One morning, while I was standing on my back patio a block from the Pacific Ocean in my underwear, drinking coffee, I got a phone call. It was from one of the executive producers of a project I was working on. Just to be clear: I was an executive producer, too, but he was the executive producer. He had found the project and developed the script with the young writer, based on his novel, and set the whole thing up at the network. He had guided the entire process from idea to pilot script, at which point he roped me into taking over as showrunner. That meant I was the one getting creative notes from the studio and the network, the one doing all of the rewrites, and the one who was getting fired that morning in my underwear before my second cup of coffee.
It was a tough call for him to make, he said—tougher, I pointed out, for me—but we both knew it wasn’t much of a surprise. He had done such a terrific job selling the show and the promising young author to the studio and the network that everyone was glowing with enthusiasm for the project. The problem was that no one was enthusiastic about the same thing. The studio loved the idea of a fractious family comedy about a long-married couple cutting loose in middle age. The network loved the idea of a spoiled daughter getting her comeuppance. And the novel on which the project was based—the entire reason for the project in the first place—was about an artsy son trying to connect with his ferocious father. My job was to convince everyone that they were all getting exactly what they wanted, which I couldn’t do, which is why my colleague, the executive producer, was giving me the axe.
No hard feelings, I said, and I meant it—until later that day, when a friend of mine called me up to tell me who, exactly, was replacing me. It was a writing team I had declined to hire on a show a few years before. Are you sure? I asked. Totally, he said. I was sitting behind them at the Zankou Chicken on Sepulveda, and they were talking loudly and high-fiving.
I was 45 and had never been fired before. (I know, I know: hard to believe of someone with such slovenly work habits, but still.) But I had had shows cancelled—and shows ordered—and I knew that the show business economy was about as zero-sum as an economy can be. There are only so many shows ordered, only so many time slots, only so many chairs when the music stops. If my show gets picked up, yours doesn’t. If I’m hired, someone else isn’t. And if I’m fired, two guys I know slightly are going to have a better financial year.
For years, I understood this instinctively, which is why, standing on my patio in my underwear, I wasn’t shocked to be fired. I was disappointed, irritated, and later a little humiliated—I mean, come on, Zankou Chicken? They couldn’t celebrate at a higher-end spot?—but not confused. Good free-market economists—not to mention followers of Jesus Christ, like me—might believe that the universe is one of abundant opportunity and love, and while that may be true everywhere else, it doesn’t apply to show business. Show business is about scarcity and tight supply. Hollywood runs along Malthusian principles. For an industry filled with commies and Marxists and Mamdani progressives, this is sort of funny to think about.
Streaming changed that. There’s no reason to rehash this, we were all there when it happened. For a while, there were so many buyers and so much money sloshing around that supply barely mattered. Everyone was working, which encouraged even more people to join the business. It was, briefly, the era of abundance spoken of in scripture. Put it this way: Back then, you couldn’t fire a Rob Long type even if you wanted to—even if he stubbornly refused, as I had, to strip out the very thing that made the original novel worth adapting in the first place—because there was no one else available. In streaming’s heyday, those two guys at Zankou Chicken weren’t waiting around for their agent to call. They were already staffed on a nine-episode order for Hulu. But when things tightened up and budgets got smaller (and in 2026, things will get even closer to the bone) suddenly, those old Malthusian rules snapped back in force, only this time there are far more players circling far fewer chairs.
For the industry to survive, a lot of us are going to have to leave it.
Over the past few months, I’ve had versions of this conversation with dozens of colleagues—writers, agents, managers, producers. Even, hilariously, the two guys from Zankou Chicken who replaced me. (True Hollywood story: I became friends with them a few months later, after they shot a disastrous version of the pilot and were themselves replaced for the next doomed phase of the project.)
And all of those conversations go the same way: We all nod solemnly and agree that more contraction is inevitable, that the town got bloated, that the correction was overdue. We say that it will be healthy in the long run, that a smaller business will be a saner business. And then, almost without exception, the conversation drifts to speculation about who, exactly, is likely to go. Who’s running out of money. Who’s thinking about teaching. Who’s, say, getting a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary (remember I told you I was a follower of Jesus Christ). Everyone has a list. No one ever puts his own name on it. So we wait, politely and patiently, for the town to shrink—thinking, not unkindly but quite firmly: You first.
I know a guy who’s a first assistant director. If you’ve never been on a set, the first AD is the person who is, more than anyone else, responsible for the smooth operation of the entire enterprise. This guy was one of the best, so during the bubble years, he worked constantly. So he bought an expensive house in Mar Vista. I mean, why not?
You already know how this ends. The contraction began. Fewer shows. Shorter runs. Longer gaps between jobs. Everything got smaller except his mortgage payment. Should he sell and move his family to Nevada? Should he quit the business entirely? For a few years, he dithered. Other people, he thought, will quit and move. Other people, he told himself, will run out of money first.
About 90 days before he lost his house, exactly one year ago, fires tore through the Pacific Palisades. Thousands of homes were destroyed, or, as some economists might put it, the supply collapsed. And suddenly, overnight, a lot of people who used to live in the Palisades needed someplace to rent. I’d like to tell you that the first AD did the smart thing and rented out his house to an agent at CAA, packed up his possessions and his family, and moved somewhere cheaper to start a new career. He did the first part—I heard his story from the agent who rented the house—but not the second. Turns out, he’s using that money to pay the rent on a smaller house about two hours from Los Angeles because he thinks this is all going to turn around. He’s sitting at Zankou Chicken, in other words, waiting for the other guy to get fired. It could be a very long wait.
Photo: gorodenkoff/Getty Images
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