Hollywood camera crew films scene for television show NCIS Los Angeles on the Venice Beach boardwalk.
Photographer: John Dvorak/ShutterstockLA Needs More Than a Comeback — It Has to Move Forward
The wildfires exposed an uncomfortable truth about the city.
If Los Angeles ever needed superheroes, now would be as good a time as any.
Prior to the fires, we already had a middle-class housing crisis, sprawling homelessness and not unrelatedly, rampant methamphetamine addiction. Even the entertainment industry, LA’s leading light, suffered one calamity after another. The pandemic froze television and film production. Union strikes slowed the post-Covid thaw, while the industry simultaneously descended to the foothills of Peak TV; in 2023, the number of scripted series dropped 24%.