Erin Copen Howard stood silently and watched as her five-year-old son Odin scrolled intently through YouTube Shorts videos on the living room TV, while his seven-year-old sister Aurora traveled through the “My Movie” Roblox-verse on her tablet.
Minutes later, Odin slapped on a VR headset and journeyed into “Penguin Paradise,” his arms flailing about as he shouted to other contestants inside the game.
“This is the death of television,” Copen Howard, 44, told TheWrap. “That’s all they watch, YouTube Shorts. And it breaks my heart.”
For most of the past two decades, she has spent her time developing reality television shows. These days, she watches the painful transformation of the TV industry playing out in real time in her Santa Monica apartment.
For Copen Howard, the tumultuous shift in television viewing habits — especially among younger consumers — is top of mind as she contemplates her family’s financial survival. In November, she was laid off from a job as a senior vice president of development for a Canadian production company. She hasn’t been able to find work in the industry since.
The divorced mother of three small children, who left an abusive marriage, is trying to hold on. Copen Howard’s eldest son, JJ, is autistic and eats mostly through a gastrostomy tube, the result of congenital diaphragmatic hernia, a situation that generates large — and persistent — medical bills. She recently had to tell her nanny she could no longer afford her. And she is leaning heavily on her retired, middle class parents in Arizona, who are contributing thousands of dollars to try to keep the family afloat in their $4,000-a-month, rent-controlled apartment.
When she’s not shuttling her kids to summer camp, Copen Howard spends her days searching for TV consulting gigs, preparing to launch a self-funded Etsy business and is pecking away at screenplays.
“I could try to put something on YouTube if I just wanted to tell stories,” she said. “But I can’t make a living that way. And right now, I have to figure out how to make money.”
Copen Howard is part of a growing pool of Hollywood workers — both above and below the line — who are fighting to stay in the industry to which they dedicated their careers. In television, especially, they are seeing troubling trends that lead them to think that their hopes may be misplaced, that the industry contraction may be secular — and that they are being left behind.
As TheWrap reported on Thursday, studios are cutting costs and becoming more cautious about greenlighting new shows, forcing production companies to find ways to make content more inexpensively. With jobs drying up and the uncertainties around artificial intelligence, the competition for gigs has become fierce, with hundreds of people applying for the same positions.
For development executives like Copen Howard, an introverted but normally sunny person, despair is starting to creep in.
“I knew that the earth was shaking, but I didn’t realize that the earthquake was going to crack open the ground and we were all just going to fall through it,” she said. “I’m still hanging on, clinging to the side of that cliff. I’ve been laid off before, and I’ve always gotten another job, but this job doesn’t exist much anymore at all now.”
From Superbowl halftime show to “crocodile whisperer”
Growing up in Memphis, Tenn., Copen Howard always seemed to be on an eventual path to the entertainment industry. At 12, her parents gave her a home video camera, expecting that she would film herself acting. “But I never really wanted to act,” she said. “I wanted to write the story. So I would write scripts, and then I would have all my friends in the neighborhood act in them.”
In 2002, fresh out of college at the University of Arizona, Copen Howard made her way to Los Angeles. She intended to work in the scripted world, but the opportunities were more plentiful in the booming unscripted genre. She landed her first PA job on the 20th Television “EX-treme Dating” show with Jillian Barberie. She worked the front desk as a PA/receptionist on “The Sharon Osborne Show.”
Soon after, Damon Wayans hired her as his assistant when he was doing “My Wife and Kids” at ABC.
Within six months, she had scored a plum PA job working on the 2003 Super Bowl Halftime Show, where Sting and Gwen Stefani sang “Message in a Bottle” together.
“I thought, ‘Well, this is it, I’m here to stay,’” she recalled. “And, you know, if anyone could have told me that 20 years from now everything is going to crater, maybe I would have planned better.”
Some assignments took her to places she wouldn’t normally visit. She journeyed to Alaska in the heart of winter for a pilot for “Wild West Alaska,” which aired on Animal Planet and later on Discovery Channel. “It was frightening — everything in Alaska is built to kill you,” Copen Howard said.
She ended up in rural Louisiana for a pilot about events for off-road enthusiasts that tricked out their own trucks and competed. And she traveled to Belize to shadow a “crocodile whisperer” who could tame crocodiles into being less aggressive so they could be returned to the wild. The docuseries was never picked up; Copen Howard thought it had the potential to be special.
“And that’s always the sad thing. We work so hard on these things that we believe in,” she said. “Most of my job was failure. It’s like, I worked so hard, and I believed in it, people need to hear the story. And then the network said no.”
In all, Copen Howard calculates, she has developed over 1,000 projects in the last 22 years, including numerous shows for HGTV more recently.
A few years in, she realized that her comfort zone was not on sets in far-off places, but in the office. “It was the thinking and the creation and all of the work putting it together that I really sort of fell in love with rather than going out there and having to get the shot 100 times,” she said.
I knew that the earth was shaking, but I didn’t realize that the earthquake was going to crack open the ground and we were all just going to fall through it.
Erin Copen Howard
Copen Howard pivoted to focusing on development. She landed several jobs as a senior VP of development, creating a sort of niche as someone who could be trusted to run an operation remotely from Los Angeles for companies based far from Hollywood. She would create a slate of new ideas for shows, gather the materials and pitch them out to networks.
She was laid off in 2008 during the recession. And again, in the summer of 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. In each case, she bounced back within a few weeks or a month or so.
“I never had any problem with job security until now,” Copen Howard said.
“Wish seeds” and screenwriter dreams
This summer, Copen Howard has settled into a new routine. She wakes up early to work on her screenplay projects, shuttles her kids to day camp, checks up with contacts and job boards for TV consulting jobs and carves out time for her “Wish Seeds” business idea. It came to her during a Chinese Lunar New Year celebration in February at Santa Monica’s 3rd Street Promenade.
She was feeling particularly vulnerable after having just lost her job. “I knew I was going to have to pivot and evolve and change,” she said. “And I was terrified.” Amid the dragons and red lanterns, she and her children all wrote down wishes and hung them on a cherry blossom tree and took a group photo.
Inspired by the experience, Copen Howard is creating quills made of seed paper that children can write their “enchanted wishes” on, soak overnight and then plant the seeds and wait for them to sprout into reality. She hopes to sell them through sites like Etsy.
But Copen Howard’s real passion is screenwriting. Being unemployed for so long has given her the impetus she may have been lacking to lean into her writing. She is working on a script for a low-budget horror film, one in the sports action-thriller genre and another inspired by the true events involving her son’s medical challenges. She recently changed her LinkedIn tagline to “emerging screenwriter.”
She also sees her children’s obsession with short-form videos and virtual reality as a harbinger of a new normal that will continue to roil the industry, especially with artificial intelligence now daring to infiltrate numerous industry professions. When she explained her job struggles to them, as young as they are, their response was for her to “make TikTok movies.”
What she worked in was “old television,” she said. “New television will be something completely different.”
Copen Howard looked over at Aurora and Odin immersed in their entertainment worlds. “I get really sad talking about it,” she said, her voice breaking for an instant. “Because I really loved it, and I can’t do it anymore. There’s still a table of people doing it. The table is very small. There’s not a lot of seats left. There’s no room for me to pull up a chair.”
Next week: The series continues.
Catch up on Holding on in Hollywood:
Part 1: Hollywood Workers Grapple for a Foothold in an Industry at a Crossroads (Erin Browne)
