Authors are writing for TV now more than ever

Los Angeles Times

Filthy Rich and Longmire writer Sheri Holman is one of many authors who have made the leap to TV writing over the past decade. "As the financial rewards of writing books shrink and the need for streaming content continues to grow, more and more novelists are doing what Holman did, expanding their skill sets and their incomes by moving from page to screen (or writing for page and screen). In recent years, novelists have been warmly welcomed — in some cases, energetically recruited — into TV writers rooms," says Meredith Maran. "And as much as publishing has changed in the past two decades, television has changed even more...In the tradition of Hemingway’s advice on dealing with Hollywood — drive to the California border, throw your book over the fence and take the money Hollywood throws back — novelists were thrilled to cash the checks that TV producers were happy to write. What changed? In a word: cable. The emergence of HBO original programming — beginning with The Sopranos in 1999 — set down a gauntlet for high art on the small screen, for prioritizing character over plot, for genre storytelling with literary flair. Eventually, along came Breaking Bad and Mad Men, harbingers of the current era of glossy abundance, when even campy fare like You comes dressed in bookish garb. And who better to write novelistic television than novelists? Suddenly showrunners needed authors like Holman, skilled at creating complex contemporary characters. In exchange for a steady income, L.A. winters and health insurance, novelists were willing and able to learn the tricks required to do the TV writer’s job: how to share authorship in a writers room instead of dreaming up stories in solitude and how to spin a tight 42-minute arc instead of a meandering 400-page narrative."

ALSO:

• The book-to-TV pipeline is all the rage these days: "Which shows have been your COVID-19 pandemic panaceas as you’ve stumbled through this locked-down, upside-down year? The Good Lord Bird? The Queen’s Gambit? The Undoing? As disparate as they are, these shows have one thing in common: They were all adapted from books," says Meredith Maran. "The so-called IP pipeline, through which stories flow from authors’ screens to yours, is just as vital to the culture economy as oil pipelines are to our fossil-fueled lives. Books have provided essential raw material (a.k.a. intellectual property) for Hollywood since its founding, but the streaming-driven proliferation of content has led to an explosion of book-to-screen deals. It’s one of the few sectors of the business that has actually accelerated during the pandemic."
• Meet the eight major Hollywood players behind TV book adaptations