Peak TV is dead. We’ve been beyond that era for a while now, with the number of shows produced annually having dropped significantly post-Covid and post-strikes. As a result, we just had the biggest example in media history of consolidation in our industry, with Paramount merging with Warner Bros. Discovery and putting two major streaming services under one roof.
Something has to change in order to get more shows and movies to the air and to better empower creators. So some of Hollywood’s top agencies — a rare coalition that includes CAA, UTA, and WME — as well as top producers like Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Jason Blum, Mark Burnett, Peter Chernin, and more, are teaming up with an idea to bring back an even earlier era of television.
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Those top agencies and producers have formed the American Entertainment Alliance, and per an announcement in the New York Times, they are pushing for federal legislation that would require major studios — including Netflix, Disney, Amazon, and Skydance — to dedicate half of their annual content budgets to be spent on independent productions in the United States. Rather than have largely consolidated studios produce the majority of their content in-house for it to then be aired on their own broadcast networks, cable channels, or streaming services, they’d like to see at least half of that content come from production companies outside their walls.
If that were to happen, it would let the creators of the shows be the owners of what they make. And the AEA believes it would send a jolt through the marketplace, in turn creating more jobs and more opportunity.
“There are fewer people deciding what gets made and what we all see, what the consumer sees,” Bryan Lourd, the chief executive of CAA, told the New York Times. “This change that we’re putting forth would foster an environment where more things could get financed and therefore there’d be more storytellers, more jobs created. Distribution is not the issue of the future. Who finances content is the issue.”
For those old enough to remember, this would be a throwback to the days of “Fin-Syn,” or the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules of 1970. It was regulation that made it so that the three major broadcasters, CBS, NBC, and ABC, couldn’t own the shows they aired or control their syndication. They knew their shows could air on broadcast, and they could own the rights to it and decide where it was syndicated in the future. As the Times pointed out, it led to independent, creator and talent-led juggernauts like Castle Rock, Mary Tyler Moore’s MTM Enterprises, “Dallas” producer Lorimar, and many more.
But the rules were repealed in the ’90s after the rise of cable, the belief being that there was more than enough competition now for it to not be a problem. The AEA says that’s exactly when media consolidation started running rampant and has led to this moment of 41 percent fewer scripted submissions from independent producers and thousands of jobs lost.
The AEA in addition to the budgets also wants production companies to be able to own their own shows and have licensing rights. So in theory it would give a popular show another bite at the apple to sell their show again to a different streamer years down the road, or perhaps a show that got cancelled could more easily be sold and saved by another streamer.
To try and push this forward, the stakeholders of the AEA are meeting with the people who helped to draft the recent bill introduced that would create a federal tax credit for films produced in the United States. We talked before about how seismic that legislation was to finally be introduced, and it remains to be seen if it will be adopted for good after the midterms. While the Fin-Syn rules used to be regulated by the FCC, the FCC has little oversight with streaming, so the AEA is instead looking to introduce legislation.
Despite the heavy hitters, all this comes with major challenges and caveats. Not only is anything of this nature a struggle to push through this polarized of a Congress, but the studios themselves would also fight it tooth and nail, saying they need to be able to own their content and that they already buy a bunch of shows from outside sources anyway. There are countless shows and films from the likes of Imagine, Blumhouse, MRC, and others that make up the AEA that have thrived in the current ecosystem.
But a diversity of voices and more power to creators is a good thing in our book, and it’s refreshing to have such big names teaming up to fight for the little guys.