The Hangover
Vanity Fair US|June 2023
Billions in losses. Sweeping layoffs and restructuring. A writers strike. Now that the streaming bubble has burst, the TV industry has woken up with an excruciating headache
JOY PRESS and NATALIE JARVEY
The Hangover

THE GOLDEN AGE of streaming didn’t always reward the people who actually mined the gold. Back in 2017, around the time that The Handmaid’s Tale emerged as a global hit for Hulu and became the first streaming show ever to win the top drama Emmy, one of its writers, John Herrera, was working a second job. The good news was that he still heard some solid gossip from Hollywood insiders. Or overheard, to be more accurate: They were talking to each other in the back of his Lyft. “There were a couple of instances of driving people to LAX and dropping them off while a billboard for Handmaid’s was staring down at me,” he says.

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