The volume of Canadian TV episodes is decreasing across the board, according to a new report from the Writers Guild of Canada (WGC)

The WGC released its 2024 Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Report on Thursday (Oct. 3), which includes updated membership data from the 2023 calendar year.

Between 2018 and 2023 there was a 45% decrease in the number of one-hour drama episodes, a 16% drop in the number of half-hour adult episodes and a 48% decrease in episodes of half-hour children’s live-action series.

When it came to animation, the number of half-hour episodes fell by 79%, the number of 15-minute episodes dropped by 33% and the number of 10-minutes-and-under episodes decreased by 69%. According to the WGC, this is the first the report has shown a decline in the number of episodes across every TV format.

The WGC also said series covered in the report saw fewer writers hired than ever before. Compared with 2016, the number of WGC members working on Canadian TV decreased by 11%.

The percentage of new diverse members joining the Guild dropped to 49% in 2023 from 56% in 2022. The WGC defines diverse as an individual who identifies as Indigenous, Black, a person of colour, LGBTQ2S+ or a person with a disability.

Regarding overall membership, 17.8% of writers identified as diverse in 2023, compared to 15.8% in 2022.

There have been several gains made across different EDI measures. For example, the percentage of WGC diverse writers in Canadian TV has increased from 26% in 2019 to 40% in 2023. This is attributed to the higher participation of LGBTQ2S+, Indigenous, writers with disabilities and writers of colour, particularly in live-action series.

The percentage of jobs going to diverse writers increased to 44% up from 38% in 2021 – thanks to some writers working on more than one series.

When broken down by various underrepresented groups, the report said 3.9% of writing jobs were held by Indigenous writers, 7.9% by Black writers, 13.9% by LGBTQ2S+ writers, 18.9% by people of colour and 3.7% by writers with a disability.

Another gain is the 53% and 42% of diverse writers that received consulting producer and supervising producer credits respectively, compared to 35% and 34% in 2022.

Diverse writers represented 30.2% of earning writers and received 28.5% of earnings in 2023.

In live-action, women made up 57% of writers rooms. Similarly, there were more women in writers rooms compared to men across all diverse categories. Women made 52.8% of writer earnings in 2023, compared to 45.5% made by men.

Indigenous writers increased their writers’ room participation to 5.5% and earned 5.1% of writing credits. However, only 0.4% of animation writing credits were assigned to Indigenous writers.

Writers with disabilities earned 9.3% of writing credits in 2023 compared to 3.3% in 2022.

The share of writers working on TV in 2023 that have intersectional identities was 7.9%, and 9.8% of writing jobs went to intersectional writers in the same year. Racialized writers who also identify as LGBTQ2S+ made up 6.1% of all working writers and received 7.5% of the jobs.

The report is based on 53 live-action and 23 animation series that were in production in 2023, as well as the 372 series from 2019 to 2022.

The WGC has also released a Best Practices Guide for Producers Working with Diverse Screenwriters as a companion document to the report.

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