The Salamander

Television is a medium that makes zombies out of the masses. It is an invention so horrible that anyone working in it and inflicting it upon the populace is marked by the Devil as his own. Yet TV is where the money is. TV is where you can make a decent living as a writer. Forget about your dreams of rockstardom and fame and fortune. If you make it long enough as a gainfully employed writer, you’ll realize that it’s a state that only one out of every one jillion writers would ever achieve. Chances are you won’t be on that happy wagon even if you live to be a hundred years old.

Let us look into the economics of television writing. A script, say for a thirty-minuter show that airs once a week non-primetime in a decent station will get you about seven or eight thousand pesos. Whoa, that’s a lot, you say, considering that there are four weeks in a month. That’s like thirty-two thousand a month, man. For a dude who’s been living on Skyflakes and instant pancit canton for the past couple of months, that’s a ginormous pile of Aztec gold.

Hold up, genius.

A show has a stable of writers. Usually, you’ll have three more writers with you in that stable. That leaves you with one episode a week. Not much, I know. But let’s say you have two shows. Finding even one show is hard enough, but let us say you’re really pesky so you finally got another one. You’ll have the time to write for two shows because you won’t be coming to work everyday, anyway. Sixteen thou. Not bad. Won’t turn you into another Bill Gates anytime soon, but it’s a decent living.

Now let us imagine you left that station and finally got into the major leagues, the big-ass networks. Your scripts would now sell for ten thousand. If you get a primetime, one-hour weekly show, you’ll get fifteen to twenty thousand per episode. The big money, though, seems to be in soaps. Those dudes get around thirty thousand. Thirty thousand, you say. Oh holy fuck! Soaps air five days a week! A hundred and fifty thousand pesos a week… I’m set for life!

No, you dumb fuck.

Soap scripts are written on a weekly basis. You submit more than a hundred pages of script that would span for the entire week. Considering that you get paid twenty thousand for around twenty pages in an hour-long weekly primetime show, soap writers are shafting themselves.

A TV show, nevertheless, is a steady source of decent income. That is, while it lasts. And that’s about two months. Yep. TV shows here recently tend to last only one Philippine season. That’s thirteen episodes, as opposed to the more than twenty episodes per season in the US. With three other writers, you’ll get four or five episodes out of a Pinoy TV season. When the show gets canned, you’ll be looking for another show. The network won’t give you one out of respect for your loyalty and the fact that you did not leak sensitive developments to rival networks. And with the way more and more aspiring young writers are getting into the biz because the network can pay them less than what they pay writers who’ve been around for some years, you’re in a town called Screwed.

And then there’s the abomination called the SP/writer.

A segment producer, or SP, is the little director/producer of a documentary. Their job is totally different from a writer’s job. Usually, SPs go on to become producers or directors. Television managers, however, thinking that writers are not that necessary in documentary shows, began scratching away that position. SPs are writers too now. They shoot the footage, they write a script to tell the story, and then they edit the material. I’m not going to go into detail about how the product usually sucks when done that way. The consequence of the SP/writer phenomenon upon both writers and SPs, though, is that instead of SPs competing with other SPs and writers competing with other writers for employment, writers and SPs are now in a clusterfuck bitchfight over who gets that single position in a show. If you’re a writer who knows nothing about segment producing, you’re done for. If otherwise, you’ll find yourself earning less than what you’d have earned as a plain old TV writer. SP/writers get paid SP wages, not writer wages. And sometimes, just sometimes, there are more than four SP/writers in a show. Meaning there will be lean months ahead for you should you be lucky enough to get that job.

A niftier job would be as a head writer. You get that job if you impress enough big people. Or suck enough cocks. As a head writer, you’ll get paid for reviewing each script. That means you’re getting something each week; roughly the same amount they pay for each script. Say you’re the head writer of a not so prominent show, you can get forty thousand each month. Plus you have another show that pays twenty per ep with one ep per month. Sixty thousand pesos, then. Again, decent, but it won’t make you rich. And getting to be a head writer is really really hard. Unless you’re a fucking genius, prophet, and ninja all rolled into one.

TV, then, is good. But shows rarely last more than a season nowadays. Nope, you’re still better off in a call center.

Or movies maybe?

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Writing for a Living Sucks Part I: Print

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Writing for a Living Sucks Part III: Movies