Umbrella Academy Executive Producer Says They Were Also Lyft Driver Before Joining Writers’ Strike

Molly Nussbaum, a writer and producer on Umbrella Academy who was working on Disney+’s Daredevil: Born Again when the Writers Guild of America strike began, revealed in a recent interview that she had been driving for Lyft in order to make ends meet in 2022. Nussbaum, who is serving as a WGA strike captain, told her story to TheWrap. Hers is the latest in a long line of stories about writers and actors who are barely scraping by. The average salary in the industry sounds pretty okay — until you consider how expensive it is to live in almost any city where a member of the TV and film community could reasonably be located.

Traditionally, most low-paid actors and writers helped pay the bills with residual payments from reruns. The contracts were pretty clear as to how those payments worked. With streaming, those contracts got significantly muddier, in part because streaming platforms refuse to provide any clarity as to their viewership numbers. Traditional reruns are also functionally dead in many cases, because streamers demand exclusivity. That’s why, for instance, The CW claims they have a hard time making money on Superman & Lois, because they can’t air reruns from previous seasons. And that extends to writers and actors not getting paid for those theoretical reruns.

“The money that you make on a job has to now last you six, 10, 12, 14 months — and when you don’t have residuals coming to help you get through that,” Nussbaum said. “I mean, I was an executive producer in April on a hit show for a streaming platform, and I was driving for Lyft in December. That doesn’t make any sense. It’s not good.”

Here’s the official synopsis for Umbrella Academy season 3:

After putting a stop to 1963’s doomsday, the Umbrella Academy return home to the present, convinced they prevented the initial apocalypse and fixed this godforsaken timeline once and for all. But after a brief moment of celebration, they realize things aren’t exactly (okay, not at all) how they left them. Enter the Sparrow Academy. Smart, stylish, and about as warm as a sea of icebergs, the Sparrows immediately clash with the Umbrellas in a violent face-off that turns out to be the least of everyone’s concerns. Navigating challenges, losses, and surprises of their own – and dealing with an unidentified destructive entity wreaking havoc in the Universe (something they may have caused) – now all they need to do is convince Dad’s new and possibly better family to help them put right what their arrival made wrong. Will they find a way back to their pre-apocalyptic lives? Or is this new world about to reveal more than just a hiccup in the timeline?

Elliot Page, Tom Hopper, David Castañeda, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Robert Sheehan, Aidan Gallagher, Justin H. Min, Colm Feore, Ritu Arya, Justin Cornwell, Britne Oldford, Jake Epstein, Genesis Rodriguez, Cazzie David, Javon ‘Wanna’ Walton, and Jordan Claire Robbins star.