If you were on staff at a B-plus show, you got an overall deal as soon as you were a supervising producer. And if you were on an A-show like 'Friends,' you could get a deal when you were a story editor," one TV vet recalls.

Now, even if you do land a deal, you'll probably split your time between development and working on some other showrunner's series. Studios now routinely demand that scribes with deals agree to join the staffs of existing shows, which means many network series boast staffs filled with super-experienced writers who are used to running their own shows. That's bad news for less experienced writers trying to make their mark.

"As a showrunner, there are fewer opportunities to take a chance on new voices," says Daniel Cerone, most recently exec producer of "Dexter" on Showtime. "You find yourself hiring people you've worked with before -- or friends of yours have worked with -- who you know can get the job done."

While the changes reshaping the business have been painful for many scribes -- and are likely to get even tougher to take post-strike -- there is an upside to the transformation of TV land.

The country club that is the TV writing business might not be as posh as it once was, but on the upside, many more people are being let through the doors vs. 20 years ago.

"In one way, it's the best possible time to be a writer," Long says. "There are more places to put your work. The idea of having a fantastic show like 'Mad Men' on AMC -- AMC was supposed to be only old movies. That's all good news for the writer."

And while networks are exerting more control over production specifics, changes in the business make it possible for writers to work in network TV and not simply churn out the least objectionable Pablum that once marked the broadcast biz.

"There have never been more good shows, and the quality of shows is really progressive and interesting because of the tradeoff of not having to hit the broadest possible demo," Schwartz says, explaining that a series no longer needs to reach a 30 share to stay on the air for a half-decade.

In other words, if you're in the biz for the money, you're going to be disappointed. If you're in it because you want to tell good stories, things are still good.

"I think it's going to be tougher but more exciting," Long says. "The irony is that as the model has collapsed and been gutted and the strike has taken its toll, there's a lot of great stuff in TV. This is a gol-den age for writers artistically."

That's particularly true for writers willing to be a bit entrepreneurial. While the strike was all about the possible dangers the Internet posed to writers' salaries, many believe the 'Net could end up offering scribes a new way to make money, possibly without the shackles of the studio system.

Right now, of course, the Internet is far from a viable medium for most successful writers, for one simple reason: money. Nobody has yet come up with a model that pays Internet content creators more than a few thousand dollars per Webisode -- a fraction of what they can make for a TV or feature script.

Herskovitz, for example, notes that the 300,000 viewers who can make a show a "hit" on the net are just a small fraction of the number that defines success (and profit) on TV.

That's why, even as new outlets for Internet content seem to regularly pop up, like Turner's SuperDeluxe and Michael Eisner's Vuguru, others already have found it tough going and shut down, like NBC's DotComedy, HBO and AOL's ThisJustIn, and Comedy Central's MotherLoad.

That doesn't mean some writers aren't trying anyway -- whether out of a desire to be on the cutting edge, to own their own content outside the studio system or simply to experiment. "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane is developing digital content with Media Rights Capital, which recently signed an interim deal with the WGA. Alt-comedy hero Bob Odenkirk has made dozens of videos for SuperDeluxe. And as part of their recent deal with Comedy Central, "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone got a stake in a new website that will feature original creations.

Herskovitz says that for now, the 'Net is a great sales tool for scribes who want the freedom to explore their ideas without the constraints mandated by the networks. For as little as $25,000, he notes, scribes can put together a decent-looking pilot episode with real actors and OK production values.

"If enough writers succeed independently, it might change the landscape a little bit," Herskovitz says. "If more writers took more risks, everyone would be better off."

Long agrees, and argues that proving success on the Web could translate into more creative freedom for scribes.

"If I was an established genre writer, say horror or suspense, and had money in bank, I'd take $100,000 and make a short, interesting Web pilot," he says. "Then I'd put it on the Web. What if I can get 500,000 people who really love it and want to see the next episode? I could perhaps go to a network and say, 'I want an order for 22 episodes and I'm not going to submit scripts for approval.'

"That writer who does that will be my personal hero. We'll build a statue to him."

(Michael Schneider and Ben Fritz contributed to this report.)