What Could Save the Industry? Fin-Syn

I’m not a doctor.

But if someone came up to me and said that they’d had pneumonia, broken their arm, lost vision in one eye, suffered from gout, had some teeth fall out, succumbed to shingles, diverticulitis and chronic gastrointestinal pains, and had mushrooms growing out of their toenails… all within the past year — well, I might suggest there’s a core problem to the calamities.

So for a Hollywood besieged by all manner of pestilence in the last decade — including consolidation, runaway production, massive job loss, AI encroachment… you know the drill by now — this is why I feel so confident in drawing a direct line from a fateful choice during the Clinton era to now.

I refer to the decision to abolish the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules (aka “fin-syn”) in 1993 after decades of network lobbying and amid a very ’90s faith that deregulation would somehow create more competition, not less. Prior to that decision, the rules prohibited networks from owning the shows they aired, breaking up programming between producers and distribution.

The end of fin-syn permitted what is known as “vertical integration,” allowing one company to own every part of the chain. Which, slowly at first and then, now, very quickly, allowed the behemoths that could bankroll that kind of sprawling business to swallow everything.

And from that, all our problems flowed.

What disappeared was not just a regulation. It was an engine — the indie engine that powered studios, production companies, TV creators, agents, writers, actors and an entire middle class of Hollywood workers.

Even an issue such as diverse representation — something not directly caused by abolishing fin-syn rules — has been exacerbated by that choice. Consider: fewer companies and fewer decision-makers retreat to very safe, familiar territory, and, on a shrinking field, there is suddenly less to go around, making anything perceived as risk-taking very difficult.

None of the other problems we’re looking at gets fixed and stays fixed without the return of fin-syn. My feelings about Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery are well known, and I hope it doesn’t go through in the end. But I say that with the knowledge that even if we do block that merger, at best, that only preserves the status quo. 

The status quo can not survive.

Hollywood once had a vast competitive marketplace of outside producers, mini-studios, TV shops and super-producers all fighting to make hits. That marketplace did not vanish by accident. It was dismantled. And if Hollywood wants its indie engine back, it has to rebuild the system that made that engine possible.