The first writers’ room I ever worked in was considered freakishly small at the time. There were seven writers, a writers’ assistant, a script coordinator, a writers’ PA, and a phalanx of personal assistants, which was the category I fell into.
Zipped into my bright floral Topshop shift dresses and vibrating with Trader Joe’s Powerberries, I leapt at any opportunity to sub for the writers’ assistant as note taker. Behind the writers’ room iMac, I tried and failed not to laugh too hard at everyone’s jokes, awed by how plot was broken and shaped in between zingy bouts of one-upmanship.
Every morning as I walked past a twee little set of Pluto’s paw prints on my way to work, I had a sense of confirmation that felt borderline delirious. My feet were on the path, so all I needed to do now was work hard for a while, write something good and funny, and then CHYRON: ONE YEAR LATER, I would be on the other side of that iMac, pitching joke alts scribbled in a script some other writers’ assistant had collated for me.
I would write on a few comedies, and after my first big sale I would reward myself with a Cartier panthère ring (see above re: delirium), and then I would keep writing television until they had to wheel me out of the room.
It was 2012!
Growing up in Australia, I used to download America-current “Friends” scripts as transcribed by some enterprising soul on Geocities, and they were so precious to me that I slept with them under my pillow. My obsession with NBC’s bowling alley lawyer dramedy “Ed” was so all-consuming I convinced half a dozen other 13-year-olds to join a club I created devoted to hating any character who got in the way of Ed and the love of his life, Carol.
But the concept of writing for television didn’t occur to me until I started watching “The Office,” and then, like a baby dinosaur’s cast iron frying pan to the head, a thought hit me: this was a job I could have!
In my early twenties, adrift in Sydney, something magic happened. A writer for “The Office” whom my sister had met in a bar and befriended on Facebook posted that he was looking for an assistant. From across the Pacific, I responded with manic speed. He interviewed me over Skype and when he offered me the job I logged off, walked around my block five times, and burst into tears.
Within a month I was in Los Angeles and my visa was underway — bananas. We went to dinner to celebrate and wound up at the same restaurant as Jenna Fischer; she stopped by our table to say hello to my new boss, who introduced me to her. My ears were ringing out of my head. I couldn’t believe I’d done it.
(But I was already too late. I should have chased those “Friends” episodes back to L.A when I had the chance. I should have Doogie Howser’d my way into the “Will & Grace” room. I should have been born in 1978.)
The rooms I worked in after this first one were “normal” sized: network comedies that ran for eight months out of the year with 14 to 15 writers and their attendant support staff. We shot on the lot and walked circumscribed laps around the sound stages at lunch. Even when we were staring down the barrel of a fourth draft rebreak under green fluorescent lights, even when we migrated en masse to Zoom and the fun factor dipped with the free lunches, even then there was something blissful in the toil.
But: I remember the July I raced home from pool parties to sit in my apartment, blinds closed against the sun, to watch “Orange Is the New Black” on my laptop. Almost overnight, the desire for speculative script samples of existing shows vanished, replaced by the demand for original pilot samples.
Then “pilot season” as a concept faded to black; shows could be picked up year-round. Initially this seemed like a boon, and people chattered excitedly about how a notes call with Netflix execs would not leave you with myriad non-negotiable changes — for a time its appeal supplanted the Promised Land of HBO.
But as the years spun dizzyingly on, we looked up and saw the majority of writers were working on streaming shows for shorter periods and less money, while production took place overseas, accessible to only a select few. Now seven writers in a room sounded downright luxurious! It was like one of those TikToks where someone’s elderly parent has brought home a stray dog that’s actually a coyote.
It was possible we’d made a mistake.
OK, so we’d had a bit of a Ship of Theseus decade, and we were partially culpable for our own demise. A labor dispute seemed like a natural way to course correct. Whenever I read “the impact of the writers’ and actors’ strikes,” I try to remind myself that this is shorthand for the contraction felt across town the last few years, not an accusation, because writers and actors are not the reason Los Angeles is currently free-falling towards the abyss. Asking the networks to see more of the profit we generate for them and also would they please not use robots to do our jobs did not get us here!
But here we all are, the landscape literally charred, hovering over our emails for intel about something, anything. I hear of a new room opening once in a blue moon. A friend developing a show for Netflix has been working on the pilot for over one calendar year. I haven’t had any kind of job in a writers’ room since August 2022, and I can’t be sure that I will ever again — I fear our overlords are too busy picking splashback tile for their third residences while they contemplate which 9/11 era cop drama to reboot in Q3 of 2026 to create any new work today.
Still, the prospect of a hard pivot sits as poorly with me as it did a certain watery-eyed passenger of Oceanic Flight 815. How do you walk away from a dream? Where do you go when every kind of writing work is melting into the sea? Whenever I inspect my joy I find it lives here, on this parched gorgeous hillside with its stupid crooked lettering.
The question is: will television ever rebound to those halcyon Powerberry days? No one can say. A sensible person would call it. And maybe soon I’ll have to, too.
We could have television again, and not just one endless season of “The Circle Is Blind Queer Island,” if the multimedia tycoons who make Conglom-O Corporation look like an old-fashioned candy shoppe wanted television and not a chart with a big green arrow.
I actually think people would like that. All the hot Gen-Z folks I know watch and rewatch shows with eight seasons of 24 episodes on loop; there is a comfort and a rhythm to them. I know we can make them — we have all the pieces sitting right there in the box. It would make a lot of sense, story-wise.
