This is part two of The Disappearing Ladder, my series about how each generation is navigating Hollywood’s narrowing path (check out Gen Z). I host the Ankler Agenda podcast and wrote about Taylor Frankie Paul and Disney’s Bachelorette mess.
Jessica* had spent seven years clawing her way up from assistant to executive at a major television studio, navigating a corporate climate she describes as “chaotic.” She had considered leaving, but stayed for the benefits as she planned to start a family.
Then, she was laid off — during her maternity leave, no less.
“Between Covid, the strikes and mergers, that was essentially five years of my career straight, and I was repeatedly held back from promotions,” the 33-year-old tells me, pointing to hiring freezes and layoffs that stymied her career goals. (She and several others spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, given concerns about professional repercussions.)
“I’m not the only one I know that has been in a situation like that, where it wasn’t a product of the work they were doing,” she adds. “These larger, major economic factors were getting in the way of moving forward in our careers.”
She is far from alone.
For this installment of The Disappearing Ladder, I spoke to 10 millennials across the business — studio executives, writers and creatives — whose careers have all hit some version of the same wall. They’ve made it past the bottom rung, but can’t see where the ladder leads.
Now in their 30s and early 40s, many are balancing young children and aging parents while feeling frustrated that they are behind where they thought they would be professionally. The careers they spent years building seem liable to blow away with the whims of their next corporate overlords. Yet fanciful professional shifts no longer feel like an option this deep into the game.
“One challenge of our generation is that you have so much more responsibility than Gen Zs,” says Juilliard-trained playwright turned TV writer Hilary Bettis (The Americans, The Dropout), who is in her early 40s. “You also have a mortgage and kids and life insurance and all of this adult stuff that you have to pay for.”
What emerged from these conversations isn’t a single story but a pattern of stalled careers, rising costs and quiet, constant calculations about how much longer this all works — and where the breaking point is.
Read on for personal confessions about:
The breaking point: when the math stops working — dual-industry households, childcare, mortgages and careers that no longer add up
The bottleneck: why the path up has stalled, as Gen X bosses block advancement and raises
Success without stability: how even award-winning writers and working creatives can feel one layoff — or one killed project — away from collapse
The workarounds: global gigs, constant travel and cross-border hustles as Hollywood work dries up at home
The new paths: microdramas and alternative pipelines emerging as the traditional ladder disappears
The Breaking Point
Like several other millennials I spoke to, Jessica has built a life with someone who also works in the industry. The studio exec’s husband is in post-production, working show to show. The series he’s on has just gotten delayed by three months, which means he’s now out of a weekly paycheck they were relying on.
The entertainment life is volatile that way: Their combined household income fluctuates wildly from $120,000 to $200,000 a year. They snatched up the opportunity to buy a townhouse in May 2020, amid Covid-era interest rates of little more than 3 percent, and know they’re luckier than most, as homeownership remains a fantasy for many of their peers. But the concept of ever upgrading from a “starter home” or simply moving to a different neighborhood seems laughable, with mortgage rates spiking to 6.38 percent amid a volatile, war- and tariff-laden economy.
“Our greatest asset is that we bought into the market at a good time,” says this between-jobs exec. “And I feel so bad for my friends who were a little bit behind — even people who were two, three years behind us are just not able to buy.”
Never mind the idea of having more children. “We just had a kid, and we would love to expand our lives, and I don’t know if that’s possible,” Jessica tells me. Their monthly expenses aren’t that high by L.A. standards but quickly add up: a $3,300 mortgage, $1,800 for daycare, plus the usual line items of groceries, gas, utilities and the occasional meal out or trip to Disneyland. That doesn’t leave much left for saving for retirement, which is a “question mark” for Jessica. “I wouldn’t be surprised if our retirement meant leaving Los Angeles,” she says.
While she feels fortunate to have received a decent severance package and has some breathing room to keep looking for a new gig, she knows that finding studio executive roles is a game of “musical chairs,” as she puts it. (A less optimistic person might call it rearranging deck chairs…) She’s thought about going back to school for an MBA or pivoting to a content strategy job.
Leaving the industry and/or L.A. altogether is unfathomable for die-hards who can’t imagine working anywhere else. But probe a little deeper and most people have a vague notion of where their breaking point is, whether it’s going X years without a job or being Y months behind on rent.
“There comes a time for everyone when the bill comes due,” Jessica says, “and you have to decide if you have to pull the plug.”
The Career Bottleneck
Gen Xers have years of experience with the pain of the promotion waiting game, as boomers refuse to leave their C-suites. Welcome to the club, millennials.
“It’s incredibly infuriating to think about Mike De Luca running a studio at 27,” says Avery*, a 31-year-old production executive, of the Warner Bros. Pictures co-chief who shot to the top of New Line Cinema early on in his career, “and to wonder what kind of films could come out of an executive class with buying power who are more directly connected to the coveted 18-34 demographic.”
Related:
Avery worked as an assistant for six years — a relatively brief period, in an era where many support staffers await advancement for closer to a decade — before getting her first development exec role.
“I was paid $75,000, salaried, which is less than what a senior assistant at the studio I worked at makes,” she tells me. “I knew taking the job would come with concessions, but after a year of work, when I approached my boss, a Gen Xer, for a raise, they didn’t budge on the pay. Sure, many Gen Xers themselves made similar salaries when they were creative execs… back in about 2004 or 2005.”
Seeking the counsel of Gen Xers and boomers seems futile anyway. Says Jessica, “How do you get advice from older generations when you’re playing a different ball game?”
Avery chucks money into her 401(k) when she can but hasn’t “even begun to think about the long term at this point — homeownership, a family, anything like that,” she says. “I’m just trying to survive.”
While Jessica regrets not leaving her studio job a few years ago, she needed the benefits in order to be able to have a baby, and her partner was bringing in zero income during the 2023 strikes.
“Frankly, we would have had a kid sooner had it not been for the strikes,” she tells me. “So there’s a world where I had had a kid a little bit earlier, and I had gotten my feet back under me, and I had started looking and left before we had gotten in this position. But you know, that’s not what life had in the cards for us.”
Millennials are also part of a unique cohort, straddling the line between analog and digital life: They grew up on VHS tapes, landlines and dial-up modems, yet are fluent in streaming technology and ChatGPT. Still, they missed the media glory days of the ’90s that their Gen X peers got to enjoy, and yearn for a Hollywood they haven’t quite experienced.
“There is a real need to bring production back to L.A.,” says Avery, who muses that the industry would benefit from new studios and players who could reinvigorate the town. “We’re becoming so estranged from the process, so divorced from our own projects, it’s hurting the films on a deeper level. There is something to be said about how much you gain by shooting in the city everyone is based in — there’s more of a community effort behind the thing. People want to show up, they want to root for it to win.”
Success Without Stability
Playwright-turned-TV scribe Bettis entered the industry after graduating from Juilliard in 2015, into the “height of the golden age of TV, where everybody was buying, and the bubbles hadn’t popped yet,” she recalls. While in school, she’d started developing a project with Alyssa Milano. Then, in early 2016 — with no TV experience — Bettis was staffed in the New York City-based writers room for FX’s prestige spy thriller The Americans, where she stayed for the next two years.
“It was wild,” Bettis tells me, recalling “literally learning how to write television while I’m in that writers room.” (She was staffed on the show on the strength of a play she had penned.) From there, Bettis was working “nonstop.” While she was on The Americans, she sold a show to FX, then sold another to Fox 21, and was always juggling several projects in development while writing on a series.
Bettis and her partner then moved to L.A. for six months so she could work on Hulu’s ripped-from-the-headlines Theranos miniseries The Dropout — for which she was Emmy-nominated as a producer. That was in 2019, “before kids, and before the cost of living was astronomical.” They let a friend stay in their New York apartment and rented a place in L.A. for just $2,000 a month. “We were paying for two places in two of the most expensive cities for [an amount] you couldn’t even find one place for now.” Afterward, they moved back to New York, where Bettis — by then pregnant — was set to make her big Off-Broadway debut as a playwright with Roundabout Theatre’s 72 Miles to Go…, a play about a family separated by deportation that received a favorable review from the New York Times.
Two days after it premiered in March 2020, Covid hit, shutting down the production. Two months after that, Bettis had an emergency C-section. Her father-in-law died suddenly from cancer. While work mercifully remained available — she was staffed in a Zoom room weeks after giving birth — the pressure to bring home a paycheck meant that her postpartum depression wasn’t properly diagnosed for about a year and a half.
She recalls thinking, “I don’t have time to think about myself or heal or spend quality time bonding with my baby, because I have to support my family.”
It was around that time that the business “started to feel a little different,” she says. Amazon Studios reversed a greenlight on a project for which she had spent 20 weeks in a writers room. A Netflix feature she’d poured two years into died because “the whole team that I was working with on it got laid off.” Projects in development at Warner Bros. and Starz began dying on the vine amid personnel cuts that prompted rapid executive turnover.
“Post-2020, 2021, all of my development started just dying much faster deaths, because of business things, because of mergers, because of layoffs, because they’re bringing in an entirely new division, and they’re getting rid of everything and starting over,” recounts Bettis. “I started to feel a lot more uncertainty.”
While Bettis has continued to find work in writers rooms, including a Yellowstone spinoff and the upcoming Apple TV+ series Lucky starring Anya Taylor-Joy — a career most writers would find enviable — she still feels “no stability.”
She is torn between New York, where she has built a life and career and owns a home, and L.A., where work has drawn her, but the cost of living is prohibitive, even on a household income of around $300,000 a year.
“We feel really trapped because we can’t afford anything here,” says Bettis, who currently pays $4,000 a month in rent in L.A. and $3,100 for preschool for two kids. She is loath to give up her New York property (like Jessica, she’s golden-handcuffed to a low interest rate), since she doesn’t think even the profits from the sale would allow her to afford a home in L.A.
“We have two small children who need stability and who need a home. My son is starting kindergarten, so we have to make a real decision,” she says. “It feels like the jobs are here. And as a mom, I don’t want to have to be away from my family six months out of the year if I get staffed on something. We can’t uproot our kids and go back and forth when they start school.”
Bettis clips coupons, shops at Walmart, and tells me her family doesn’t take vacations.
“From the outside, it’s like, oh, you have a great career. You have a career that anybody would look at and say, ‘You’re very successful and you’re lucky,’” she says. Yet “retirement does not seem like something that is in the cards for us. I feel like I will work until the day that I die.”
The Workarounds
Janet Hsieh and her husband, actor George Young (The CW’s Containment, James Wan’s Malignant), both 46, are familiar with the struggle of working and living in two places at once. Young works mostly in L.A., where they live with their two kids, 5 and 8, but Hsieh, the longtime host of Discovery travel series Fun Taiwan and Fun Asia, travels to Asia at least once a month to produce and film projects.
It’s tiring, but it’s a paycheck. Traveling that often — despite the demands of raising a young family — is reflective of the lack of choices Hsieh has felt in L.A. since the strikes and last year’s wildfires. And despite Squid Game and a recent embrace of non-English programming, it can still be tough to convince Hollywood agents to take a flyer on someone whose career has flourished mostly overseas. (Fun Taiwan and Fun Asia aren’t available to watch in the U.S.)
“I just played the president of Taiwan in a TV series in Asia,” says Hsieh. “On the same day that I got the call getting that offer, I was begging my current agents in the U.S. to let me audition for the role of masseuse with no lines. It was basically a glorified extra.”
She checks her SAG-AFTRA earnings as we chat on the phone. In all of 2025, she brought in $77.54 from union gigs stateside. Her income in Asia? Though she’d rather not say, it’s decidedly enough to make it worth the 15-hour flight there and back once a month.
“We’re going into year three of really not having a sustainable income, and that’s why, starting last year and this year, it’s been constant, constant trips,” she tells me. It’s frustrating, but she’s also using the opportunity to develop co-productions between the U.S. and Asia.
“All these things that we’ve been doing these past couple of years are in preparation for the next five years. So yes, I’m losing money making a TV show. I’m probably just breaking even with all these flights. However, I’m establishing relationships [in Asia] and in Hollywood. Maybe we can find a crossbridge somewhere.”
Some of that vision is already manifesting. Hsieh has a new travel series, Get Away With Janet Hsieh, premiering in May on YouTube, a co-production between Hsieh and Interesting Media. And she remains “still optimistic for what’s to come.”
The New Paths
While a pivot feels riskier when you’re farther along on your path, it’s the only option when you keep hitting dead ends.
Peter Forbes didn’t think he’d turn 40 before he started to find a sustainable lane in the industry. But his coming-of-age story, like that of so many other older millennials, has been punctuated by global and economic disasters. He graduated from college right into the Great Recession in 2008, then emerged from Columbia’s MFA film program right into Covid in 2021. Forbes, who is neurodivergent, has been accepted into several high-profile programs, including two disability fellowships with 1IN4 Coalition and Disability Belongs, as well as the NBCUniversal Animation Writers Program, headquartered at DreamWorks.
But at the end of the tunnel, NBCU told his cohort that “there just wasn’t anything for us to roll on to after the fellowship and they couldn’t extend our contract,” says Forbes. By early last year, “It was hard not to look back over the past 20 years and wonder if I’d been chasing a mirage.”
So Forbes started reading up on the burgeoning microdrama industry — crediting The Ankler’s coverage — and by mid-2025 landed a gig at microdrama giant ReelShort writing verticals, as they’re also known.
“I got hired as a contractor in August. I shifted into being an in-house full-time screenwriter in January,” Forbes tells me. “My first vertical drama with them came out in February and is a hit with nearly 100 million views.”
While he hasn’t yet found management, he has secured representation from an entertainment lawyer and contributed additional story material to the animated short Forevergreen, which was nominated for an Oscar this past season.
Like others who spoke with me, the ability to keep plugging away at the industry dream feels like a victory in and of itself.
“I feel very fortunate to be a full-time, professional screenwriter, and I also continue to develop my own projects,” says Forbes. “I feel like I’m finally getting a little bit of a foothold in the industry.”
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