Once upon a time, a television show was delivered through the cathode-ray tube to American living rooms in orderly half-hour or hour-long bursts. Seasons began like clockwork in the fall and closed up shop in spring; in between was the deathly dull valley of reruns. Predictability ruled the production side as well. Writers spent long hours in airless rooms drumming up jokes or churning out cliff-hangers, but they knew exactly how long they would be there and what they were delivering. In our current age of peak TV, there are no certainties or standard formats anymore. A series can consist of 4 episodes or 24; it might broadcast weekly or stream online all at once in a giant, binge-ready bloc. Networks launch shows at any time of year. As the series in production swell in number, taking on a dizzying array of shapes and sizes, and as cable and streaming channels compete with the major networks for viewers’ attention, there’s also a new fluidity to the way shows are created. Traditional television practices—such as producing elaborate, pricey pilot episodes as the basis on which network executives decide what shows to put on the air—are being reconsidered.

“It’s the Wild West,” says screenwriter Evan Dickson, who’s developing a TV series alongside horror director David Bruckner. “I feel like the landscape changes from month to month.” The partners are currently running a three-week-long mini–writers’ room funded by a studio to “pressure test” eight episodes’ worth of story ideas and “see how they hold water.”

The rise of such “mini-rooms” represents a potentially seismic shift in the way TV is made. Mini-rooms (the “mini” can mean fewer writers, a shorter time frame, or both) offer the promise of flexibility and reduced costs for studios and networks, while increasing opportunities for less experienced writers to get their feet in the door. But mini-rooms also threaten to turn a profession that was reasonably stable and lucrative into yet another poorly paid spoke of the gig economy. “[The mini-room] was a very unusual thing when I first got into television, which was only five years ago, and now they’re everywhere,” says Patrick Somerville, a writer for The Leftovers and creator of the forthcoming Netflix series Maniac. Having both worked in and run mini-rooms, Somerville worries that the industry is pushing toward a freelance model, one far less secure than the writers’ rooms of yore. “With creative flexibility also comes the danger of exploitation of writers—less guaranteed time, less guaranteed income,” he says.

‘Mini-room” is an open-ended term that can describe a range of setups. Gina Welch, who has written for Feud and Ray Donovan and is developing a series based on Carmen Maria Machado’s story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, says the phrase often refers to rooms “where there’s no expectation that a whole show is going to get written. They’re just sort of either a cauldron of ideas or they’re to get the creator going on writing a pilot.” In recent years, cable channels such as Starz and AMC have experimented with a “script to series” process that short-circuits the traditional development model. Instead of spending millions on a cast and crew for a pilot, executives fund a less expensive writers’ room in which a small number of scribes generate scripts and a detailed story arc. Based on these materials, the network will decide to green-light the series or smother it at birth. Starz programming chief Carmi Zlotnik says he has four or five such small writers’ rooms going at any given time. “Our approach to all of our shows is to be bespoke and try to figure out what is the right thing that each show needs in development, in production, all the way through,” he says. The network’s two most recently premiered series took slightly different paths. For Vida, scripts were written and a mini–presentation video was shot to test out actors; Sweetbitter went straight from mini-room-generated scripts to shooting an entire series. The focus on scripts over pilots was born of economic necessity at Starz, Zlotnik says. A pilot can cost two or three times (or more) as much as a single episode of a series. That’s a lot of money to blow on a bet. Zlotnik compares his team to “venture capitalists in a creative medium, where the businesses are the shows. The [writers’] room is part of a system of staged investment that manages the risk.” He says that in the standard pilot model of production networks start a new series with lots of unknowns. “You’re budgeting and trying to imagine, ‘What are we going to need for the last episode of this season that hasn’t been written yet?’ ” he says. “Eventually, it comes and smacks you in the face.” Working out the story arc in advance gives a much better sense of what the show requires in terms of sets, locations, cast, and all the other expensive variables that go into creating a fictional world. David Madden, president of original programming for AMC, SundanceTV, and AMC Studios, says that when he likes a pitch the next step is not a pilot but a room that will generate four or five scripts, which amounts to half of the network’s usual 10-episode season. The writers are also asked to hand in “a supplementary document that basically lays out the rest of the season, and maybe gives people a sense of what the next season or two might be.”