GoFundMe<\/a> to help her neighbors who were kidnapped from their car on their own block.<\/p>\nThe fires last January reached places and neighborhoods no one ever thought they could touch, shattering our sense of security, not to mention the lives of those who lost their homes. My friend Jen, who lost the house she raised her two sons in almost a year ago today, still has the urge to drive through her old neighborhood in the Palisades every couple weeks as if to remind herself it actually happened. \u201cIt\u2019s a wasteland,\u201d she says. Miles and miles of dirt with scorched chimney remnants where entire blocks used to exist. The other day, I was watching the local news and the meteorologist mentioned prepping for \u201cSanta Ana winds.\u201d Her voice dropped low like she was worried about summoning Voldemort.<\/p>\n
And Hollywood\u2019s contraction, with its mass unemployment, affects everything here from schools to restaurants to small businesses. Sara is an actress but also a bartender at a tavern across the street from a major studio. Her regulars were always crew guys; they\u2019d pop over to the bar during their lunch break. \u201cWe used to \u2014 and I\u2019m saying like a year, year and a half ago \u2014 easily have 20 to 40 guys walk in every day of the week,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd now if we get three to eight guys one day, we\u2019re kind of like, \u2018Whoa, is there a show filming over there?\u2019\u201d Pieter Vodden, who owns Pharos Athletic Club in Echo Park, tells me his gym\u2019s revenue is still below 80 percent of what it was pre-pandemic. A huge chunk of his clientele are TV writers. \u201cPeople are grumbling about the state of the industry all the time to us,\u201d Vodden says. \u201cWe\u2019ve never really recovered from the pandemic in terms of the energy of Los Angeles. And because of everything else that\u2019s happened since it just feels like getting knocked down. We\u2019ve all taken a lot of blows.\u201d As of September, the unemployment rate in Los Angeles County was 5.9 percent, a point and change higher than the national average, 4.4 percent, which is the highest the country\u2019s seen in four years.<\/p>\n
The first person I heard give voice to this mood, publicly at least \u2014 obviously my friend group of anxiety-disordered writers has been on this beat for years now \u2014 was metal musician Roddy Bottum on the podcast How Long Gone. Bottum, who recently published a memoir in part about his childhood growing up in L.A. in the \u201970s, tells hosts Chris Black and Jason Stewart he was back in the city recently on his book tour and was shaken by how dismal he found his birthplace. \u201cWow, Los Angeles is super-dark right now,\u201d Bottum says before mentioning the fires and the ICE raids. \u201cWe\u2019ve experienced so many decades of Los Angeles just being this place of glory.\u00a0Especially, you know, people in New York love to talk about how people have moved to Los Angeles and the benefits of that. \u2018Oh, it\u2019s so great. There\u2019s so much space.\u2019 And the classic line, \u2018It\u2019s just so easy. It\u2019s just so easy.\u2019 And suddenly we\u2019re in this era right now where it\u2019s not. It\u2019s really, really dark.\u201d Bottum concludes, \u201cI just think Los Angeles right now deserves our compassion.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, a black Escalade double-parked on Larchmont Avenue \u2014 a well-to-do area in central L.A. \u2014 and Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, emerged from the back and popped into the coffee shop where I was laptop-warrioring with what I assume were a bunch of fellow un-to-semi-employed writers. (You can spot script-formatting from across the room.) Sarandos ordered whatever coffee drink his assistant\u2019s assistant\u2019s intern usually gets him and a muffin. Then he kind of gazed over us without ever actually making eye contact with anyone. There was a palpable shift in energy. It was like we were in the chimp pen at the zoo when the guy with the big bucket of produce starts jingling his key ring. Typing slowed. People stared at Sarandos or deliberately refused to. It felt like a moment out of a bad play, like a theater professor had issued the prompt \u201cwrite a scene based on your current insides.\u201d And this was before news broke of Netflix\u2019s bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, a move that would trash-compact the industry further and tip us into whatever the next level of Dantean employment hell awaits.<\/p>\n
Hollywood isn\u2019t the first industry to get folded, spindled, and mutilated. But having personally lived through the collapse of two industries (see also print media), what strikes me about Hollywood\u2019s state of peril is how fast it happened. In 2019, a year that still felt like the Peak TV era for me and my cohorts, there were 3,011 television-writing jobs. Most everyone I knew, including myself, was \u201con a show\u201d for at least part of the year. Most everyone I knew, including myself, had sold a show or two. By 2024, the number of jobs was nearly halved to 1,819 positions.<\/p>\n
I reached out to the WGA, my own guild, at least ten times while writing this piece to see if it had 2025 statistics, but no one called me back. A sign, perhaps, it\u2019s stripped thin too \u2014 or that I\u2019m over six months late on my dues. But I assure you that things did not improve this year. Back in October, I inquired about an open position on a writing staff I heard about through the grapevine and was given this offhand estimation: There were four total job slots open in comedy at the moment and about 1,800 people competing for them. Those are the kind of odds that make your mind go places. Places like \u2026 grad school? Real estate? OnlyFans?<\/p>\n
Even those who have managed to hang on to their Hollywood jobs \u2014 or are doing well even, at least by comparison \u2014 understand the code red of it all. I spoke with a showrunner\u2013executive producer who\u2019s worked as a TV writer for over two decades and is still under an overall deal at one of the major studios. She says working on the lot these days feels like clocking in at a ghost town. \u201cDuring the strike, the slogan was \u2018Survive until 2025.\u2019\u00a0 I think it was January or February \u201925 when it still wasn\u2019t picking up when I realized we need another slogan \u2026 What rhymes with 2028?\u201d The showrunner knows she\u2019s fortunate to be getting a steady income, even though she\u2019s having a much harder time selling projects. \u201cEighty percent of my friends aren\u2019t working,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Beyond the loss of tangibles (job, income), I think what we\u2019re collectively grieving most is a sense of hope. Los Angeles runs on hope the way Boston runs on Dunkin\u2019. Think about it: We\u2019re a bunch of people with \u201caspiring\u201d in front of our job titles. So much of this job requires optimism. You spend months developing ideas or toiling away at a screenplay with no guarantee that someone will want to hear your pitch, let alone pay for it. HBO\u2019s I Love LA gets this right \u2014 the struggle to \u201cmake it\u201d here is the fun of the show. But those characters still get lucky \u2014 or even deserved \u2014 breaks. In reality, it\u2019s starting to feel like those breaks don\u2019t actually exist anymore for anyone.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s not like the back-to-back news of a Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition and Disney investing a billion in OpenAI is making our hearts sing. Another writer, my friend Julieanne, who worked prolifically until a couple years ago, has resorted to asking the universe for reinforcement.\u00a0\u201cHave the past two years been, objectively, the worst of my working life? Yes,\u201d she tells me by text. \u201cBut I\u2019m not leaving the figurative or literal town yet, even though a tarot reader on Larchmont told me emphatically that I should become a baker, while grabbing both of my hands. I love it too much, which is probably something dumber than hope. Also, I cannot bake.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, I was on a hike with Dave, in the middle of telling him about this assignment, when he clutched my forearm and, with a stricken face, said, \u201cI have to tell you something.\u201d He was getting out of L.A. too.<\/p>\n
Dave came here in 2018, fresh from grad school, to be a screenwriter and has never found steady work. But as much as employment woes factored into his decision, so did the unshakable loneliness he felt just being here. It\u2019s not that David didn\u2019t find smart, cool friends. (He did, obviously \u2014 me.) \u201cThe pace of friendships feels really different here,\u201d he says. \u201cYou know how people talk about how one thing they love about L.A. is the space? Most of the time they mean physical space. If you\u2019re successful here, you can have a house. You can have a yard. And it\u2019s almost like people want that socially too. They want a yard socially. You want to make plans? Great. Yes, I would love to see you in two weeks. Let\u2019s just have a little space.\u201d Early on, Dave also got the \u201cJust give it a couple years\u201d speech. \u201cIt\u2019s like Retin-A,\u201d he jokes. \u201cEveryone says it\u2019ll be really rough at the beginning, but give it a few weeks and you will glow like you\u2019ve never before. I kept waiting for that to happen with L.A., and it never did. I also kept waiting for that to happen with Retin-A, and it never did. It just kept making my skin peel.\u201d<\/p>\n
To some extent, isolation is just a feature of Los Angeles the way light frottage is a feature of riding on the New York City subway. We\u2019re alone in our cars, and big concrete roadways slice through our neighborhoods. One friend, a drama writer who hasn\u2019t worked for a couple years, confessed that he goes to a restaurant in his neighborhood almost every day for breakfast. He knows he shouldn\u2019t, he\u2019s not earning income at the moment, but he says, \u201cSometimes it\u2019s the only chance I get to talk to another human.\u201d<\/p>\n
But something about the present despair seems to be shifting how Angelenos behave. I met Rachel Day, a 31-year-old Los Angeles native, when she approached me at a caf\u00e9 after overhearing me talk about the woes of our city. \u201cIt\u2019s a muscle that\u2019s not used as often here,\u201d she says about reaching out to strangers. \u201cAnd so it feels that much more rewarding, but also we\u2019re all kind of rusty at it.\u201d It seems like when life gets hard, community is the first thing to suffer. And it\u2019s hard to forge community when L.A. has always been hard-pressed for a cultural mouthpiece to tie us together. (Sorry to the L.A. Times; I know you\u2019re trying, baby.) I learned about what\u2019s arguably the most important art exhibit of the past five years, Kara Walker\u2019s \u201cConfederates,\u201d currently exhibiting at the MOCA in Downtown Los Angeles, from reading The New Yorker. I\u2019m writing about my life as an Angeleno for New York Magazine.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople in L.A. are contending all the time with outside sources diagnosing or examining or legitimizing or delegitimizing it,\u201d Day says.\u00a0\u201cBut the vibes do feel off and the only way to figure it out is for us to talk about it.\u201d Inevitably, when she\u2019s visiting friends in New York, she\u2019ll encounter someone who makes a snide remark about L.A. \u201cI can talk about my frustrations and anger or disappointments with this place,\u201d she says. \u201cBut when someone else does, it feels like, Hey, that\u2019s my mom.\u201d<\/p>\n
Is that the silver lining of this moment? That we\u2019re actually acting more like a community? Rachel and I were both buoyed just by the fact that we had a spontaneous conversation. Ironically, in talking to a bunch of Angelenos about our shared anxiety, I feel more myself here than ever before, like I\u2019m able to live out and free as an anxious person in the sunshine. A few weeks ago, I was at Trader Joe\u2019s and I ran into a former co-worker.\u00a0 Ordinarily, she\u2019s a real \u201cHow are you? I\u2019m working with Spielberg\u201d type. This time when I asked the question, she dropped the fa\u00e7ade. We actually talked. About how bad things were, but still. Maybe just being in the same boat (i.e., the Titanic) is making us connect more. And relate more. And maybe even be willing to overcome some of L.A.\u2019s infrastructural challenges to do it. That in and of itself is a small victory.<\/p>\n
The other day, a text chain of writers I used to work with on a sitcom sparked back up again. Of the 12 people on it, two are currently staffed on a show. Our text conversation turned to talk of getting a reunion lunch at Max & Helen\u2019s, a new diner that just opened in Larchmont Village from Nancy Silverton and famed TV veteran Phil Rosenthal. Then someone sent a screenshot of the menu, displaying the price of a side of jam: $1.75.\u00a0 Riffing ensued along the lines of \u201cIn this economy?!\u201d but funnier because these are comedy writers with free time. My friend Lew, who lost the home he and his wife raised their three children in during the Palisades Fire last year and who has since moved to New York, took on the comic persona of an Evangelical doomsdayer and texted, \u201cLeave Los Angeles AT ONCE! The thing you used to do is\/was nonsense! Cast of your chains! Open your eyes!\u201d\u00a0 Then \u2026 \u201cCast *OFF your chains. So drunk rn.\u201d<\/p>\n
I pressed the \u201cHa-ha\u201d button on his text and packed up my laptop to go to the coffee shop. Apparently I\u2019m not ready to shake off my chains just yet.<\/p>\n
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