Writer's Memoir Serves as an Historical Analysis
Jeffrey 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 television writers 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event in the modern network television era, however, occurred in 1996 when the Federal Communications Commission repealed the long standing Fin-Syn (Financial Interest and Syndication) Rules.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. Brooks 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, the studio’s executives actively participated in the creative discourse that determined the overall direction of a series,” Jeffrey Stepakoff writes. “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 Twenty First 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 an 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, Jeffrey 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 Jeffrey 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)
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