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(Photo illustration by The Ankler) Share Note: Please check out my colleague Ashley Cullins' Dealmakers newsletter from earlier today: Death of TV's Overall Deals (As We Know Them). Safe bets. Known IP. Budget-conscious showrunners. "Familiar faces only" seems to be the tacit order of the day in Hollywood, to hear industry insiders tell it, as the town locks into austerity mode and jobs still seem scarce. "Most everyone I know, at every level, is looking for work," says Arrowverse co-creator and showrunner Marc Guggenheim. "It feels as though the entire town is holding its breath, waiting for the studios to figure out what they want to do. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard 'survive 'til '25,' I could buy a meaningful stock position in all the major studios." As challenging as the current environment is for more established creatives, this development can be particularly discouraging for new or lesser-known writers. "It's harder to get a staff job, because the writer budgets have been squeezed so much that showrunners often don't have enough money even to pay the upper-level writers their quote a lot of time," one scripted TV agent tells me this week. "They need people who they know can deliver, can write a draft and really contribute to the show." That means that a showrunner or exec producer is going to bring on board people "that they trust," he adds. "Obviously, that's not an emerging writer. That's a very established writer, that's probably someone who's been on staff for many years, possibly run a show for many years, created a show, all of the above. Part of that is really just the nature of the business. These shows are so expensive now that the bar is higher." Maybe 15 or 20 years ago, if a writer didn't get staffed during pilot season, this agent would've told his clients to wait until the following year or nab an off-cycle cable series. "You would sell one or two scripts. You could almost always guarantee that," says this agent, who has more than two decades of experience. "I probably had one, maybe two, clients that I couldn't sell a script for [or find a role for]. Nowadays, you have 25 to 35 percent of your roster that you may not get a job for." In this week's Series Business, I'll look at what all this means for today's TV writers, particularly: How Peak TV helped — then hurt — new creators Why the traditional staffing ladder is back, but the talent pipeline isn't Why showrunners aren't hiring as many emerging voices How the development bottleneck is rippling through other areas of the business The challenge in getting an agent as they focus on current clients What one agent says newer or less high-profile writers should do while they wait for their big break How one showrunner survived the 2008 correction as a young writer— and what he believes can work today Share