Beth Schacter’s voice carries that particular New York cadence—direct, unpretentious, and punctuated with the kind of laughter that feels earned. We begin not with the expected Hollywood preamble, but with a photograph. Not just any photograph, but Irving Penn’s 1947 Theater Accident: a spilled purse, a torn cigarette, a fuzzy pill. A commissioned work meant to sell products, yet framed with such startling humanity that it stopped her in her tracks at the Met.
“It’s so modern,” she says, almost shrugging, as if surprised by her own reaction. “It’s this beautifully framed vision of chaos—something intimate exposed in public.”
Then, almost casually, she mentions another piece: Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead. A painting commissioned by a widow, depicting a coffin being rowed to the underworld. When Böcklin delivered it, he told her, “You will be able to dream yourself into the world of dark shadows.”
Beth is finishing Clancy Martin’s How Not to Kill Yourself around this time. The timing isn’t lost on her. “I’m not morbid,” she clarifies, “but I am really thinking a lot lately about how we talk about grief and death.”
It’s an unexpected opening. Not the industry talk, the credits, the namedrops. She could’ve led with Billions, with Showtime, with Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis. Instead, she offers a spilled purse and a journey to the underworld. It feels intentional, this choice to begin in the quiet corners of a museum rather than the roar of a writers’ room. Maybe because all writing—whether for premium cable or public television—begins here: in the quiet, uncomfortable, often unspoken places.
We’re talking just days after the news broke that the second season of Super Pumped, the one she co-ran and deeply believed in, wouldn’t move forward. There’s no bitterness in her voice, just a faint weariness. The kind that comes from loving something that no longer exists. She describes the planned season, which was to focus on Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg’s relationship at Facebook, as “really close to being fully written.”
“We knew what that story was,” she says, and there’s a pause. Not sad, just full. “Understanding the psychology of everyone around a company like Facebook is such a gift.”
This is the tension that defines her—and maybe every writer who lasts: the ability to hold both the grief of a canceled story and the gratitude for having told it at all. It’s a balancing act between art and commerce, between the thing you dreamed up and the thing that gets made.
Before Billions, before Uber and billionaires and corporate battles, there was a different kind of story. Normal Adolescent Behavior, her first film. A small, independent feature about teenage sexuality and friendship, starring Amber Tamblyn. It was personal in the way first films often are—raw, close to the bone. She wrote and directed it herself. When she describes it now, she calls it “an adaptation of Spring Awakening,” but also “about how I saw my own sexuality.”
“I was everyone in that story,” she says. “And none of it happened, and yet all of it was real.”
That might be the first real clue to who Beth Schacter is as a storyteller: someone who understands that truth isn’t about factual accuracy, but emotional honesty. That the best lies are the ones that tell the truth.
She grew up between Ohio, Connecticut, and New York. A horse girl, she calls herself. Not someone who always knew she wanted to tell stories. “I was pretty lost,” she admits, “and I was also a total coward.” Even when she felt the pull toward theater, toward film, she assumed she’d end up a producer or an agent. Someone near the art, but not making it.
It’s a familiar story, especially for women of her generation. The idea that creating art was for other people—people with more confidence, more right, more something. “I mean, the people who were doing it when I even let myself imagine being an artist—who were making Reality Bites and My So-Called Life and Say Anything—how do you even imagine yourself standing in a room and saying, ‘Umm, I have something to add’? It is a ridiculous notion.”
What changed? Mentorship. Specifically, Lewis Cole and Katherine Dieckmann at Columbia, where she went for her MFA. “Lewis told me that I was a writer and that, if I worked with him, I could be a writer for a living,” she recalls. “Sometimes cowardice needs to be met with mentorship.”
Even after Columbia, the path wasn’t straight. She sold that second-year feature script to New Line—what sounds like an amazing origin story—but then came “five tough years” of nothing. The strike, the death of films, the expansion of TV. She went back to theater, wrote a one-act, directed it with friends. That got her a TV agent. Finally, a staff writer job—on SEAL Team, of all things. She was four months pregnant when she got hired.
“I have never said out loud that I want to tell stories the rest of my life,” she confesses, “and maybe that is because I feel insanely lucky to do this job. I love it a lot and I fear if I tell that career how much I want it, it might get annoyed and disappear.” She laughs. “That sounded crazy. Oh well.”
It doesn’t sound crazy. It sounds like every writer who’s ever loved something too much to name it.
When Billions creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien first called her about joining the show, she was packed and ready to move back to L.A. after years in New York. She said no. They kept asking. “They are menschy like that,” she smiles. Eventually she said yes.
She knew nothing about finance. Still doesn’t. “Before I worked on Billions, I chose stocks based on the merit of the company. I know. Pathetic.” What she knew was story. Structure. Character. “It is all Aristotle,” she says of television writing. “Like, all of it.”
What fascinated her about Billions wasn’t the money, but the power. “Billionaires are nation-states,” she observes. “They make more money passively than most humans will see in their lifetime. That does something to a person. And the people around them.”
She’s currently not writing about billionaires. The Silicon Valley project she was attached to is on hold after the studio making it shut down. “The vicissitudes of this business aren’t personal,” she says, then adds wryly: “Can you send that to my therapist? I’m growing.”
What she is writing about now are real people. “After Super Pumped, I developed a skill set—taking real life and making it into TV. And that is really fun.”
We circle back to the beginning—to grief, to art, to the things that haunt us. I ask about an old script of hers, one about Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady’s relationship. Does she ever think about returning to it?
“I do wonder what I was searching for in my obsession,” she says. “I think part of it is the succubus nature of Jack towards Neal—he really stole Neal’s soul and Neal died in the desert, cold and alone. And somehow Jack was the hero.”
But will she ever open that screenplay again? “Oh my god, the mortification,” she groans. “My shoulders are already in my ears.”
It’s this ability to hold both the profound and the ridiculous that makes her such compelling company. One moment she’s talking about the existential weight of grief, the next she’s joking about GameStop stock tips. It feels less like a performance and more like a survival strategy—a way to navigate a business that demands both artistic sensitivity and industrial toughness.
As we near the end of our conversation, I ask about that part of her that still wants to be an indie filmmaker. What percentage of her still wants that?
She sighs, not out of frustration, but recognition. “The real issue is that in order to have any sort of career, you have to have ambition and, for us, that ambition is to tell our own stories in our own way. And that ambition is always going to run into structural reality.”
She describes the painful irony of creative work: “Nothing makes you feel like your story isn’t worth telling like having to say out loud, ‘My story is worth telling!’ So, you feel smaller and smaller the more you have to ask to speak.”
What’s the solution? “There’s no real solution for this but success. And there’s no guarantee of success.”
She’s married to another writer. They talk about the sunk cost fallacy of their careers—the need to believe that staying at the table will pay off. “I know—I absolutely know—that people will look at me and see someone successful,” she says, “but I don’t feel that way yet. I don’t feel even remotely finished.”
The dance between ambition and art is messy and fraught, she admits. “When writers tell you they don’t think about the ways success and money factor into their lives they are lying. Don’t believe them.”
Her advice, finally, is pragmatic: “You’re alive in this moment in time. So try and find a way to hold both things at once—the art and the commerce.”
We end where we began: not with answers, but with the ongoing work of creation. “I spend a lot of my life sitting in writers’ rooms and on sets and that feels pretty damn good,” she says. “It isn’t enough for me. But it is definitely not bad.”
And maybe that’s the most honest thing any of us can hope for: not enough, but not bad. And the courage to keep writing toward something more.
There’s a particular quality to the way Beth Schacter speaks about art that makes you lean in closer. It begins with her recollection of standing before Irving Penn’s 1947 photograph Theater Accident at the Met—a seemingly mundane image of a spilled purse that contains, in her words, “a torn broken cigarette, a fuzzy pill.” But it wasn’t the composition that held her there. It was the quiet revelation that even commercial art, created to sell products, could harbor such raw, accidental truth.
This moment of connection echoes throughout our conversation, revealing a writer who sees art not as decoration or distraction, but as essential dialogue with the deepest parts of ourselves. When the discussion turns to Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead—a painting of a coffin being ferried to the underworld, commissioned by a widow—Beth’s voice shifts into something quieter, more personal.
“I’m just finishing Clancy Martin’s ‘How Not to Kill Yourself,'” she shares, “and the idea of dreaming yourself into the Underworld hits hard. I’m not morbid, but I am really thinking a lot lately about how we talk about grief and death.”
The admission feels like both confession and invitation. Here is a successful showrunner, someone who helmed the final season of “Billions” and co-ran “Super Pumped,” speaking openly about the weight of mortality. But this isn’t academic for her. When she reveals losing her mother before establishing herself as a writer, the professional facade gives way to something more vulnerable.
“I think a lot about how it feels when you don’t really ‘become’ before they leave,” she says. “Like, it doesn’t count in some sort of way? Which I know isn’t real, I know it isn’t true, but it feels real?”
This tension between knowing and feeling, between intellectual understanding and emotional truth, becomes the throughline of our discussion about creativity. For Beth, writing isn’t about constructing perfect narratives or delivering moral lessons. It’s about building “little bridges to lands we aren’t meant for yet. The land of death included.”
Her creative philosophy challenges the romanticized image of the fearless artist. Instead, she argues that fear and cowardice are not obstacles to creativity but essential components of it. “Nothing is brave if nothing causes you fear,” she says, recalling advice from her Columbia University playwriting professor Eduardo Machado: “Write things that you are afraid your parents will read/see.”
This embrace of fear as creative fuel manifests in her approach to character and story. Though recently known for writing about billionaires in “Billions” and “Super Pumped,” she admits she’s “not the biggest fan of billionaires and wealth and private planes.” What draws her to these stories is power—how it transforms people, corrupts ideals, and reveals fundamental human truths.
“Every story is about sex and power,” she says, quoting one of her favorite teachers, “and since most sex is about power… well, there you go.”
Yet beneath the professional insights and industry stories, there’s a consistent thread of personal negotiation—how to create authentic art within a commercial system, how to maintain creative integrity while answering to executives, how to balance ambition with reality.
“In order to have any sort of career,” she reflects, “you have to have ambition and, for us, that ambition is to tell our own stories in our own way. And that ambition is always going to run into structural reality.”
The conversation keeps returning to this delicate dance between art and commerce, between personal expression and professional demands. It’s a tension every creative professional faces, but few discuss with such honesty.
As we transition from these broader philosophical questions to the specific techniques of her craft, what becomes clear is that for Beth Schacter, writing isn’t just a profession. It’s a way of making sense of the world—of grief, of power, of fear, and ultimately, of what it means to be human in a complicated industry and an even more complicated world.
The Inner Landscape of Creation
When Beth Schacter speaks about losing her mother before establishing herself as a writer, she isn’t sharing a sob story. She’s revealing the foundation of her creative philosophy—that our deepest wounds often become our most authentic creative sources.
“I think a lot about how it feels when you don’t really ‘become’ before they leave,” she says, her voice softening. “Like, it doesn’t count in some sort of way? Which I know isn’t real, I know it isn’t true, but it feels real?”
This acknowledgment of emotional truth versus intellectual knowing is at the heart of her approach to storytelling. For Beth, writing isn’t about constructing perfect narratives from a safe distance. It’s about leaning into the messy, uncomfortable, often contradictory human experience.
She describes frequently thinking about “the sadness of wanting to close your eyes and be taken to the island of the dead. How grief can make you want to visit a land you’re not meant for yet.” Then she makes the connection to her craft: “I do believe—truly as cheesy as it may sound—that part of what we do as writers is build little bridges to lands we aren’t meant for yet. The land of death included.”
This perspective transforms writing from a professional skill into something approaching spiritual practice. It’s not about providing answers but about creating space for questions—about giving form to experiences that often feel too large or too painful to hold alone.
When I suggest that art serves as a form of “emotional mirroring,” helping people understand what’s happening to them, she immediately connects with the idea. “I like that… like maybe art is a version of sitting with someone and actively listening.”
But this creative approach requires confronting rather than avoiding fear. Beth openly admits to having been “a total coward” when starting out. “It is so easy to think that there’s nothing you can offer—nothing that you can add to the conversation,” she says, recalling watching creators behind works like “Reality Bites” and “My So-Called Life” and wondering how anyone could “imagine yourself standing in a room and saying, ‘Umm, I have something to add.'”
What’s refreshing is her rejection of the narrative that fear is a personality flaw to be overcome. Instead, she argues that “fear and cowardice are not obstacles to creativity but essential components of it. Nothing is brave if nothing causes you fear.”
She shares advice from her Columbia University playwriting professor Eduardo Machado: “Write things that you are afraid your parents will read/see.” The instruction reframes fear not as something to eliminate but as something to engage with—a compass pointing toward what matters most.
When I ask how she’s managed to reveal herself on the page despite these fears, her answer surprises me. “I’m disgustingly good at revealing myself,” she says with a laugh. “I would say I’m better at it in my writing than in therapy sometimes.”
She clarifies that it’s not necessarily literal confession but something more subtle: “Not me exactly, but what I write has to scratch that part of my brain that needs scratching. For me, the revealing is the answer to the fear—if I show myself, or just a little of my truth, somehow that makes me brave.”
Her first film, Normal Adolescent Behavior, serves as a perfect example. While not strictly autobiographical, it contained essential emotional truths about her and her friends, her view of sexuality, her experience of growing up. “I was everyone in that story,” she says. “And none of that happened, and yet all of it was real.”
This approach to creative truth—where emotional authenticity matters more than factual accuracy—becomes a recurring theme. She describes planting “Easter Eggs” of personal experience in unexpected places, like a beat in Season 1 of “SEAL Team” that came directly from her life, despite the show having nothing to do with her personal experiences.
When I note that her language around this process sounds almost ritualistic—like using words and symbols to summon a version of herself she’s trying to bring into being—she pauses to consider.
“I haven’t thought of it like that,” she admits. “I guess I understand it—but would clarify to say that I write to wrap my arms around who I am, what I think, how I want to move through the world.”
She compares it to wish fulfillment—”that monologue you say in the shower that comes out perfect, that gets the point across in the way you never could in real life”—citing Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail as an example of this transformation through writing.
Ultimately, she defines writing as “how I exert control over the world, in a way that makes me feel some satisfaction that is denied all of us in real life.”
This tension between control and surrender, between crafting perfect narratives and acknowledging life’s inherent messiness, seems central to her creative process. It’s what allows her to write about power and wealth while maintaining her own moral compass, to explore dark themes without losing sight of light, to acknowledge fear while continuing to create.
What emerges is a portrait of an artist who has made peace with contradiction—who understands that creativity isn’t about resolving tensions but about holding them in productive balance. The fear and the courage, the personal and the universal, the commercial demands and the artistic integrity—these aren’t problems to be solved but energies to be channeled.
In a industry that often encourages either cynical commercialism or impractical idealism, Beth’s approach feels both grounded and aspirational. She acknowledges the realities of the business while maintaining the belief that “we can still make personal, very authored art in exchange for a paycheck.”
It’s this balance—between the practical and the philosophical, the commercial and the creative, the fearful and the brave—that makes her perspective so valuable. She’s not offering easy answers or inspirational platitudes but sharing hard-won wisdom from someone who has learned to build bridges between worlds that often seem determined to stay separate.
The World on the Page: The Art and Craft of Character Creation
What separates compelling television from mere entertainment often comes down to one essential element: characters who feel authentically human, even when they inhabit realities far removed from our own. For Beth Schacter, this truth became her professional compass while navigating the rarefied worlds of “Billions” and “Super Pumped.” Her approach to character development offers a masterclass in finding humanity in the most unlikely places.
When Schacter joined the “Billions” writers’ room, she brought no particular expertise in high finance or the psychology of extreme wealth. What she did possess was something more valuable: an understanding that every story is ultimately about power dynamics. “Most of the characters on ‘Billions’ weren’t actually billionaires,” she observes. “They were people who wanted to be near that kind of force.” This distinction became the key to unlocking the entire series.
Billionaires, in Schacter’s view, function as nation-states—entities that generate more money passively than most humans will see in their lifetime. This reality fundamentally alters how they perceive the world and how those around them respond to their presence. The writing challenge became not about explaining complex financial instruments, but about exploring how extraordinary wealth distorts human relationships and personal morality.
“The show was never pro- or anti-money,” Schacter explains. “It was about two out-of-control forces: Chuck in politics and Axe/Mike in finance. It charted how these corrupt men would try to destroy each other.” This neutral stance allowed the writers to avoid moralizing while still creating complex, multidimensional characters. The result was what Schacter describes as “Rock Em Sock Em Robots” storytelling—characters operating at maximum intensity, fighting for what they believe in, while remaining brilliantly funny and deeply human.
The transition to “Super Pumped” presented different character challenges. Where “Billions” explored established power, this series examined the creation of power from nothing. Travis Kalanick represented a particular type of modern figure: the striver who wills an entire sector into existence through sheer force of personality. “He did it with the kind of focus and passion usually reserved for artists or athletes,” Schacter notes. “His success and drive exacerbated all of his flaws—his greed, his ego, his misogyny, his anger.”
This character journey embodied what Schacter sees as a recurring modern tragedy: revolutionaries who overthrow existing systems only to become what they sought to replace. The planned second season, focusing on Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, would have explored this theme further. “There were fascinating questions about Sheryl attaching herself to someone she knew wasn’t a good guy and convincing herself she could make him better,” Schacter reflects. “How do women square their morality when it’s attached to someone amoral? Are we willing to concede that women can be truly amoral?”
Surprisingly, Schacter finds writing billionaire characters less challenging than crafting what she considers the most difficult character type: stupid people. “Writing stupid is like acting drunk—it almost always seems fake,” she admits. The problem stems from how these characters typically function in narratives: as setup devices for smarter characters’ monologues or punchlines.
Her personal approach involves what she calls “sub-verbalizing” dialogue—a technique that makes her a challenging office mate but produces remarkably authentic character voices. “I end up feeling really dumb writing a dumb person because I am saying their dumb words,” she confesses. The solution involves finding moments of humanity, often rooted in something childlike within the character that occasionally surfaces.
This method connects to Schacter’s broader philosophy about character creation: everyone contains multitudes, even those we might initially dismiss as one-dimensional. For billionaire characters, this means looking beyond the private jets and extravagant purchases to understand how they think about vacations, education, or family—aspects of life that exist in completely different cultural contexts when wealth reaches certain levels.
The technical aspects of character development always serve emotional truths in Schacter’s approach. Whether writing about hedge fund managers or tech entrepreneurs, she seeks the universal human experiences beneath the surface specifics. Power may manifest differently across contexts, but the desire for it, the fear of losing it, and the corruption it breeds remain constant human experiences.
This perspective explains why Schacter doesn’t particularly care for genre distinctions. Having worked on teen ballet dramas, FBI procedurals, and musical series, she maintains that good storytelling transcends categories. “I like a good story,” she says, acknowledging how simple that sounds while standing by its truth.
Her character work on “Billions” particularly benefited from this genre-agnostic approach. By treating financial warfare as personal drama and office politics as psychological warfare, the writers created characters who resonated beyond their specific context. The performances by Damian Lewis and Paul Giamatti certainly helped, but the foundation was always in writing that understood these characters as human beings first, financiers second.
This human-first approach extends to how Schacter views character arcs across seasons. Long-form television storytelling allows for gradual transformation—or the revealing lack thereof. Characters on “Billions” changed, but often in ways that reinforced their core nature rather than fundamentally altering it. This realistic approach to human change—or resistance to change—created deeper audience investment.
The ultimate test of character writing, in Schacter’s view, comes down to a simple question: Can you find something to care about in even the most problematic character? This doesn’t require endorsing their actions or minimizing their flaws, but rather understanding their humanity well enough to make their choices comprehensible, if not admirable.
This philosophy proves particularly valuable when writing about real people, as Schacter did on “Super Pumped.” The challenge shifts from pure creation to interpretation—understanding the gap between public perception and private reality, between documented actions and underlying motivations. The writer becomes part journalist, part psychologist, part moral philosopher.
What emerges from Schacter’s approach is a refreshingly pragmatic view of character creation. There are no magic formulas or secret techniques, just persistent curiosity about why people behave as they do—whether they manage billions of dollars or struggle to pay rent. The writer’s job remains fundamentally the same: to understand, to empathize, and to reveal.
This work continues to evolve for Schacter as she moves beyond billionaire stories toward projects about “real people.” The skills developed on previous series—taking real life and transforming it into compelling television—remain applicable across subjects. The core challenge persists: finding the human truth beneath the surface circumstances, whether those involve extraordinary wealth, extraordinary talent, or ordinary human struggle.
In the end, character creation comes down to what Schacter describes as “giving them a tiny moment of humanity.” This moment might emerge through a childhood memory, an unexpected vulnerability, or simply the way they take their coffee. These small details accumulate into believable people who happen to inhabit extraordinary circumstances—whether that’s a billionaire’s penthouse or a writer’s imagination.
Navigating the Hollywood Labyrinth
The path from indie filmmaker to television showrunner is rarely a straight line—it’s more like navigating a maze where the walls keep shifting. Beth Schacter’s journey exemplifies this non-linear trajectory, moving from writing and directing her own independent film Normal Adolescent Behavior to running writers’ rooms for major television series. What becomes clear in talking with her is that career progression in Hollywood often has less to do with meticulous planning and more to do with being prepared when unexpected opportunities arise.
After Columbia’s MFA program, where mentors like Lewis Cole and Katherine Dieckmann helped her recognize her writing talent, Beth sold her second-year feature project to New Line. What sounds like a dream launchpad actually led to five years of professional uncertainty—the writers’ strike, the contraction of the indie film market, and the television industry’s evolution all created a landscape where even someone with a produced feature couldn’t find steady work. She returned to theater, writing and directing a one-act play with friends, which eventually led to securing a TV agent. Even then, it took another year before landing that first staff writer position, and she was hired while four months pregnant.
This meandering path highlights a truth many working writers know too well: Hollywood careers are built less on grand designs and more on persistence through what Beth calls “the vicissitudes of this business.” The ability to adapt—from indie film to television, from one genre to another—becomes its own essential skill set. What began as a focus on intimate coming-of-age stories evolved into expertise in writing about power dynamics in shows like Billions and Super Pumped, not because of any particular affinity for billionaires but because those projects offered opportunities to explore universal themes of ambition, corruption, and human behavior under extreme circumstances.
The Modern Olympus: CEOs as Greek Gods
There’s something almost mythological about the power structures that govern Hollywood, and Beth’s analogy of executives as Greek gods feels particularly apt. “They could get all the awards they want if they would just let artists make art,” she observes, “but they can’t help themselves.” This comparison extends beyond mere metaphor—it captures the capricious nature of an industry where projects live or die based on the whims of those in power.
Like the deities of ancient myths, studio and network executives possess the power to grant creative immortality or consign projects to oblivion. Their decisions often seem arbitrary from the outside, governed by mysterious algorithms of market trends, personal preferences, and corporate strategy. The Greek god analogy becomes even more compelling when considering how these modern-day Olympians are often victims of their own hubris, making decisions that undermine their stated goals in pursuit of short-term gains or personal validation.
What makes this system particularly challenging for writers is that these “gods” frequently change—corporate restructuring, mergers, and executive musical chairs mean that a champion today might be gone tomorrow, taking their supported projects with them into development purgatory. Navigating this requires not just creative skill but political savvy, emotional resilience, and the ability to detach one’s self-worth from the constantly shifting fortunes of projects in development.
The Reality of Development: When Projects Die
Nothing illustrates the fragile nature of television development better than the story of Super Pumped‘s second season. The first season, exploring Travis Kalanick’s rise and fall at Uber, was critically acclaimed and positioned Beth and her collaborators to tackle another tech giant story: the complex relationship between Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook. “We knew what that story was,” Beth recalls. “We were really close to being fully written.”
Then the strikes happened. Then changes at Showtime. And like so many projects in Hollywood, what seemed like a sure thing evaporated. What’s remarkable isn’t that this happened—this is the norm in television development—but how creators learn to process these professional disappointments. “The vicissitudes of this business aren’t personal,” Beth notes, adding wryly, “Can you send that to my therapist? I’m growing.”
This resilience isn’t innate; it’s learned through repeated experience with projects that don’t go forward. Each “almost” teaches something about storytelling, about collaboration, about what makes a concept compelling enough to survive the development gauntlet. The Facebook season, while never produced, represented something important: it confirmed that Beth and her team were “poking at the right bear, but maybe not at the right angle.” That validation, while not the same as seeing a project through to production, still moves a creator forward in their craft.
What emerges from these experiences is a kind of professional philosophy that balances creative passion with pragmatic detachment. Writers must care deeply enough about their projects to fight for them, but not so deeply that they’re destroyed when those projects don’t move forward. They must believe in their ideas completely while understanding that most ideas will never see the light of day. This delicate balancing act becomes its own form of artistic discipline—learning to pour everything into work that may never find an audience, then letting it go when the time comes to move on to the next idea, the next project, the next opportunity that might finally break through.
The Hollywood maze has no map, but conversations with writers like Beth Schacter provide something perhaps more valuable: the reassurance that everyone gets lost sometimes, and that the winding path itself—with all its dead ends and unexpected turns—is where the real creative growth happens.
The Daily Grind: Navigating the Space Between Art and Commerce
There’s a particular kind of tension that defines the creative life, one that never truly resolves no matter how many seasons you’ve run or how many projects you’ve shipped. It’s the constant push-pull between the stories burning inside you and the structural realities that determine whether those stories ever see the light of day.
This dance between artistic ambition and industry reality isn’t something you solve once and move past. It’s the permanent background hum of a writing career, the creative equivalent of tinnitus that sometimes fades to barely noticeable but never completely disappears. The need to create meaningful work clashes daily with the need to pay rent, the desire for artistic integrity bumps against notes from executives who see your script as just another product in their pipeline.
What makes this tension particularly acute in television writing is the collaborative nature of the medium. Unlike novelists or painters who can create in relative isolation, screenwriters must constantly justify their choices, defend their vision, and negotiate with countless stakeholders. Every episode represents countless compromises, some small and barely noticeable, others that feel like surrendering pieces of your creative soul.
The irony that’s taken me years to appreciate: this tension, while often painful, is also what keeps the work honest. When you have to fight for every creative choice, you learn which hills are worth dying on and which battles aren’t worth your energy. The constant negotiation forces clarity about what matters most in your storytelling.
The Illusion of ‘Making It’
Here’s the dirty little secret nobody tells you about success in this business: it never feels like you’ve arrived. There’s always another level, another goalpost that moves just as you approach it. I’ve run shows, worked with actors I’ve admired for years, and still find myself wondering when the feeling of being an impostor will finally fade.
It doesn’t. Not really.
The external markers of success—the credits, the industry recognition, the paycheck—never quite match the internal experience. You might be sitting in a writers’ room that you’re running, looking at faces waiting for your direction, while internally you’re still that horse girl from Ohio wondering how she tricked everyone into thinking she belongs here.
This disconnect between external perception and internal experience is something I’ve learned to make peace with rather than solve. The gap between how others see your career and how it feels from the inside never closes completely. The showrunner who seems to have it all figured out is often just better at hiding their uncertainty.
What I’ve come to understand is that this perpetual sense of not-quite-having-made-it might actually be necessary fuel for creation. Complacency is the death of good writing, and that nagging feeling that you still have something to prove, that you haven’t quite said what you need to say, keeps you hungry. It pushes you to take risks in your storytelling that you might avoid if you felt securely established.
Survival Tactics for the Long Haul
After years in this business, I’ve collected what might generously be called survival strategies. These aren’t secrets to breaking in or formulas for creating hit shows—those don’t exist despite what any screenwriting book might claim. These are simply ways to stay sane while doing this work that we simultaneously love and find utterly maddening.
First, therapy. Not as a luxury or something you do when you’re in crisis, but as routine maintenance for anyone whose job involves constantly putting their creativity and ego on the line. A good therapist helps you separate your self-worth from your professional validation, which in Hollywood is basically a superpower.
Meditation has become non-negotiable for me. Not the woo-woo kind where you try to achieve enlightenment, but the practical kind where you learn to observe your thoughts without being ruled by them. When you’re dealing with network notes that seem designed to destroy everything you love about your script, the ability to step back and breathe before responding is practically a professional requirement.
Physical exercise isn’t just about staying healthy—it’s about processing the frustration that builds up in your body during those endless notes calls. There’s nothing like a hard run or weight session to work out the aggression that comes from being told your main character isn’t “likable enough” for the eighth time.
Medication, when needed, shouldn’t carry stigma. Writing is emotionally taxing work, and dealing with depression or anxiety while trying to be creative is like trying to run a marathon with weights tied to your ankles. Getting proper treatment isn’t weakness; it’s pragmatism.
Perhaps the most important survival tool is what my husband and I call “continuing to gamble on ourselves.” This is the stubborn belief that staying at the table, despite the statistical unlikelihood of any particular project succeeding, will eventually pay off. It’s the creative equivalent of the sunk cost fallacy, but it’s what gets us through the years between jobs and the projects that die in development.
The reality is that no single strategy works forever. What gets you through your first staff writing job might not serve you when you’re running a show. The key is maintaining enough self-awareness to recognize when your current coping mechanisms have stopped working and enough humility to seek new ones.
At the end of the day, what keeps most of us going isn’t some grand philosophy about art or legacy, but the simple fact that sitting in writers’ rooms and on sets feels pretty damn good. It’s not always enough, but it’s never nothing. And in the space between enough and nothing, we find reasons to keep creating, keep pitching, keep writing—even when the odds seem stacked against us.
The balance between art and commerce isn’t something you achieve so much as something you continually recalibrate. Some days you lean more toward art, others toward commerce. The goal isn’t perfect equilibrium but avoiding complete surrender to either extreme.
The Daily Grind: Finding Balance in the Creative Chaos
There’s a particular alchemy that happens in writers’ rooms and on sets—a strange magic that somehow makes all the industry nonsense worthwhile. It’s not the glamour or the prestige, but those moments when a group of creators collectively solves a story problem, when an actor finds something unexpected in a scene, when the words on the page suddenly breathe and become something more than ink. These are the moments that sustain us through the endless meetings, the network notes, the projects that die quietly in development hell.
I spend most of my life in these spaces—crammed around a conference table with other writers, standing on a soundstage watching actors work, huddled over scripts in various states of completion. There’s a comfort in the routine of it, in the shared language of storytelling that transcends the individual egos and anxieties we all bring to the process. The writers’ room becomes a temporary family, the set a makeshift home, and in these spaces, we create little worlds that somehow help us make sense of our own.
Yet even surrounded by these tangible signs of creative fulfillment, that nagging sense of “not enough” persists. It’s the curse of ambition—the constant companion that whispers about bigger projects, more creative control, greater impact. The success I’ve achieved, by any objective measure, never quite matches the vision in my head. There’s always another story to tell, another character to explore, another way to push the boundaries of what television can be.
This tension between gratitude and ambition defines the creative life. We’re simultaneously thankful for the opportunities we have while hungering for more. We cherish the collaborative process while dreaming of projects where our voice can ring clear and uncompromised. We appreciate the paycheck while questioning whether commercial success has cost us artistic integrity. These contradictions don’t resolve; we simply learn to live within them.
The reality is that most working creators exist in this liminal space between art and commerce. We’re not starving artists in garrets, but we’re not entirely free either. Every project involves negotiation—with studios, with networks, with collaborators, and most importantly, with ourselves. What are we willing to compromise? Where do we draw the line? How do we maintain creative integrity while working within a system designed to minimize risk?
There’s no clean solution to these questions, no magic formula that balances artistic ambition with commercial reality. The answer changes with each project, each collaboration, each phase of our careers. Some days we fight for our vision; other days we pick our battles. Some projects feel like pure expression; others feel like well-compensated compromises. The key is recognizing that this spectrum exists and that most creative work falls somewhere between the extremes.
What I’ve come to understand—slowly, painfully, through years of therapy and self-reflection—is that the hunger never really goes away. The desire to create something truly meaningful, to leave some mark on the cultural landscape, to tell stories that matter—these aren’t needs that success satisfies. If anything, success only amplifies them by showing you what’s possible while reminding you how much further there is to go.
So we develop coping mechanisms. We find joy in the process itself—in the daily grind of writing, rewriting, collaborating, problem-solving. We learn to appreciate the small victories: a scene that finally works, a note that actually improves the material, a performance that exceeds expectations. We build communities of fellow creators who understand the particular madness of this profession and who can talk us down from ledges when necessary.
And perhaps most importantly, we make peace with the fact that creative satisfaction is always provisional, always conditional, always just out of reach. The work never quite matches the vision; the reception never quite matches the effort; the impact never quite matches the intention. This gap between aspiration and achievement isn’t a failure; it’s what keeps us creating.
In the end, we’re all just trying to find ways to keep making things in a world that often seems indifferent to art. We balance the need to pay rent with the desire to make meaning. We navigate systems designed for commerce while trying to create something that transcends it. We hold both things at once—the practical reality of building a career and the impossible dream of making art that matters.
The writing room, the set, the editing bay—these become our sanctuaries. Not because they’re free from compromise or frustration, but because they’re spaces where creation happens despite everything. Where for a few hours each day, we get to forget about the business side and focus on the magic of making something from nothing.
It isn’t enough. It will never be enough. But it’s also pretty damn good.
