Curing TV's ‘Spec Script Fatigue'

The Stranger Things phenomenon sparks a deluge of material and backlash from execs and agents expected to read all weekend long.

- Bryn Elise Sandberg

William Morris Endeavor partner Ari Greenburg and his family were on a ski trip in Utah with his former assistant, now a development executive at HBO, when he caught a glimpse of her reading list: nearly two dozen original scripts that needed to be read before the weekend was through. Several likely had landed on her desk that Friday, and many of the producers and reps no doubt would be following up Monday looking to gin up a bidding war.

The crushing pile was a wake-up call for Greenburg, who urged his department to survey the marketplace to see if generating piles of specs — completed scripts that, if picked up, allow writers to sidestep a pitch and a bureaucratic development process — is the most effective way to do business. “The whole point of that analysis,” he explains now, “is that we hear a lot about the ones that sell but we don’t hear a lot about the ones that don’t.” And as the survey would reveal, most don’t.

Sure, the approach often is preferable for writers who favor more creative control, an accelerated timeline and the ability to approach execs with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. But both the quantity and the pace are becoming unsustainable, say multiple cable executives who tell tales of having to retain weekend baby-sitters just to get through their stack. “No script is getting our full attention or excitement because we just have to get through the pile,” says one whose network averages 20 specs a weekend, a jump from the more manageable three or four not long ago.