Film & TV Writer Kayla Alpert Discusses The Changing Face Of The Biz

Known for her work on Wednesday, Emily In Paris, and Code Black, prolific film and television writer Kayla Alpert spoke with Creative Screenwriting Magazine about building and sustaining a career in a business which has dramatically changed since she started.

“I started as a staff writer on a sketch show called All That in 1994,” recalls Alpert. She had a writing partner at the time and together they submitted a bunch of sketch writing samples and got the job. This role lasted around ten weeks and things took off from there.

“I tend to write things that are darkly funny and darkly satirical, and I tend to have a strong emotional base. This is not necessarily reflected in all the TV shows I’ve been on, but the personal projects that I’ve done or the pilots that I’ve written, some of which never have seen the light of day.”

Breaking In

Back in the day, it was the assistant’s route or submissions to getting staffed on a television show. Although these routes are still viable, now there are a range of contests and more networking opportunities both online and in person. “You have so much access to getting your material seen or read or making a voice for yourself on X [formerly Twitter], Instagram or TikTok.”

Alpert also notes, “Writing for television and feature films are two very different career tracks. And, within television, writing comedy and drama are also two very different tracks.”

Broadly speaking, there are fewer features being made, especially in the comedy space. “The development arms of the studios have shrunk, so they’re not buying many specs and they’re generally not making many movies outside of big IP brands or sequels,” she continues. “And those tend to be written by writers that are very established who they know.”

Kayla Alpert specifically came to Los Angeles to write sitcoms. “There were dozens of them on broadcast television. One route to getting into that would be being a writer’s assistant on a show. Those rooms were big and had ten to twelve writers in them.”

“There was definitely a sense of community, schmoozing, and networking. People got to know you. And if they were in a comedy room, maybe they would get you hired. I think there weren’t as many stand-up comedians becoming TV comedy writers back then.”

Broadly speaking, the legacy broadcast networks used to have multiple shows with giant staffs that would be hired for most of the year. In sharp contrast, the streamers have much smaller staffs and shorter hiring windows nowadays.

“I had dinner last night with Diane English who created Murphy Brown. And she was saying her sweet spot was seven writers for a writers’ room,” mentions Alpert.

Kayla Alpert got her start in comedy, but went on to work a range of TV shows across other genres. “I’m a fairly atypical writer and I’ve written in so many different genres that don’t seem to have any connective tissue. I’m not a certain kind of writer.” She doesn’t perceive her non-specificity to genre to be an obstacle. “I’ve grown as a writer. I’ve learned how to understand story. I understand theme, I understand plot, and I understand character. You take those very basic tools and you apply them to any television show.”

Writing for television isn’t a simple matter of slotting into a writers’ room for your episode(s) and then leaving after you’ve written your script. “I didn’t just write an episode of Emily in Paris. I worked on the show for six months, breaking the whole first season,” she says.

Kayla Alpert has worked her way to producer status which comes with additional responsibilities. There are different titles in the writing ranks such as staff writer, story editor, executive story editor, co-producer, producer, supervising producer, co-executive producer, and second producer. “And obviously, most of it is just writing.”

“I was an executive producer on Wednesday, but the show was shot in Romania so I didn’t go to set. Even though I had a huge hand in the voice of the show, I wasn’t necessarily boots on the ground. Whereas with Code Black, I was a supervising producer and I had a much more producorial role and I was on set all the time, in casting sessions and working with the different directors, the DP and the wardrobe and the props people and the actors,” Alpert elaborates.

How The Business Has Changed

Kayla Alpert notes that these on-set opportunities are rapidly diminishing for writers, especially in the streaming world. “Writers don’t get the opportunity to be producers as much. And that is an incredibly valuable experience.” It also allows writers to exercise more control over how their words are realized on screen. Broadcasters used to allow writers to go on set and produce their own episodes with greater frequency.

Another marked change in the television writing landscape is that TV writers can rise up the career ranks much faster and they may work on several shows in a year, especially in the streaming world. This can be both a blessing and a curse.

“They’re moving up a level quickly, they get to co-executive producer level, yet they’ve never even been on a set. And I think, look, in some ways, they’re getting over their skis, They don’t actually have the production experience, or even the writers’ room experience, that they should have at that level. It’s a very strange conundrum,” cautions Alpert.

“I think that’s also a function of the streamers treating writers as a kind of chattel. We’re just shipped in for the writers’ room and then shipped out.” Due to substantially shorter hiring seasons, there are also reduced opportunities for writers to do polishes and rewrites. There’s little, if any, time to fully process studio, producer and showrunner notes. If a writer is allowed on set, they’re faced with the issue of bring asked to fix a scene which may not need fixing.

“The main actor comes to and says, ‘I don’t like this scene. I don’t want to say this, or this doesn’t make sense to me. You’ve got to, after all of that work, be able to think on the fly.” On other occasions, a showrunner or director might simply change their minds and request something new.

Furthermore, production schedules have been increasingly compressed so there is minimal time for read-throughs and rehearsals when story issues should be addressed.

Enjoying a sustainable writing career is becoming increasingly difficult in the current climate. Some writers have pivoted sideways to writing for podcasts, graphic novels, books, and comics.

“IP is still king right now and I think if you can go back and create your own IP you’re in a better position to be able to make some money and turn it into something bigger.”

Alpert’s career has spanned almost three decades and has witnessed big swings in the types of TV shows being made. “Times are different now. Concerns are different now, so there’s going to be a natural progression.”

She’s also seen that networks are take a lot more creative chances along with more inclusivity and diversity. “I think it’s much needed; hearing different voices, different tones, and different kinds of storytelling.”

Years ago broadcast shows had to appeal to a very wide audience and advertisers. “Now things have become much more niche so you’re able to write things that are edgier and weirder.” The advent of shorter seasons also facilities being able to take bigger creative swings. “It gives you freedom to go a little crazy in a way that maybe writing twenty-two episodes of television would be harder to do.” This trend started during cable television and continued through into streaming.

“I remember watching Breaking Bad and having my mind blown. I remember watching The Shield, where it feels for a moment like a police procedural, and then the police kill one of their own in the pilot. I don’t think enough people talk about how groundbreaking that particular show was. It introduced us to the anti-hero.”

What Kind Of Writing Excites Kayla Alpert?

We asked Kayla what separates good writing from the great. “Surprise and tone. I think that is a very tricky thing to do. And it’s not just about a plot twist either, but a surprising kind of character, a surprising plot twist, a surprising moment, a surprising way of getting into a world.”

Alpert also advises writers to read a lot of scripts of the TV shows and films they love. “I probably read six or seven scripts of other TV shows, movies, and things that I like, just to get me back in the mode. People with different prose styles, people have different ways of describing things, different ways of moving between scenes, different ways of characters interacting, different kinds of dialogue styles. It’s really helpful to see it on the page because watching a movie and reading its script are two very different experiences.”

Kayla Alpert is fortunate to have a consistent work history. The projects that she turns down are those that don’t speak to her on a personal level. They don’t excite her. “I think you just have to find the thing that speaks to you personally and make it your own. It’s very rare that you find something that immediately connects with how you’re feeling at the time, but you write the best script that you can.”

“I just saw Barbie. I’m excited to go see Oppenheimer. Two totally different projects written by two different people. But you might come out of Barbie saying, ‘I wanna write something like this. But then you come out of Oppenheimer, and say, ‘I wanna write something like that.’ And there isn’t necessarily any causal or topical link between the two. But why couldn’t a writer write both of those things?”

Greta Gerwich may not have been the obvious choice to write and direct Barbie. “But she found what spoke to her about the doll, about the experience of the doll, about the experience of being a woman, about the experience of being a wife, about the experience of being a mother, about the experience of being a career woman, and she figured out a way to make that story both so personal to her and universally delightful to everybody else.”

Another writer may have decided that Barbie represents a kind of plastic ideal anti-feminist sort of trash and focus solely on that.