How hard do you have to work to earn $60m in just three years? The answer, for Phoebe Waller-Bridge, at least, is not very hard at all. In 2019 the Emmy-winning creator of the hit TV show Fleabag signed a $20m-a-year deal with Amazon Studios. Originally, she was supposed to collaborate with Donald Glover on a series based on the 2005 movie Mr and Mrs Smith, but she reportedly left the show after a few months because of clashing creative styles. No worries, Amazon said, you can work on a Tomb Raider series instead. However, the Hollywood Reporter notes, since a showrunner (the person who has overall creative authority over a show) was also being hired, it’s questionable just how much work would actually be needed by the Fleabag creator. In short: Waller-Bridge has collected $60m from Amazon over the last few years without ever making a new show.
I’m not shaming Waller-Bridge, to be clear. I think this is brilliant work if you can get it. Taking away some of Jeff Bezos’s joyrides-in-space money as payment for staring into space? A+ work! And I should state for the record that Amazon Studios has rejected recent allegations that Waller-Bridge is being paid simply to exist. Apparently, she is “feeling very committed” to Tomb Raider and they expect her to be worth the money. “When she does deliver, she delivers,” the Amazon Studios head of television, Vernon Sanders, has said. Not everyone is so sure the deal was a good idea, however. One showrunner described Amazon’s behavior to the Hollywood Reporter as “star-fucking”.
There certainly seems to be a lot of that going on lately. Waller-Bridge is far from the only creative to be being paid big bucks for doing very little. In 2020, Harry and Meghan signed a multi-year Netflix deal, worth a reported $100m. “Our focus will be on creating content that informs but also gives hope,” the couple said at the time. No doubt Netflix is hoping that, once they’re done mining their personal lives for views, they’ll come up with some decent original content. So far it’s not clear that will be the case. Their most recent output was a seven-episode series called Live to Lead – dry profiles on Greta Thunberg, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Gloria Steinem – which was released on Netflix on 31 December with little fanfare and almost no reviews. Netflix has also cancelled Meghan’s animated series called Pearl, amid cutbacks.
Another high-profile name who hasn’t exactly been breaking a sweat for his money is the film-maker JJ Abrams (a nepo baby who is also the father of a nepo baby, for those who keep track). Bad Robot, Abrams’s production company, got $250m from Warner Bros Discovery to create content back in 2019. It has not created very much and Warner Bros is apparently frustrated with the lack of delivery. Abrams, meanwhile, is busy working on a Star Trek movie for Paramount Global, a Warner rival, as that $250m deal didn’t have an exclusivity clause.
The creators of South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, found a similar loophole to get away with doing less than they promised. In 2019, they signed a $500m deal with Warner Discovery to air at least 30 new episodes of the show, but in the end delivered less than half of what was promised by suddenly switching to two- or six-episode “seasons”. In 2021, the pair signed a separate $900m deal with Paramount+ to make exclusive “events” that seemed essentially like longer episodes of South Park – because Warner Discovery didn’t have exclusivity. Warner Discovery is suing Paramount for using “grammatical sleight-of-hand … to side-step South Park’s contractual obligations”. (South Park obviously made fun of the whole thing in a series of specials for Paramount called The Streaming Wars.)
While they were doing at least some work for their millions, the MNSBC host Rachel Maddow got paid a fortune expressly to stick around and take it easy. In 2021, NBCUniversal gave Maddow, who was considering leaving the show she’s been fronting for 13 years, $30m a year to stay with the company on a more flexible schedule. Maddow commanded such exceptional ratings that they basically had to pay her not to leave them for someone else.
It’s not just Hollywood where employers seem keen to pay certain people to do nothing. Back in the zero-interest-rate era, tech companies reportedly used to hire well-paid workers to do very little just so the competition didn’t nab them. “[I]t kind of seemed that Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us and they were just hoarding us like Pokémon cards,” a former Meta worker, Brit Levy, said in a recent TikTok video about her experience at the company. Levy said that she had to “fight to find work”. My friend, you’re doing it all wrong. Take a leaf out of Waller-Bridge’s book: sit back, collect your cash and enjoy being a human Pokémon card.
