Next TV used to coach youth baseball in a league adjacent to Los Angeles’ affluent Hancock Park neighborhood. 

Those blissful days of escape on the ball field followed several traumatic layoffs in the print news business, and we tended to enviously lump the writer, actor and producer parents we dealt with into one monolithic ball bucket — rich Hollywood folks, far better off than we were, who weren’t being so much disrupted by the internet but rather flourishing amidst it, the rise of new suppliers like Netflix and Amazon adding to their seemingly endless prosperity. 

Also read: Hollywood Actors Strike, Say Producers Proposed Tangible Today, Super-Scary, Here-and-Now Plan To Replace Secondary Talent With AI

They may have looked diffused from our relatively disadvantaged perspective, but the lines of fault and class demarcation were certainly there. We just didn't see them at the time.

For starters, few of these parents were ”just writers.’ If you were merely a subordinate in a writers’ room, even for a hit show, you probably couldn’t afford to live in a neighborhood with a median home price of $2.3 million. 

There were a few notable actor parents among the group. One was an affable former supporting role player on a classic NBC sitcom. He was a truly nice man who loved nothing more than to watch his son play ball, but he was perpetually rushing from the stands to catch flights to places like Vancouver. He never lacked work, which was good because he seemed to be locked into a kind of Tantalusian curse, unable to fully grasp onto the level of an austere overhead somehow forever out of his reach.

Looking back on it, the league was run — literally — by the showrunners, one of whom staged a coup, firing everyone from the board and taking it over. A charismatic “multi-hyphenate” who still acted in the shows he ran, several ousted board members even thanked him after he had them jettisoned from their fun volunteer roles.

These producers largely stayed in town when they weren’t traveling all over the world with their families for personal pleasure. The coup leader turned league president often threw backyard barbecues (yes, lavish ones) for the families of his teams. Next TV never got invited to one of those events, but we heard they were fun. 

Also among these producer ranks was a top-level creator of the then-new Netflix hit original series Orange Is the New Black, who I was told hosted fundraising dinners for then-President Barack Obama when he’d fly into town. Her kid was our catcher. I met her once as she was whisking her boy off the ball field in the middle of a doubleheader so that he could attend a dinner party of some kind. 

Catchers are hard to replace, but we got by.   

Lose My House? What House?

On Friday, Next TV read Michael Schulman’s 3,300-word story in The New Yorker about underpaid role players on Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black with mouth-agape wonderment.

There was, of course, the essential through line of this can’t-miss read titled, “'Orange Is the New Black’ Signaled the Rot Inside the Streaming Economy.”

This collection of previously unknown female performers starred on a hit show watched by hundreds of millions of viewers globally. The series, one of the first subscription streaming originals, fundamentally changed the way we watch television. The term “binge” dates back to this specific series. 

Many of the actors interviewed in the story appeared in this brilliantly orchestrated, wonderfully diverse ensemble comedy-drama irregularly, but they still became recognized all over the world. 

But due largely to shortsighted capitulation on digital project revenue sharing during the tense 2009 SAG-AFTRA negotiations with producers, these talented performers were receiving royalty checks of $27 or less and still living in one-bedroom apartments. 

But what really floored us was Schulman just letting the aforementioned Orange producer completely off the hook. This top-level creative, who ostensibly had the final word on hiring each of the vastly underpaid performers interviewed in Schulman’s story — and who refused to be interviewed herself — “had little say over the actors’ salaries,” contends the author, who rather directs boogeyman-seeking readers to Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and the series’ studio, Lionsgate. 

Schulman’s not wrong. The digital giants and their Hollywood studio partners deserve plenty of blame for what has been somehow only recently revealed to be an ugly, vast wealth chasm threatening the peace, civility — and productivity — of the video business. 

Certainly, the optics were conspicuous enough this week, as captains of media industry met at their annual “summer camp for billionaires” in Sun Valley, Idaho, while SAG-AFTRA negotiations with the AMPTP melted down. 

But Schulman telling us that Jenji Kohan had no idea that actress Taryn Manning, who played a core role on her show as Pennsatucky, was struggling to find an off-the-rack size zero, on her own dime, so that she could attend the SAG Awards and pick up her well-deserved acting trophy?

Sorry, we’re not buying that. 

Fortunately, others have spoken up. 

A lifelong denizen of the conspicuously capitalist Mecca that is Los Angeles, Next TV has always cast a jaundiced eye — OK, they’re both pretty jaundiced — to Hollywood's often fawning, conspicuously performative gestures of proletariat support. 

We initially reacted that way on Friday to actor Ron Perlman ... initially.

Hours after SAG-AFTRA joined the WGA in striking against Hollywood producers, Perlman posted on Instagram a since-deleted, expletive-laden video that included a threat against an unnamed producer quoted in one of the Penske showbiz trades. This studio executive suggested waiting writers out, until they’re softened up by unfortunate economic circumstance including foreclosure of their homes, before returning to the negotiating table. 

“There are lots of ways to lose a house,” brooded tough guy Perlman, raised in an unbroken home in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood, and schooled in the dramatic arts from an early age. 

According to the super-credible website Celebrity Net Worth, the former Hellboy and Sons of Anarchy star has an asset value of $8 million. You shouldn’t be impulsively writing campaign checks over two bottles of Pinot Grigio at Hancock Park Democratic fundraisers with that kind of money, but it doesn't necessarily rank you with the Orwellian chickens and the other condemned livestock of Animal Farm L.A., either. 

Indeed, Perlman's tough guy act comes off a little cliche … with a tinge of criminal liability. But credit him for being one of the finite number of established showbiz folks who have put something on the line to call out Hollywood's polarized, unsustainable charade. 

The internet is the ultimate tough guy here. 

It took down newspapers. Then the music business. And now it’s coming for video entertainment. Every major sector in our Company Town built around media has now been disrupted. 

And judging by Maureen Dowd's column this week, AI promises to be even worse. 

Many of us in other media sectors have already had our own Orange Is the New Black moment, and they’ve been pretty lonely experiences. 

In 2009, Next TV, along with a lot of our colleagues, was told to grab a box, get our things and get out by the print showbiz trade we’d worked for over the previous decade.

The next thing we knew: Editors were telling us to accept freelance writing rates of 3 cents a word because they could find someone else who would do the work for that unsustainable rate. 

And we were naively floored by how little of a shit was expressed by our surviving coworkers at the time, who were probably just scared out their minds about their own job security. 

At the same time that Next TV and our colleagues were being kicked into the ice-cold waters of The Great Recession, SAG-AFTRA was negotiating its way out of a previous strike with the AMPTP … which somehow managed to convince the actors union that “new media” would remain in a nascent developmental stage of YouTube cat videos for the foreseeable future. 

Yeah, and Next TV remembers the visionary editors of our showbiz trade --- effectively our “showrunners” — referring to the youthful workers in the far-flung ghetto of our newsroom as the “web monkeys” as recently as 2008.

We didn’t have a union … or good strategic decision-makers in our corner … or even guys like Perlman. But we sure could have used any and all of them

After 20 years of perpetual layoffs and sales to private equity, the news business continues to eat its own legs, with Buzzfeed, Vox and Vice becoming only the latest examples of news companies blowing the digital future. 

In the 30-year-old age of the internet, our industry’s executive decision-makers have never been any good at digital monetization and are certainly no match now for formidable forces like Google and Meta, which continue to steal our goods at will. 

Yes, the “Golden Age” of print and digital journalism, if there ever was one, seems like very long ago. But we don’t just have the greed of internet companies and private equity firms to blame for this. 

Our showrunners let us down. And we let ourselves down by showing a complete lack of unity, caring, pride ... and Perlman-esque grit. 

We didn’t take care of each other. Too many of us who managed to find full-time editorial work again were OK offering their freelancers 3 cents a word. 

Will TV, just coming off what was a true Golden Age, fare any better?

For the first time, the industry's executive decision-makers have no idea how to effectively monetize their products. (This recent Bloomberg story illustrates the situation pretty good.)

The  man who is currently the most influential executive in the video business, David Zaslav, isn’t making his mark on what he creates but rather what and how much he chooses to tear down. 

Amid his well-publicized CNBC Squawk Box appearance last week, Disney chief executive Bob Iger simultaneously devalued the futures of both streaming and linear, the latter of which he seemed to indicate was approaching fire sale. 

(Responding to Iger, SAG-AFTRA chief Fran Drescher called his remarks “repugnant.”)

Given this backdrop, it’s hardly surprising to see the AMPTP close ranks and try to impose a little desperation on the other side. 

For the sake of the video business — which we certainly don’t want to become like, say, the news business — let’s hope Hollywood’s rank and file finds its inner Ron Perlman and it also discovers the will and unity to dig in for the long, good fight. 

RELATED:MCN Original Video: One Question for ... 'Hand of God' Star Ron Perlman

Actor Ron Perlman is no stranger to playing larger-than-life roles, like superhero Hellboy on the big screen and tough biker Clay Morrow on FX’s drama series Sons of Anarchy. In Amazon Studios’ new series Hand of God, premiering this month on Amazon Prime (see Review), Perlman once again tackles a seminal role in the morally corrupt Pernell Harris, a politically connected judge who finds religion — and vengeance — after believing he has heard the voice of God through his comatose son.

Perlman spoke with Multichannel News programming editor R. Thomas Umstead about Hand of God (read our review), the current state of TV (and streamed) content and his SOA legacy. Here’s an edited transcript.

MCN:Were you concerned thatHand of God, which features a storyline dealing with touchy topics like religion and spirituality, would be shunned by content distributors?

Ron Perlman: I knew we were going to push some buttons — it pushed some buttons for me when I was reading it. But the takeaway is the genius of what [series writer] Ben Watkins was able to thread together. You are really never told what to believe or not believe. What you are watching is somebody who is making these choices based on their own survival. You are brought into this thing and questioning, would I do this, or would I do the same thing this guy is doing given the same set of parameters?

MCN:Do you see any of your personal traits in the character of Judge Pernell Harris?

RP: You bring what you have to bring. The character is not me, but the invention of Ben Watkins. But my job is to make it look like I’m him, so I have to constantly look inward to see what’s in myself that can be useful in depicting this guy. A lot of it is imagination, because there are things about this guy that I’m not even close to in real life, but that’s the fun of being an actor — taking something that’s abstract in real life and making it look like he’s been here all along.

MCN:How influential was Amazon in the creative process ofHand of God?

RP: Amazon has been a phenomenal entity to collaborate with because they recognized how dangerous this project was, and, rather than trying to compromise it, they embraced the uncomfortableness and the boldness of it. So on that level I’m in love with them because they have balls. No. 2, they gave us huge amounts of resources to make as good a show as we could. They seem to be real fans of what we were doing. They have been as forthcoming and creative as an executive organization has ever been, and I’ve been lucky enough to participate in a few of them. FX was phenomenal in that way too.

MCN:Judge Harris is a little different than Clay Morrow, your character in FX’sSons of Anarchy. Were you surprised at the long-term success and popularity ofSOA?

RP: I think we all were. I’ve been at it longer than any of the others at Sons — I’m in my 40th year in professional acting — and I know for a fact that that was the biggest success I ever enjoyed. It was the biggest game-changer, in terms of going around the world and being recognized and people wanting to have their picture taken with Clay. So it had to be the same for all the other guys. For most of us it will never get better. It really hit a nerve.

MCN:At this point in your career, would you rather do television shows or movies?

RP: The reason I was so insistent on finding another television show after Sons was that I really believe that we are now living in the most exciting period in television. First came the [premium] cable channels, which opened up the conversation — with HBO and Showtime you could show nudity, say anything and deal with any subject; then came the basic-cable channels with almost as much [creative] expanse. Now Hulu, Netflix and Amazon have come around. All of these new players have created a world in which the only thing that can get you market share to compete with what the other guys are doing is to be more original. Whenever you’re in a situation like that in a creative medium, that’s where you want to be, and television is there right now. I think in 10 years it will burn out and they’ll manage to [mess] it all up like they do everything else, but for right now that’s where we’re at, and that’s why I was so insistent on hopping from one TV show to another, because I knew I would never find that originality anywhere else.

MCN:Are you working on any other projects?

RP: Actually, in defiance of that reality, I’m in the process of launching my own movie studio. We have four movies in production now that I’m producing and three or four movies in pre-production. That’s the tail that wags the dog for me — I’m a movie freak. The fact that the movie business is in the state that it’s in right now, I take that kind of personally. I feel that has more to do with market forces, which are [weak] reasons to kill a distinguished art form. So, I’m starting this movie studio because it’s too beautiful to turn away from and see if we can make some nice movies that get a little resonance.

RELATED:MCN Original Video: One Question for ... 'Hand of God' Star Ron Perlman

Amazon Studios delves into the seemingly alternate worlds of religion and revenge in its new drama Hand of God.

The series stars Ron Perlman (Sons of Anarchy) as powerful Judge Pernell Harris, a major political figure in a fictional California town who’s not afraid to wield his power and influence over the entire community, from Mayor Robert Boston (Andre Royo) all the way down to the town’s police department.

Harris’s world is rocked when his son PJ (Johnny Ferro) shoots himself after an unknown assailant repeatedly assaults his wife, Jocelyn (Alona Tal), in front of him. The pilot opens with the elder Harris in the midst of a mental breakdown, naked in a public fountain and speaking in tongues. Later it would be revealed that Harris had recently been converted into a born-again Christian by a con man preacher, Paul Curtis (Julian Morris).

Unwilling to come to grips with his comatose son, who has been declared brain dead by doctors, Harris refuses to pull the plug despite Jocelyn’s pleas to move on. His stubbornness is steeled when he begins to hear PJ talk to him from his bed, which Harris interprets as the voice of God asking him to avenge the wrongs done to PJ and his wife.

Unable to convince his own wife, Crystal (Dana Delany), or his friend Boston of his divine messages, he turns to Curtis for spiritual direction and to a born-again convict, KD (Garret Dillahunt), to help him dole out vigilante justice against those he believes are guilty of hurting his family.

Perlman is terrific as the complex and strongwilled, yet conflicted and complex Judge Harris, and Delany turns in a solid performance as his supportive but not-so-innocent wife.

The series suffers through numerous subplots that tend to take away from the strength and appeal of Judge Harris’ s plight. Overall, though, Hand of God should ultimately receive the blessing of Amazon Prime subscribers.