As part of its first-ever National Arts Advocacy Summit in Las Vegas on Feb. 13, The Creative Coalition hosted a series of panels to engage 50 Fortune 500 leaders, policymakers, actors, musicians and entertainment executives on current events affecting the industry. In the “The Business of Art,” facilitated by Harry Hamlin, showrunners and executive producers Bill Prady (The Big Band Theory), Jessica Sharzer (American Horror Story) and Gloria Calderón Kellett (One Day at a Time) were prompted with the question: “With the rise of streaming platforms, content consumption habits have changed dramatically. How has this shift impacted the way you develop and pitch shows?”
“We are in a bad spot,” responded Sharzer, alluding that cracks in the streaming business model have caused significant structural defects in the industry. “The bubble of streaming burst. It wasn’t a sustainable business model, especially without ads. We’re starting to see ads and it’s so much harder to sell [shows],” she said. “All these companies are vertically integrated, owned by giant corporations. It’s not a great time for TV.”
Prady remarked that the whole concept behind streaming, “the notion that companies would pay a gazillion dollars for 12 episodes of something that had no shelf life, no secondary market, no ability to recoup the cost,” was one of the most overly optimistic decisions by an industry ever. “‘We’re going to buy peaches for a dime, sell them for a nickel and it’s going to be great.’”
Lamenting that because of vertical integration and people having to justify their decisions within corporations, “there are no more Jack Warners in a room saying, ‘I like that movie. You know, go out and make it.’ Everybody’s afraid to say yes to projects, so the decisions push toward “existing IP,” Prady said. “People draw the wrong lesson. Game of Thrones was successful because it was unlike anything. The lesson from that is, let’s make more shows that are unlike anything. However, [Hollywood goes], let’s make more versions of Game of Thrones. As content creators, it’s incredibly frustrating.”
Kellett proposed returning to single-sponsor shows of yore, such as The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour sponsored by Ford, and has been working with line producers and business people to streamline budgets. “This is what I need. This is how many writers I need. This is what it looks like. I can shoot this in this amount of days with this many sets. This is what the budget is,” she said of her process.
Sharzer fears that show will “handle all the rewrites by themselves through production and post-production” and not pay writers to do so, resulting in writers not getting training on set or in the editing room.
Hamlin poked the group: While television used to be called the “writers’ medium,” with algorithms deciding what gets made, are we still making art? “I’m sure you have stories of friends who had a show green-lit as a streamer, and then we’re told we’re not going ahead because we found that the recommendation algorithm won’t tie your show to an existing show,” says Prady.
The discussion ended with them all commenting on a phrase they often hear: “Where’s the line between elevated storytelling and just making something wildly addictive?”
“You can’t decide to make an addictive show,” says Sharzer. “You have to hope people like it and it catches fire. The problem is, there’s a lot of cynicism about what will cause that. TV is very movie star-driven right now. It’s hard to get those people to commit to more than a limited series and nobody wants to make limited series.”
“There is a culture shift issue. My kids also watch Friends, and they did it in three months, and oh, that was 10 years of my life. I feel like we’re in the position we’re in right now because television is ‘bingeable,’” says Kellett. “We used to watch it, talk about it the next day and think about it next week. Somebody at NBC loved Friends and said, ‘I want to keep it on.’ Over time, it became a phenomenon. We don’t have the time anymore.”
In closing, Prady wrapped it up: “Streaming was a drug, television went on a bender, and television is in rehab. It will take a while, and in the meantime, viewers are returning to television’s old product, watching stuff from what was good and patiently waiting. [We must] get back to the notion of people in the decision-making positions putting on shows they like because they like them, as opposed to because they can sell an IP. Television has to go back to remembering it’s a commercial art form — but it’s an art form.”
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