417 Minutes With… Lacey Leone Mclaughlin

The anti-cancellation consultant hand-holding anxious Hollywood execs afraid of their young assistants.

- By Shawn Mccreesh. Photography by Maggie Shannon

In a parking-lot-adjacent patio behind a low-slung building in Burbank, California, one recent morning, Jeff Hasler, a Gen-Xer who runs Original Productions, which makes documentary and unscripted programming, is holding a summit with his staff. The employees, younger than he by a decade or more, sit around folding tables, some wearing combat boots, others in hoodies, munching on sandwiches. They’re here to give their boss feedback. Why, they wonder, did Hasler feel the need to be at every pitch meeting? Could he please explain the chain of command? And what about that deal they were told to chase that was clearly never going to happen?

“That was my mistake,” says Hasler, tapping his blue suede shoes. He looks pleadingly in the direction of a judiciousseeming woman with chunky tortoiseshell sunglasses on her head who is there to facilitate this intergenerational parley. She meets his gaze, then turns to the group, marriage-counselor style, to ask, “At what point did we know it wasn’t going to work out?”

She is Lacey Leone McLaughlin, a consultant who has become the go-to underling whisperer for bosses perplexed by the very demanding young people who now work for them. As one showrunner who was pitched her services for thousands of dollars a month puts it to me, “She’s who you call when you need to play defense against a town that’s pretty quick to cancel people.”