I host Ankler Agenda and wrote about how to age-proof your career and the pressure to look and feel young, spoke to California AG Rob Bonta about the fight to stop the Paramount merger and wrote about brand-funded series.
The trajectory of the comedy Tires, which debuts its third season on Netflix this Thursday, is the kind of arc that gives independent creators hope. Shane Gillis, who self-funded and independently produced a six-episode first season and sold it to Netflix in 2024, quickly earned a renewal. Both seasons charted on Nielsen and Luminate’s Top 10 streaming lists shortly after their debuts.
The show started as a pilot on YouTube in 2019, the same year Gillis was named a Saturday Night Live cast member before being let go days later after clips surfaced of racist and homophobic bits from his comedy podcast. By the time Gillis came to Netflix with a six-episode season of Tires to sell, his star had risen significantly, allowing him to self-finance the show. Netflix produced and financed season two, and in January, Gillis and his Tires collaborator John McKeever inked an overall deal with the streamer.
Independently financed TV is not a sure thing, but when it hits, it really hits. That success has revived one of Hollywood’s oldest pieces of advice for frustrated creators: Stop waiting for permission. Make the damn thing. Indie TV has an appealing model because of its scrappy ethos: You get to circumvent the gatekeepers of old, avoid endless notes and development hell, and do things your way, on the cheap.
It’s also incredibly difficult — risky and fraught, even if you’ve got Gillis’ deep pockets, which few creators do.
Cooper Raiff, for instance, wrote and produced Hal & Harper, the indie series starring Mark Ruffalo and Lili Reinhart that was well-reviewed at Sundance and ultimately got bought by Mubi. But as he told Vulture last December, the experience revealed to him that “independent TV is not a thing yet. We will make money, but it was fucking hell to get there.” Raiff told me last year that convincing network execs — each with their own homegrown slates to champion — to acquire his show was “quite frankly, very bleak.”
This hasn’t stopped advocates of the indie TV model from forging ahead as the number of platforms grows. Natalie Jarvey reported that even Instagram is having its own scripted-TV boom.
The problem, of course, is money. Financing remains the major hurdle to getting an indie series off the ground — doubly so if the aim is to self-fund an entire season of a show rather than a pilot. But as streamers and studios tighten budgets and order fewer series, a small but growing group of producers is building alternative ways to get shows made first and sold later.
And one producer I spoke with says the odds change dramatically once the show actually exists.
Betting on yourself and your idea is becoming increasingly compelling — if you can stomach the risk.
So today, I’m looking at three ways creators are financing independent TV — and what happens when they take those finished projects back to Hollywood.
Read on for:
- The three ways creators are financing TV projects without a studio — and then selling them
- What former Amazon exec Joe Lewis says the odds are to sell a pilot vs. a finished series
- Two kinds of indie shows that can make financial sense — including one built to survive on YouTube
- How shooting in L.A. can actually become a cheaper option on indie TV budgets
- Why private equity’s appetite for entertainment could give creators something studios won’t: capital and ownership
- Why streamers aren’t set up to buy full indie series, and who needs to be in the room for a buy to happen
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