“People are scared. I’m trying to go back to bartending,” she says. “A lot of people are wondering what other jobs they can do. I’m close with my old showrunners, and they’re supportive of me, but they’re looking for jobs.”

Across the TV landscape, buying has cooled dramatically and many writers now find themselves in situations like Cheever, with opportunities shrinking as the industry shifts from Peak TV to an era of contraction and austerity — a wave of downsizing that kicked off last year when the priorities of Wall Street changed from a focus on subscriber growth to profitability. As streamers like Netflix and Max right-size their slates, the broadcast pipelines for Peacock, Hulu and Paramount+ are drying up. A decade ago, broadcasters collectively ordered as many as 98 pilots; today, that number can be counted on one hand.

“There are so few shows that are still being greenlit, so few new pilots that are being ordered and fewer spots in writers rooms,” says Shannon Corbeil, a finalist for the Disney TV Writing Fellowship that was put on hold during the WGA strike. “The staffing positions available are going to more seasoned writers and the pilots that are being purchased are being bought from proven writers.”

Brandon K. Hines spent more than a decade working in support staff jobs and as a script coordinator on Comedy Central’s Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens and Amazon’s Harlem. He was staffed as a writer for the first time on Showtime’s Fellow Travelers. Hines was homeless and had been bouncing between camping, couch surfing with friends and the occasional Airbnb before he turned to driving for DoorDash and Grubhub after his 16-week writing job on the Showtime limited series concluded before the strikes began. A potential writing job on a Weeds revival he lined up before the strike evaporated during the work stoppage, as Showtime dropped plans for the series sources say.

“You need multiple gigs a year to make a livable wage,” Hines says, noting that competition for lower-level writing jobs has intensified as mid-level scribes and showrunners are increasingly putting themselves up for the few shows that are currently staffing. “It’s the craziest time to be a working writer in Hollywood: You can [work on] a semi-hit show but still can’t afford to make a living wage. It’s pretty intense.”

It’s not just the lack of pilots that is affecting the challenging landscape that writers have found in the industry since the strike concluded in September. The overall volume of U.S.-produced, live-action scripted TV series tumbled 14 percent last year, from a high of 600 in 2022 to 516 in 2023. FX CEO John Landgraf, who coined the term “Peak TV,” told The Hollywood Reporter in February that the downturn started well before the WGA strike last May.

“There was a certain amount of inefficiency that was just about a whole bunch of companies entering a space where they had no prior experience. And you can’t blame anybody but inexperience for that,” Landgraf says of the billions of dollars rival streamers spent on programming in a bid to compete with Netflix.

Since then, television reporters have been transformed into show grim reapers, announcing waves of cancellations and “unrenewals” — series that were canceled after they had originally been renewed by networks — including Uncoupled, Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin and A League of Their Own.

The Entertainment Community Fund, which provides assistance in the form of funds, workshops and trainings for those who work in the film and TV industries, has already distributed more than $3.25 million to 1,600 folks from Jan. 1 through March 22. That’s on top of the $18.8 million the ECF handed out in 2023 during the dual work stoppage to 8,500 people (including more than 600 writers).

Keith McNutt, executive director of the ECF, says the group has received requests for financial assistance from writers of all experience levels and cultural backgrounds since the strikes concluded. The ECF, he says, is dispersing between $200,000 to $300,000 a week. “We’re still doing three times the amount of assistance per week as before the pandemic,” he says.

The WGA, which monitors employment levels among its members, declined to comment for this story other than to say the union “required some time for a clear post-strike picture to occur.”

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