Hollywood's Great Contraction, and the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence

Over the past few months Deadline has published a series of articles about "the Great Contraction" in Hollywood's television production, and the "depression"-like conditions this has meant for the industry. Depicting a hellscape of surprise cancellations of long-running series', shows to which platforms had already committed dropped before they even began, and a dearth of investment in new productions, while when a series does make it to order what follows has tended to be a story of smaller budgets, smaller casts (with regulars getting downgraded to "recurring" characters), and shorter seasons with fewer episodes.* (Those 22-episode network seasons now run more like 13-18 episodes, while network tight-fistedness is translating to fewer really long runs than before, few shows making it to season eight, or even seven.)

Oriented to what this has meant for the writers and actors looking to get along, the articles have struck me as being stronger on description than explanation, not that it is too hard for anyone to understand what has been going on. Previously TV has had its booms and busts, but these have tended to be in a part of the industry, with the decline of one thing usually a function of the ascent of another thing--as when growing original production for cable took a big bite out of the networks' market. After that streaming boomed at the expense of the networks and cable together--really, really boomed in an unsustainable way (companies churning out massive amounts of stuff without regard to profitability, just attracting subscribers, because the Federal Reserve was pretty much giving money away), so that when the streaming boom collapsed (because growth had its limits, because debt piled up, because interest rates went up, because investors were switching their focus from growth to profits) there was nothing else that could really make up for it. The disruptions of the pandemic, and then the recent strikes, made for an even shakier situation--with this reinforced by the broader economic uncertainty, as those doing the math in Hollywood, like their counterparts everywhere else, worried over the movements of the interest rate, the implications of trade war, and much, much else.

Of course, one would ordinarily expect a recovery eventually. Still, there is no plausible basis for a return to the reckless spending of the boom years--as indeed we see the streaming services going for content in other ways, as by buying the rights to old TV shows in the expectation that people will learn to love reruns again (quite plausibly, to go by the evidence), and I suspect in the wake of hits like Squid Game, become more open to bringing North American audiences the kinds of foreign production once virtually barred from the American market. Certainly I see no reason to think broadcast or cable TV are going to pick up the slack, their penuriousness a significant part of this picture. (As Nellie Andreeva informs us, where a decade ago there would have been a hundred broadcast pilots shooting during the relevant season, this year there were only three, and all of them at just one network, NBC, the others not bothering.) This is all the more the case in as, frankly, if there is no shortage of stories out there worth telling, those thinking in terms of content instead cannot possibly imagine the consumer to be very hungry for more at this point, the market overstocked by that standard (partly thanks to the boom, but also thanks to the tapping of those vast, vast reserves of older content and international content).

Moreover, it may be that even this is not the full story. Consider that critical object of contention in the aforementioned strikes of last year, the possible use of artificial intelligence to replace writers, actors and other industry workers. In considering this object of contention also consider the hype about the rate of progress in artificial intelligence, especially generative artificial intelligence, and particularly what technologies like Sora hint at its possibly permitting its users to do within a matter of months. Should this expectation be borne out even partially the industry is unlikely to ever be the same again--that Great Contraction not an exceptionally deep downturn but the end of an era and the beginning of another in which, as has happened so many times elsewhere, many an occupational category all but disappears.