Illustration: Igor Bastidas
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In 2014, I moved from New York to Los Angeles, allegedly to make a go at TV writing. Though, if I’m being honest, after nine years, New York’s roughness had started to gnaw at me. In the months before I left, a rat scurried across my unsocked foot, the magazine I worked for underwent a second series of layoffs, and one night I realized I could open the microwave door while sitting on the toilet in my studio apartment. Los Angeles seemed full of promise, fortune, and space — the same things that drove explorers westward 200 years ago. My main worry with moving to L.A. was that I knew maybe two people in total in all of California, one of whom was a college friend’s divorced mother in Palo Alto. And like an inverse Bachelor contestant, I am here (on this planet) to make friends.
I spent much of my first year in Los Angeles going on friend dates, which are like first dates but worse since there’s no possibility of sex. My friend Adam always says that, socially speaking, New York is a daily while Los Angeles is a monthly. Texting a friend of a cousin’s friend to set up an initial drinks date here took weeks after the inevitable cancellation or two. I started using the calendar on my iPhone for the first time in my life. For the dates themselves, we’d “meet in the middle,” which should really be the slogan printed at the bottom of license plates here and still usually entailed a 30-to-40-minute drive in rush-hour traffic for both parties. We’d have one or two drinks (still had to drive home, after all) and perform our rough bios for each other. Everyone was perfectly lovely and perfectly tepid about going through the whole rigamarole again. When people say the first few years in Los Angeles can be lonely and isolating — upon moving here, everybody gets some version of the “It Gets Better” speech they give to gay teens — this is the period that comes to mind.
Then, in 2015, I won the friend lottery. Her name was Doni. She’d just moved from New York to work on the network sitcom I was then staffed on. She was smart and funny, obviously — basic requirements of the job. She also happened to share my height and pants size, a perk I’d never had in a friendship as my body type is Wisconsin farmhand (broad tall, not supermodel tall). Most important, as a new transplant, she was also desperate for pals. She moved into an apartment a couple blocks away from me, and for the next decade we saw each other multiple times a week. We took road trips to Vegas and stayed up till 3 a.m. playing blackjack with the seriousness of two Tracy Flicks taking the SATs. We drove to Malibu to try new trails and Altadena to try new taco trucks. She was there for the birth of my daughter and my divorce, which nearly coincided. Doni was an L.A. constant, like “For Your Consideration” billboards and Range Rovers trying to merge last minute from the exit-only lane on the I-10. We helped each other fall in love with the city.
You can probably imagine where this is going. In early 2025, Doni left Los Angeles. She survived COVID, the writers’ strike, and the fires, but this past year, the city started to feel, in her words, “not tenable.” After working successfully as a comedy writer for years, she hadn’t been able to find work since the writers’ strike ended two and a half years ago. Sealing her decision to go, the person whose job it is to find her a job, her agent, was laid off in a round of massive firings at Paradigm this past summer. “It just became a thing of If I’m taking in no money, I can’t afford to stay here,” she says. “What was tying me here is the work. And I built a life around that. But once that’s gone, it seems irresponsible to be here.”
In the past year alone, four of my friends have left the city, and that’s not counting the numerous acquaintances and friend-of-a-friend stories I’ve heard: the guy I worked with who announced he was moving to Michigan halfway through the show season; a woman I once had drinks with who, I realized via Instagram, had relocated to Chicago; my babysitter’s friend who quit her nannying job and moved to a safer state with her boyfriend before ICE could find her. According to a PODS moving report, Los Angeles was ranked the No. 1 city for move-outs in 2025 for the fourth year in a row. It’s nice to be the best at something?
Census data is notoriously slow (refresh this page in 2030), but the California Department of Finance estimates Los Angeles County lost close to 80,000 people in 2023 and about 46,000 more in 2024. Hans Johnson, an analyst at the Public Policy Institute of California, points out that even though L.A. has been shedding population for decades now, he understands the new level of anxiety. “This moment does feel different,” Johnson says, “And it’s different on both extremes of the labor market — low-income workers who are undocumented immigrants are at risk and then we have more highly skilled workers whose jobs in the entertainment industry are moving to other places or drying up entirely.” Meanwhile, the cost of living in California somehow remains 50 percent higher than the national average. “Not tenable” sounds about right.
More telling than the stats is the mood around Los Angeles. (Sorry to be so L.A., but feelings matter.) To say we’re having a down moment is putting it mildly. “The vibes in L.A. got very We’re all so sad, we’re all so broke. It just made me feel hopeless,” says Niccole, a writer-actor friend who moved back to New York this past November after ten years in L.A.
My latest friend to abandon Los Angeles — let’s call him Dave because he kinda looks like Dave Franco and will be flattered by this comparison — told me he was shocked by the response he got from Angelenos as he made his good-bye rounds. “Not one person gasped or asked ‘Why?!’ when I told them I was moving,” he says. “Everyone was like, ‘Good for you.’ Or even whispered conspiratorially, ‘I wish I could do that.’”
Just to be openly talking to people here about our collective dissatisfaction feels like an indicator of how off our game we are. After all, L.A. is a place where you manifest. You fake it till you make it. You exude wellness and gratitude. Part of the charm of Los Angeles is how hilariously Los Angeles–y it can be. If you go to a dermatologist to check out a weird mole, they will try to give you Botox. If you drive past a Lamborghini in Beverly Hills, it will be piloted by a man who is basically a bag of bones with a blonde 40 years younger in the passenger seat. (His daughter, I’m positive!) It can rain for four days in a row and on the first clear day Angelenos will proclaim, “It never rains here.” There really are certain Hollywood types who will respond to “How are you?” with “I’m in talks on this big project with Spielberg’s company.”
At the best of times, L.A.’s unapologetic on-the-nose-ness is what makes its many surprises feel so special in a goths-at-the-beach kind of way. Like when you get in a fender bender and end up simply adoring the person who hit your car. Or you start talking to two older ladies eating lunch near you at Joan’s on 3rd and find out they’ve been best friends since they met in a psych ward here in the ’70s and that one of them once did cocaine off Burt Reynold’s thigh and then you decide to all share a blondie the four-spoon way. These are the surprises that endear you to this place. That and the fact it never rains.
But in recent years, L.A.’s experienced bang after bang of terrible surprises, making the communal beliefs we held about this place seem as flimsy as set backdrops. California was pedestaled as a sanctuary from the Trump administration — in 2016, people drove around with “Secede” bumper stickers on their Teslas. Gavin Newsom peacocked loudly about setting up a legal fund to battle Trump before he even returned to the White House. Instead of a haven, we became a target. ICE raids are happening everywhere all the time, and our local officials don’t even seem to be bothering to offer protest lip service anymore (Karen Bass, you up?). I see a new horror story weekly on Instagram: a writer posting that ICE showed up at her kid’s preschool graduation in Silver Lake; a producer linking to a GoFundMe to help her neighbors who were kidnapped from their car on their own block.
The fires last January reached places and neighborhoods no one ever thought they could touch, shattering our sense of security, not to mention the lives of those who lost their homes. My friend Jen, who lost the house she raised her two sons in almost a year ago today, still has the urge to drive through her old neighborhood in the Palisades every couple weeks as if to remind herself it actually happened. “It’s a wasteland,” she says. Miles and miles of dirt with scorched chimney remnants where entire blocks used to exist. The other day, I was watching the local news and the meteorologist mentioned prepping for “Santa Ana winds.” Her voice dropped low like she was worried about summoning Voldemort.
And Hollywood’s contraction, with its mass unemployment, affects everything here from schools to restaurants to small businesses. Sara is an actress but also a bartender at a tavern across the street from a major studio. Her regulars were always crew guys; they’d pop over to the bar during their lunch break. “We used to — and I’m saying like a year, year and a half ago — easily have 20 to 40 guys walk in every day of the week,” she says. “And now if we get three to eight guys one day, we’re kind of like, ‘Whoa, is there a show filming over there?’” Pieter Vodden, who owns Pharos Athletic Club in Echo Park, tells me his gym’s revenue is still below 80 percent of what it was pre-pandemic. A huge chunk of his clientele are TV writers. “People are grumbling about the state of the industry all the time to us,” Vodden says. “We’ve never really recovered from the pandemic in terms of the energy of Los Angeles. And because of everything else that’s happened since it just feels like getting knocked down. We’ve all taken a lot of blows.” As of September, the unemployment rate in Los Angeles County was 5.9 percent, a point and change higher than the national average, 4.4 percent, which is the highest the country’s seen in four years.
The first person I heard give voice to this mood, publicly at least — obviously my friend group of anxiety-disordered writers has been on this beat for years now — was metal musician Roddy Bottum on the podcast How Long Gone. Bottum, who recently published a memoir in part about his childhood growing up in L.A. in the ’70s, tells hosts Chris Black and Jason Stewart he was back in the city recently on his book tour and was shaken by how dismal he found his birthplace. “Wow, Los Angeles is super-dark right now,” Bottom says before mentioning the fires and the ICE raids. “We’ve experienced so many decades of Los Angeles just being this place of glory. Especially, you know, people in New York love to talk about how people have moved to Los Angeles and the benefits of that. ‘Oh, it’s so great. There’s so much space.’ And the classic line, ‘It’s just so easy. It’s just so easy.’ And suddenly we’re in this era right now where it’s not. It’s really, really dark.” Bottom concludes, “I just think Los Angeles right now deserves our compassion.”
A few weeks ago, a black Escalade double-parked on Larchmont Avenue — a well-to-do area in central L.A. — and Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, emerged from the back and popped into the coffee shop where I was laptop-warrioring with what I assume were a bunch of fellow un-to-semi-employed writers. (You can spot script-formatting from across the room.) Sarandos ordered whatever coffee drink his assistant’s assistant’s intern usually gets him and a muffin. Then he kind of gazed over us without ever actually making eye contact with anyone. There was a palpable shift in energy. It was like we were in the chimp pen at the zoo when the guy with the big bucket of produce starts jingling his key ring. Typing slowed. People stared at Sarandos or deliberately refused to. It felt like a moment out of a bad play, like a theater professor had issued the prompt “write a scene based on your current insides.” And this was before news broke of Netflix’s bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, a move that would trash-compact the industry further and tip us into whatever the next level of Dantean employment hell awaits.
Hollywood isn’t the first industry to get folded, spindled, and mutilated. But having personally lived through the collapse of two industries (see also print media), what strikes me about Hollywood’s state of peril is how fast it happened. In 2019, a year that still felt like the Peak TV era for me and my cohorts, there were 3,011 television-writing jobs. Most everyone I knew, including myself, was “on a show” for at least part of the year. Most everyone I knew, including myself, had sold a show or two. By 2024, the number of jobs was nearly halved to 1,819 positions.
I reached out to the WGA, my own guild, at least ten times while writing this piece to see if it had 2025 statistics, but no one called me back. A sign, perhaps, it’s stripped thin too — or that I’m over six months late on my dues. But I assure you that things did not improve this year. Back in October, I inquired about an open position on a writing staff I heard about through the grapevine and was given this offhand estimation: There were four total job slots open in comedy at the moment and about 1,800 people competing for them. Those are the kind of odds that make your mind go places. Places like … grad school? Real estate? OnlyFans?
Even those who have managed to hang on to their Hollywood jobs — or are doing well even, at least by comparison — understand the code red of it all. I spoke with a showrunner–executive producer who’s worked as a TV writer for over two decades and is still under an overall deal at one of the major studios. She says working on the lot these days feels like clocking in at a ghost town. “During the strike, the slogan was ‘Survive until 2025.’ I think it was January or February ’25 when it still wasn’t picking up when I realized we need another slogan … What rhymes with 2028?” The showrunner knows she’s fortunate to be getting a steady income, even though she’s having a much harder time selling projects. “Eighty percent of my friends aren’t working,” she says.
Beyond the loss of tangibles (job, income), I think what we’re collectively grieving most is a sense of hope. Los Angeles runs on hope the way Boston runs on Dunkin’. Think about it: We’re a bunch of people with “aspiring” in front of our job titles. So much of this job requires optimism. You spend months developing ideas or toiling away at a screenplay with no guarantee that someone will want to hear your pitch, let alone pay for it. HBO’s I Love LA gets this right — the struggle to “make it” here is the fun of the show. But those characters still get lucky — or even deserved — breaks. In reality, it’s starting to feel like those breaks don’t actually exist anymore for anyone.
And it’s not like the back-to-back news of a Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition and Disney investing a billion in OpenAI is making our hearts sing. Another writer, my friend Julieanne, who worked prolifically until a couple years ago, has resorted to asking the universe for reinforcement. “Have the past two years been, objectively, the worst of my working life? Yes,” she tells me by text. “But I’m not leaving the figurative or literal town yet, even though a tarot reader on Larchmont told me emphatically that I should become a baker, while grabbing both of my hands. I love it too much, which is probably something dumber than hope. Also, I cannot bake.”
A few weeks ago, I was on a hike with Dave, in the middle of telling him about this assignment, when he clutched my forearm and, with a stricken face, said, “I have to tell you something.” He was getting out of L.A. too.
Dave came here in 2018, fresh from grad school, to be a screenwriter and has never found steady work. But as much as employment woes factored into his decision, so did the unshakable loneliness he felt just being here. It’s not that David didn’t find smart, cool friends. (He did, obviously — me.) “The pace of friendships feels really different here,” he says. “You know how people talk about how one thing they love about L.A. is the space? Most of the time they mean physical space. If you’re successful here, you can have a house. You can have a yard. And it’s almost like people want that socially too. They want a yard socially. You want to make plans? Great. Yes, I would love to see you in two weeks. Let’s just have a little space.” Early on, Dave also got the “Just give it a couple years” speech. “It’s like Retin-A,” he jokes. “Everyone says it’ll be really rough at the beginning, but give it a few weeks and you will glow like you’ve never before. I kept waiting for that to happen with L.A., and it never did. I also kept waiting for that to happen with Retin-A, and it never did. It just kept making my skin peel.”
To some extent, isolation is just a feature of Los Angeles the way light frottage is a feature of riding on the New York City subway. We’re alone in our cars, and big concrete roadways slice through our neighborhoods. One friend, a drama writer who hasn’t worked for a couple years, confessed that he goes to a restaurant in his neighborhood almost every day for breakfast. He knows he shouldn’t, he’s not earning income at the moment, but he says, “Sometimes it’s the only chance I get to talk to another human.”
But something about the present despair seems to be shifting how Angelenos behave. I met Rachel Day, a 31-year-old Los Angeles native, when she approached me at a café after overhearing me talk about the woes of our city. “It’s a muscle that’s not used as often here,” she says about reaching out to strangers. “And so it feels that much more rewarding, but also we’re all kind of rusty at it.” It seems like when life gets hard, community is the first thing to suffer. And it’s hard to forge community when L.A. has always been hard-pressed for a cultural mouthpiece to tie us together. (Sorry to the L.A. Times; I know you’re trying, baby.) I learned about what’s arguably the most important art exhibit of the past five years, Kara Walker’s “Confederates,” currently exhibiting at the MOCA in Downtown Los Angeles, from reading The New Yorker. I’m writing about my life as an Angeleno for New York Magazine.
“People in L.A. are contending all the time with outside sources diagnosing or examining or legitimizing or delegitimizing it,” Day says. “But the vibes do feel off and the only way to figure it out is for us to talk about it.” Inevitably, when she’s visiting friends in New York, she’ll encounter someone who makes a snide remark about L.A. “I can talk about my frustrations and anger or disappointments with this place,” she says. “But when someone else does, it feels like, Hey, that’s my mom.”
Is that the silver lining of this moment? That we’re actually acting more like a community? Rachel and I were both buoyed just by the fact that we had a spontaneous conversation. Ironically, in talking to a bunch of Angelenos about our shared anxiety, I feel more myself here than ever before, like I’m able to live out and free as an anxious person in the sunshine. A few weeks ago, I was at Trader Joe’s and I ran into a former co-worker. Ordinarily, she’s a real “How are you? I’m working with Spielberg” type. This time when I asked the question, she dropped the façade. We actually talked. About how bad things were, but still. Maybe just being in the same boat (i.e., the Titanic) is making us connect more. And relate more. And maybe even be willing to overcome some of L.A.’s infrastructural challenges to do it. That in and of itself is a small victory.
The other day, a text chain of writers I used to work with on a sitcom sparked back up again. Of the 12 people on it, two are currently staffed on a show. Our text conversation turned to talk of getting a reunion lunch at Max & Helen’s, a new diner that just opened in Larchmont Village from Nancy Silverton and famed TV veteran Phil Rosenthal. Then someone sent a screenshot of the menu, displaying the price of a side of jam: $1.75. Riffing ensued along the lines of “In this economy?!” but funnier because these are comedy writers with free time. My friend Lew, who lost the home he and his wife raised their three children in during the Palisades Fire last year and who has since moved to New York, took on the comic persona of an Evangelical doomsdayer and texted, “Leave Los Angeles AT ONCE! The thing you used to do is/was nonsense! Cast of your chains! Open your eyes!” Then … “Cast *OFF your chains. So drunk rn.”
I pressed the “Ha-ha” button on his text and packed up my laptop to go to the coffee shop. Apparently I’m not ready to shake off my chains just yet.
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