Topline:
TV’s pilot season has been replaced by year-round development, which some network executives say has improved programming quality. But it’s also frustrated writers who now routinely have to do a lot of unpaid labor and are left without knowing the status of projects for months at a time.
Why it matters: The Writers Guild of America strike revolved around the question of how to make the profession a sustainable one. What the strike didn’t solve, though, is the year-round development cycle, which makes showrunners “as interchangeable as lightbulbs” and some say constitutes “wage theft” for having to produce a season’s worth of shows before even having a shot at a green light.
Lack of urgency: The hard deadlines of network TV created urgency for executives. But in the world of streaming, when shows can debut at any time and not mostly in the fall, executives can take months to respond to writers, forcing them to pursue other gigs while their own work is in limbo.
Executive counterpoint: On the other hand, the deadlines of network TV meant that networks had to get anything out for those fall premieres, so not everything was of the highest quality. Some executives, though, also wish to return to the imperative of commissioning shows within a set schedule.
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