Hollywood is finally starting to spring back to life after 148 tense days of a writers strike that left the town in a state of suspended animation. Even for those in the industry who’ve been dreaming of the day production would restart, it feels like a bit of a shock, as if walking into bright sunlight after a long, deep slumber.
“It’s almost like coming out of a bunker and going, What does it look like out there? What am I doing?” says Dan Erlij, cohead of TV lit at UTA. “Everything that was closed before the strike is now in play.”
Emails started flooding into agents’ inboxes at 12:01 a.m. PT on September 27, the morning the strike was lifted. “It was like drinking from a firehose,” says one dealmaker. Network executives stared down their programming schedules, steeling themselves to make hard decisions about which shows to bring back and which ones to drop. Studio development teams began sifting through old and new projects, wondering which ones might thrive in a new world of tighter streaming budgets and fewer shows. And writers—well, they returned to their desks, hoping that the work they left back in May (if they were lucky) would still be waiting. Everyone was excited to be back in action, even if they weren’t quite sure what awaited them.
When writers walked out of work and onto picket lines in May, they effectively shut down most of Hollywood’s engines. Writers rooms for upcoming seasons of Abbott Elementary and Yellowjackets, among countless other shows, immediately closed down. Screenwriters stopped responding to studio notes, and executives stopped sending them. Some productions halted because they couldn’t continue without a writer on set to help polish up the dialogue. Then the actors joined writers on strike in mid-July, and any TV show or movie still filming was forced to immediately suspend production.
Now that the writers are back to work, the first order of business is to finish up any series or movie that was nearly done before the strike. Networks and streamers are also eager to reopen writers rooms for new and returning series. Shows and movies in development also need to get pushed along, and the studios are already plotting to restart shooting—whenever the actors strike ends. “For the past couple of months, we were in a constant state of semi-readiness,” says Erik Feig, the CEO of independent studio Picturestart. “It felt a little bit like we were doing a dress rehearsal of Waiting for Godot over and over and over, playing through our scenarios for our projects and talking to other executives, trying to get a sense of how it would impact our lives on the other side of things. There were so many Signal chats with producers trying to read the tea leaves of what was going to happen next.”
The environment that writers are returning to looks vastly different than the one they left behind in May. All the major studios are tightening their belts as executives look to sell a story of streaming profitability to Wall Street. That means nearly every network and streamer in town is expected to make fewer shows this year than they did in 2022, and budgets on shows that do get made are likely to be noticeably smaller. The strike shouldn’t be blamed for these cuts, but the work stoppage may have exacerbated the trend. What would have felt like a gradual shift in strategy now feels like an anvil dropping. “We’re definitely going to see a moment of contraction,” says another top television agent. “How are we going to do more with less? We’re about to find out what that looks like. The next month, two months, three months of deals will tell us a lot about what the new normal is.”
From executives’ point of view, the logistics are labyrinthine, especially since the actors remain on strike. “We’ve been planning for several weeks,” says an industry insider, who’s expecting a rush to reserve soundstages and rehire crew members once the actors strike ends. This source says he actually paid for unused stages and crews during the strike so he’d keep his place in line: “If I didn’t pay my crew, I wouldn’t have my crew.”
The urgency is also high to get returning hits back on the air. “My priority is to make sure we have shows in ’24 and beyond,” says an executive at a major distributor. That means projects in development while new show pitches will have to wait. “Right before the strike started, I got a flurry of drafts. Now I’m hearing from writers, ‘Let’s set up notes calls.’ I’ll get to that in a week or two or three.”
Some decisions have been easy. Hulu breakout Only Murders in the Building was just given a fourth season, with writers room set to reconvene on Monday. According to reports, Grey’s Anatomy, Ghosts, Law and Order, and The Sex Lives of College Girls are also picking up where they left off. But studios are reportedly pulling the plug elsewhere. Amazon Studios un-renewed The Peripheral and A League of Their Own. The iCarly reboot for Paramount+ has been shelved, as have ABC comedy Home Economics and a trio of Starz series: Heels, Run the World, and Blindspotting.
The many months of downtime was wildly painful for Hollywood, impoverishing not just the striking writers and actors but also many of the crew members and other workers who make Hollywood run. Still, it did offer people on all sides a chance to stop and contemplate what they want to make. “We’ve been able to consider some of these projects, sit with them for a minute, decide what really needs to get done and give thoughtful direction,” says one top studio executive. “So on some of the projects that are coming back, I think they’ve benefited from this time. Maybe not financially—because there’s a cost to that—but creatively.” The executive calls this a “soul-searching time” for everybody, with some writers coming in wanting to focus on different projects altogether: “The past five months have really affected people’s psychology.”
Joy Press, Natalie Jarvey
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