Cable Jobs Carnage: 'Like Watching Your Old High School Burn Down'
TNT losing the NBA is the latest as employees, alum describe agony inside 'zombie networks.' Plus: 4 ideas for your coming career pivot
Elaine Low covers the TV market from L.A. She recently wrote about what’s selling in unscripted, Salary Confessions of a new TV staff writer, assistant director and a dev exec, and where the TV jobs are (and not).
Hello Series Business readers. Here’s hoping you’re starting off the week gainfully employed and not nervous about the state of your career — you know, the simple joys in life. Still, it’s a surprisingly tall order these days, as headcounts are slashed left, right and all over the place.
Disney TV, for one, is laying off another 140 people, this time with nearly half those cuts coming at National Geographic, the brand that encompasses the once-storied publication as well as the pay-TV network. Still other cuts are happening at sibling cable network Freeform, among other divisions.
If you work in linear cable, the necks feel extra close to the chopping block these days.
Not that long ago, working for a cabler was once like working for a streamer: exciting, disruptive, startup-esque. When TV consisted of a handful of broadcast networks, cable was the original agitator.
In the early 1980s, “Nobody had cable television, nobody knew what it was,” says former Comedy Central, VH1 and MTV chief Doug Herzog, who joined the fledgling MTV in 1984 and became its first news director. “Nobody knew what it was supposed to be. We didn’t have a lot of money. We didn’t have a lot of visibility early on. So risk-taking was something that was very much encouraged. That was the only way we were gonna get noticed without any money: take risks and do things differently.”
Doing things differently meant bringing the world MTV News and Comedy Central programs like The Daily Show and South Park. But by the time he left the Viacom building more than three decades later, in 2017, as president of the company’s entertainment group, it had become clear to him that “we were losing audience and losing subscribers, and that was not necessarily going to turn around.” Cable had entered a notably different era from the one in which just the halo of working for MTV could get you, as he tells me, upgraded to first class on a flight.
How does the pay-TV landscape look to Herzog these days? “It’s like watching your old high school burn down.”
Now, working at a linear cable network in the streaming era might as well be working for a horse-and-buggy provider not long after the advent of the car. Sure, it still throws off cash as people shift their consumption habits, but for how long?
Case in point: One longtime TNT Sports production staffer says that in the weeks since TNT lost the media rights to air NBA games (unless Warner Bros. Discovery’s lawsuit improbably succeeds), the atmosphere at the company has been laced with uncertainty. It doesn’t help that a chunk of the redistributed games went to streamer Amazon, seemingly adding to the writing on the wall about cable’s future.
“There [are] people here who are terrified every day of losing their jobs,” this person says.
In this Series Business, I’ll take a closer look at:
4 places to look for a career after cable you might not have thought of
What life is like working in cable 2024 right now
How WBD’s frenzy of acquiring sports rights to replace the NBA is creating a cycle of overwork
The stark contrast of a cable job today vs. the cable boom heyday
How international co-productions are the last opportunity for ambitious originals on cable
How budgetary demands have curtailed the culture of risk-taking that once defined cable
Why a new cycle of innovation and risk-taking may be on the horizon in the wake of cable’s demise and streaming consolidation