Why are playwrights moving to TV writing — and do the two mediums need to be feuding?

After a second season filled with turmoil, HBO's Euphoria began its penultimate episode last Sunday with an old-fashioned respite: a luxe, orchestral overture held on the screen for a full minute before launching into Lexie Howard's (Maude Apatow) highly anticipated autobiographical school play, as if the viewers at home were taking their seats and tucking away their programmes.

Capping off the season with the most lavish high school production in recent TV history brought enough treats for a theatre fan to supersede any of the interpersonal drama unfolding between the characters — the egregiously detailed sets, the chaos backstage, that locker room scene, and a revolve (a revolve!). Even the penultimate episode title, "The Theater and Its Double," comes from French dramatist Antonin Artaud, who — aptly, if you're familiar with the show's subject matter — founded the theatrical movement "Theatre of Cruelty."

These dramatic influences aren't surprising if you've been following Euphoria consultant and co-producer Jeremy O. Harris on Twitter. Earlier this month, Harris — a Yale-trained playwright who has merged the Broadway success of his hit Slave Play with high-profile film and TV gigs — took to Twitter to comment on the perceived trend of high-budget TV hiring writers with theatrical backgrounds to, in his view, "elevate" their programs.

With that, Harris sparked a feud between TV writers and playwrights, and for anyone remotely connected to either world, the heated debate took over timelines for a few days. But for Canadian writers, a passionate response didn't come in defence of either form, but over the fact that it's a conversation at all.

"It's just not cool to say, 'We are better than you are, we're going to elevate the medium,'" says Andrea Scott, a Toronto-based playwright and TV writer. "But [the reaction] has shown that there has been a bit of resentment. It's not warranted because playwrights becoming TV writers isn't new, not even close."

Ever since Paddy Chayefsky's work in the "Golden Age of Television" in the 1950s, writers have hopped between the two forms. That line is especially blurry in Canada, where a transition from theatre into TV is almost inevitable for most writers, either for professional development, financial stability, or both.

Moving into TV writing was certainly good timing for Scott, who just finished a contract writing on Murdoch Mysteries, a gig that got her through most of the pandemic when theatres shut down. A regularly produced playwright for over a decade, Scott is still completing plays as in her Tarragon Theatre residency and premiering new works — like Controlled Damage, which opened to sell-out audiences in Halifax in February 2020. However, Scott felt the reality of the life of a professional playwright when three and a half years of work on her play Every Day She Rose, which was met with critical acclaim, netted her $1500.

"It was sobering," she says. "[TV writing] has been a complete change in my life. That is for sure."

Why would a playwright not want to do what they love but for more money and in a way that allows their work to be seen by a much wider audience?- Keavy Lynch, playwright and writer

"Theatre commissions are woefully inadequate for the amount of work involved, and the reality is you don't start making money until the play has had a number of productions," says writer Rose Napoli. "I've only been writing television now for a few years. But I will say when I made the decision to take the leap, many of my playwright pals were happily there with open arms to welcome me."

Scott and Napoli aren't alone by far. Even for younger writers like Keavy Lynch, a coordinator and writer on shows like Coroner and Pretty Hard Cases, the switch from theatre to TV had "a career ladder that actually makes sense — I could earn a living from day one, working in writers' rooms and learning from other incredible writers."

"Interestingly, I've gotten to work with a lot more of my theatre heroes working in TV than I ever did working in theatre."

"It obviously has an appeal," says Hannah Moscovitch, one of the country's most prolific contemporary playwrights who also has experience in writing for radio dramas and opera. Moscovitch has written for TV for the past nine years, even breaking into the bigger U.S. market.

"It's a huge medium if you want your work to be seen very broadly. Pay scales can be ridiculously high. And, when I started, it was a 'golden age' of TV and suddenly the storytelling was super complex, character-driven, and original, and that appealed to me aesthetically."

But even if it's not a new concept for playwrights to get jobs writing on TV shows, it is true that a recent crop of titles like Euphoria have had distinctly theatrical elements, with some major dramatic credits to boast. Lynn Nottage took her two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning flare for dialogue to the 2017 reboot of She's Gotta Have It; Michaela Coel turned a play into her TV series Chewing Gum and then created I May Destroy You; Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag was famously adapted from her solo show of the same name. The wildly buzzy third season of Succession wore its writers' room full of playwrights proudly — the plot clearly borrows from Greek tragedy and Shakespearean intrigue, and its dialogue-heavy style comes exactly from a playwright's biggest strength. 

"It's not a new thing. But I do think that a lot more established writers are writing for television right now," says Anusree Roy, a Dora Award-winning playwright with TV credits on Remedy, Killjoys, Nurses, and Transplant. Roy just started a writers' room for a show in development — half of which are fellow playwrights.

"When you bring a theatre person into the writers' room, they understand character. Theatre writers understand characters' motivations; theatre writers understand kinds of conflict built out of characters wanting something that they don't have," says Romeo Candido, who began his career making theatre in Toronto before moving into TV production, writing, and now showrunning — his digital series Topline premieres on CBC this year. (Full disclosure: Candido is a former employee of CBC Arts.)

All of the playwrights-turned-TV-writers I spoke with cite a grasp of character, dialogue, and theme as the edge of a playwright moving into new mediums. Conversely, the skill of a career TV writer is structure, plot, visual storytelling, and the more methodical, collaborative process of TV production.

Of course, streaming networks have fundamentally shifted how viewers consume TV — and, as a result, how it's written and created, opening up opportunities for writers of different backgrounds to embrace the qualities of theatre as well as film, visual art, and literature in their TV work. 

"I think it's exciting that we're talking about it more in the open, questioning and challenging what we can do with the format of television," says Tabia Lau, a Toronto-based playwright and writer on the CBC and Netflix show Fakes. "It's exciting to be writing in a time when everyone's always looking for something new."

Lynch agrees, especially for younger writers establishing a career: "More and more playwrights are realizing that we are making some pretty amazing television nowadays, and why would a playwright not want to do what they love but for more money and in a way that allows their work to be seen by a much wider audience?"

Candido maintains that theatre "has always been a place where auteurs can thrive because you can write a script, write a grant application, and find a stage. There are no barriers to entry other than your own confidence." Still, it's only recently that those barriers in theatre, and even more so in TV, have opened to stories that actually look like Canada's population, leading to some of the country's biggest televised successes that happen to come from the stage — like Trey Anthony's Da Kink in My Hair, Ins Choi's Kim's Convenience, and Bilal Baig's Sort Of (whose second season was officially announced last week).

"The reason I expanded into TV, in absolute honesty, is because I wanted to see diverse stories onscreen and I wanted to see people of colour who are speaking their own language and telling their own stories," says Roy. "What I'm really looking forward to now is getting my own show produced where I can authentically give voice to my own people. So when it's my time, I can bring forth all the things I've learned, from any medium, in my toolkit."

"There's absolutely no reason for there to be any division between feature writers and TV writers and playwrights," says Scott. "It's all the same continuum. It's very hard work. But we all want to do the same thing, which is to tell stories that unite all of us."