The Closed-Off World of Television Kabillionaires

Let’s assume for the moment that you want to be hired as a television writer on a network series. Your first step is to get past someone like Jamie.

Jamie, who is in his late twenties, was recently involved in the writer-staffing process for a network show. He agreed to provide me a glimpse into his world so long as I kept him and his show anonymous. Here’s what I learned: TV writing is not an easy gig to land. According to Jamie, the process unfolds as follows. First, the producers put out a call to talent agencies to send over sample scripts from their writers. For his particular show, Jamie received around a hundred packages, each containing a sample script, which Jamie read, reviewed, and graded. Only around the best twenty or so from this pile will be passed on to the producers for additional consideration. Keep in mind that the producers have already hired their favored veteran writers, so there are precious few spots left to be filled from this open call.

To provide a sense of the competitiveness of this process, Jamie sent me a copy of his script evaluations. Out of the hundred or so writers who submitted scripts, all but fourteen sent a script that had already been produced and aired on television. Of the fourteen who had not yet broken into the industry, the highest score any received from Jamie was a 6.5 out of 10. Most of this group, however, fared much worse. “It was flat, without any interesting storytelling, engaging act-outs, or smart dialogue,” he wrote about one such script (score: 4 out of 10). “I only read about a quarter of this script but it’s clearly pretty subpar,” he said about another.

In other words, getting on the inside in the world of television writing is daunting. But at the same time, I can understand why so many thousands aspire to this goal: It’s a fantastic job. For one thing, there’s the money. As a new writer, your salary starts modest. The Writer’s Guild of America guarantees that you make at least $2,500 a week, which, given a standard twenty-six week season, is decent for half a year of work. Depending on the success of the series, you’ll then progress after a year or two to become a story editor, where, as a longtime TV writer explained in a Salon.com article on the topic, “you’re still making shit” (though, as another writer admitted, “shit” at this point qualifies as over $10,000 an episode).¹ Things start to get interesting when you make it to the next level: producer. Once there, “you’re in the money.” Top writers can pull in seven-figure paychecks. In the Salon.com article referenced above, the term “kabillionaire” was used by multiple people to describe the salaries of producers on long-running shows.

Of course, you can also make lots of money in other jobs. A fast riser at Goldman Sachs can hit the seven-figure mark (including bonuses) by his or her midthirties, and a partner at a prestigious law firm can get somewhere similar a few years later. But the difference between Wall Street and Hollywood in the style of work is staggering. Imagine: no e-mail, no late-night contract negotiations, no need to master intricate bond markets or legal precedents. As a writer your whole focus is on one thing: telling good stories. The work can be intense, as you’re often under deadline to deliver the next script, but it only lasts half a year, and it’s immensely creative, and you can wear shorts, and the catered food, as was emphasized to me several times, is fantastic. (“Writers are crazy about their food,” one source explained.) To recast the job in the terms I introduced in the last chapter, television writing is attractive because it has the three traits that make people love their work: impact, creativity, and control.

By the time I met him, Alex Berger had managed to break into this elite world. He had recently sold a pilot to USA Network. To sell a pilot is to sell an idea: You sit down in a room with three or four executives from the network and spend five minutes pitching your vision. At a cable network like USA, these executives will hear around fifteen to twenty such pitches a week. They then retreat to a staff meeting and choose three or four to actually buy. Alex’s idea was one of the four they bought that week.

Alex has a few more hurdles to leap before his show makes it on the air at USA, but selling a pilot, by itself, is seen as impressive in the industry—a mark that you know what you’re doing. As if to emphasize this impressiveness, one of the executives at USA, who liked Alex’s work, helped staff him on an already running show, the hit spy drama Covert Affairs, so that he’d have something to do while waiting for the pilot decisions to be made. Not that Alex needed the boost to his reputation: He had already written and aired episodes for three different shows leading up to this point. His latest gig was on the stop-motion comedy Glenn Martin, DDS, which he had cocreated with Michael Eisner and had run for two seasons. In other words, there’s no doubt that Alex is an established writer in an industry that allows few through its gates.

The question is, how did he do it?