The Well Won't Run Dry

But Hollywood is making far fewer movies and shows, thanks to the coronavirus

- Anthony Breznican And Joanna Robinson

Like many industries around the world, the dream factory of Hollywood has been closed for business for most of 2020 – and even as it staggers back to its feet at reduced capacity, we’ve only just begun to see the impact on film and television. After the unprecedented era of plenty that gave us both Peak TV and a surge in tent-pole film-making, are we headed for a content desert?

Maybe not quite a desert, at least when it comes to TV. There were 532 scripted shows in 2019, so if only 400-something made it to air in 2020, that’s still more than even the most binge-happy housebound viewer could take in. When the pandemic first hit and TV production ground to a halt, Rolling Stone’s chief TV critic, Alan Sepinwall, was bracing for a drought that never came. “I kept moving the goalposts,” he says. “ ‘Oh, we’re probably going to run out of things when we get to July,’ or ‘Fall will definitely be a trouble spot because the broadcast networks won’t have anything ready.’ The amount of programming so far has slowed but certainly not stopped.”

For the steady flow of entertainment thus far, we can thank the quick thinking of TV execs like WarnerMedia’s Brett Weitz, who found himself staring at a 500-hour hole in the schedule when live sports shut down. “You have two options,” he says. “Curl up in a ball and just never come out of whatever cave you’ve crawled into, or stand side by side with your teammates who are brilliant programmers and brilliant marketers and reconstitute the air.”