Hey! This Isn’t Funny!

Lately, you could sum up the life of a sitcom writer this way: One year you make hundreds of thousands of dollars, spending long hours with strange people, but the next year you make nothing--again spending long hours with strange people, only this time the office is a movie multiplex, and the strange people are the other souls at the 11:30 a.m. showing of “Gladiator.”

In the last several weeks, many of this city’s television writers have reported to work on new and returning series. Some of them--the talented or the lucky or the connected--landed jobs during the annual mad dash for work that’s known around town as “staffing season.” Though some jobs are filled earlier, staffing season traditionally begins after the networks announce their new fall schedules in May. A harried month ensues. Writers keep track of who got a meeting where while their agents, who have their own office politics and internal fears to deal with, call in favors, if for no other reason than to give their clients a sense of activity. As one writer puts it: “A zeitgeist of panic settles over the city.” Sitting out a year looks bad; it’s a black mark on your career that can be hard to erase.

Alan Kirschenbaum, co-creator and executive producer of “Yes, Dear,” a new sitcom on CBS, likens the frantic staffing season to a game of musical chairs, “and there are more people walking around than there are chairs there, and when the music stops, you’re either sitting or you’re out of work for a year.”

Those left standing join the ranks of the “available,” as one agent chose to more delicately describe unemployment last week, conceding that not all of his clients had work.

On the one hand, these TV writers are among the least pitiable of the nation’s unemployed. Suddenly out of work, they have stress: How to pay for the leased Lexus, the mortgage on the Santa Monica home, the kids’ private schools?

But talk to them these days and you get a sense of the unique pressures and frustrations they face. Comedy writers, particularly, are growing more morose as viewers flock to unscripted, low-budget, carnival-sideshow-like programming, wherein ordinary folks eat rats (CBS’ “Survivor”), wed strangers (Fox’s “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?”) and go up against the trivia gods for a king’s ransom (ABC’s “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”).

Those with polished “Sex and the City” spec scripts but no job are enduring their own version of “Survivor.” But blaming the unemployment of a pack of writers on the success of “Millionaire” or “Survivor” is far too facile an explanation for the current climate, many say, failing to take into account various other political forces and shell games at work.

Only Themselves to Blame?

Some also take the less popular view that writing for a sitcom is not a birthright, and that if sitcoms are slumping right now comedy writers have only their own mediocre work to blame. Maybe, too, these writers have had it unrealistically good in years past--during the fall 1995-96 season, for instance, when there were 60 sitcoms on the air, to go along with 34 dramas.

For fall 2000-2001, the numbers stack up this way: 44 sitcoms and 43 dramas. That may not sound like a huge drop-off, but when you consider that each show represents, on average, 10 to 12 jobs, that’s roughly 200 people back in circulation, to say nothing of all the fledgling writers who flock to L.A. yearly to make their fortune. That all but one (UPN’s “The Parkers”) of the dozen sitcoms ordered for fall 1999-2000 aren’t around this fall is no surprise, given that shows are routinely canceled if they don’t perform well immediately. And while several midseason entries, including Fox’s “Malcolm in the Middle” and NBC’s “Daddio,” are on the new fall schedule, seven other returning series were canceled too. ABC scheduled a fourth hour of “Millionaire” on Wednesday night at 8, meaning just seven of the 23 hours of prime-time programming on ABC will be occupied by scripted drama or comedy series, with the rest divided up among game shows, “Monday Night Football,” newsmagazines, movies and “The Wonderful World of Disney.”

Agents and writers grouse that with “Millionaire” ABC is mortgaging the future on a game show with no back-end value in syndication and whose popularity is already being usurped, at least in the media, by “Survivor.” In the meantime, however, it’s hard to argue with the show’s profitability; simply by adding that fourth hour of the game show, one source estimates, ABC parent the Walt Disney Co. will take in an additional $100 million.

For writers, then, it has been a jittery month--with fewer job openings, fewer episodes ordered on new shows, and fewer development deals being made, which means less turnover on established shows.

“The networks and studios are responding to [the tight market] by handing out offers and saying, ‘If you don’t respond by this afternoon, we’ll move on to another writer,’ ” says one sitcom writer, asking not to be identified, who landed a position on a new show but at a 20% pay cut from the last job. “They’re really using the dearth of positions to their benefit.”

“There was definitely a certain sense of desperation out there from agents,” adds Eileen Conn, one of the creators and executive producers of “Dag,” a new sitcom on NBC starring David Alan Grier as a secret service agent guarding the first lady, who is played by Delta Burke. “We noticed that people were willing to take bumps down, whether in title or credit or money.”

Some jobs were claimed before the game of musical chairs really started. Three top writers left NBC’s “Frasier” last season to develop shows of their own. But their slots were filled long before staffing season began with writers coming off of existing shows, two from the canceled NBC sitcom “Stark Raving Mad” and one from “The PJs,” which will air next year on the WB.

‘Yes’ and No: How the Jobs Were Filled

Even though “Yes, Dear,” a buddy comedy starring comedians Anthony Clark and Mike O’Malley, hardly holds the cachet or job security of “Frasier,” writers had reason to covet a job there too. For one, CBS gave “Yes, Dear” a good time slot, Monday nights at 8:30, sandwiched between two family-oriented hits, “King of Queens” and “Everybody Loves Raymond.” And CBS picked up 13 episodes of the show in a year when networks were often more conservative in their upfront episodic orders, at times committing in advance to just a half-dozen episodes.

Kirschenbaum and Greg Garcia are “Yes, Dear’s” “show-runners,” the executive producers who hire the writers who will work under them on a season’s episodes. In searching for people, Kirschenbaum says he and Garcia read hundreds of scripts, then interviewed 10 people to fill positions. But most of the writing jobs on “Yes, Dear” went to people whose work they knew, he said. Two of these slots went to writers with development deals at Twentieth Century Fox, the studio that produces “Yes, Dear.”

Kirschenbaum says Fox didn’t exert any pressure on him and Garcia to hire writers with deals at their studio. But the practice has become more than common. Profligate spending in recent years on writers coming off of hit shows like NBC’s “Friends” has largely failed to produce a new crop of hits; studios, looking to defray the cost of these seven-figure deals, have started putting the writers on existing shows to earn some of that money back. This migration downward has had the effect of crowding out the middle class.

“Every overall deal now usually has a component of [having to work on an existing show],” says Bruce Helford, who as executive producer of four shows (ABC’s “The Drew Carey Show” and “Norm,” as well as the WB’s upcoming comedies “Nikki” and “The Oblongs”) single-handedly employs dozens of writers. “There are less people sitting in offices thinking up ideas, which means that the lower-level people are left out.”

Those people do have other options, including cable outlets like Nickelodeon, E!, the Disney Channel and Comedy Central. The pay isn’t as good and the prestige factor isn’t the same, but the arrogance of years past is changing.

“A few years ago, if you had told me there’s a new show on the Disney Channel, I wouldn’t have been interested. Now, I’ll listen,” says an agent.

Execs More Involved in Hiring Process

Meanwhile, writers and agents complain that the hiring system has gotten bogged down by increased involvement among studio and network executives, particularly as networks pick up more shows produced by their corporate parents or in-house production companies.

“For the most part it’s the show-runner who decides who they want, but with new shows you’ve gotta ask studio executives, and the studio executive’s dental hygienist--everybody who has an opinion,” says Danny Jacobson, a veteran of the staffing process as executive producer on shows including “Mad About You” and “Two Guys and a Girl.”

Asked to assess the general state of things, one agent begins: “I find that it’s less and less a meritocracy. This started a couple years ago when a lot of writers assistants got hired.”

The agent goes on to list a dizzying array of mitigating factors that presumably override sheer talent. Established writers taking consultant jobs at half their going rate. Misguided overall deals. Scaled-back orders for new shows. The pledge networks made to bring in more minority writers in the wake of NAACP protests last year. Corporate synergy. The possibility of a strike when the current WGA contract expires in May 2001. Too many managers and too many agents representing too many writers looking for their own little piece of the pie.

The end result?

“More people talking about how bad it is,” he says.