Figure 1
Strike on the Set of Septième ciel.
Credit: Alexis Leclère, all rights reserved.
- 1 The term “platform” is the subject of debate (see the introduction to this issue of the journal). I (...)
1In recent years, there has been a rapid increase in the number of productions shot in various countries around the world financed by Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+, and their fellow streamers, or streaming platforms.1 They act as transnational commissioners, contracting a company in the host country to recruit the production crew and oversee the work on each individual film or television series project. This policy is epitomized by “prestige” television series with big production budgets and big-name actors. For local crews, these projects are both creating new job opportunities, and transforming the way in which they work. In France, a territory in which the streamers have invested heavily, film and television industry professionals often describe this change as being driven by the fact that “they [the streamers] want cinema quality, but for television.” This description prompts exploration of the way in which the streamers are adapting existing ways of working for the purposes of their business model.
2For indeed, far from seamlessly implementing a new model of norms, the arrival of the streamers is disrupting the “work conventions”—understood as a “system of reciprocal expectations concerning skills and behaviours, self-evident and taken as read” (Salais 1989: 213)—of productions for television and online broadcasting. These reciprocal expectations underpin the coordination of the economic actors involved in the production chain: the broadcaster, production company, and work collective (de Verdalle 2012).
3This disruption of convention has been studied in relation to production companies, which are finding their use of resources and accounting operations coming under much greater scrutiny during shoots compared to the more distant monitoring done by national television broadcasters (Stephan 2023). But the specifics of collective work—involving the directing, camera, set design, and editing teams, all supervised by a “showrunner”—have not previously been explored.
4This article looks at how the production of television series for US streamers is putting art and technical crews in the French television and film industries under unprecedented pressures. It analyses the change in these professions, and in the television industry more broadly, through the shoots of a number of different television series. For my research, I interviewed a number of experienced crew members who worked on their first television series for a streamer between 2019 and 2023, the period corresponding to the rapid increase in these productions in France. These crew members played a central role in coordinating collective action as part of the directing, production management, and set management teams, and were therefore able to provide insight into the organizational disruption that streamers are causing shoots as a whole, over and above the changes specific to each technical and art department. This analysis of French television production complements work on television and film production in other territories, including Europe, Australia, India, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates (Bouquillion & Ithurbide 2021; Curtin & Sanson 2016; Daum 2023; Dickinson 2024; Goldsmith, Ward & O’Reagan 2012).
5The article is structured in three parts. First, I begin by providing a broad outline of streamer-financed productions, which are characterized by a substantial increase in international shoots, and a typical hierarchical structure: it involves a “showrunner” who is responsible for the aesthetic consistency of the project, and a commissioned company responsible for its managerial oversight. Second, I examine the shoots of a number of different television shows, and explore how crews are experiencing work intensification due to demands for higher quality within a compressed timescale over long periods, and put under strain due to endemic problems. In the third and final section, I explore the extent to which the challenge represented by these pressures on work is destabilizing the norms of social, economic, and political reciprocity that underpin the professional engagement of these workers with projects, and their availability on a discontinuous labour market.
Methods
This study originated in a post-doctoral sociology project (2020–2021) at the Centre Maurice-Halbwachs (EHESS, School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences), which I have since continued. It also builds on a PhD dissertation on salaried work in the film and television industries in France (Zarka 2019). The network of contacts I developed as part of my PhD gave me access to a wide range of opportunities to gather information on and discuss the changes brought about by the streamers: direct observation of national and European trade union and professional association meetings; participation in trade, academic, or mixed webinars and round tables; and attendance at professional association meet-ups and trade fairs.
Adopting a constant comparative approach (Glaser 1965), I sought to refine my analysis of the issues involved in working for streamers by conducting two series of interviews with highly experienced professionals (all with at least twenty years of experience in French film or television production). The interviews concerned their initial experience(s) of working for a streaming platform.
- 2 Post-production consists of editing, sound effects, mixing, and colour grading.
In an initial exploratory phase in late 2020, I conducted nine semi-structured interviews with crew members involved in filming and post-production.2 They occupied various positions in the division of labour (administration, set design, and editing) and all had at least one complete professional experience (for the full duration of a shoot or post-production) with a US streamer. I also conducted two additional interviews with trade union representatives. In a second phase in 2023, I conducted a further six interviews with production managers (n = 3), first assistant directors (n = 2), and a set coordinator (n = 1). On a shoot, these roles are central to the “organizational work” (de Terssac 2011) designed to ensure the coherence of the work at the level of the collective as a whole.
- 3 France’s on-demand audiovisual media service providers (services de médias audiovisuels à la demand (...)
These interviews paved the way for a study of four examples of television series shot in France for three US-based streaming platforms, which I will refer to as SPx, SPy, and SPz. The first two of these were projects conceived in the US: a single-season mini-series I will call Country, shot in 2022-2023, and a series I will call Bright, the first season of which was filmed during the same period. These were both period dramas, with international stars and big budgets for set design, costumes, and background artists. The other two series were conceived in France, and had more modest budgets. The first of these, which I will call Masques, was a two-season genre series filmed in 2019-2020, and the second, which I will call Enigme, was a single-season contemporary drama mini-series shot in 2021. All these projects were carried out within the framework of a commissioning relationship, including those filmed after France’s SMAD legislation came into force.3 The interviews were supplemented with a documentary analysis of the production and art and technical teams using the Internet Movie Database and a press review.
6The transnational shoots of streamer-financed productions represent a continuation of a much older trend to offshore the production of Hollywood films. These “runaway productions” (Goldsmith et al. 2012) began in the 1980s, with the aim of circumventing US union regulations while benefiting from economic advantages such as favourable exchange rates, lower labour costs, and local tax incentives. Host countries may also have other appealing features, such as the availability of studios or outdoor sets, transparent administrative procedures, a highly trained workforce, plentiful hotel accommodation, and political stability.
- 4 Since 2016, the French international tax credit has been 30% of local spending (or 40% for VFX-inte (...)
- 5 This investment increased from €33 million to €260 million. See the report from the French broadcas (...)
7The mobility of productions has increased still further with the arrival of the streamers, due to their desire to mobilize diverse cultural resources in order to increase the chances of their output being viewed both locally and globally (Wiart 2021). In France, an international tax credit for foreign-financed film and television projects has become a crucial tool for attracting productions of this kind.4 As in other countries (including Belgium, Hungary, and Australia), this support is conditional on spending on wages and services (such as equipment hire) in the host country, and has thus led to an eightfold increase in investment by streamers in producing television series and exclusive feature films in France between 2018 and 2022.5
8But the arrival of the streamers in France has had an impact far beyond financial investment, since the way they manage projects also disrupts the usual forms of economic coordination between production stakeholders (Stephan 2023).
9Under the existing framework, the broadcaster (typically a television network, such as TF1 or France Télévisions in France) provides the majority of the financing for a project (television film, series, or documentary) alongside a number of minority co-financers. This dominant financial role gives the broadcaster major decision-making power over the stages upstream of production (script, budgeting, production time, and recruiting cast and crew) and downstream, in particular editing (Boudon & Sonet 2017). The financing is entrusted to an independent production company responsible for the “completion guarantee,” meaning that it takes on legal, financial, and artistic responsibility for seeing the project through to delivery. To this end, this company secures additional financing, usually through production grants (for example from the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée [French National Centre of Cinema, CNC], domestic tax credits, or regional subsidies), recruits the cast and crew, and oversees the work. It also retains intellectual property rights to the final work, enabling it to market it to various broadcasters over the long term.
- 6 CNC/CSA (Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel), La vidéo à la demande par abonnement en France : marc (...)
- 7 This is a legal framework: the same company may act as an independent producer or commissioned prod (...)
10The projects examined in this study, however, have a somewhat different organizational structure. The streamer acts as an exclusive financier (with the exception of international tax credits) and retains all broadcasting rights.6 The production company thus no longer plays an independent role, but is commissioned.7 It is no longer responsible for the financing of the project, but solely for operations, and its relationship with the broadcaster is limited to a commercial one in exchange for a fixed fee, independent of the success of the production. This gives the broadcaster a stronger commissioner status, closely monitoring the work from an accounting and operational perspective. This commissioned status is not new in itself: it had previously been used for foreign shoots in France, and a handful of French companies (such as Firstep) even specialize in this area. But the streamers have brought in greater use of this legal framework in proportion to the number of shoots, including—and this clarification is important—projects written by locally-based creators.
11Alongside their stronger commissioner status, the streamers have brought in the role of the “showrunner.” This term originated in “quality television”—the high-end series that began to come out of the US in the 2000s (Martin 2016)—to describe the central artistic figure responsible for defining and maintaining the aesthetic direction of a television show across all of its episodes. The showrunner oversees writing, filming, and editing, and may also have shares in production.
12In France, other than a few exceptions, the role of showrunner was not clearly defined until the arrival of the streamers (Rochant 2017). The artistic direction of projects was characterized by a compartmentalized approach to writing, directing, and producing, with the broadcaster retaining a major role in shaping a production and making decisions. In contrast, the projects studied in this article reveal the use of novice showrunners recruited locally after extensive experience in writing or directing French shows. However, the showrunner role is not imported in the same way across the board: among the productions studied, there is a sliding scale in the budgets they are allocated that essentially corresponds to whether the projects were originally conceived in France or the US.
- 8 The production manager represents the production company on set.
13The showrunner of the single-season contemporary drama mini-series Enigme was based in France, and had ten years’ experience directing “quality” television series. SPx gave him his first experience as a showrunner: as part of a six-strong writing team, he oversaw the writing of the four episodes of the mini-series he had developed himself, and then directed them. Overseen by a commissioned production company, the shoot involved a few dozen crew members, plus occasional reinforcements, and around twenty recurring cast members (appearing in at least half of the episodes) alongside a whole host of brief roles. The production manager, who was responsible for coming up with solutions within the budget and regulations,8 explained that the showrunner had a great deal of freedom over everything from casting to storytelling and the length of the episodes (which varied from forty-eight to sixty minutes): “he basically had carte blanche, he could do whatever he wanted with his project.”
- 9 La Fémis is a prestigious film and television school in Paris.
14Similarly, the showrunner for the genre television series Masques was a graduate of La Fémis9 who had previously worked on writing episodes of French television shows and web series. He was in his thirties when SPy agreed to back the first two seasons of a project he had been working on since he was a student, but for which he had not found a broadcaster. Each season consisted of six episodes shot in blocks of two, alternating between a number of different directors and their respective directors of photography. Recurring cast members appeared throughout both seasons, while the crew changed from one season to the next.
15I interviewed the production manager of Masques during filming of the second season. He described how the role of the showrunner on this series was a novelty for him, even though he had over twenty years of experience in the French television industry:
This is the first time I’ve worked with someone who’s a genuine showrunner. On season 1 and season 2. He’s the creator. He’s the creator of the series. […] He brought this idea to [the commissioned production company]… and [they] proposed it… believed in it and proposed it to [SPy]. And [SPy] was immediately interested. […] He [the showrunner] is on set every day. He follows everything. We’re currently shooting block 2 [of season 2], with the second director, so we’re already editing, we’ve already got pre-edits of episodes 1 and 2, the first block. And he’s following the editing and filming in parallel. So there you go. And he’s also writing. On a day-to-day basis, if anything needs to be adapted or changed, he’s the one who handles it. And he’s thinking about continuity, he knows what he wants to do in season 3. So he’s on set to ensure the director doesn’t make any mistakes […] that could have an impact on a final season […]. (Production manager, Masques)
- 10 The sole exception was the second director of photography, who came from another European country.
16The presence of this showrunner at the top of the project’s artistic hierarchy lends credence to the streamers’ promise to support original projects that have been unable to find a home with the national television channels (Baldacchino 2019). However, in the case of the two projects conceived in the US, the streamers had not taken a similar chance on a relative unknown. On Bright, a big-budget period drama shot in Paris, the showrunner was a seasoned US scriptwriter with several Emmy Award and Golden Globe nominations. Although he was the sole writer, he was assisted on direction and photography by a number of North American executives, all with television show expertise. A French director with very strong symbolic legitimacy was brought onboard, and the other department heads were also recruited in France.10 Finally, the showrunner was accompanied by a British producer from a feature film background, to whom the local commissioned production team reported.
17The first assistant director on Bright was also an experienced crew member. At the time of the interview, he had worked in this role for around twenty years on a variety of projects in both film and television, from the highly commercial to the highly auteurist (Duval 2006). His job consisted of day-to-day coordination of the myriad comings and goings of people and equipment, alternating between setting up and filming scenes. Bright had a very large budget: around 150 people were employed on set (in photography, sound, costume and make-up, etc.), along with 300 people off set (in administration, construction, transport, etc.), and some scenes required hundreds of background artists.
18This interviewee confirmed the artistic supremacy of the showrunner, who took precedence over both the British production team and the directors:
The role of showrunner is a kind of director of directors, so there’s a certain sense of needing validation from above. The director is no longer telling me in black and white terms about decisions, what they want, etc., but saying ‘Yes, maybe… to be confirmed’. (First assistant director, Bright)
For the French director of this production, who came from the auteurist tradition and had been hired for his reputation, this reorganization of authority was not without its little clashes of convention: the show’s first assistant director explained that the director’s aesthetic decisions could be queried by the showrunner at any time.
- 11 ARCOM-CNC, Étude sur le tissu économique du secteur…, op. cit., p. 59.
19Whether or not a project is conceived in the US, the artistic supremacy of the showrunner has to accommodate recurring pressures. First, the commissioning streamer determines the budget and deadline for delivery. This latter is set in stone, and therefore constitutes a powerful time pressure on completion of the project. The streamer also decides whether the project will continue from one season to the next. Masques, for example, was abruptly cancelled after the filming of its second season, as were several other projects shot in France around the same time. In spite of their central artistic role, the showrunner has no say on whether or not to continue with the project, which is a discretionary decision made by the commissioner. A show may be cancelled as a result of what are deemed to be inadequate viewing figures. The decision may also be related to the winding up of a policy of trial and error that has enabled the streamer to develop a network of partners and stabilize its ways of working after entering a new territory, before a phase of economic rationalization, with tighter budgets focused on “a less diverse editorial strategy.”11
20Finally, even in artistic terms, there are limits to the central role of the showrunner. In my interviews with an editor and a post-production manager, they described how the commissioning streamer sought to intervene in the editing stage, a crucial phase during which the footage shot takes overall shape. This kind of intervention is not new in itself: it is common for television networks to require changes to dialogue or the plot during editing. But my interviewees described how these demands have ballooned into ten- to fifteen-page reports covering everything from the lighting and framing to the pacing, music, or even acting.
21The central role of the showrunner, however notable, is therefore relative, and sits within a broader power structure. This is shown in Table 1, which presents two different ideal types for hierarchical structures. In both cases, the showrunner is central to the artistic hierarchy, and their origin determines that of the production company and the senior crew. Regardless of where the project is conceived, the broadcaster-financier sits at the top of the hierarchy, and has the final say on both artistic and managerial decisions. For projects developed outside the US, it may be represented by a local office.
Table 1
| Project conceived in the US |
Project conceived in France |
| Broadcaster-financier (streaming platform) |
Broadcaster-financier (streaming platform)
Representative: local office
|
| Artistic oversight |
Managerial oversight |
Artistic oversight |
Managerial oversight |
| US showrunner |
US production company |
Local showrunner |
Local commissioned production company |
| US and/or local director (number may vary) |
Local commissioned production company |
Local director (number may vary) |
Local production manager |
| Local production manager |
| Department heads (mixed or local team) |
Local department heads |
Production Hierarchy by Origin.
Credit: Samuel Zarka.
22From a French perspective, the changes to the organizational model on shoots for streamer-commissioned television series are reflected in a number of different aspects. The first of these are deadlines, which were mentioned in all of the interviews and unanimously considered to be very tight. This time pressure not only produces a “dread of making a mistake and causing a delay” (Cardona Gil 2023) characteristic of television productions, but is also accompanied by demands for cinema quality. While the shooting schedule is optimized in order to meet deadlines, recurring contingencies—in particular script delays—get in the way, and operations and financial management on the shoot are subjected to close scrutiny. This results in more arduous working conditions, but also prompts learning to develop coping strategies.
23Shooting higher quality material in a short space of time requires an optimized shooting schedule. Here, the first assistant director plays a key organizational role. Before the shoot begins, they are responsible for drawing up this schedule, which contains all the essential information for each day’s shoot, including the date, location, set, scene number, actors, background artists, special effects, equipment, props, and additional crew. This document is key to collective organization, and used as a reference by all of the technical departments. During the shoot, the first assistant director is responsible for coordination on the set in conjunction with their team: a second assistant director in charge of background artists, and several third assistant directors responsible for supporting the lead actors. Their job is to enable the director to focus on the business of directing (cutting, camera placement and movement, and working with the actors).
24The first assistant director on Bright thus described himself as the “guardian of time.” But on this project he had to grapple with a demand he had never faced before: to produce cinema quality in terms of the acting, photography, and set design, but on a television production schedule. He considered this to be an impossible ask, insofar as “time is the difference between television and cinema” (first assistant director, Bright). What makes high-end television series unique is that they maintain artistic standards that traditional television productions tend to forego because of deadline constraints.
25This tension is expressed in “useable minutes,” the term used in the industry for the amount of useable footage shot each day. The first assistant director on Bright provided two points of reference: a “well-financed” one-and-a-half hour French film aims to shoot two to three minutes of useable material a day, and a “normal” television drama around five minutes a day. The television series studied in this article sit somewhere in between, with each episode presented as a “short feature film” lasting between fifty and sixty minutes, shot at a brisk pace and linked together to form a season. On the Bright shoot, this tempo had to be reconciled with the commissioning streamer’s “sky-high expectations” (first assistant director, Bright) for symbolic and commercial pay-off from the project due to its big budget and prestigious cast. The production company, which had experience of foreign-financed projects, therefore employed several hundred people on the shoot, and the first assistant director had expanded his team to nine people instead of the usual three or four.
26The same production company oversaw Country, another period television drama with an international cast, and a larger crew than the French norm. The set management team, for example, was based on the US model: rather than using a single multi-skilled team as would usually be the case in France, five separate teams were recruited to manage transport, accommodation, supplies, set design, and health and safety.
27These sizeable crews are employed for several months, working to a schedule comparable to the “manufacturing flow” used for daily soap operas in France (Mille 2018), which was hitherto the most advanced model for combining writing, preparation, filming, post-production, and broadcasting without down-time. The first season of Bright adopted this flow model by alternating preparation and filming over ten and a half consecutive months (Figure 1), but with a budget and aesthetic ambitions on a wholly different scale to a television soap.
Figure 2
Bright, Ten-Episode Shoot.
Credit: Samuel Zarka.
28The ten episodes were shot in blocks of two, with two directing teams alternating work on each block. My interviewee, the “main first assistant director,” was responsible for the start, middle, and end of the shoot, and was given around three months to prepare the first block, including location scouting, script breakdown, and devising the shooting schedule. He described this as “relatively comfortable.” Once the six-week shoot was underway, the second directing team began preparing for the second block.
The day after my final day of shooting on the first block, the very next day, I started preparing the next one and they [the second team] started shooting. […] So I did six weeks of filming, six weeks of prep, six weeks of filming, six weeks of prep, six weeks of filming. (First assistant director, Bright)
Each directing team alternated between shooting and preparation up to the end.
29In contrast, the production teams (cameras, sound, set design, etc.) remained the same from one block to the next. In order to avoid down-time of crew and hired equipment (such as cameras) and shooting locations, the production company
doesn’t give the crew a day’s break, and they don’t go back to prep, they carry on with different [directing] teams and different directors. So in total, I think they do 156 consecutive days of shooting. (First assistant director, Bright)
To make this work, crews have a fifty-hour working week, with day-to-day variations depending on the team and specific role (for example based on the set-up time at the start of the day). The department heads are particularly prone to extensive “temporal availability” (Bouffartigue & Bouteiller 2003) beyond the hours they officially work, putting in extra hours at the beginning and end of the day, or at weekends. Here again, while this temporal availability for work is not in itself new in relation to practices in the French film and television industries, prestige television series have brought in a more intense flow of people, objects, and situations that have to be managed over long periods of time, while handling contingencies.
30Script delays are a recurring problem on television series, with knock-on effects for optimization of the production schedule. These delays involve delivery of the screenplay and technical information relating to sets, costumes, background artists, and special effects, which are needed by the directing teams to prepare upcoming scenes. They have to be handled on top of the contingencies inherent in the television and film industry, such as technical delays, unforeseen problems with the working environment, and adverse weather. On Bright, the longer the shoot went on, the longer the showrunner and production company took to make these documents available.
To begin with, I had [the scripts for] first two episodes, so I could prepare. The next two were handled by [first name], the other assistant director, but there was a delay, which obviously means that you not only have less prep time, but also episodes are still in development, are being changed and modified, which eats further into your limited prep time due to missing scripts, gaps, and so on. By the time I got to prep for the final block, i.e., the final two episodes, episodes nine and ten, I felt pushed to the limit, and found myself going into preparation, six weeks of preparation, with months of work already behind me and feeling exhausted… And I didn’t have the scripts. I had a rough idea of what was going to happen, but I didn’t have the scripts. How are you supposed to prepare properly when the deadline is already too tight? (First assistant director, Bright)
31Pending delivery of the scripts, the rest of the shoot had to be planned “in a vacuum” (first assistant director, Bright), with the exception of certain elements that would remain the same, such as the main sets. When the scripts finally arrived, the first assistant director found himself “essentially preparing a six-week shoot of an extremely ambitious period drama in just three weeks.” Some of the preparations therefore had to be carried over to the shoot itself, resulting in “excessive workload, bursts of activity, that kind of thing,” while having to allow for “last-minute changes made for the ‘aesthetic quality’ of the series” (first assistant director, Bright).
- 12 Observation of the round table “Anatomie d’une collaboration. Le décor d’Emily in Paris” [Anatomy o (...)
32The increased formalization of the schedule of work is thus accompanied by a disorganization of the phases of work, which overlap rather than follow on from one another. In the view of the first assistant director on Bright, these overlaps were caused by an earlier problem: just as the streamer greenlit the production based on one version of the script, the showrunner took it upon himself to rewrite the project. While this might be considered a one-off, similar problems have been observed with other series, such as Emily in Paris.12 It was also the case with the mini-series Enigme. The production manager for this show, who came from a background in the film industry, faced similarly overlapping phases of work: “As we started preparation, we began location scouting, casting, and writing at the same time. We had to start shooting three months later. It’s really stressful, really so stressful.” Using a flow model for the writing and production of entire seasons thus exposes crews to endemic coordination problems. This leads to work intensification, which is compounded by the streamer’s continuous monitoring of the project and the increase in reporting requirements.
33One final aspect of the pressures on work characteristic of productions commissioned by streamers is their close monitoring of operations and spending. This monitoring not only involves the production company (Stephan 2023), but also makes major demands of the on-set administrative team. The production manager of Enigme—which was her first project for a streaming platform—described the time-consuming nature of providing financial reports for contacts in Britain and the US. As part of this, she had to make allowances for the fact that the people receiving these reports “don’t necessarily understand production in France, of how a film is made here.” This spatial and professional distance applies equally to accounting conventions and working practices in different countries. Preparing the necessary documentation in different languages, accompanied by explanatory tables and notes, represented substantial extra work for a small team of assistants: “We’re not set up for this, we’re not used to it” (production manager, Enigme). In particular, this work eats into the time usually spent managing the set, for example liaising with the director and the crew, resolving problems, and overseeing working conditions. This production manager described it as “a baptism of fire,” and “a rather rude introduction for everyone.”
34But she also explained how she had learned from this experience. On her next project, for another streamer, she was planning to expand her team to “four, five, or six” assistants, instead of the two or three typical on “major feature films,” in a bid to cope with the increased administrative burden. Similarly, on Masques, a “line producer” was recruited to act as a continuous liaison between the commissioning streamer and the French crews. This position, which originated in the US, is senior to the production manager, and is designed to implement a Hollywood-style organization of work (Szczepanik 2016). A line producer was also employed on Country. Meanwhile, the casting, costume, and set management teams on this show employed coordinators to handle all administrative liaison tasks on behalf of the crew. The set management team, for example, which is responsible for ensuring that the shooting location is accessible and has everything in place ready for filming, had a set coordinator who managed the daily flow and compliance of an array of administrative paperwork (including agreements, purchase orders, and invoices) between her team, the crew department heads (photography, set design, etc.), service providers (equipment, supplies, etc.) and production companies (French, British, and US).
I pick up anything that’s a time suck. So they [the set management team] can focus on their job. It’s tedious, but when you’re an assistant [set manager] and you turn up with your team on a shoot, you don’t want to be worrying about whether the owner is up to speed, whether all the paperwork has been signed, and whether you’re going to be told “yes, but you haven’t paid for that.” Nope, they turn up, they have the keys, and they can get to work with peace of mind. (Set coordinator, Country)
35This provides an example of the accentuated division of administrative labour brought about by the streaming platforms, in a bid to reduce the mental load on the technical crew. This organizational change is contributing to an increase in the size of crews as sectoral working standards are redefined across the board, beyond individual shoots.
36Beyond individual shoots, the rise of streamer-financed television series is challenging the “norms of reciprocity” (Alter 2012) that have hitherto linked work collectives with production companies at the sectoral level. Previously, the uncertainty about the future characteristic of discontinuous employment (Mias & Samak 2022) meant that crew members were accustomed to having to take the first decent job they were offered (especially in terms of wage), but they are now able to choose from a range of different opportunities. This shift in favour of employees’ ability to choose between different projects must be weighed up against the sustainability of working conditions and pay on streamer-commissioned series in France, in light of developments in the US.
37In the view of the Enigme production manager, investment by the streamers had undoubtedly resulted in an increase in job opportunities:
The most obvious change, which has taken place over the last two or three years with the arrival of the streaming platforms, is the sheer amount of work. It’s very noticeable. I must get calls offering me projects at least two or three times a week.
- 13 ARCOM and CNC, Étude sur le tissu économique du secteur de la production audiovisuelle, 7th edition (...)
38This observation should, however, be put in context. The French broadcast regulator ARCOM13 has highlighted how streamers often employ department heads from the film industry, as was the case with this particular production manager, and the increased number of projects that tie up crew for several months also necessarily result in a scarcity of people with these skills, causing an increase in demand. Informal chats I had with crew members further suggest that this growth in employment is having a much bigger effect in the Île-de-France (Paris) region, where the majority of producers and employees are based, compared with other regions. At the time of my study, trade unions were reporting labour shortages concentrated in certain roles, including production administrators and set builders.
39This relative growth in labour demand is substantially improving the capacity of workers who benefit from it to take their pick from among a range of projects. The Enigme production manager also told me that: “There’s a huge amount of work, so it’s definitely […] more enjoyable, because we really get to choose our projects.” In a reversal of the usual recruitment norms, the worker who is approached chooses their employer, rather than the other way round. They are free to consider a range of different criteria for accepting a job, not only the pay but also the intrinsic interest of the project on the offer, the opportunity to work with a well-known department head, the chance to try out new techniques, the opportunity to take on more responsibility given the difficulty employers have in recruiting, and whether the non-coincidence of the contract period with planned holiday dates.
40As employees become choosier about the projects they work on, the streamers are attempting to appeal to them with a promise of social and symbolic appreciation. As part of Micro-Salon 2023, a trade show dedicated to photography and sound in film and television, I attended a talk with a screening by Matias Boucard, director of photography on the feature film Athena, a Netflix production directed by Romain Gavras. Boucard explained to a packed room of around two hundred camera operators how this production had presented him and his team with unusual technical and aesthetic challenges. Testimony of this kind, in relation to a film that received widespread publicity on its release, enables the streaming platform to position itself as being on the side of, and supporting, the technical elite.
41This is not an empty promise. Several of the crew members I interviewed described their experience of working for the streamers in terms of technical and artistic feats. They included the first assistant director on Bright, who derived immense symbolic gratification from reconstructing a historical scene set in 1940s Paris.
When you block off an entire area of Paris, redo all the shop fronts, bring in vehicles, three hundred background artists all in made-to-measure costumes, and suddenly it all comes to life, and you see a street in Paris looking like “what it was supposed to look like during the period,” it’s exhilarating. […] I love it when it comes to life and it works. It’s rather fun, you see. Since it’s my job to ensure that it comes to life, yes, I enjoy it. […] It’s incredibly intense to coordinate, but you also get these wonderful moments. Do they look good on screen? I’ve no idea. But they’re also wonderful moments to experience, you know, to be recreated, and that’s what I’m interested in. (First assistant director, Bright)
42This standout moment should not be seen as being in contrast to everyday production, since the latter also holds potential for symbolic gratification. With the directing teams alternating from one block to the next, and the showrunner constantly coming and going from one area of work to another, it is down to the crew, who remain the same throughout, to ensure consistency in the aesthetic decisions made over time. The costume designer for Emily in Paris put it in these terms:
- 14 Observation of the round table “Anatomie d’une collaboration. Le décor d’Emily in Paris,” Productio (...)
In a way, it’s the costume and set departments that hold the “bible” for the director coming into the series. Because on Emily in Paris, we [the costume and set departments] know the aesthetic, since we’ve been creating it since season 1. So we’re kind of the experts for all the directors who come in—it’s a different way of working.14
This de facto, rather than formal, aesthetic responsibility contributes to professional engagement with the work (Bidet 2011).
43However, this increase in job opportunities is also accompanied by a trial of credibility: one that might be described as a “challenge-trial” [épreuve défi] (Martuccelli 2015), which consists of responding to an unprecedented set of pressures. This is particularly true with the first contract of this kind, since it is important to “show that you know how to work” (first assistant director, Bright), and “show that you’re effective” (production manager, Enigme). While the challenge may be individual, it is also a collective one, as it is the future chances of re-employment for the profession as a whole, within its territorial base, that are at stake.
44Given the intensification of working periods, this demonstration of professionalism is not without its health risks. This issue was explicitly brought up by the first assistant director on Bright: “On this show, for example, we were filming with shoulder-mounted cameras all the time, and we literally broke several camera operators, they couldn’t continue.” The flipside of freedom to choose one’s period of employment is that, once a job is accepted, everything else has to be set aside for several months: “We haven’t even mentioned all the repercussions it can have on your personal life—for this whole time, you don’t exist” (first assistant director, Bright). These long working hours raise questions among department heads about their responsibility for the health of their teams: “On Enigme, I was angry with myself for having put myself… well, I was angry that everyone was so on edge, that I was overworked” (production manager, Enigme).
45It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the advent of the streamers has prompted renewed discussions about working conditions for crew at the national and European level.15 A collective conversation is being held about how to support decent working conditions while continuing to meet the quality requirements. To this end, the European Federation for Costume and Production Design (Artscenico) suggests distinguishing between three types of production design team, ranging in size and structure from twelve to thirty-six roles (with duplication if necessary), based on the budget of the project and the scale of its international distribution.16 On shoots, the organizational learning discussed above is already helping to limit the harmful effects of work intensification, provided that the production budget is adequate: by using bigger crews, rotating crew, and avoiding exceeding daily working hours, particularly among off-set crew (for example in costume or set design), since this practice is more difficult on the set itself, which imposes its working hours on the entire work collective.
46These conversations also concern pay. In France, these discussions are being echoed by professional associations for crew, which have sprung up since the 1990s to represent most professions in the film and television industry (from scriptwriters to props managers and editors). They often produce charters of best practice, and provide opportunities for socializing within the profession. In October 2021, eighteen of these associations issued a joint open letter to production companies on the subject of pay. This action echoed the strike notice issued a few weeks earlier by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the union representing film and television crews in the US. In response to the pressures exerted on working conditions and pay by broadcasters, and in particular streamers, the IATSE drew on its powerful union base (Kleingartner 2001) to secure for all union members, by collective agreement, elements as basic as “reasonable rest periods,” “meal breaks” and wage increases for those at the bottom of the pay scale.17
47In France, the industrial relations system is characterized by the extension of collective agreements to employees across each branch of the industry (film or television), even if they are not union members. As such, the professional associations support a number of different trade unions representing crew, which are the only ones entitled to negotiate agreements with the employers’ federations (Zarka 2022). In their letter to production companies, these associations drew a link between a “heightened competitive environment” and “the lack of preparation time, compressed shooting times, and undersized crews, resulting in excessive working hours and unreasonable demands on available energies.”18 They argued that these pressures justified an increase in the minimum wage defined in the collective agreement for the television industry,19 as these minimum levels closely determine actual wages. Industry professionals wanted the pay levels set out in this collective agreement, known as the USPA agreement (after the Union syndicale de la production audiovisuelle, the main employers’ federation in the sector), to reflect the fact they were being asked to produce higher quality within tight timescales.
- 20 ARCOM and CNC, Étude sur le tissu économique du secteur…, op. cit., p. 63.
48At the time this letter was published, the streamers were recruiting people from the film industry, meaning that some were able to negotiate their terms of employment on an individual basis. Some employees succeeded in obtaining pay increases of between 10% to 20%, depending on their role, bringing them into line with film wages, which are higher than those in television. However, these individual compromises have been made neither general nor permanent: in response to pay inflation, commissioners and producers have in fact tended to be “more careful” and to seek to “educate” crews, stressing the economic heterogeneity of projects in order to adjust wages accordingly.20
49In the summer of 2023, as the writers’ strike began in the US, a number of French associations renewed their demands, with backing from the unions. They included the Association Française des Cadreurs et Cadreuses de Steadicam (French Steadicam Operators Association, AFCS), which published the following statement on its website in July21:
At our level, we are concerned about the use of the USPA agreement on shoots with a budget and artistic and technical expectations far in excess of the type of projects for which this agreement was introduced. We hope that the industrial action launched in the US will serve as a basis for discussions to improve relations with production companies in France as well, for projects commissioned for streaming platforms with international distribution.
50This demonstrates the construction of similar pay issues in France and the US. In France, these demands were further fuelled by high inflation, and culminated in a call for strike action from 15 November 2023, led by the sectoral wing of the CGT general trade union. The strikers sought a 20% increase in pay in the film and television sectors (to cover cumulative inflation since the early 2000s) as the first step in a broader discussion about working conditions. The action was spearheaded by crews working on dramas for streaming platforms and television networks, with post-production teams and other areas of the television industry (documentaries and entertainment shows) following in their wake. Like other examples of mobilization in the television industry (Percival & Lee 2020), the scattered nature of work collectives across multiple sites was compensated for by extensive use of social media (WhatsApp and Telegram) to synchronize strike days, alternating with resumption of work. A series of rallies and general meetings were held until late December 2023, with peak action on 23 and 24 November, when eighty-six crews were on stoppage or on strike simultaneously.
- 22 In France, trade union representativeness is assessed through regular professional elections (at th (...)
- 23 The conflicting union positions on this agreement were made explicit at a hearing of the various un (...)
51The strike led to the signing of an agreement by several employee unions and production federations on 18 January 2024. This controversial agreement has been rejected by the CGT, supported by a majority of the crews involved in the action, even though it did not have majority union representation status in this sector at the time.22 While the agreement includes increases in pay, particularly for those at the bottom of the scale it also provides for in-depth negotiations aimed at differentiating wages according to genres (drama, documentaries, and entertainment shows), and thus opens the door to widening pay gaps.23 Another consequence of the arrival of streaming platforms in France has thus been disruption to the system of industrial relations, putting the norms of reciprocity between work and pay on an uncertain trajectory.
52Work conventions in the film and television industries have long been subjected to change, as demonstrated by the transition of the various professions to digital since the 2000s (Barnier, Bonhomme & Kitsopanidou 2019). But what strikes employees working on their first shoot for a streamer in France is the sudden, wholescale change in the production model, particularly on drama series. The streamers are intensifying the existing trend for offshoring US-developed productions, and importing their ways of working: acting as exclusive financiers, and using commissioned production companies to oversee the work as service providers. They also bring with them the powerful role of the showrunner, who sits above the directing teams in the production hierarchy. Finally, they are also having an effect on the organization of work, due to the pressure to combine higher quality than in traditional television productions with tighter deadlines than in film.
53The decline in linear television broadcasting (Le Champion 2019) thus contrasts with the increasingly linear nature of production, with preparation and filming alternating over several months with no down-time. This flow of activity causes recurrent coordination problems. In addition to the initial unpreparedness of crews for the scale and duration of the work, there is a more structural reason for these problems: script delays, which result in an overlap between phases that are supposed to follow one from one another (writing, location scouting, casting, building the first sets, and shooting). This results in work intensification, with crews seeking a balance between excessive work and practices to moderate the physical and mental load. In addition, administrative liaison between the commissioner and the production crew is increasingly delegated to specialist teams.
54Beyond individual shoots, this disruption to work conventions is also affecting the norms of reciprocity governing the relations between production companies and employees at the sectoral level. While investment by the streamers in the local job market is strengthening the ability of employees to choose between different projects, and encouraging upward negotiations on pay, acceptance of a job also instigates a kind of professional trial, in which the individual and collective reputation of workers in their territory are at stake. In France, this trial is prompting crew, via their professional associations and trade unions, to ask questions about the sustainability—in terms of both health and pay—of the boom in activity driven by the streaming platforms. The emergence of the streamers has thus precipitated the expression of a collective revendication in a bid to redefine the pay standards that can be considered normal given the responsibilities taken on by employees, in conjunction with the mobilization taking place at the same time in the US. This case study therefore enabled us to examine the conditions for the stabilization of productive coordinations at the transnational level, but also the circulation of collective conflicts in the age of the shift to digital and to streaming in film and television production.