TV writers, like all of us, are developing a love-hate relationship with Zoom ~ USA Latest Games

ATX TV's panel on writers' room Zooms: From L to R, top row: IndieWire's Ben Travers (moderator), Sera Gamble (Netflix's You), Dan Goor (Brooklyn Nine-Nine). Bottom row: Melinda Hsu Taylor (Nancy Drew) and Beth Schwartz (Sweettooth)

Every week now seems to bring news of another Hollywood project being delayed. Sometimes this is because you can't make money in an empty theater, but it's just as often due to production halts in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. While most of that industry hits pause for now, one crucial segment has not—the writers. Like many of us, they've instead become intimately familiar with the inner workings of on-the-job Zoom calls.

"I kind of feel for every aspiring TV writer at home right now due to the pandemic," said Sera Gamble, showrunner of Netflix's You (formerly of Supernatural and The Magicians), during this year's online-only edition of the ATX TV Festival. "They're trying to write while doing a bunch of other stuff; well, congrats, you're now in showrunner training. I've frequently had to sit down in the past and rewrite a script in a moment that felt like a severe crisis, and sometimes it was a severe crisis. But it feels like that times 10. I have to reset expectations every morning: I wake up, wait a minute before checking my phone, check in with loved ones, and then take the problems of the day as they come... [I tell my writers] 'You can't solve what you can't solve, so what can we get done in the next hour?'"

For this late-addition panel to this year's ATX TV Festival, Gamble (virtually) joined Dan Goor (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Parks and Rec), Melinda Hsu Taylor (Nancy Drew, Lost), and Beth Schwartz (Sweet Tooth, Arrow) to take streamers "Inside the Writers (Zoom) Room." For some, the change came abruptly. Hsu Taylor and her staff had nearly completed both writing and production on the latest season of Nancy Drew when suddenly they had to convert everything to be remote-friendly (she credits doing a Zoom birthday for her son around that time for helping her grasp the basic logistics and experience). Other writers started wholesale in a digital world, like the staff of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. They were five weeks into story-breaking at the time of this panel and hadn't been together in-person at all while working on the upcoming season eight.