The concept of the writers’ room is, in that respect, a tricky one. It is obvious that we live in an age where we’re enslaved by marketing and algorithms, where the exact brilliance of what a writer can offer – the unique, the personal, the responsive – is not valued. This is heartbreaking, not some precious creative whinge, and makes me feel angry about the lack of respect for writing as a craft. He also had to buy a bow-tie for the Writers Guild Awards on credit. The same article detailed the impecunious state of many writers, with Alex O’Keefe, who worked on Disney’s chef drama The Bear, revealing that he had to decamp to a local public library in Brooklyn when his space heater blew the power out. It is also a deeply practical one – and this is where the tragedy of the whole situation lies.

“Hello, now that our chatbot has managed to generate a hotel-based drama set in a generically exotic location, I am afraid you are surplus to requirements.”Īll of this means, as writer Laura Jacqmin told The New Yorker this week, “an existential fight for the business of writing”. This sounds worryingly dismissive, and of course a lot can happen in a year. Instead, they have been offered annual meetings to discuss technological advances. At this stage, no chatbot is going to replace Stephen Colbert’s writing team, yet the Guild has an eye on the future, and has demanded that the studios regulate the use of AI on creative projects – a demand that has just been rejected. More worrying still is the rise of artificial intelligence, and its use in scripting shows. There’s no doubt that they have been treated badly: the gap between the residuals (a form of royalty) that they receive from actual TV broadcasting and streaming services is considerable (much less in the latter case), and the streamers’ dropping of old shows from their platforms means that a source of income has now all but disappeared. I should point out at this stage that I am with the writers, and not simply in a “sock it to the Man” way. It’s the first time in 15 years that such disruption has occurred, and while it may seem like a distant problem here in Britain, we will soon see the effects on our TV screens, be it in comedy or drama. This week, the Writers Guild of America went on strike.

The reality bubble