Nicole LaPorte wrote about L.A.’s struggling real estate market, the battle over Brentwood Country Club’s barbed-wire fence, the spec script market comeback and how Hollywood DEI is now D-I-E.
When it came time for Alex’s daughter to pick an outfit for prom, Alex was 2,000 miles away, in an apartment in Toronto, watching some of her children’s biggest moments via FaceTime. Alex’s mother took the girl dress shopping back in L.A. Alex — a veteran showrunner who didn’t want her real name used here — had signed on to what should have been a plum job overseeing a streaming series. Instead she got a complicated, effects-heavy production, shoots that ran through the night, a thin bench of inexperienced writers, and a year of feeling underslept and unwell, far from home for proms, birthdays, Mother’s Day. When the shoot finally wrapped, she quit. “I just didn’t want to regret anything,” she says.
That she could walk at all makes her an outlier. Alex and her husband, also in the business, had spent decades building a nest egg, so walking away from the job was a relatively easy call. Most of her peers have no such cushion. With the streaming bubble burst, the dual strikes still reverberating, the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger pending and production fleeing L.A. fast, the writers lucky enough to be working can’t afford to say no to much of anything — least of all to where a show shoots.
One of Alex’s favorite jobs was co-showrunning a broadcast series in the 2010s that shot on the Universal lot. “I loved the show, I loved the people I worked with,” she says. “My kids could come and actually be there. They would come before school and after school.”
Now, horror stories about the hell of runaway production on families are everywhere, as a once-local industry goes fully global. It’s no longer just other states luring work that used to be commonplace in L.A.; it’s countries around the world bending over backwards to do what Hollywood increasingly cannot: keep production — and the people who make it — close to home.
Two Weeks Turn Into a Year
Alex’s miserable experience in Toronto traces back to a more fundamental change in the way streaming shows get made. On a network series, the writers room and the shoot run in parallel, so even when a show shoots in a remote location, a writer’s trip to set lasts a couple of weeks before she’s back in the room working on the next episode.
Streaming pulls those stages apart, often by months — which means the one or two writers sent to set stay for the whole production. Eight months. Ten. Sometimes a year. The senior TV writer’s job has effectively been remade in the shape of a film director’s: gone, on location, for the duration. The fights over runaway production get waged in tax credits and soundstages, over how to lure the work back; what they skip is that the job waiting at the other end isn’t the one writers signed up for. The exodus changed what the job is, and a job built around disappearing for a year tends to weed out anyone who can’t swing that.
The scale of that flight is hard to overstate. In 2019, 196 scripted series shot in Los Angeles; by 2024 — the most recent year FilmLA has counted — that number had dropped to 77. More than half the work gone in five years, with a 27 percent fall from 2023 alone. Most of that work simply moved: to Vancouver, long the cheaper stand-in known as Hollywood North; to the U.K., where Marvel relocated its productions after leaving Atlanta over rising labor costs; to Eastern Europe. The months away from home are what it looks like when an industry ships most of its production somewhere else — and its people with it.
Gone, and Paying for It
“I was in Vancouver for almost a year on my last job,” one executive producer tells me. “Even though our writers room was in L.A., we shot in Vancouver and I was gone for eight months. I still have kids. One of them is in college, so that’s something. But I still have one who’s home and that is a big deal. You just feel like: This is not what you signed up for.”
Worse: Because writers’ set visits are so long now, some studios consider writers local hires and don’t fully cover their living expenses. In Vancouver, the EP was given a paltry budget and encouraged to “get yourself Airbnb.” After trying that briefly, she found a place through a corporate housing rental company. She wound up paying $20,000 out of pocket.
When a job came up in New York City, she thought about it but ultimately turned it down because of the cost. “They were not going to pay the location money,” she says. “So I have a house in L.A. and I’m not going to move my kid across the country for a job that I don’t even know if it’s going to work out. And then I’m having to pay to live in New York? That’s an expensive proposition.”
Some writers “are so hard up for work that they’ll be like, ‘OK, I’ll take it,’” she says. “I mean, you’re kind of over a barrel. Everyone wants to work.”
Even writers on network shows that don’t require them to be away for quite as long are still dealing with the challenges of being away, period. One New York-based showrunner who’s shooting a series in Canada says he watches his son’s basketball games via livestream. Last year, while writing closer to home, he attended all 26 games of the season. “I just made it a priority to leave work and make sure I could get there,” he says.
Now he flies home when he can for a whirlwind visit with his wife and two kids. “The trip I just made the other day, I think I got in to New York at 4 p.m. and left at 10 a.m. the next day,” he says. “It was worth it for me, because I got to see everyone at night and in the morning before they went to school. But it’s still, like, showing up and not really doing any work — just getting all the great parts of being in a family and then driving off and leaving all the shitty parts to my wife.”
Who Gets to Keep a Life
The writers who thrive in this new regime tend to be the ones with the leverage to dictate their own terms, or with nobody at home counting on them to turn up. Everyone else takes what they’re handed — or pays on the home front for the privilege of working.
Ask around about who ends up accepting the year-on-location jobs and you get a blunt answer. “The people who take those jobs tend to be men, because they’re OK leaving their kids,” says one writer on a streaming show. “Most women are not OK with going away for eight months and leaving kids, especially when they’re little.” She knows the toll firsthand, though from the other side: Her actor husband is gone for up to five months a year while she holds down a house full of teenagers. “It’s not great for our marriage,” she says. “Forget about kids — it’s just not a way to live.”
The same logic can run in reverse, and just as crudely. During Covid, when set visits were limited, one showrunner was asked by a colleague why she was in L.A. instead of on the out-of-state set. “He was like, ‘Why aren’t you [on set]? You have no reason to be in L.A.’” Because she has no husband or kids, the production simply assumed she was free to pull up stakes.
The divide, though, is about power more than gender. Marc Guggenheim (Carnival Row, Legends of Tomorrow) had the standing to refuse the worst of it. He skipped gigs that shot in Europe because he didn’t want to be away, and on Carnival Row, which filmed in Prague, he made it a condition that he wouldn’t be on set every day and could get back to L.A. periodically. “Not a lot of writers,” he says, “especially now, but even then, have that level of independence where they can make that demand and have it be followed.”
Guggenheim’s wife is also a TV writer, and between their two travel schedules, the kids are “being raised by wolves,” he jokes. “You’ll meet them when they try to mug you.”
Clout Has Its Privileges
The writers who manage to bend the job to their lives are the ones with the seniority to do it. Jessica O’Toole — co-creator of Charmed and a writer on The Summer I Turned Pretty — ran XO, Kitty out of Seoul with two kids at home in L.A. Rather than swallow the absence whole, she negotiated against it, writing into her contract that she could fly home for two weeks midway through production, a clause she now lobbies for as a matter of routine.
“I’ve found that it works out fine,” she says. “Things don’t go off the rails, because you’re always working anyway.” The job trails her home — emails, notes, the next scripts — so the time off is hardly off at all: It’s when she finishes the work the shoot never left room for.
Her home-leave clause couldn’t keep her from missing one of her sons’ birthdays, so she FaceTimed from a production vehicle en route to set. “I called in when they were doing the cake,” she recalls. “We sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ and I was singing in the van and my driver starts singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in Korean. It was so sweet.”
Her family flew out for a week to visit, and they all took a trip to Japan. She believes her kids have benefited from her far-flung work schedule: “I think they do appreciate the experiences they’ve gotten to have, because they’re so worldly.” Most recently, her family visited her in Italy, where she was shooting the upcoming film Blame It on Rome, which she co-wrote. Even then, she allows that she has to “turn myself into a pretzel” to make it work. It works for her because she’s a showrunner. A staff writer isn’t getting a fly-home clause or a plane ticket for the family.
Natalia Temesgen is shut out for a different reason. A playwright and screenwriter with credits on Dear White People, Julia and Reasonable Doubt, she’s also a tenured creative writing professor at Columbus State University in Georgia — and she’d jump at an L.A. writers room now that her kids are in middle school. But her husband is a state court judge whose career is rooted in Georgia, so the family can’t relocate even though she’d go. The workaround she envisions is to make the job come to her: She’d like to run a show rather than staff one, so she could set terms livable for “so many other writers I know who don’t live in L.A. anymore and have families.” It’s the kind of fix O’Toole engineered — and it depends on the one thing that is consistently in short supply, even among showrunners: the clout to dictate terms at all.
Taken together, these stories start to show a clear pattern, one that follows power as much as gender. The writers who get to keep a life are the ones with the leverage to protect it, and that leverage takes two forms: the standing to bend the job from inside, as O’Toole did with her fly-home clause, or the money to walk away from it, the way Alex did. Even a veteran showrunner like Alex still couldn’t make Toronto livable on her terms, so she served out the year and walked — something her nest egg let her do. The writers the job grinds down are the staffers and mid-level writers who have neither lever: no clause to invoke, no financial cushion to fall back on.
Gender still matters, but mostly because it informs who ends up with the leverage. Power skews male, so men are more likely to have the standing or savings to dictate terms. The assumptions track gender too: A woman without kids gets read as available — the colleague who wanted to know why she wasn’t on set — while a woman with young kids is presumed unwilling to vanish for a year.
The Power Showrunners Forgot
If leverage is the factor that decides who gets to keep a life, one question is whether it can be pooled — whether the clout a handful of showrunners use to shield themselves might be turned into something that shields everyone. Michael Rauch thinks it can.
Rauch — a showrunner himself, on Royal Pains and Instinct — is vice president of the WGA East. Along with the guild’s president, Tom Fontana, he’s convening a working group of showrunners to fight for rights they’ve stopped asking for, chiefly the ability to shoot close to home. He also wants to push showrunners to start hiring lower-level writers again, to “repair the pipeline” that has been devastated by the ongoing contraction — the same pipeline that feeds the staffers now stuck with no leverage at all.
His pitch rests on the conviction that showrunners have far more power than they currently exert. “A lot of showrunners either forgot or don’t know the power that they hold,” Rauch says, and the fear running through the business keeps them from reaching for it. They don’t push, or know how to ask. Studios and streamers can always say no, he acknowledges, but that’s no reason to stop “pushing and pushing and pushing for what we feel is best for our shows.”
It’s a bracing argument, and Rauch is making it from Montreal, where he’s shooting CBS’ new Einstein — a series set in Princeton, New Jersey.
Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom passed a bill that increased the cap on California’s film and TV tax credit program to $750 million, up from $330 million, but the effects are just starting to be felt. The efforts are also coming as other states, like New York and Texas, are ramping up their own tax credit programs, making some wonder if it isn’t all too little, too late. Meanwhile: In April, Netflix Animation Studios opened a 110,000-square-foot production facility in Vancouver. The streaming goliath is also constructing a $1 billion production studio in New Jersey, set to open in 2027.
“L.A. has been late to the party,” says one TV writer. “They really screwed things up.” Another called the new incentives “a step in the right direction. But they’re not going far enough.”
Rauch’s own plan is contingent: If the series is renewed, he’ll build a New York or New Jersey budget that can compete with Montreal’s, leaning on state tax incentives and coordinating with local leaders who he hopes will offer concessions to attract the production.
That “if” is the whole problem in miniature. One showrunner, pushing hard, can occasionally move one production. None of them can push back the tax-credit arithmetic that emptied Los Angeles down to 77 scripted series, or outspend the billion dollars Netflix is sinking into a New Jersey studio, or coax a business this scared into pushing at all. Even if Rauch is right that showrunners hold more power than they use, a working group is years from changing what a season costs in Vancouver versus L.A. Until then, people will go on solving the problem the only way that’s ever reliably worked: one private deal at a time. A fly-home clause. A nest egg big enough to walk.
Alex is the rare writer who got to make the call on her own terms — the savings that let her walk is leverage most of her peers will never have. Her health has come back. She’s home for her younger daughter’s proms now. She figures she might even take work again next year. And she still feels it as a loss. “I couldn’t be happier with my choice,” she says. “At the same time, it’s sad that I had to make that choice.”
