The 3-Letter Deal TV Writers Love/Hate
OWAs were used on Netflix's 'The Perfect Couple' second season and ‘a good part of the business,' says one agent. How to make them work for you
Lesley Goldberg reports from L.A. She recently interviewed CBS Entertainment president Amy Reisenbach and wrote about the loss of The CW as a crucial training ground for writers.
Last fall, The Perfect Couple became a monster hit for Netflix and generated nearly 2 billion minutes viewed (per Nielsen) in less than a week after its debut. Almost immediately, the streaming giant optioned Swan Song, another book from Perfect Couple author Elin Hilderbrand, to serve as the backdrop for a second season of the former limited series that’s currently in the works.
The only catch was that Netflix needed a writer to carve star Nicole Kidman’s Greer Garrison Winbury into Swan Song as the character does not appear in the book. The search for a scribe became what’s known as an open writing assignment (OWA for short) as sources say every rep in town began lighting up 21 Laps (the producers of Perfect Couple alongside The Jackal Group and Kidman’s Blossom Films), which fielded a number of takes — done for free — to find a showrunner.
As scores of writers scramble for work amid the industry’s contraction, OWAs and the sometimes months-long process of pitching for them — i.e., doing creative development work for free — have become increasingly common. “You’re competing for the right to pitch [a show] and not for money anymore,” says one manager of the process. “Nobody is getting paid until someone buys the show.”
The Perfect Couple is an outlier. Many OWAs begin at the studio or production company level with the initial steps on a piece of intellectual property — be it a dormant title the company is looking to revive or a newly optioned book, podcast or article. The company then typically puts out a notice to agencies that it’s looking for a writer for the project, sometimes without knowing even so much as the direction or tone they’re looking to take with the source material.
“It’s something for a writer to do — but even if they chose the writer you rep, it’s not a job; it’s a project to then go pitch and set up. It’s a bakeoff to win the right to pitch. It’s being called an assignment now, but it’s not,” says one former lit agent. “So many writers are available and are willing to put in legwork these days . . . bakeoffs have become more relevant because writers are willing to engage; they want the project, so you do what you need to do to get it.”
In today’s Series Business, I’ll let you know:
The big name who won that Perfect Couple bakeoff and the status of the show’s second season
Why even seasoned, in-demand writers participate in OWAs
The “best-case scenario”: the upside for writers when producers know what they want
How writers can set themselves up for success or at least a good experience on an OWA
Which production companies are more likely to pay a development fee for a writer who takes an OWA
Agents’ advice for writer clients: “It can be an entry point”
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