Writer's Memoir Serves as Historical Analysis of a Television Era
Writer
Jeffrey Stepakoff came to Los Angeles in 1988, which put him in the
proverbial “right place at the right time.” The concept
of “quality television,” given birth with Hill Street
Blues and further advanced by St. Elsewhere, thirtysomething
and Moonlighting, had recently raised the medium from embarrassing
enjoyment to guilty pleasure to literary enchantment. Stepakoff had
originally aspired for the life of a New York playwright but saw his
career move in a different direction when Hollywood producer John Wells
(China Beach, The West Wing) lectured at Carnegie
Mellon University in Pittsburgh about working in the entertainment industry.
Stepakoff was sold, and recites his adventures in Billion-Dollar
Kiss: The Kiss That Saved Dawson’s Creek and Other Adventures
in TV Writing (Gotham Book, 2007).
Stepakoff
arrived in LA during the longest writers strike in Hollywood history,
but by the time that labor conflict ended the television industry was
primed for an explosion that would make the TV writer a hot commodity.
Profits from syndication zoomed in the 1990s, with more than a billion
dollars for ER and Friends while Seinfeld
earned over three billion, and every network and production studio in
town was willing to spend whatever it took to find shows that could
reach such a financial stratosphere. The birth of new networks (first
FOX, then The WB and UPN) and the rise of cable channels (HBO, Showtime)
only fueled the high levels of television production. And when the Berlin
Wall fell in 1989, leading to the end of the Soviet Empire shortly thereafter,
a market that was once closed suddenly opened as the previous state-owned
media monopolies gave way to privately-owned television stations hungry
for American-made content.
The singular
most important event in the modern network television era, however,
occurred in 1996 when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) repealed
the long standing Fin-Syn (Financial Interest and Syndication) Rules.
Created in 1970, Fin-Syn prevented networks from making their own shows,
enabling independent companies to rise and thus fill the production
void. It also meant that the sole source of revenue for the networks
came from advertising, as not owning a show meant not sharing in the
syndication profits as well. That was now about to change.
Repealing
Fin-Syn started a wave of media mergers and acquisition, including CBS
becoming a part of Viacom, Turner Broadcasting System being sold to
Time-Warner and the Walt Disney Company acquiring ABC. It also resulted
in a massive amount of “development deals” handed out to
television writers as the networks and studios hoped to cash in on the
“next big thing.” Although a massive amount of money was
generated from these events, the negative implications were equally
enormous. All these mergers and acquisitions meant that there were soon
only six media conglomerates—GE, Viacom, Bertelsmann, TimeWarner,
Disney and News Corp—producing and broadcasting nearly all television
content in the United States, while systematically driving any-and-all
independent competitors out of business. This included MTM Productions,
which not only had developed the gold-standard working-model for television
creation but also personified the concept of “quality television.”
MTM was
originally formed by Grant Tinker (who would go on to serve as president
of NBC in the early 1980s) as a production vehicle for then-wife Mary
Tyler Moore’s classic sitcom, The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Tinker immediately hired two writers—James L. Brook and Allan
Burns—to develop the series and granted them not only unprecedented
freedom in that endeavor but also in the production of the show. This
autonomy was likewise given to other writers as MTM went on to produce
some of the quality-defining television series of the 1970s and 80s,
including The Bob Newhart Show, Lou Grant, Hill
Street Blues, St. Elsewhere and Newhart. MTM
was a haven for talented writers willing to push the boundaries of the
medium, and served as a well-cushioned buffer between network interference
and creative decision making; the repealing of Fin-Syn and subsequent
demise of independent production companies like MTM eliminated that
buffer and resulted in an increase in network interference.
“In
the days when MTM produced television shows,” Stepakoff writes,
“the studio’s executives actively participated in the creative
discourse that determined the overall direction of a series. Since the
studio was not concerned with provisional stunts that would just keep
a show going week to week but with its overall quality—which translated
into better syndication sales—a studio supported the writer and
the integrity of his or her vision. With the studio now out of the equation,
this checks-and-balances system between studio and network were gone.
The network now had free and unadulterated run of all aspects of a series,
from marketing to casting to story. Television was now, quite literally,
at the mercy of an individual network executive’s personal predilections.”
Television
soon became even more under the “mercy” of network executives
when reality television was not only born but flourished at the beginning
of the current century. Part of the reason for the genre’s rise
falls at the feet of the television writer, as the Writers Guild of
America was again threatening to strike in 2001. Although such action
never materialized, the networks prepared for the worst nonetheless
and stockpiled an assortment of reality shows as a safeguard. Since
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and Survivor had experienced
astonishing ratings a year earlier, these new reality creations were
given the green light despite being no longer needed. Cheap to produce
compared to “scripted” series—mainly because they
did not utilize union labor—and at times bringing in comparable
ratings, the importance of a television writer began to fade in the
networks’ eyes.
At the
same time, the stock market dropped dramatically, with not only the
publicly-owned media conglomerates taking a hit but their major advertisers
as well. Despite a steady drop in viewership from the mid-80s onward,
advertising revenue for the networks continued to steadily increase
during the same period. This abruptly ended during the 2001-2002 season,
however, as companies slashed their advertising budgets due to the economic
conditions of the time. Reality shows soon became even more appealing
to the networks, thus marking an end to what had been a truly writer-driven
era in the medium’s history.
Although
the financial bubble suddenly burst for the television writer, both
in terms of the lower development salaries networks were now offering
as well as the shrinking number of employment opportunities, Stepakoff
does not see this turning of the tide as a necessarily bad thing: “You
see, the more I consider what had happened to television between 1988
and the beginning of the new millennium, the more I actually felt that
upheaval was not only what the business had coming, but what television
itself needed. While my colleagues and I were all beneficiaries of one
of the greatest run-ups in corporate America—what essentially
was the leveraging of Hollywood—I came to believe that the overall
effect this had on the business had ultimately hurt the product we loved
so much. What quality television needed was a break, a chance, if you
will, to reinvent its creative soul. And so did I. By the spring of
2004, with good TV already well into its break, I had my chance, and
I took it”
Thus ended
Stepakoff’s career as a television writer, at least for the time
being. During his stay in Los Angeles, he worked on numerous television
shows, including Simon & Simon, The Wonder Years,
Sisters and Dawson’s Creek. Billion-Dollar
Kiss is thus not merely a history of the times but also an insider’s
look at television writing and production, filled with highs, lows and
the requisite amount of amusing anecdotes. Or, as Stepakoff himself
writes, “This is the story of television, the story of the television
writer, and this is also my story.” It also a worthwhile read
for any fan of the medium.
Anthony
Letizia (January 14, 2008)
