Mike Schur Expects an ‘Upswing’ in TV Production, Even for Comedies: ‘We’ve Seen the True Bottom’
Production in Hollywood is down. Fewer distributors means fewer shows. Fewer shows means fewer jobs. Whether it’s from conglomerates culling their cable channels or eliminating their streaming services, creatives are scrambling for work they wouldn’t have needed in years past, while others are looking for new careers entirely. On top of these immediate issues, the election results have spurred intensified concern over escalating media consolidation under the second Trump administration.
All of this indicates 2025 could be a tough year for Hollywood writers, and Michael Schur isn’t blind to the signs. The acclaimed showrunner, executive producer, and writer behind elite modern comedies like “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place,” as well as Netflix’s upcoming “A Man on the Inside,” told IndieWire the facts and figures emerging right now are “pretty stark.”
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“Yesterday, Freevee disappeared,” Schur said. “That was the home of ‘Primo,’ which was a really great show that Shea Serrano created. In any other era, it would have happily run for five or six seasons and made 60 or 80 episodes — at least.”
Schur said he first noticed a general contraction in scripted TV production starting in 2018-2019. Then the pandemic accelerated things even further, as did the 2023 WGA and SAG strikes. “But the contraction had basically already taken hold by that time,” said Schur, who served on the WGA negotiating committee. “Those strikes are getting blamed for a lot of stuff that I don’t think they had anything to do with, frankly.”
Still, the numbers are the numbers, and “the number of buyers out there has continued to go down,” Schur said. “Every time a buyer disappears, the chance for those shows — any show, really, but certainly ones that you consider on the margins or shows representing underrepresented groups or whatever — the odds get longer, and that stinks. […] There’s now talk of potentially further media consolidation, which is bad for everyone. It’s bad for consumers, it’s bad for people who like TV, it’s bad for the American economy. It’s just bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.”
But it’s not all bad — not what’s ahead, and not what’s already happening.
“I do get a little bit of a sense that we’re on a bit of an upswing, especially with comedy,” Schur said. “It’s faint, but there’s a pulse. I sense there’s more of a desire. You’re seeing more announcements about comedy shows being put into development and ordered to series and stuff. We’re not back where we were, certainly, and we might not be back there for a while, but I think — if I’m right, and I hope I am — I think we have seen the trough, we’ve seen the true bottom, and now we’re going to slowly build ourselves back up and there will be more comedies and more shows and more chances for folks to get their ideas to market. And that’s a thing that benefits everybody.”
While pointing out the unpredictability of the entertainment industry — “No one saw the contraction coming as quickly as it happened, because of COVID. Nobody saw the boom [coming] before that. No one saw any of this coming. So who knows what’s around the corner now?” — Schur puts a lot of the responsibility on himself and his fellow producers to make sure future progress is made.
“I lay a lot of this off at the feet of showrunners because they’re where the rubber meets the road for hiring decisions,” Schur said, “and showrunners are going to have to make a really concerted effort in the next five years to give people shots.”
Schur noted how tempting it can be in TV to keep hiring the same people over and over again. In a fast-paced creative environment, knowing you can trust the people sitting next to you to produce quality work in a timely fashion brings a level of “comfort and familiarity” that can be hard to resist.
“It isn’t easy to say, ‘I’m going to carve out a slot or two on this writing staff for someone I’ve never worked with before,'” Schur said. “‘Someone who was recommended to me, or someone whose script I read, but that person doesn’t look like me, doesn’t talk like me, and isn’t from the same state I’m from, or didn’t go to the same college.'”
But making room for those new voices is exactly what’s required to continue evolving the medium, to continue creating great TV, and to continue producing TV the way that Hollywood has always needed it to be produced.
“It is, at some level, just a question of at-bats,” he said. “I hate to extend this baseball metaphor, but you just need at-bats. You just need to be in a bunch of rooms, working with a bunch of people, pitching a bunch of jokes that suck so that you can figure out that they suck, so that you can start pitching better jokes and better stories. You need to understand how these things work.”
Schur said that’s why a major priority for the WGA during the strike was ensuring writers weren’t just hired for one stage of production. They need to see their projects through from start to finish if they’re going to grow as writers, evolve into showrunners, and keep Hollywood in the business of providing entertainment to the masses.
“The complete divorce of writing from production has meant that even if those writers get at-bats in the writers’ room, those writers don’t get to go to the set,” he said. “They don’t get to talk to the actors. They don’t get to see how the production design department works with the lighting department, who work with the ADs, who work with the script coordinators. You just don’t know how it all works.”
Schur said it’s become far too common for a writers to never experience a full production schedule.
“We have become an assembly line — an old-timey, Ford Model-T assembly line — where my only job is putting this widget on that wodget, and then I don’t know how the rest of the car is made. And that’s not how this works. TV shows are teaching hospitals, and if the people in the teaching hospitals never get to interact with patients, they don’t learn how to be doctors. Pretty soon, we’re not going to have any doctors, and it really worries me.”
With the exception of a handful of broadcast comedies like “Abbott Elementary,” “Ghosts,” and “St. Denis Medical,” the opportunities to work on a year-round TV series are few and far between.
“You know, writing dialogue is 28 percent of the job of being a writer in Hollywood, and the rest of that job is understanding what actually happens when you start making the show and how you do it well, and how you follow through the ideas, how you adjust on the fly, change things, come up with new ideas, change jokes, whatever. Those skills are being lost at a very rapid rate. And once they’re gone, they’re gone. I’m 49 years old. I’m one of the youngest people in the world who remembers how to make a 22-episode season of TV. […] We’re at real risk of the language of writing becoming a dying language, and that would be a real tragedy, and it would mean worse TV.”
Here’s hoping the positive parts of Schur’s predictions pan out before things in Hollywood go from bad news to worse TV.
“A Man on the Inside” premieres Thursday, November 21 on Netflix.
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