M uch has been written about how The Pitt is a throwback to “old school” television. Instead of a lean eight-episode binge drop and a moody antihero, the medical drama rolls out 15-episode seasons, one a week, full of lofty ideals and heroic characters fighting the good fight. The West Wing in scrubs. Not a Walter White in sight. But there’s another element to The Pitt that defines it even more as a product of an earlier era, and that’s where it shoots — Los Angeles.
The flight of television and film production from Hollywood isn’t new, but an extreme drop-off in the past few years is. Los Angeles is a company town, and since late 2022, the area has shed about 42,000 industry jobs — a 30 percent drop in employment, according to Labor Department numbers recently reported by The Wall Street Journal. Noah Wyle, star and executive producer of The Pitt, pulled out some Dr. Robby-style advocacy at a March congressional hearing focused on the problem, explaining how the past six years have contributed to “a near cratering of our once thriving industry.”
The reason behind this massive decline in jobs is multifaceted — global competition, industry consolidation, changing viewing habits, to name a few — and cannot (yet) be pinned on the looming existential threat of AI. But simply put, media companies are making less content and making even less of that in Los Angeles for one simple reason: to save money. California is expensive and union crews demand living wages; the whole point of the congressional hearing was to lobby for a federal film tax incentive to make shooting in Hollywood economically advantageous again.
Still, there’s something deeper at play.
Television was booming in the first two decades of this century. Most consumers watched TV via cable; in 2010, it was in over 90 percent of American homes. Once it took hold in the 1990s, cable proved to be a wildly successful financial model, because the cable company got paid multiple times — renting out hardware, charging the customer for the service, and then charging companies to advertise. The networks, which provided the content, also raked it in — they collected fees from the cable company and sold advertising. Everyone had multiple revenue streams, and the consumer got stuff to watch. A lot of it.
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The largest impact of cable was the explosion of channels available to the viewer. When someone bought a cable subscription in the 2000s, they acquired access to more than 100 channels, even if research showed a person only watched about 17 of them. Due to new government regulations established in the 1990s, the more channels a network created, the more money it could earn. The Military Channel? Romance Classics? The Boyz Channel? Sure. Cable companies “bundled” all these bangers together and charged more to the customer. Again, everyone made money — including the television industry of working, middle-class professionals.
Hundreds of channels meant thousands of hours of content to work on. No longer confined to a limited number of jobs offered by a handful of networks, a camera assistant or a costumer could do shifts on Mad Men for AMC, The Closer for TNT, Laguna Beach for MTV, or countless others. After all, someone had to make shows for the American Heroes Channel (full disclosure, that someone was me). And while not all this production was based in Los Angeles, or used union crews, there was enough work to go around. With their multiple revenue streams and questionable channels, cable and media conglomerates may have been greedy, but their greed was mutually beneficial to all.
The change started with Netflix, the DVD rental company which debuted a stand-alone streaming service in 2011, followed by original content in 2013. By then, one of the lures, aside from exclusive access to buzzy shows like House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, was the idea that a viewer could now pay for only what they wanted to watch — without commercials. And that touched a nerve. The ever-rising costs of ad-drenched cable subscriptions for a bundle of never-watched channels began to feel more like a con than a boon. Or, in practical terms: “Why, exactly, am I paying for the American Heroes Channel?” People signed up for just $7.99 a month.
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The success of Netflix spawned the streaming rush of the 2010s. First, that meant new tech players like Hulu and Amazon Prime Video, but soon, and more importantly, all the major media companies that didn’t want to be left behind launched their own services, like NBC’s streamer Peacock, Disney+, Discovery +, Paramount +, CNN+, etc. Internally, resources were shifted away from profitable cable and linear programming to bulk up those new “plus” platforms.
For people working in the industry, that was mostly OK, too, at least for a little while. Because for the first few years of these new streamers’ existence their primary target for success was gaining subscribers. Networks commissioned fewer shows for cable and its myriad channels (American Heroes Channel stopped producing new content in the late 2010s), but still bought a ton of new shows in a variety of genres, on the idea that the best way to get people to watch your stuff is to offer as much stuff as you can. This was Peak TV, and it worked. Consumers, especially millennials and Gen Z, decided to “cut the cord” and cancel cable. Streamer subscriptions blasted off.
And then, in 2022, it stopped working. Both writers and actors went out on strike, one issue being the lack of substantial residual compensation when their work played on streamers. But something even more momentous happened that year — for the first time, Netflix reported a loss in subscribers. Faced with a real dilemma, the company decided to move the goalpost. As FX network head John Landgraf summed it up in a 2024 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, “The inflection point was when Netflix decided to change their public-facing Wall Street metric from global subscribers … to profit. The only thing that you can do to get closer to profitability faster is reduce your output. It’s cut costs. Everyone has had to do that, by the way.”
Everyone did. Streamers bought fewer shows, cut staff, and raised subscription prices in the name of the new objective: profitability. Which brings us to March’s congressional hearing. Yes, it’s cheaper not to shoot in L.A. because of a lack of tax incentives, but the streamers have decided it’s cheaper not to shoot much at all, anywhere.
At the end of 2025, industry publication Deadline offered up a “Streaming Report Card,” and the grades were good: “After more than five years of gushing red ink, 2025 was the year when streaming across the board started to turn a profit.” Of course, in getting to this point, these platforms broke a successful system that provided steady, middle-class employment to thousands and thousands of people. It also ushered in the streamer enshittification era. Subscription rates have skyrocketed since 2023, cheaper plans include commercials, password sharing is policed, and there is less new content to watch. Far from benefiting all, the new TV model of greed only favors Wall Street.
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But there’s no going back. Eighty-three percent of American adults now use streaming services — and the number goes higher the younger the viewer. Giant mergers and AI are on the horizon, sure to cause more destabilization. None of this means the industry, and the people in it, won’t evolve and adapt, or that something won’t happen to shift the balance of power away from pure profit to something more sustainable for all players. And yes, a federal tax incentive will help.
Compellingly, even though a majority of Gen Z favors streamers over traditional TV, that group spends more time on video sharing services (YouTube, TikTok) and social media watching user-generated content, live streams, and short-form videos — very little of which requires staff anywhere near a standard Hollywood production. Not only that, this group likes to fast-forward through programs and cherry-pick favorite clips, all while multitasking across multiple screens. Translation: Gen X and millennials may be the last people who really want to sit down and watch shows like The Pitt, anyway. Which makes streamers going all-in on profits right now look like a cutthroat but ultimately shrewd move. Unless they figure out how to lure young eyes to long-form and incentivize professionally produced content, it may be the last chance to make money they get.
Photograph used in Illustration
David Swanson/AFP/Getty Images
