This is The Butterfly & The Bee where I write about issues facing the film and TV industry - focusing on drama, my area of expertise for nearly thirty years. I also blog on the craft of developing and running TV series on my other substack, The Showrunner’s Notebook. Enjoy!

Last week began with a degree of embarrassment. I rocked up to the office, brimming with excitement about an idea I’d been percolating on over the weekend. I reckoned it was an excellent idea, by any standards. So excellent that when I pitched the story to my development team - a dystopian series set in a world without any internet, phones or online shopping - their faces arranged themselves into something close to polite horror. Who, they asked, will commission that? The story, they agreed, was good. But the idea that any global broadcaster would want to turn it into big budget TV was far-fetched.

And, of course, they were right.

For the most part, the US streamers are not here for a story about a broken world. They are here to tell stories, yes, but they also want to extend their brands. I had simply forgotten that the job of a drama producer is sometimes not only to help craft great drama but also to create stories that can support a brand strategy. My team were right and the confusion was entirely mine.

But the moment was clarifying. It made me think about where British drama is heading, what we keep getting wrong, who is actually paying for it and why that matters.

We talk a lot about US money in the UK drama industry. Distribution advances, co-production deals, platform commissions. We need it more than ever and we know we need it. What we talk about less honestly is what it costs - not financially but creatively and culturally.

When streamers commission or distribute British drama, they are not always in the television business in the way a PSB used to be. They are often in the values export business where the show is the wrapper and the brand is the thing.

And those brands have very specific values. Apple’s world is clean and premium, a universe that looks like the inside of one of their stores. Amazon wants scale and spectacle, things that justify a subscription - splashy, delicious concepts big enough to cut through a crowded market. Netflix is the most complex, commissioning challenging work but underneath that apparent diversity sits a consistent worldview: globalised, progressive, emotionally intelligent, forward-looking. Which sounds fine if you’re a progressive but it’s still a worldview - constraining in its own way.

Subscribe now

These brand values have worked well for streamers and they’ve produced some phenomenal shows. But no brand is value-free. It’s no coincidence that there’s an increasing tendency to define aspiration as wealth with most lead characters living in architect-designed glass boxes or penthouses with those massive kitchens. These days, if you choose a typical UK house as a location, your series is seen as, well, gritty.

Tomorrow, I’m a panellist on a session at the EITV Fest about whether the UK drama industry needs ‘saving’ and what producers and broadcasters can do to flex with changing global economics. It promises to be a lively session with a host of producers and commissioners buzzing with entrepreneurial ideas. The focus will primarily be on the creative response to a new financial order. But there’s a cultural argument to be made alongside this.

British drama in its heyday was something very different in tone and aspiration from the co-produced work we make a lot of today. If you think of British TV classics - everything from Edge of Darkness to It’s A Sin - the fingerprints of British culture can be seen again and again: moral ambiguity, protagonists you’re not sure you’re supposed to like, who don’t arc towards easy redemption, who end the series as compromised as they began it. How well does that sit in a brand universe that needs to leave the viewer feeling good about their subscription?

British TV is saturated with class - the texture of it, the humiliation of it, the quiet violence of it. Class is often the subtext even when it’s not the subject - a concept that is almost entirely illegible to a US audience and therefore almost entirely unwelcome in a room that needs the show to work in twelve territories - unless of course, it’s a period piece. British TV is comfortable with irony and bleakness as default registers, suspicious of clean sentiment, likely to undercut a moving moment with something uncomfortable. It is stubbornly local in ways that resist universalising. It is politically uncomfortable in ways that implicate institutions - the state, the establishment, the class system - without resolving into hope. That is a difficult sell to large corporations with relationships to maintain with governments, regulators and shareholders across multiple territories.

Share

And perhaps most fundamentally, British drama is comfortable with failure and with people who don’t make it, don’t change, don’t get what they wanted and never will. American storytelling has a deep structural bias toward prevailing. British drama used to find that bias faintly dishonest.

What sometimes gets lost when British drama routes itself through US brand values and is supported by US money isn’t just tone or texture. It’s the capacity to tell stories about Britain honestly. About power and who holds it. About what this country actually feels like to live in. That loss is political as much as it is creative. And it happens quietly, without anyone deciding it, in the thousand small moments when writers, producers and commissioners ask themselves “Will this travel?” or “Will this be able to attract the US distribution partner to get it made?”

Of course, there are wonderful US exceptions to this rule: Netflix’s Adolescence is a triumph and HBO’s instinct for groundbreaking, uncomfortable drama is unparalleled. DTF St. Louis and The Pitt break the rules in ways that should be applauded.

But it leads me to believe that the place where genuine creative freedom currently lives in British drama is not where the industry tends to look for it. It is at the level we have spent years treating as a consolation prize - lower budget British production and, in particular, our terrestrial broadcasters operating at this level. Some broadcasters (like Channel 5 and UKTV) are leading the way in innovating how drama gets made. Other terrestrial broadcasters may need to take note. Lower budgets can be seen as an opportunity to be relished, not a burden to be carried.

At lower budgets, something important changes.

You are not beholden to a platform justifying itself to shareholders. A distributor doesn’t need the show to work in twelve territories. You don’t need the story to be legible to someone who has never heard of the place or the people it describes. You can make something genuinely and specifically itself. Risk decreases with cost. People’s shoulders fall. The potential upside is huge. And, of course, the story can just be the thing.

That is not an argument against US money. The UK industry relies on it and we will continue to rely on it. But it is an argument for being clear-eyed about what it costs, and for fiercely protecting the spaces where those costs don’t apply.

Our industry needs to stop apologising for being cash-poor and start utilising it as a strategic asset. Lower budget British drama, made with proper editorial freedom, could be more than just a symptom of a struggling sector. It might be one of the few remaining places where the creative culture of this country can express itself without asking permission first.

The conversation the creative industry won’t have

This essay isn’t about hating on diversity initiatives. As a left-leaning British Asian, I believe the push for greater representation was long overdue, the initiatives were designed with the best of intentions and have had laudable success.

Racism is real. Sexism is real. Homophobia and ableism are real. What follows is not a denial of those truths but an attempt to describe the whole machine, not just the parts that are easiest to talk about. Because there remain some thorny, uncomfortable issues at the heart of the creative sector’s push for equality of opportunity that are avoided because they’re just too damn….well, uncomfortable.

We shy away from raising these issues because it involves asking probing questions about the nature of power, wealth and influence within the creative sector. Power doesn’t like being questioned. And I don’t mean ‘power’ as in a cabal of senior broadcast execs gathered in a private members’ club. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. I think the reality is more boring than that, and that’s why it’s harder to fight.

What I mean by power are the thousands of small, rational choices made by individuals trying to survive in a super competitive system. Choices that add up to a culture where certain truths stay unspoken because naming them would mean questioning how the room is built, and who the room is built for.

And the truth we keep dodging is the simplest one. Inherited privilege is not just money. It is time, networks, and insulation from risk. It is advantage passed down, one generation handing the next a smoother path through a system that pretends it’s a level playing field.

Money – the quiet bouncer on the door

Let’s start at the beginning. As a modern liberal society, we pride ourselves on being meritocratic. We support the idea that power, wealth, status and resources should be distributed on the basis of individual talent, effort and achievement rather than inherited wealth, privilege or background. Diversity initiatives are devised to redress structural inequalities in a society that favours certain demographics. Their aim is to enhance meritocratic equality of opportunity.

But if you strip the creative industries down to their practical reality, those early decades of a career are governed by two factors: education and private income.

Education - because it builds networks and a sense of belonging in the room.

Private income - because it buys time.

Time to be underpaid. Time to be unpaid. Time to ‘develop’. Time to do the attachment, the shadowing, the low-paid runner job, the speculative short, the ‘opportunity’ that pays in ‘experience’ and a Pret sandwich. Time, in other words, to hang around long enough for the industry to decide you are ‘emerging’.

People talk about talent like it’s the golden ticket, but in practice talent is often the entry fee. Time is what allows you to stand in the queue for as long as you need. And time is not evenly distributed. If you have family support, savings, a partner with a stable income, or a free place to live in London, you can afford to take the long route. You can say no. You can wait for the right thing. You can be picky and build a portfolio that looks coherent and intentional.

If you don’t have that cushion, you do what any sane person does: you take what pays. You become ‘reliable’. You get locked into a path early, not because it’s the dream, but because paying rent is not a theory. Later, the industry reads your CV as if it’s a creative autobiography rather than what it really was: a financial survival plan. But we’ll come to that.

London doesn’t make life any easier for those without private support. London is a great city, but it functions as a filter. Yes, there are regional hubs. Yes, production has spread. But in drama especially, a significant amount of decision making, relationship building, and career acceleration still clusters around London. And London is expensive in a way that doesn’t just hurt. It selects.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. If you can live at home, or have family help, the city becomes a playground of possibility. You can float between gigs, stay visible, go to the thing, meet the person, be ‘around’. If you can’t, London becomes a tax on your ambition. You spend your energy earning enough to stay, which means you have less time for the low-paid stepping stones that supposedly open doors. And doors tend to open for people who can afford to stand in front of them longer.

The job snobbery tells its own story

If that weren’t enough, the industry then moves against those who must work by creating a hierarchy of work which places some jobs at the bottom of the pile.

Some of the most stable jobs in TV, the ones taken by people who need to work, are treated as faintly embarrassing by the ‘high end’ of the business. Soaps are the obvious example in drama directing but there are others. Agents will advise their clients not to get ‘trapped’, not through malice, but because the industry perpetuates the idea certain shows are artistically contaminating, like you need to cleanse yourself afterwards with a limited series.

Sometimes people dress this up as a creative argument about authorship or voice. But there’s another explanation we rarely say out loud. Stable paid work is what you do when you can’t afford to wait. The ability to turn down money gets reframed as integrity. The inability to turn down money gets reframed as creative limitation.

That is not a creative distinction. That is a class snobbery wearing a taste hat.

This privilege is not just economic. It’s social.

Inherited privilege comes in all shapes and sizes. Not just money. It’s networks. It’s word of mouth. It’s the reassurance that someone is one of us. It’s one generation passing on advantage to another. On repeat.

To be clear: nobody is saying parents shouldn’t help their kids. If you can give your kids a leg up, most people will. I certainly would.

The problem is performance of denial that often follows because it’s a refusal to acknowledge what’s really going on. You see this in miniature whenever a well-connected parent loudly insists their children’s success was entirely self-made, apart from the small detail of the ladder they placed against the wall. It’s not the help that irritates people. It’s the insistence the help doesn’t count. (And yes, Kate Winslet I’m looking at you).

Of course, the creative industries are particularly vulnerable to this because what we do is based on judgement. Taste. Instinct. Chemistry. ‘Fit’. That’s part of the art. It’s also the loophole. Subjectivity creates space for comfort and familiarity to pose as good judgement. It creates endless plausible deniability. It also creates space for second chances. Lots of them.

In a system built on relationships, nepotism rarely looks like a brown envelope. It looks like a coffee. A recommendation. A ‘they’re great, you’ll love them’. It looks like opportunity arriving early and often, and mistakes being written off as potential.

Refusing to acknowledge the real mechanics of opportunity helps no one.

Diversity initiatives of the last five years have focused on race, gender and disability because they kind of, almost-not-quite, map onto categories of power(lessness) within our society. To give them credit, publicly funded institutions are slowly attempting to address class in their recruitment. But if we don’t have an honest conversation about inherited privilege more broadly, we end up with a version of equality that improves optics without changing opportunity.

You can diversify a room by race and gender and still recruit primarily from the middle and upper middle class. The gender discrimination experienced by a woman from a low-income background is not the same as the gender discrimination experienced by a woman from an upper middle class, privately educated background. You can change the colour of the room without changing the assumptions of the room.

An Eton educated British Asian may be ‘diverse’ on a spreadsheet while being perfectly fluent in elite culture and fully equipped with many of the same structural advantages as everyone else at the table. That does not mean they do not face racism. It means racism does not cancel out class advantage. Both can be true at the same time. The category is the same. The life is not.

Why the backlash is inevitable without change

Most people I have ever worked with in the creative sector are fair minded professionals who welcome a fairer industry. But these are the factors that stoke resentment, frustration and a sense that the industry isn’t doing all it can to tackle root causes of inequality of opportunity.

If people don’t have the networks, don’t have the financial cushion, or the nod, and they do not qualify for the initiatives either, they start to suspect the system is tilted against them.

If you have watched the industry celebrate ‘diversity’ while continuing to ignore the real mechanisms of power, you feel excluded. Especially if the narrative becomes ‘the system is fairer now’, quietly implying your lack of progress is morally justified.

Throw into the mix the fact there is more pressure to diversify freelance and mid-level roles, where risk is cheap and churn is high, but less pressure to diversify the most prestigious roles, the ones that confer real power. For low and middle-range paid jobs it’s all about ‘representation’. At the top, the criteria quietly becomes ‘excellence’.

The thorny question

We say we believe in meritocracy. We say we want the industry to reflect the country. We say we care about equality of opportunity. But the industry still relies on a career structure that is easiest to navigate if you have certain privileges.

There are different types of privilege. Most of us have privilege of some form and it works for us all in different ways. My privilege derives from the fact I got the grades to go to a good university. However, privilege in this arena - which has become real and consequential in my life - didn’t save me from having to clean toilets in a post-production house two months after I graduated because I was skint.

The problem is not privilege itself but the hierarchy of privilege we are told to subscribe to, where it is insisted that one privilege supersedes another. But the awkward question remains: who sets that order? And is the order right?

It is delusional as an industry to congratulate ourselves on fairness while operating a system where wealth decides who gets to be available, who gets to take risks, who gets to stay in London, who gets to do the low-paid stepping stones, who gets to wait long enough to be noticed. Which is why inherited privilege, wealth, class, whatever you want to call it, is the conversation we do not quite have.

What needs to happen

Let’s be honest: there are no easy fixes for structural inequality. Wealth reproduces itself. That’s the system we’re in. But the creative sector still makes choices, and those choices can either harden the pipeline or widen it.

So start with the unglamorous basics. Build pathways that do not assume a private subsidy. Pay people early. Stretch development so it isn’t a hobby for the independently wealthy. Recruit with intention, not on vibes. Train over the long term, instead of dropping inexperienced people into high-stakes jobs and calling it ‘opportunity’ when it’s actually risk transfer.

Most importantly, resist seeing the call for representation as the finish line. It was the opening move. Because equality of opportunity isn’t just about who gets invited into the room. It’s about who can afford to remain in it long enough to matter.

In my last post, I said what many of us were thinking: 2025 was not a bounce back, it was a grim chaser to 2024. So, let’s say goodbye to ’25 and start talking about how 2026 could be different.

Over the last twelve months I have spoken to scores of TV drama people. The ones who are rolling with the punches keep saying the same things to me. So I’ve distilled those thoughts in the hope it helps - or at least reminds you that you are not alone or going slowly mad.

If you’re skimming, here’s the whole thing in a nutshell ;-)

• Treat this change as permanent, not a wobble

• Get specific about the problem you solve and who trusts you to solve it

• Learn how the money works or you will lose leverage fast.

• Use AI for workflow, protect taste and judgement

• Stay human and keep your network warm

(And PS this is mostly for people who built lives and careers around the pre-2023 TV model and are now trying to stand upright on shifting sand. If you are newer to the industry, or you have always lived outside the mainstream, your gameplay is different and, in some ways, more exciting.)

1) The change is not a wobble - plan like it is permanent

The people who seem to be thriving in this new world are those that understand that the change is – probably - here to stay and are planning accordingly to get ahead of the curve.

The broad picture in the UK is contraction. Pact’s Census reported total UK television production sector revenues fell 8% in 2023, and total UK commissioning revenues have fallen 10% from 2022. This is not ‘a quiet patch’ – and if it is, that’s great – but to me it looks like a smaller machine.

During 2026, I think this will become evident in drama in two ways – fewer big budget shows and the pressure for everything else to get cheaper.

When greenlights thin out, the middle gets squeezed first. In my view that means fewer Band 2 projects (roughly £1.25m to £3m per hour) and more shows being pushed down into lower-cost models just to get made. You already feel this in the way budgets get discussed: as if getting it made is the achievement.

Producers will still fight to qualify for UK high-end TV relief where they can, which is often tied to an average core spend test of £1m per broadcast hour of slot length, pro rata. But a meaningful chunk of work is going to drop below the old expectations because there is no other way to get it over the line.

The audience has not disappeared. It has moved.

Getting ahead of the curve involves understanding where the audience is heading to and there’s one main answer – YouTube. YouTube viewing is increasingly happening on TV sets. Barb reported last year that TV-set viewing accounted for 43% of YouTube viewing among people aged 16+. That means it is not a side-hustle platform anymore, watched on ipads - it is a living-room platform. Ofcom said the same thing.

The direction of travel is hard to ignore: fewer than half of 16-24s watch broadcast TV weekly, and YouTube is a major part of younger people’s media diet.

As I write, there are no straightforward, legacy-friendly revenue models for traditional producers to put long-form onto YouTube and make it add up. But it’s coming. I know of smart, hungry producers who are already assembling hybrid models: ad revenue plus sponsorship, product placement, memberships, merch, live events etc to make it all work. The same goes for vertical and microdrama, which still feels like a Wild West where business models appear, spike, and collapse.

The savvy TV professionals are eyeing up these new opportunities as the old ones dry up. Sure – Netflix ain’t going anywhere, thank God. But to make a living, it’s incumbent on us to look at the new models.

Over the coming months, I am going to post about how traditional companies are experimenting, in the UK and the US, as the old model strains. It is not an instant salve if you need work this month. But it does point to where demand will grow for talented people who genuinely add value in the process.

2) We are all entrepreneurs now (even if we hate the word)

There was a time when getting hired was a word-of-mouth merry-go-round. The next gig was never guaranteed, but something usually turned up with a nudge to an agent and a few targeted calls. For many of us, that is no longer the default, and it is not coming back in the same form.

The people I see making it work now do not see themselves as ‘for hire’. They see themselves as entrepreneurs - problem-solvers with a value proposition. In practice, that means stopping the pitch being ‘I’m a producer’ and making it ‘I solve this specific problem, reliably, under these constraints’.

Entrepreneurs ask themselves a very simple question to work out their leverage:

Who has money, what are they afraid of, and how do I reduce that fear?

Depending on your role, the answers might be -

• delivering high production value on tight budgets without the wheels coming off

• building high-volume returning series that does not haemorrhage crew

• getting scripts production-ready fast without crushing the writer

• keeping a set calm, safe, and moving when time and money are disappearing

You get the idea. The important part is marketing what unique value you offer.

People worry that specificity limits them. I have found the opposite is true. Specificity differentiates you. And when budgets tighten, differentiation is oxygen.

Keeping our networks strong is also essential to what you offer. Included in our unique value are the people we know who enjoy working with us or who value us as much as we value them.

The skills quotient of any ‘unique offering’ will change over time but your network should build year to year. When I started directing, access to kit and post was a barrier to entry. Now everyone can shoot and edit. So the edge moved. For directors working now, competitive advantage lives not in ‘delivering on time’ as much as it does leading in taste, leadership, networks, and trust. Which actors want to work with you. Which crew will follow you. Which writers feel protected in your room. Which producers sleep better when you are on the call sheet.

That is leverage.

3) Understand how the money works, or you will be priced out of your own career

There was a period when many of us could ignore how the numbers worked. We got hired, we did good work, and we moved on. Distribution, long tails, secondary windows, rights value, none of it felt like stuff we needed to know.

Those times are gone.

A lot of TV is not getting made because the numbers don’t add up. This will cause an increasing and significant downward pressure on rates. This is not a moral judgement or a personal slight - it is a market symptom. That means more deals where experienced people are asked to take less up front, or defer. Because of this, the TV professional of tomorrow needs to have - at the very least - an understanding of the financial model of the production they are working for.

Let’s be clear: health and safety is non-negotiable. Working conditions matter. But if you cannot flex at all on pay structure, the work will simply move elsewhere.

So in 2026, people need to start thinking in deals, not just day rates.

• Can you take 75% for the right project, but negotiate clear upside if it performs?

• Can you trade a slice of fee for something auditable and contractual, not simply “backend” on a wing and a prayer?

• Can you protect yourself with contractual terms that have clear definitions, clear points to trigger additional payment, transparent financial reporting, and genuine participation in success?

If volume stays lower and budgets stay pressured, more transparent upside-sharing stops being idealism and starts being survival.

But we can only negotiate these deals, if we understand how the finances work. I’m passionate about people sharing in the upside if they share in the risk. It’s fair and it’s right. But not all producers feel the same. It’s important that you are able to understand your value to the production – creatively but also financially - to fight your corner.

Over the next months, I’m also going to be posting some outlines of basic TV financing models to make the new world clearer. Stay tuned if you’re interested.

4) If you don’t work with AI, it will work against you

It’s fashionable to hawk and spit when talking about AI. I wrestle with it myself. About 18 months ago, I viewed AI like that angry pitbull running across the park and reckoned that if I took to my heels, I could outrun it. Truth is, I don’t think any of us can.

Here is not the place to debate the ethics of AI, big tech, or the march towards AGI. A healthy dose of scepticism is useful but denial isn’t a strategy. The people I know who are planning to create work over the next year are not pretending it isn’t happening. They are working out what AI is good for and using it deliberately.

For storytellers, there’s some good news here. Currently, AI works on convergence, whereas great stories thrive on divergence.

AI scrapes patterns and averages them. It produces the safest ‘most likely’ answers. It’s brilliant at pulling together the middle. It’s less brilliant at generating the sharp left turn, the culturally precise detail, the uncomfortable truth, the strange human contradiction that makes a scene breathe. Ask it for story and you often get competent mush, a second-hand version of what already exists.

Real storytelling is the opposite. The work that hits us is specific, surprising, and alive. It shifts how you feel. Writers and producers at the top of their game are not valuable because they can generate ‘content’. They’re valuable because they can sense what’s moving in people and culture, then corral it into narrative with judgement and intent. They can take responsibility for a point of view. That edge is still edge: taste, leadership, relationships, accountability.

Where AI will bite first is in what can be mechanised: admin, research, iteration, summarising, comparing drafts, versioning, schedules, budgeting scenarios. If your role has any of those components, get fluent in the new tools that are out there. There are reputable companies offering training in emerging production-facing AI and workflow tools. Filmustage, Cinelytic, StudioBinder, Yamdu are just the tip of the iceberg. Productions will increasingly value people who can use these tools to move faster without dropping quality - from ideation or the way through to post.

Sometimes attitudes to AI become like an identity or a religion. For the purposes of sustaining a career, it’s important to preserve the creative parts of our work, and use AI like a tool. Use it where it saves time. Protect the bits that require judgement.

5) Go easy on yourself and do not leave your colleagues behind

One final pattern I’ve noticed in the people who seem to be getting it right? They’re kind to themselves, without slipping into passivity.

They’re not pretending this is easy. But they’re also not turning the whole situation into a personal failing. They don’t waste much time on blame, or on the fantasy that the old world is about to flick back on if we just wait patiently enough.

And they remember something the rest of us forget when we’re stressed: this work is relational. TV is collaborative. Careers are built in rooms, not in inboxes. Most jobs still come from people knowing you, trusting you, and wanting you in the mix.

So let’s keep networks warm without being needy. Show up for other people. Recommend good colleagues and share scraps of intel. Let’s stay connected to the process, even when the big jobs aren’t flowing.

If 2025 was the year we all stared at the dead tap, then the people thriving in 2026 will be the ones who stop waiting for it to splutter back to life and go upstream to find where the water is.

Thanks for reading & all the best -

Jon

Share

Apart from the lucky few, it’s been a tough year for those working in TV drama. We all sensed that the rhyming couplet “Survive Till ’25” was shrink-wrapped in hope. Now we know it was simply a prayer for salvation, uttered with a rictus grin as our sinking boats took on ever more water. Recently, I’ve heard mention of green shoots, but only by people surrounded by expansive, evergreen plastic lawns. I remain unconvinced. And I say this as somebody who is lucky enough to have a job.

Of course, it’s freelancers who have been hardest hit. I’ve talked to many this year who are, on paper, the sort of people television should be fighting over. Serious credits and skill. With the kind of CVs that used to get you an instant call back and a “Can you start next Monday?” And yet here they are, watching inboxes like runners waiting for a call sheet that isn’t coming.

What makes it worse is not just the lack of work, it’s the lack of explanation. The industry has become a smoke machine. Everyone has a theory but nobody has a map. And when your mortgage is the thing waiting for the next greenlight, “Don’t worry, things’ll pick up” isn’t reassurance, it’s about as good as a lullaby.

And when work dries up, it doesn’t only hit your bank balance. It also hits your confidence, your sense of momentum, and, if you’ve been doing this long enough, a bruising little question you never used to ask yourself: am I suddenly irrelevant? The answer, most of the time, is no. It’s not you. It’s the economics.

So here’s my stab at an explainer of what’s happened to TV drama over the last decade, why it’s landed so hard on freelancers, and why the post-pandemic party was never going to last. I intended this to be brief. I have failed.

I’ll do a separate post on how to claw your way back into work in an industry that’s short of cash and already eyeing AI the way management eyed up the free biscuits. For now, this is the “how did we get here?” bit.

The part that’s obvious, but still needs saying

Commissioners don’t hire crews. They commission programmes. Jobs are the exhaust fumes of greenlights. When commissioning slows down, the whole machine starts to stutter. Not because everyone woke up less talented, but because the pipeline narrows.

Fewer shows. Shorter prep. Leaner shoots. Truncated post.

If it feels like the whole place has gone quiet at once, it’s because the tap isn’t where you are. It’s upstream.

How TV drama used to pay for itself

Every channel or platform needs content, but they pay for it in different ways. The BBC is primarily driven by public funding logic and public value. Commercial broadcasters commission to sell advertising and sponsorship around audiences. Subscription platforms commission to attract and keep subscribers.

The old model (and why it mostly made sense)

Once upon a time, things were a lot simpler.

Through much of the 2010s, UK drama financing followed a fairly consistent pattern. The broadcaster fee often covered a bigger share of the budget than it tends to now, so producers could stitch the rest together from UK tax relief and distribution money, usually via international pre-sales. Sometimes a co-pro partner joined the party. Sometimes you bridged a gap against expected sales. It wasn’t always pretty, but it was doable.

The detail to note is what that money buys, because it usually buys rights. To get the show made, producers trade some rights to broadcasters and distributors. But if enough rights were retained, there could be real value later.

In that period, because the broadcaster fee covered more of the cost, there was real profit potential in the backend: international sales, repeats, secondary windows, long-tail exploitation. “Rights retention” sounds like something you file in a drawer. In practice, it paid for development, overhead, and the ability to keep good people around between jobs.

That backend income didn’t just make some companies profitable. It helped fund slates and keep teams together. Not perfect. Not equal. But steadier.

Then the ground shifted.

The double hit: pandemic plus streaming

Two things collided: the pandemic, and the acceleration of streaming.

During the pandemic, demand surged while production became harder and more expensive. Audiences were at home. Broadcasters and platforms needed more finished hours. Pipelines jammed. Safety protocols, delays, and disruption pushed costs up. This also happened during a period when money was relatively cheap and investors were comfortable with growth strategies. Demand up, supply constrained, cash in the system. Commissioning heated up and budgets inflated.

At the same time, streaming platforms were in land-grab mode. They were competing for subscribers and attention, and one very old-fashioned way to win a modern war is to buy the best soldiers.

So rates went up. Not just for the glamorous handful whose names appear in headlines, but across the freelancer ecosystem, directly and indirectly. If a platform is paying premium fees for writers, directors, cast, heads of department, and key crew, the rest of the market shifts. Not necessarily because everyone can afford it, but because if they don’t move, they lose people.

Budgets rose alongside those rates. Ten years ago, a basic benchmark for an hour of UK drama might sit in the low millions. In the post-pandemic boom, a new “basic” became closer to double that.

This is the part that still matters now. Costs didn’t just rise for a while. The baseline reset.

Then came the pull-back

From 2022 into 2023, the mood changed. The era of “grow at any cost” gave way to “show me the profit”, and the platforms started behaving less like disrupters and more like accountants. Fewer greenlights. More “strategic reviews”. More projects circling in development like planes that never quite get permission to land.

And then the strikes landed. Even though the picket lines were in the US, the shockwave travelled. Anything reliant on US writers, US actors, US studios, or simply US decision-making slowed, paused, or got kicked down the road. The result was a very particular kind of quiet: not a clean stop, but a lurching backlog, where nothing dies decisively, it just doesn’t go.

Add consolidation and restructuring into the mix and you get another predictable symptom: waiting. Mergers, re-orgs, leadership changes, budget resets. These circumstances rarely produce bold commissioning. They produce spreadsheets, approvals, and a sudden allergy to anything that cannot be justified in a board meeting.

But the cost base did not politely reset along with the strategy. Rates had been pushed up during the land-grab. Budgets had learned to live at a higher altitude. So the industry ended up in a mismatch: less appetite for volume, more scrutiny on every pound, and a drama economy priced for a boom that had already left the building.

The market went global (and got smaller at the same time)

Another big shift since the pandemic is that UK drama has stopped behaving like a mostly domestic industry with some international upside. It has become part of a global English-language market.

That changes what you’re competing for, and it changes what gets made.

If your work sits mainly inside the UK domestic ecosystem, you can feel the shrinkage. Soaps and continuing drama are still here, but they’re domestic products tied to UK schedules, UK ad markets, and UK viewing habits. When the domestic market tightens, those areas often contract first. You can’t simply “go global” by wishing harder.

The growth area moved the other way. Much of the drama that still gets financed at scale is local production designed for a global audience. It can be culturally specific and still travel. But it has to travel. It has to be legible and marketable across territories, and it has to make sense to a buyer who’s thinking internationally.

In practical terms, there is now an English-language territory that behaves like a single competitive pool: the US, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, often with Ireland and Canada in the mix depending on the show and the finance plan. For many high-end drama jobs, you aren’t only competing with UK freelancers. You’re competing with whoever can do that job best in the wider pool, at the price and speed the production is carrying.

There is a real upside here. If you can compete in that market, the money can be good and the credits can travel.

But there’s a hard trade-off. The work is more concentrated.

When spend concentrates into fewer global-facing titles, you get fewer greenlights, fewer episodes, and fewer productions running at once. That means fewer total jobs, even if the jobs that exist pay better.

Why the industry feels stuck

A lot of this comes down to a simple problem: drama is now often too expensive to make at the volume the industry used to rely on.

Broadcasters’ programme budgets have not risen in line with the new cost base, and in some cases have tightened. Advertising money has been under pressure, with a long-term shift of spend toward Google and social platforms, which leaves less to flow into commissions.

Streaming platforms can still spend, but the volume of UK commissions is relatively small compared to the size of the global market, and they often want global rights. If you’re a producer, that’s a double bind: the money might be bigger upfront, but the backend is thinner, and the rights that used to keep you afloat are often the rights you’ve just handed away.

So plenty of projects don’t fail because nobody likes them. They fail because the finance doesn’t close at the new baseline, especially once you add delivery requirements, post, and the risk buffers everyone now insists on.

That’s why the slowdown can feel confusing from the outside. It’s not always a creative drought. It’s often an affordability problem.

Less money means more caution (and caution has a type)

Once affordability becomes the central problem, the behaviour of the system changes.

When money tightens at streaming platforms and broadcasters, they rarely reduce commissioning evenly. They tend to concentrate spend into fewer titles they believe will cut through. That usually means returners, recognisable IP, proven packages, and genres that travel. Fewer hours means fewer jobs. It’s not a personal insult. It’s arithmetic.

And when broadcasters have less money, they also become more risk averse. This is not about commissioners lacking taste or courage. It’s about the cost of a flop when there are fewer slots and less slack. Nobody wants to be the person who backed the expensive thing that didn’t land. Nobody wants to explain to their boss why the big swing became a very public miss.

So even when people still want distinctive work, commissioning often shifts toward risk control. The same writers and showrunners. The same production companies. The same kinds of leading actors. Familiar tones and structures. If you’ve ever wondered why everything can start to look like a cousin of something you’ve already watched, that’s part of the answer.

There are knock-on effects too. Finance takes longer and greenlights happen later. Every number gets challenged, approvals stack up, projects sit in limbo. Even when something goes, hiring can happen later and bookings can be shorter because schedules get squeezed to hit delivery without increasing spend.

At the same time, risk gets pushed onto producers and then onto schedules. Buyers push back on fees, contingencies, and overhead. Producers have limited levers left. Time and headcount are the levers that move fastest. Prep shortens. Shoots tighten. Teams get leaner. Post compresses. The work can feel more intense at exactly the moment it becomes harder to find.

The attention economy and the pay gap

Layered on top of this is something that’s easy to feel but hard to name. We’re in an attention economy.

There is so much drama available that the competition isn’t just between channels or platforms. It’s between everything a viewer could do with their evening, including other shows on the same service, social media, games, YouTube, and the simple habit of switching off.

That has shaped content and it has shaped pay.

On content, there’s more pressure for shows to grab you quickly and keep you watching. Cold opens matter more. The first minutes matter more. End-of-act pulls matter more. Series engines need to declare themselves early. Even quieter shows are often asked to prove their hook fast, because nobody wants to spend big money on something viewers abandon after ten minutes. In a crowded market, “slow burn” becomes less a creative choice and more a luxury purchase.

On pay, attention scarcity makes certain kinds of “certainty” incredibly valuable. Above-the-line talent who can reliably bring an audience with them, star actors, headline writers, established showrunners, certain directors, can command very large sums. In a world of fewer greenlights, buyers want shortcuts to confidence, and recognisable names are one of the few shortcuts that still work.

But that creates a painful split. While a small tier sees fees rise, many of the people providing the craft of storytelling and production, the people who make scripts better, make days work, keep shows on track, can find their rates stagnating or being squeezed. Expectations rise, teams get leaner, and the money concentrates at the top because that’s where the industry thinks the attention insurance lives.

If you’re reading this with that familiar little punch of “maybe I’m replaceable,” I’m going to say it plainly: you’re not replaceable. But you are working in a system that now treats time, attention, and certainty as the most important commodities on the balance sheet.

AI will simply add to the pressure

As if all of this weren’t enough, there’s another change that’s here to stay: AI-driven automation.

This is already affecting parts of the industry where the work is audio-heavy or asset-heavy and where buyers are constantly looking for savings. Voice and VO are an early example. When tools can generate usable speech quickly and cheaply, a chunk of lower- and mid-tier work gets replaced or squeezed.

Post is also feeling the pinch, not because AI can finish everything end-to-end, but because it can remove time from tasks that used to require more people or more days. Rough assembly, clean-up, versioning, captioning, metadata, localisation. When time comes out of workflows, jobs and rates often follow.

Production is different because it’s anchored to real-world logistics: people, locations, schedules, weather, safety. But it’s reasonable to expect pressure on production-adjacent roles as tools compress parts of prep and iteration, and as expectations shift toward “smaller teams can do more.” Not because everyone suddenly turns into a robot, but because someone in a meeting will say, with enormous confidence and very little practical experience, “Can’t AI do that bit?”

Put simply, AI lands on top of an industry that is already commissioning fewer shows and squeezing schedules. In that environment, anything that promises efficiency becomes a justification for smaller teams, shorter bookings, and tougher rate conversations. Even where AI doesn’t replace roles outright, it changes expectations about speed and resources.

Where this leaves us

The industry isn’t dead. But it is changing shape. Money is tighter, risk is being managed more aggressively, competition is more global, and the work is more concentrated. That combination creates long gaps for freelancers, even when there is loads of talent available and loads of people who still want to make great drama.

The uncomfortable truth is that the post-pandemic boom lulled everyone into expecting a level of volume that was never going to last. The more useful question now isn’t only “when does it come back?” It’s “what kind of industry are we in now?” and, quietly, “how do we stay afloat while it finds its next balance?”

In the next post, I’ll get practical about what we all need to do over the next few years to stay afloat.

Thank you for reading.

Jon

As I headed home after seeing James Graham’s excellent PUNCH on Friday night, I passed two men squaring up to each other on Berwick Street. The irony of having just watched a play about the devastation sparked by a one-punch-kill wasn’t lost on me. I paused to intervene but decided against it. These men were coked up, fired up and fucking giants. And I’m 5’3 and I hate pain. And as much as I want to kid myself I live in a Jimmy Stewart movie where a common sense talking-to can spark Damascene moments of epiphany, I know that, really, I’m the patsy in a Woody Allen film who ends up in hospital, wrapped in plaster-cast sucking liquids through a straw.

Watching Samir Shah fumble the ball for the last month, I realise I’m not the only one scared to speak out and say what I really think. It seems people don’t realise how much fear they carry until the moment they try to speak. Then if you do ever start to talk, you feel the room tighten, as if everyone is waiting for you to get something wrong. When you type a sentence you sometimes imagine a crowd gathering on the other side of the screen, rehearsing the worst possible interpretation. And yes, I did pause before committing to the Woody gag…

This isn’t paranoia. It’s the culture we live in.

For many now, fear isn’t an emotion; it’s background radiation.

As a freelancer, I sensed it most keenly. One misstep and suddenly you’re “awkward” or “not the right fit this year,” which is the industry’s polite way of burying someone without a headstone. Entrepreneurs worry about the good will of investors and buyers. Employees feel it in meetings, gauging which version of themselves is least likely to cause trouble. Even billionaires like Bezos and Zuckerberg, whose personal wealth outsizes the GDP of a few nation states, bow and scrape to Trump as though a poorly phrased sentence might ruin them. If the people with fuck-you money can’t say fuck-you, what does that mean for the rest of us?

Subscribe now

And yet, silence has its competition.

One of the greatest ironies of our times is the people with the least to contribute, shout the loudest. Shamelessness is the defining trait of the populist politician. In this new world, hypocrisy is the ultimate sin, so being authentically and brazenly devoid of morality wins out.

Others are convinced to speak constantly, loudly, earnestly, because they believe their feelings are truth. Not a reflection of truth - truth itself. If they feel offended, someone must have offended them. If they feel unsafe, danger must exist. Feelings matter, but they’re not facts. We’ve institutionalised Impact over intention. A society that treats emotion as evidence ends up unable to distinguish a bruise from a disagreement.

Then there are the people who speak because they want to belong. They’ve mistaken talking for identity, opinion for a password. The words aren’t theirs. They just want to be waved through the door of a tribe that promises protection in exchange for predictable speech.

And meanwhile, in the background, something else is happening.

The people who don’t speak - the ones afraid of saying the wrong thing, or of being shamed, or of being judged by people who don’t know their lives - begin to collect resentments. Quietly. Efficiently. You could hear this in the years before Brexit: rooms where people stopped voicing what they actually thought because they knew the labels that would come flying at them. So they swallowed it. And kept swallowing it. Until the only safe place left to express themselves was the ballot box.

Silence doesn’t soften anything. It ferments. And when it finally surfaces, you get shocks that commentators call “surprising” but anyone paying attention heard rumbling years earlier. Brexit was one version of that pressure valve releasing. A Reform victory will be another. There will be more.

This is the landscape: fear suppressing speech, feelings masquerading as facts, tribes replacing thought, resentment building in the cracks.

So here we are. Caught between fear, feelings, and tribalism. Fear keeps thoughtful people quiet. Feelings are mistaken for facts. Tribes demand loyalty oaths disguised as opinions. And all the while the quiet ones gather resentments like Clubcard points.

I don’t pretend writing this solves anything. But perhaps the best we can do is speak with a touch more humility and humour. Admit that we’ll get things wrong. Recognise that other people will too. Try to create a world where speaking out doesn’t require heroic levels of courage, just a basic sense of honesty and a commitment to truth.

Because speaking out has become dangerous for all sorts of reasons.

But the greatest danger of all is what happens when the quiet people finally speak.

And yet I’ve spent a frankly absurd amount of time fretting about the title and I’ve settled on The Butterfly and Bee. Now I’m going to double down on it because, as titles go, it’s not bad and as a strategy for life, there could be worse.

The floating comes first. Be agile. Never get stuck in your ways. Respond deftly to this never-ending game of Tetris. For anyone wanting to live a successful creative life, grace and elegance are good qualities to aspire to and to strive for.

But the sting is important too. Standing up for what you believe in; your values and your beliefs; your vision; your quest for excellence or a simple desire to do (what you believe) is the right thing means sometimes you need to fight your corner.

Long before my first job in TV, I was rehearsing the act. I grew up in West Yorkshire with an English mother who longed to be Indian, a Bengali father who wanted to be white, and the constant sense that wherever I was, I was out of place. Playground, classroom, later at work - I shape-shifted, chameleon-like. Being dual heritage means carrying two cultures, two histories, two sets of expectations.

Turns out floating and stinging is a decent metaphor for a making a career in TV: moving with changing tastes and technology, but being bold enough to take risks in the knowledge that most gambles don’t pay off.

I started as a runner then a “VT tape op” (don’t ask), then an editor (my natural habitat). A writer one year, a director the next, a producer after that. Doing fancy footwork between different jobs in an industry that likes people to follow a neatly plotted career ladder. The more tools you have, the more control you have over what you make. I have never regretted the skills I amassed during the duck, bob and weave of those early years.

The sting? Use sparingly. Too much and people stop inviting you back. (I learned that the hard way.) But every so often you need it: fighting for your interpretation of a scene so it lands harder than expected, revisiting an edit until it’s unforgettable. Excellence is always hard-won in an industry that often settles for “good enough.”

Subscribe now

My storytelling follows suit: the seduction and the surprise. The magician’s misdirection and the punchline you never saw coming. Contradiction has never been easy, but it has become the source of everything I write. The challenge isn’t to smooth those contradictions, but to turn them into story.

That idea - embracing contradiction - runs through all my work. From my first short film, through hundreds of hours of prime-time drama, to Badmash (about British Asian youth and buried crime in the Noughties), Emmigré (about expats, secrets, and survival in Cyprus), and my memoir-in-progress Becoming Brown. And now, this Substack.

So what will you find here? Fragments of memoir, reflections on culture, politics and identity, and the messy, exhilarating business of TV - making drama series from scratch and turning contradictions into story.

It won’t always be tidy. But it will be honest. Grace when possible, bite when necessary.

- Jon

Subscribe now