You get into TV writing because you have things to say. You have a voice.
In theory, you know that voice is valuable if it lands you a staff writing job, a prize that grows more competitive every year. The entertainment industry is in free fall, as constantly merging companies slash spending to increase shareholder profit. A recent WGA report showed that there were 1,819 TV writing jobs in the 2023–24 season, compared to 3,011 in 2018–19.
But even if you do snag one of those rare jobs, it lasts for just a few months before you're on the hunt again. Your agents say they're doing everything they can, but just so you know, there's one show staffing right now, and it's gotten 400 submissions for two spots. There's nothing for you to do but crank out more writing samples to prove you're good enough to do the job you've already been doing for five or 10 or 20 years.
In meetings, producers and execs ask "what you're really excited about lately." The truth, which you are not allowed to say, is that what you're really excited about is whateverthey'rereally excited about, because actually you're really,reallyexcited about accruing enough earnings to continue qualifying for your guild-covered health insurance. In fact, you're excited to the point that a better word would bedesperate,but you must disguise this with fake confidence if you don't want to disgust them.
So you become an expert at figuring out what people want before they tell you and presenting that as what you want. In other words, you lie.
Tina Fey was lauded for declaring, "Authenticity is dangerous and expensive"onLas Culturistasin 2024, but I'd already fully internalized that lesson. Years earlier, when Fey herself concluded our hour-long staffing meeting with "Nice to meet you, Hannah," I didn't even consider correcting her. I wouldn't dream of causing friction or being difficult by having the wrong name. I was just happy to be there! (I didn't get the job.)
Fey's authenticity comment was a joke, sort of, but it's one that speaks to the culture of fear that pervades a painfully contracting industry in a country under fascist leadership.
I didn't realize the full effect this culture had on me until I took a break to write a novel. I'd temporarily moved across the country to live in my husband's childhood bedroom while he finished graduate school. It wasn't like I had any professional reasons to stick around L.A. My novel was about a TV writer, and as I drew on my own experiences to inform hers, it struck me anew how pathetic they were. I'd been in some incredibly warm, collaborative rooms, but I'd also been in one where the second a certain writer left the room, the rest of us spent his entire bathroom break viciously mocking his harmless habit of chewing ice. On another job, a text thread including everyone but one writer was devoted solely to making fun of her pitches and personal stories. To feel secure in a job this precarious, you must always ensure that someone else is lower in the pecking order.
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I've said, "Oh, I love that show" about a show I hate, in case the person I'm talking to knows someone who worked on it. I've sat in a room full of hungry adults for two hours, too afraid to point out to the showrunner that lunch was waiting outside the glass door of the writers' room, because no one wanted to be the first person to suggest taking a break.
Away from my Hollywood environment for the first time in a decade, I started to notice the ways it had shaped me even outside of work. I realized I didn't trust my friends when they expressed their affection or complimented me. If I was so willing to lie all the time, why would any of the nice things other people said to me be true?
Meanwhile, I had a hard time advocating for any needs of my own. I had learned from the industry that I was utterly replaceable. If I dared to complain that a friend's flakiness or offhand comment had hurt my feelings, I could simply be swapped out for someone younger, greener, and more in touch with authentic Gen Z slang.
This mindset can have more serious consequences too. In late 2023, writers I knew started losing their agents and managers for posting online in protest of the genocide in Gaza. I told myself I wasn't posting anything because I didn't post on X anymore—whose mind could I possibly change in my little echo chamber of woke comedians?—not because I was afraid of getting dropped by my own reps. But I couldn't deny this final piece of evidence: I'd gotten so obsessed with appearing cooperative, grateful, and compliant that, on both personal and political levels, I officially stood for nothing.
As I began drafting my novel and creative instincts popped up that made me laugh (what if this chapter were entirely made up of scheduling emails from agency assistants? What if my protagonist clogged a series of toilets throughout the book?), I waited to be shot down before I remembered that no one was standing over my shoulder to give me notes. If I liked it, it went in the book. Slowly, I learned to take price in my own voice again. I was proving to myself, page after page, that I wasn't replaceable. No one else could write the exact story I had to tell. My depiction of Hollywood might piss people off, but that was a far lesser risk than continuing to constantly censor myself to curry favor with anyone and everyone.
As I write this essay, there's more pressure every day on artists to sand down the edges of our work. To pitch TV shows dumb enough that people can watch them while playing Block Blastandfolding their laundry. And sooner or later, to protect our own careers by capitulating to the fickle demands of an authoritarian regime.
Sure, authenticity is dangerous and expensive. But without it, we have nothing.
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