I wrote about David Ellison’s brutal cable choices as Rob Bonta closes in, Disney’s strategy to win kids from YouTube, Off Campus’ coming showrunner shift, DC’s TV trouble and Cindy Holland’s streaming strategy.
Shonda Rhimes helped define the Peak TV overall-deal arms race. In 2017, she left her longtime home at Disney for a four-year, $100 million exclusive pact with Netflix. That yielded Bridgerton, one of the streaming giant’s most-watched franchises. Last week, Netflix announced a third deal with the prolific creator. Financial details are being kept under wraps, but multiple sources tell me the five-year exclusive is likely one of the few remaining deals in the nine-figure range as streamers and legacy studios continue their spending pullback.
Some of the eye-popping eight- and nine-figure deals signed during that Peak TV era have since expired (see Steve Levitan at Disney and Ava DuVernay at Warner Bros. TV, for example). Paydays with that many zeroes are now reserved for those with a track record of delivering multiple hits. All-star writers like Rhimes, Taylor Sheridan, Ryan Murphy, Dan Fogelman, Greg Berlanti, Chuck Lorre and Bill Lawrence can command top dollar even in this contracted climate. But for nearly everyone else — and even, to some degree, these super-producers — Hollywood has rewritten the overall deal playbook.
Post-Peak TV, many exclusive deals have seen their guaranteed upfront value come down. Studios and streamers are replacing some of that guaranteed money with bonuses that pay out only in success. The moves are part of a larger trend across the industry after streamers and legacy studios were burned by overpaying showrunners and non-writing producers and getting little to no return on their major investments.
“The overalls replaced backend and were the result of three new entries — Apple TV, Amazon and Netflix — entering the legacy space,” a lit agent tells me. “They had to pay people up front to steal them” from the networks and legacy studios.
But even as top showrunners remain in high demand, exclusivity is no longer the only game in town. When Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door, for example, shifted from an exclusive overall to a first-look agreement with NBCUniversal, I’ve learned that move was actually requested by MacFarlane — taking less money up front so that his team could have the freedom to sell projects elsewhere. J.J. Abrams, on the other hand, saw his Bad Robot’s overall at Warner Bros. TV downgraded because, as one exec puts it, the studio “wasn’t getting a return.” Meanwhile, mid- and lower-level writers who are able to find gigs are also pushing for so-called “showverall” deals — Dungeon Crawler Carl co-showrunner Eric Heisserer has scored one with NBCU, I can exclusively report.
The throughline: less guaranteed spending, more flexibility and an increasingly relentless focus on ROI.
I spoke with a dozen sources — studio, streaming and business affairs execs as well as agents and showrunners — about how the overall deals space has changed since the Peak TV bubble burst.
Here’s how the new overall economy works:
- Why MacFarlane chose flexibility over a larger guarantee
- Who still gets $20M-$50M a year — and whose deals are being downgraded or disappearing
- What even sought-after creators must bring to the table to justify an overall
- How guaranteed money is being replaced by bonuses and “kickers”
- Studios’ “showverall” strategy to lock down one-off hit makers — and why some writers covet them
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