{"id":490358,"date":"2026-06-13T04:14:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T04:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/490358\/"},"modified":"2026-06-13T04:14:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T04:14:08","slug":"the-directors-guild-is-sick-of-everyone-else-on-the-set-taking-their-jobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/490358\/","title":{"rendered":"The Directors Guild is sick of everyone else on the set taking their jobs"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a well-known TV phenomenon, especially as television shows move into their advancing years: You\u2019ll be watching an episode of something, see the credits scroll by, and then go \u201cHuh, they let David Duchovny direct this one.\u201d Not to single out Duchovny\u2014who directed three episodes of\u00a0The X-Files, and six of\u00a0Californication, during his long runs on both shows\u2014since, again, it\u2019s a pretty common way to keep an actor happy once their feet start getting itchy with a role. (Steve Carell on\u00a0The Office, Ellen Pompeo on Grey\u2019s Anatomy, Bryan Cranston on Breaking Bad\u2014name a show that lasted long enough, and with a prominent enough star, and it\u2019ll probably crop up.) It\u2019s a win-win for both parties, usually, allowing producers to keep their stars happy (and their egos stroked) while the performers in question bulk up their resum\u00e9s for whatever come next.<\/p>\n

And the Directors Guild Of America is, apparently, moving to put some limits on it\u2014and, indeed, on anyone involved in a show\u2019s production hopping into the director\u2019s chair when they\u2019ve already got a job.<\/p>\n

This is per\u00a0Variety<\/a>, which reports on a summary of the DGA\u2019s tentative agreement with Hollywood\u2019s major TV and film studios, which it\u2019s been negotiating over the past few weeks. That includes a lot of the expected provisions, including adjustments to how much the studios kick into the Guild\u2019s health plan, calls for the studios to lobby for better tax incentives to make movies in the United States, and quite a bit of material on AI. (Some of which is a little worrying in its own right; we\u2019re all for the provision that says directors get final say on any AI material generated for their work, but the addition of \u201ca new employer-funded program to help directors build their AI skills\u201d sounds like it\u2019s just capitulating to the technology\u2019s supposed \u201cinevitability.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The most interesting provision, though, is one that was apparently pitched in response to the fact that there\u2019s just less TV, on an episode-by-episode basis, being made these days\u2014and, consequently, fewer slots for professional directors to ply their trade. While it doesn\u2019t go into exact numbers, the summary states that the contract \u201cseeks to preserve valuable episodic directing slots for career directors by limiting the number of episodes that can be directed by those who have no track record in directing and are already employed in other capacities on a scripted series.\u201d All of which sounds like a pretty clear\u00a0 message to the \u201cY\u2019know, I\u2019ve always wanted\u00a0to direct\u201d set, while still leaving a window open for truly passionate multi-hyphenates to take a spin in the big chair. And while it\u2019s easy to imagine this growing out of a few carefully nursed grudges about toes being stepped on over the years, it really just feels like an obvious outgrowth of the overall shrinking of TV over the last several years. It was a lot easier, in the era of 22-episode seasons, to throw one or two at your resident would-be auteur; in the era of far more limited run times, the DGA is apparently feeling a little more territorial about those slots.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s a well-known TV phenomenon, especially as television shows move into their advancing years: You\u2019ll be watching an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":490359,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-490358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/490359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}