In 2022, the drought in the Czech Republic was so severe that the Elbe River receded to reveal a rock along the bank with an inscription chiseled in 1417. It read, Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine. If you see me, then weep. Such warnings, found throughout Europe, are known as Hunger Stones.
I tell you this for two reasons. One, it demonstrates great storytelling skills that would be useful to any corporation looking to explain its brand in a crowded marketplace. But also because I am a Hunger Stone.
My warning is much easier to understand than the one along the bottom of the Elbe River because, first, I’m a great storyteller, and second, it’s not written in 15th century German. Though, if you’re a multinational company in Berlin, I can do that, too: Ich bin ein Hungerstein und habe eine Botschaft für die Unterhaltungsindustrie.
Heed my words, Hollywood. Pain is coming. It will come slowly. In ways you will try to ignore but should not.
I know this because I lived through the destruction of print journalism before seeking refuge in the TV industry. In particular, I chose to work in scripted network half-hour comedies, which turned out to be the newsmagazines of broadcasting.
I’m not sure what will be destroyed next, but if you see me trading crypto or opening a pottery studio, do not get involved.
What are these signs that your once-great industry is turning into a hobby? The first is that you call your work “content.” Not even farmers, when agribusiness destroyed their livelihoods in the 1950s, degraded themselves by lamenting unharvested ears of content.
Here’s how it happened to magazines.
In 2002, one of the nicest editors at Time, perhaps the most successful magazine in history, quietly stopped stocking our refrigerators with Snapple. Did we complain? Way more than you can imagine. Because on some level we knew that if we let Steve Koepp take our mint iced tea, eventually he’d come for our peach iced tea. We didn’t see much further than that, which was a mistake.
The Snapple of the television industry is the menus handed out in the writers room so scribes can choose between free Sugarfish, free Din Tai Fung or free Marmalade Cafe. Those menus have not yet completely disappeared, but one day — and soon — they will, and that is a signal of the end times.
Same with Christmas gifts. You know what I got from Time magazine’s Santa in the late 1990s? Stock options. Not just stock options — pre-AOL merger stock options. My friend who works on Only Murders in the Building got nervous when she saw what Hulu gave her this season. “We used to get TVs, expensive luggage, watches,” she says. “This year, Hulu gave us wrapping paper with logos for their shows on it so we could market for them when we give our loved ones gifts.”
In both publishing and television, real estate is another barometer of bad times ahead. In the magazine industry, it meant moving offices from expensive midtown Manhattan to the financial district, then to parts of Brooklyn once mentioned in 1990s rap songs. In the entertainment industry, that part of Brooklyn is Canada.
Chris Harris, who runs the Frasier reboot, is trying to stay calm about the changes. “Overall, we have fewer writers per room, lower budgets for amenities,” he says. “But we also get fewer notes since there aren’t as many executives, so the contraction isn’t all bad.”
But mostly bad. Leila Gerstein could see the writing on the stone as soon as she got a greenlight for her Amazon show Every Year After. “The amount of submissions I had for the five writers I could hire was staggering,” she tells me. “People who created their own shows.”
Yet another tell that the end is nigh is that your friends will start blaming technology. But they will blame the wrong technology. We were sure the problem in publishing was that the internet posted our valuable articles for free. The real problem was that reading is hard. But now people could watch an infinite amount of video. On their phones. Which they have to take out every few seconds to get directions, see the weather, text friends. The only time you need to take out a magazine these days is when you see a spider. TV writers believe the problem is AI. It’s not. The problem is that just as reading was once considered too taxing, now watching a video longer than 34 seconds is hard. Have you seen young people try to watch a movie? It’s like asking them to sit through Mass on the Easter Vigil.
Last year, I walked in circles around Walt Disney Studios, holding a sign. That sign demanded job security in the form of longer-term contracts and a minimum number of writers on a show. A friend I was walking with looked quizzically at all our angry fellow writers and said, “Every single one of them was warned by their parents not to do this for a living.”
Our parents were right.
This story appeared in the Jan. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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