Times must be tight, as Grey's Anatomy and FBI cut back their stars' work orders

TV’s ongoing budget crunch has hit another milestone of “Welp, that’s probably not good” over the last two weeks: The casts of some of the most fundamentally unkillable shows on television have reportedly gotten their individual episode orders cut down. That includes the massive ensemble at Grey’s Anatomy, and now the casts of the FBI franchise of shows (specifically, FBI and FBI: Most Wanted, both at CBS). All of which are now facing an increasingly common practice in the world of Hollywood penny-pinching: A reduction in the number of episodes individual cast members on the shows are being guaranteed to appear in, even as overall episode numbers stay on the higher side.

In case it wasn’t clear, here’s how the maneuver breaks down: Stars on these shows are being told that, while, say, FBI might be getting a standard 22-or-so episode order for its upcoming 7th season, actual performers will be guaranteed to appear in fewer episodes than that—2 less in the case of the FBI shows, and 3 or 4 in the case of Grey’s, according to Deadline. Since actors don’t, y’know, get paid for episodes of TV they don’t make, part of being a regular on a series usually means a contractual guarantee of an appearance in every episode; the upshot of this is that you can expect characters to find all sorts of reasons to dip out of events at Sloan-Kettering/The FBI Store as these show’s individual seasons progress.

News of this phenomenon hitting FBI and Most Wanted isn’t entirely unexpected, since they’re both Dick Wolf shows; Wolf’s production company started pulling this stuff on the Law & Orders last year in an effort to deal with increasingly tight TV budgets. (None of which has likely been helped by studios scrambling to recover momentum in the wake of last year’s strikes.) Grey’s is a bit of a surprise, though, if only because it’s such an institution at this point; it’s not like the series doesn’t have characters to spare as it swaps stars in and out, but hearing that belt-tightening is hitting TV’s most dependable medical drama is still a bit of a shock.

Still, it’s not the worst thing producers can do to a show (besides cancel it, of course); we find it helpful to remember the parable of Bob Hearts Abishola, which—before ending, which it did earlier this year—announced that it was demoting everybody except stars Billy Gardell and Folake Olowofoyeku to “recurring” status for its final season, basically paying them on an episode-by-episode basis. The budget cuts have generally been framed as a survival issue, i.e., “You can have another season at reduce price, or nothing,” with a number of shows having clearly decided cheap TV is better than no TV at all.