Is writer pay up or down? Depends how you look at it
Top writers make significantly more (see, for example, the large paydays for Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Quinta Brunson).<p>But everyone else makes significantly less. While pay scales have increased on a per-episode basis, TV show seasons are less than half as long as they were before, and streamers don&#x27;t pay royalties, so absolute pay decreased substantially.<p>For point of comparison: a friend who worked in the writer&#x27;s room on a FOX broadcast TV show several years ago (5+ years ago) was able to buy a house with the salary from one season and the royalties for writing a single episode broadcast that season (out of approximately 20ish). She currently works on a streaming show for one of the major streaming services and her salary this year as the head writer for that 10-episode show is less than the royalties for that single broadcast episode, despite millions more viewers watching the streaming show.