Television

LOS ANGELES — It seemed like a good deal. At first.Last April, Netflix offered Kay Reindl and her longtime writing partner a substantial sum — in the mid-six figures, Ms. Reindl said — to oversee 10 episodes of a new sci-fi series, “Sentient.” It sounded like a lot of money for what they figured would be less than a year of work.Ms. Reindl and her writing partner, who have worked steadily as TV writers since the 1990s, would be executive producers, instead of staff writers on someone else’s show. That would mean a lot more responsibility and much longer hours, but it seemed worth it. They found office space and hired a few writers.Then came a surprise: they learned that “Sentient” would actually take 18 months from start to finish. When Ms. Reindl did the math, she realized that, under the new timetable, she would be making roughly the same weekly pay as the writers she was overseeing.“It was a very bad day,” Ms. Reindl said.Netflix declined to comment.The rise of streaming has been a blessing and a curse for working writers like Ms. Reindl, who said she and her partner had ultimately left “Sentient” because of creative differences unrelated to the length of the series. On-demand digital video has ushered in the era of Peak TV, meaning there are more shows and more writing jobs than ever. But many of the jobs are not what they used to be in the days before streaming.“All this opportunity is great, but how to navigate it and keep yourself consistently working and making your living has been the challenging part,” said Stu Zicherman, a writer and showrunner whose credits include “The Americans” on FX and HBO’s “Divorce.”When Ms. Reindl got her start, network series had 24 episodes or more a season. The typical TV writer’s schedule looked something like this: Get hired by May or June, write furiously for most of the year, and then take a six-week hiatus before the process started again.The seasonal rhythms that had been in place for TV writers since the days of “I Love Lucy” started to change more than two decades ago, when cable outlets put out 13-episode seasons of shows like HBO’s “The Sopranos” and, later, AMC’s “Mad Men.”Streaming platforms have revised that model further: eight-episode seasons of Netflix’s “Stranger Things” and Disney Plus’s “The Mandalorian”; six-episode seasons of Amazon Prime Video’s “Fleabag”; three- and six-episode batches of Netflix’s “Black Mirror.” Cable has replied in kind, offering fewer than 12-episode runs of shows like “Atlanta” on FX and “Silicon Valley” on HBO.“I think they’re experimenting with the shortest product they can still call a TV series,” said Steve Conrad, the president of Elephant Pictures, a production company in Chicago. “I couldn’t keep this company together if it was fewer than eight, and it’s coming.”In addition to shortening season lengths, the streaming platforms have ignored the school-year-style calendar of television’s network days, with its premieres in the weeks after Labor Day and finales late in the spring. Netflix has served up new seasons of its most-watched program, “Stranger Things,” in July. Apple TV Plus unveiled one of its most-hyped shows, “Little America,” in the middle of January.The rise of streaming has fattened the wallets of superstar writer-producers like Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy, while also giving chances to unproven writers. But the medium’s shorter seasons and unpredictable cadences have made it harder for writers in Hollywood’s middle class to plot out a year’s work in a way that doesn’t leave them nervous when mortgage payments are due.Complicating the issue is that streaming platforms have been known to take more time to make an episode than their network and cable counterparts. For many writers, that meant less money for more hours, and they complained to their union representatives.“Five years ago, it grew from an isolated problem to a dominant problem,” said Chuck Slocum, the assistant executive director of the Writers Guild of America, West. “We had half of our members wake up and realize one day that they’re making half the money that they were making.”The union worked out some protections for its members. Since 2018, studios are sometimes required to pay writers extra when filming runs longer than expected.That change kicked in too late to help Lila Byock, a writer whose credits include HBO’s “The Leftovers” and Hulu’s “Castle Rock.” She said she was hired on a scripted series that she figured would last 10 months. Instead, it took nearly 18 months, which caused her to pass on other writing jobs.“It gets tricky,” Ms. Byock said. “That wasn’t what I had budgeted for two years of my life.”On the flip side, streaming seasons that require a short time commitment — say, eight months — can also wreak havoc on a writer’s schedule. “You’re not being paid by the studio for five months of the year, but that’s not enough time to take on another show,” said Mr. Conrad, of Elephant Pictures.The old TV calendar is not quite dead. Major producers of network shows, like Dick Wolf and Chuck Lorre, still must come up with at least 22 episodes per season of shows like NBC’s “Chicago P.D.” and CBS’s “Young Sheldon.” But with new streaming platforms like NBCUniversal’s Peacock and HBO Max set to start in the spring, the lives of many TV writers are likely to get more chaotic.“I have friends working in network television and it’s like they’re on a different planet,” said Harley Peyton, a writer and co-executive producer of “Project Blue Book,” a History Channel series with 10 episodes a season.He described staff positions on network shows as “the last full-time jobs in this business,” adding that “those jobs are extraordinarily difficult to get.”The 10 established Hollywood writers who discussed the changes in the industry with The New York Times were careful to point out that they were still able to make good money, even amid the digital disruption of their industry. And yet, they said, it is common for veteran writers these days to be paid as if they were rookies.Jonathan Shikora, a Los Angeles lawyer who represents actors and writers, suggested that longtime TV writers were now underpaid. “Should I be getting the same as some new writer whose script I’m rewriting because their work is so green and new and I’m teaching that person?” he asked.The new economy has some writers thinking twice about moving up the ranks to the position of executive producer. “What I’m starting to see is a lot of friends being like, ‘Why would I ever want to be a showrunner?’” Ms. Byock said, referring to the hands-on executive producer in charge of the writers’ room. “If you’re making the same amount you could be making doing a much less stressful job, why wouldn’t you just do that?”Rob Long, once a writer and an executive producer of the long-running NBC sitcom “Cheers,” said he had tried to make allowances for the changes when he was in charge of “Sullivan & Son,” a TBS sitcom.That show had 10 episodes in its first two seasons and 13 in its third, a significant change from the 28-episode final season of “Cheers.” That was fine with the financially secure Mr. Long, who said, “I got to be honest, I thought it was fantastic.” The difficulty came when he was hiring staff writers.“I was making deals with younger writers just starting out,” he said, “and I was doing the math.”It took eight weeks to write the scripts and prepare for shooting. An additional 15 weeks brought the staff to the end of the production. The schedule meant that “Sullivan & Son” would eat up nearly six months of staff writers’ time.Under the terms of their contracts, they had to give priority to “Sullivan & Son,” meaning that, if the show got renewed, they were obligated to go back to it even if they were working on another project.“It was a de facto way of locking you up,” Mr. Long said.So he came up with an informal solution that he has used on other shows since then.“We make a private, handshake deal with our writers,” he said. “We tell them that if you get on another project, or you sell a pilot or something else happens, I will let you out of your contract,” he said.In other words, Mr. Long added, “I promise to fire the writer.” More

Johni Cerny, the chief genealogist for the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” who helped some 200 famous people — among them Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, Senator Bernie Sanders and Speaker Nancy Pelosi — trace their ancestry, died on Wednesday in Lehi, Utah, near Salt Lake City. She was 76.Deborah Christensen, Ms. Cerny’s partner of 23 years, said the cause was coronary artery disease and congestive heart failure.“Johni Cerny was the proverbial dean of American genealogical research,” Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor who is a host and executive producer of “Finding Your Roots,” said in a statement. In an email message on Thursday, he described her work as “transforming raw data into narratives and metaphors about diversity and our common humanity.”Ms. Cerny’s passion for the field began in childhood, for intensely personal reasons.Jonnette Elaine Cerny was born on Aug. 27, 1943, in Kansas City, Mo. Her mother was Vivian Elaine (West) Cerny, and the man she was told was her father was John Steve Cerny, a soldier in World War II who later worked in the heating and air-conditioning business. She was the oldest of five children.The family later moved to Southern California. She enrolled at the University of Missouri but transferred to Brigham Young University in Utah, where she received a bachelor’s degree in social work and genealogical research in 1969.She was always fascinated by family trees. Her maternal grandmother, Bertha Smith West, had been adopted and always wanted to learn the identity of her biological parents. Johni was 19 when she began that research, but it was not until long after her grandmother’s death in 1972 that she was able to use DNA — essentially a 21st-century genealogical tool — to find their names.Meanwhile, Ms. Cerny had long suspected that John Cerny was not her biological father. It was not until 2018, however, that with the help of DNA she was able to identify the man who was: Charles Owen Williams.According to Nick Sheedy, a researcher at Lineages, Ms. Cerny’s family history and genealogical research company, he and Ms. Cerny signed up with “every database out there” and the process took about nine months.Mr. Williams had died in 1960, but Ms. Cerny soon met a whole new circle of relatives on her father’s side.Ms. Cerny did not go into genealogical research immediately after college. From 1972 to 1979 she served in the Army, reaching the rank of captain. She returned to Utah because of its research resources, particularly the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Family History Library.She founded Lineages in 1983, before most computerized databases and long before $99 mail-order DNA reports. As a social media tribute to her observed, she spent a lot of time “looking through microfilm and toting bags of quarters for the copy machines.”Ms. Cerny was an editor and author of “The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy” (1984) and “The Library: A Guide to the LDS Family History Library” (1986). A favorite research subject of hers was Germanna, the Virginia settlement of Germans who in 1718 were tricked into indentured servitude. She and Gary J. Zimmerman published several “Before Germanna” books, including histories of the Baumgartner, Dieter, Moyer and Willheit families.She began working on PBS projects with Professor Gates in 2006 as a researcher on “African American Lives,” which Virginia Heffernan, in a review in The New York Times, called “the most exciting and stirring documentary on any subject to appear on television in a long time.” Ms. Cerny also worked on “Faces of America” (2010) and “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” (2013).From 2012 through 2019, she was the chief researcher for “Finding Your Roots.” Her subjects on that series also included Stephen Colbert, Larry David, Queen Latifah, Representative John Lewis, Meryl Streep and Tina Turner.Ms. Cerny was never one to pinpoint a favorite project, associates said, but in a 2019 interview she mentioned an episode with the comedian Sarah Silverman.“Her comment just took the words right out of my mouth,” Ms. Cerny said. “She was looking at a photograph of family members she had never seen before. And she just said, ‘I wish I could crawl into this picture and know what’s going on in there.’”In addition to Dr. Christensen, a psychologist, Ms. Cerny is survived by a brother, Jack Cerny, and three sisters, Antoinette Greenstone, Nanette Muirhead and Stevette Shinkle. She helped raise Dr. Christensen’s sons, Tim, Matthew and Jake, and her daughters, Anna Ward and Rachel Stowe. There are 11 grandchildren.There was little doubt that Ms. Cerny loved her career. In a 2019 video, she admitted to a workday that began around 7:30 a.m. and ended at about 6:30 p.m. — and to a habit of waking up in the middle of the night with an idea and going straight to her computer. Her work, she said, was “very addictive.” More

Lynn Cohen, the veteran actress best known for her role as Magda on the hit HBO series “Sex and the City,” died on Feb. 14 at her home in Manhattan. She was 86.Her death was confirmed by her son, Laurence Frazen.Ms. Cohen was seen in numerous movies and television shows, and in both Broadway and Off Broadway stage productions. But she didn’t achieve her greatest fame until late in life, through her role as Magda, the stern Eastern European housekeeper employed by Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) on “Sex and the City.”“I auditioned and they called me right away to do the episode, but my mother was turning 90 years old in Texas,” Ms. Cohen said in a 2018 interview with Cosmopolitan. “I said, ‘I would love to do this but I’m sorry, I have to be with my mother and she’s turning 90 and she’s sexier than anybody on the show.’ And they moved the date for me.”Magda first appeared in the show’s third season, in 2000. Ms. Cohen was supposed to appear in only one episode, “Attack of the Five Foot Ten Woman,” in which Magda memorably replaces Miranda’s vibrator with a statue of the Virgin Mary and later tells her that she’ll need to learn to cook if she ever wants a boyfriend.But the character returned in 12 more episodes over the following seasons and in both “Sex and the City” movies. When Miranda had a baby, Magda became her nanny.Lynn Harriet Kay was born on Aug. 10, 1933, in Kansas City, Mo. Her father, Louis Kay, was a salesman; her mother, Bertha (Cornsweet) Kay, worked in retail.After spending a year at the University of Wisconsin and a year at Northwestern University, Lynn Kay moved to St. Louis. While there she played roles in regional theater productions and taught at a summer theater program.Her marriage in 1957 to Gilbert Frazen ended in divorce in 1960. She married Ronald Cohen, an actor and writer, in 1964.Ms. Cohen and her husband moved to New York City when she was in her mid-40s, and she made her Off Broadway debut in 1979 in “Don Juan Comes Back From the War.” Over the next decades she appeared in more than a dozen Off Broadway productions, including “Hamlet,” “The Traveling Lady,” “I Remember Mama” and “Total Eclipse.”Ms. Cohen made her Broadway debut in 1989 in Peter Hall’s production of Tennessee Williams’s “Orpheus Descending.” Her second and last Broadway appearance was in a 1997 production of Chekhov’s “Ivanov.”In 2013, Ms. Cohen played Mags, an 80-year-old woman who volunteers to participate in the dystopian competition in “Hunger Games: Catching Fire.” Her many other film credits include Woody Allen’s “Manhattan Murder Mystery” (1993) and Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” (2005), in which she played Golda Meir.Among her television credits were “Law & Order,” on which she played a judge in 12 episodes from 1993 to 2006, as well as “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Blue Bloods,” “The Affair,” “Chicago Med,” “Damages” and “Nurse Jackie.”In addition to her son, she is survived by her husband and two grandchildren. More

What’s on TVWHITMER THOMAS: THE GOLDEN ONE (2020) 10 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO platforms. The Los Angeles-based comedian, actor and musician Whitmer Thomas keeps audiences guessing with his unusual, deeply personal sets. Is it appropriate to laugh when he performs his goth-pop song “Partied to Death?” (“My mommy drank herself to death/and I know she tried her very best/But now I can’t party because my mommy partied to death.”) Such painful realizations are sprinkled throughout this new comedy special, filmed at the same Florida bar where Thomas’s mother used to perform with her band. Much of the special is on the lighter side, though. Thomas riffs on his childhood in Alabama and his time in an emo rock band, and performs songs from his upcoming debut record, “Songs From the Golden One.”51ST N.A.A.C.P. IMAGE AWARDS 8 p.m. on BET. This annual awards show celebrates the work of people of color in film, television, music and literature. Netflix leads going into the show, with nominations for “Dear White People,” “When They See Us” and “American Son,” among others. Lizzo received six nominations, including entertainer of the year, while Beyoncé has eight, including best female artist and documentary, for “Homecoming.” Anthony Anderson returns as host.ALMOST FAMILY 8 p.m. on Fox. This drama series, based on the Australian show “Sisters,” requires that you shut off your critical thinking switch for a moment. Julia (Brittany Snow) learns that she’s not an only child after all when her father, a successful fertility doctor, admits he used his own genetic material to conceive dozens of children over the years. The news unites Julia with two half sisters (played by Megalyn Echikunwoke and Emily Osment), and the three find comfort in their connection. If you’re wondering whether the father faces any repercussions for impregnating all those women, this two-hour season finale follows a trial brought against him in court.THE HIDDEN KINGDOMS OF CHINA 9 p.m. on National Geographic. Michelle Yeoh (“Crazy Rich Asians”) narrates this two-hour special on China’s landscape and diverse wildlife. We get a glimpse of soaring mountains and tropical jungles, and meet animals like the giant panda and the Tibetan fox.What’s StreamingMS. PURPLE (2019) Stream on Hulu; rent on Amazon, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube. This melancholic drama from Justin Chon (“Gook”) dissects the reunion of two siblings in Los Angeles’s Koreatown. Kasie (Tiffany Chu), a karaoke hostess, is left reeling after her bedridden father’s live-in nurse quits. With little help in sight, she reaches out to her aimless, estranged brother, Carey (Teddy Lee). Both have yet to recover from their mother’s abandonment years ago. Tending to their dying father lays bare their wounds and offers them a chance to regain a sense of family. Jeannette Catsoulis named the movie a Critic’s Pick in her review for The New York Times, calling it “a moody, downbeat drama soaked in color and saturated with sadness.” More