"The most positive step is to try to expand the employment base by making it, if not economically friendly, at least not economically disastrous, for studios to take on deficits"
About this Quote
Dick Wolf isn’t selling a dream here; he’s doing triage. The line has the cool, fluorescent lighting of a budget meeting, where optimism is measured in how few people get laid off. “The most positive step” lands with deliberate modesty, then immediately lowers the bar again: not “economically friendly,” just “not economically disastrous.” That calibrated understatement is the tell. Wolf is speaking from a producer’s vantage point where creative ambition is always filtered through payroll, risk, and the brutal arithmetic of whether a show lives long enough to hire anyone next season.
The key phrase is “expand the employment base,” a union-coded, industry-insider way of reframing the entertainment business as a jobs program. It’s a values argument disguised as a spreadsheet argument: if studios can be nudged into tolerating short-term losses (“deficits”), more productions get greenlit, more crews work, and the whole ecosystem stays warm. The subtext is that studios have become so allergic to red ink that the safest choice is often paralysis - fewer shows, fewer experiments, fewer opportunities for anyone who isn’t already bankable.
Contextually, it reads like an intervention into the recurring Hollywood cycle of contraction: post-merger belt-tightening, rising production costs, and the streaming era’s preference for “efficient” slates over long-running employment engines. Wolf, architect of durable franchise TV, is implicitly defending volume and continuity - not because it’s romantic, but because it’s how an industry sustains a middle class. The real demand here is for a system where taking a risk doesn’t trigger a corporate panic, and where “deficit” isn’t a scarlet letter but a calculated investment in people.
The key phrase is “expand the employment base,” a union-coded, industry-insider way of reframing the entertainment business as a jobs program. It’s a values argument disguised as a spreadsheet argument: if studios can be nudged into tolerating short-term losses (“deficits”), more productions get greenlit, more crews work, and the whole ecosystem stays warm. The subtext is that studios have become so allergic to red ink that the safest choice is often paralysis - fewer shows, fewer experiments, fewer opportunities for anyone who isn’t already bankable.
Contextually, it reads like an intervention into the recurring Hollywood cycle of contraction: post-merger belt-tightening, rising production costs, and the streaming era’s preference for “efficient” slates over long-running employment engines. Wolf, architect of durable franchise TV, is implicitly defending volume and continuity - not because it’s romantic, but because it’s how an industry sustains a middle class. The real demand here is for a system where taking a risk doesn’t trigger a corporate panic, and where “deficit” isn’t a scarlet letter but a calculated investment in people.
Quote Details
| Topic | Business |
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