“It’s a Dead End”: TV Writers Assistants Lose Hope for Post-Strike Career Advancement

Ryan Gajewski
·6 min read
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Although landing any Hollywood gig will always be a challenge, those who work as writers assistants and in other support staff roles within the television-writing ecosystem have found this moment particularly dire. The writers strike is over, and rooms for broadcast hits have reopened, but few jobs in this space have surfaced since then, and getting staffed as a scribe — which remains the goal for nearly everyone taking these positions — is tougher than ever before.

“I would never advise someone to be an assistant anymore,” Nate Gualtieri — who worked in support staff roles for five years, including on The Morning Show, before getting staffed as a writer last year on the short-lived Gotham Knights — tells The Hollywood Reporter. “The pay is too low. The hours are too long. It’s too thankless of a job most of the time. Once in a while, you get a good showrunner who wants to see you succeed — and I was lucky that I had a couple of those — but that can only go so far.”

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For decades, the one identifiable stepping stone on the forever-nebulous journey to becoming a TV writer was landing as support staff, which encompasses work as a writers production assistant, writers assistant and script coordinator, among other roles. Even these positions — which, depending on the role, can involve tedious tasks like taking copious notes in the writers room, grabbing coffee for the team or even letting a handyman into a showrunner’s home — have always been hard to come by, relying on the time-honored Hollywood system of knowing the right people or perhaps getting a tip on message boards or Facebook groups. But now, these gigs feel like dues-paying that never actually, well, pays off.

Nick Perdue was a podcaster when he met a Brooklyn Nine-Nine producer, who helped him land as an office PA on the comedy. This led Perdue to spend seven seasons on the show in support staff roles, moving up to writers PA, then writers assistant and eventually script coordinator, and writing two freelance scripts along the way. After working as script coordinator for the second season of Hacks, Perdue is back on the market. His manager aims to get him staffed as a writer, but at this point, Perdue is open to returning as support staff, even after his years of experience.

“People assume that you can’t write if your résumé has been support staff for X amount of years,” says Perdue, who has considered getting back into podcasting if unemployment continues. “You get pigeonholed into this dead end. It shouldn’t be, but as of right now, it’s a dead-end position that’s a very skilled position. It definitely sucks.”

A key difference between this current moment and the situation from years past is the evolution from broadcast TV to the streaming model, where shows now get shorter episode orders and tend to run for fewer seasons. In the previous configuration that saw most seasons stretching 22 episodes, each series would generally have a few freelance script assignments for those outside of the writing staff, meaning an assistant or script coordinator could see this as a reward after a couple years of hard work spent studying every aspect of the show. But these days, even staff writers fear going a season without writing a script. Plus, shorter seasons often mean returning to the job market months later and starting from square one.

“I’ve made peace with the fact that I don’t think I’ll work again the rest of 2023, and I’m just hoping and praying that things get better in 2024,” says Alison Golub, who has been a member of IATSE Local 871, which covers support staff, for three years but hasn’t landed a union job in that time and has been taking non-union work, including a recent role as a writer’s assistant for a pilot. “Streaming has absolutely destroyed the support staff ladder. Because the ladder is broken, it’s not entry-level jobs anymore. I know people who are script coordinators in their 40s. They have families and mortgages.”

One individual who worked in TV support roles for a number of years has abandoned the medium entirely and found success writing a feature that landed distribution last year. “You can’t work your way up the ladder anymore,” says the person who asked to be anonymous to avoid offending previous employers. “It’s frustrating because you invest all this time working on these shows that you don’t typically like all that much, and you’re trying to write samples that are up the showrunners’ alley, rather than writing something for yourself. I don’t want to say I squandered all this time — I did learn from these showrunners — but it seems like an impossibility to become a staff writer at this juncture. And I’ve heard it from so many folks that it doesn’t strike me as strictly an ability thing.”

With studios in belt-tightening mode as streaming services struggle for profitability, the climate isn’t likely to change. One rep for TV-writer clients anticipates the number of shows getting made to dramatically decrease by 50 percent. “There was more opportunity and ability for promotion in television starting in 2016, when streaming platforms were born and growing the business,” says the rep, who requested anonymity. “Now we’re seeing a course correction, and we’re going to experience a period of the TV business contracting, which will decrease the amount of support opportunities.”

Danielle Weisberg has worked for nine years as support staff, including three and a half years as a writers assistant on The Simpsons — where she wrote a freelance episode that aired in 2020 and was nominated for a WGA Award — and serving in that role for seasons two and three of Krapopolis, writing two upcoming episodes. Weisberg, who recently taught a workshop for those hoping to get hired as support staff and had to cap attendance at 100 people, says that landing her first staff writing gig is her only focus despite the depressed job market. She calls support-staff work fine as a foot in the door but wouldn’t recommend it to anyone expecting that elusive promotion to staff writer.

“There are a number of shows on the air with enough episodes and seasons to give a lot more people chances than are happening at the moment,” says Weisberg, attributing the blockade not just to the streaming model but also a perceived showrunner bias against moving support staff up the ladder. “I have more friends who have quit the industry in the past couple of years than I have who have stayed because there’s no viable path at the moment.”

Amy Thurlow is set to return as script coordinator for a streaming series after having experience on previous shows in nearly every support staff position and written a freelance episode for both Two Sentence Horror Stories and Gotham Knights. She remains hopeful for a revival of the linear model, due not only to the increased job opportunity but also her sense that it can create a better product. “It’s quite heartbreaking knowing that there are people who want to staff you, but that there’s no opportunity for them to do so,” Thurlow says. “Maybe I’m a fool, but I keep coming back to work because I feel like, maybe it won’t be this season, but eventually I will get the opportunity to show what I can do. And I have to believe that. Otherwise, I would be very unhappy.”

A version of this story first appeared in the Nov. 8 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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