By Gavin Boyle
The Writers’ Guild of America released statistics from 2024 that revealed 40% fewer of its writers worked on TV in the 2023-24 season compared to the year prior.
“With an industry in transition — cable TV subscriptions and cable programming declining, a massive run-up and then pullback in streaming series as Wall Street demands quicker streaming platform profits — the number of TV jobs has declined,” the WGA wrote in its jobs report.
In total, there were only 1,819 TV jobs during the 2023-24 season, compared to 3,138 jobs over the 2022-23 season, representing a 42% drop in employment. The area of employment most hit were higher-up positions as jobs such as executive producers or showrunners. They were cut by over 600 positions.
“Writing careers have always been difficult to access and sustain, but the contraction has made it especially challenging,” the WGA wrote in an email to its members, per The Hollywood Reporter. “We are all subject to the decisions of the companies that control this industry, who have pulled back spending on content based on the demands of Wall Street.”
While those in the industry expect some writing jobs to return for the 2024-25 season, given that it is unaffected by strikes, there is little hope for the return to match previous highs. Furthermore, the WGA’s data reveals that movies are no safe haven for writers either, as writing positions for them have fallen in previous years as well, despite Hollywood producing a comparable number of movies.
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In 2022, for example, 198 movies worked on by WGA members were released by Hollywood. In 2024, that number was 197. However, 1,947 writers were employed for those movies in 2022, compared to only 1,651 writers in 2024.
While this decline in writing positions across the board is concerning for any writer in the industry, the studios are not fully to blame for this decline. In some ways, the WGA is at fault, too, because during their 2023 strike, they picketed for higher wages — which the studios could only accommodate by cutting some roles. Furthermore, California has continued to enact more and more legislation which causes the costs of production to continue to rise.
“I had to shoot a film for one day in L.A., and it was cheaper for me to take the whole crew and fly them to Europe and shot for three days, lodge them, fly them, everything, than it was to shoot one day just down the road,” Mel Gibson told Fox Business in March. “So, there’s something really wrong there.”
The reduction of writer jobs highlights the fall of Hollywood as more and more movies bust and audiences turn to other sources for entertainment. For the industry to reclaim it former glory, it will need to focus on creating family-friendly, moral content that will draw back its audience, rather than continue to push them away.
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