Tyler Perry’s been in the film industry for nearly two decades and has dedicated his writing skills to several movies and plays for his fans.
Now it seems that Perry is planning to surrender some of the work to other aspiring television writers while he takes on more of a managing role. He told Hollywood Reporter that he plans to continue to write for about “three to four more years.” Expounding on that, Perry said, “My plan is to relinquish to a lot more directors and writers to take over a lot of these shows that I’ve started. So yeah, for sure.”
The “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” creator gloated a little about his “work ethic” in January 2020, when he tweeted a video of his scripts. He had several scripts for nine different shows laid out on the table and revealed that while most TV shows and films have a writers room, he does not. “I write it all,” he said.
While he may have thought this would have gotten him some sort of praise from fans, it actually did the opposite. Several criticized him for not having more people to help with his creations because of his previous scrapes with union writers. He’s also seen his writing receive a lot of backlash for his characters or the plots being too toxic or traumatic or formulaic.
It looks like he is taking those fans’ advice and is going to do more “overseeing, rather than doing the hands-on work.” But seeing that Perry’s been writing his own scripts for years, it’s understandable why it may be hard to depart from doing the work that he loves.
He said, “For the past six weeks, I was in the mountains. I wrote 72 episodes of television — just me in a room by myself, sitting out there, looking at the moose and the mountains. I treat it like a job. Every morning, after I work out, I start writing at 7 and don’t finish until 7 in the evening. I do that every day until it’s done. I love it. And I love directing for 12- or 15-hour days.”
However, Perry seems to be looking at the bright side of not doing all the writing himself. “I realize there’s so much more that I could be doing if I were to hand some of the other stuff off — rather than doing it all myself.”
