Mark Duplass Reveals the ‘Criminally Low’ Salaries FX Paid ‘The League’ Cast in Their First Season
The League star and indie filmmaking giant Mark Duplass says that FX passed out pitiful paychecks when the sports-focused sitcom first started in 2009, but I’m not so sure — $8,000 is a lot of money for a fantasy football buy-in.
Like most sitcoms of its era, The League, which followed fantasy football competitors living in Chicago for seven seasons, fell in that strange in-between category after the age when networks shelled out for 20-plus episode seasons and before streamers began gobbling up TV comedies in the now-concluded content land-grab of the mid-to-late 2010s. While seven seasons on cable television is certainly nothing to sneer at, The League never made it to that much-desired land of syndication and endless residuals, and it also didn’t enjoy the same level of an extended streaming second life as did its contemporaries like The Office and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
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Sadly, the economics of sitcoms today are simply not as lucrative as they were in eras past. But, as Duplass revealed during a recent interview for Variety, some pre-streaming-explosion shows like The League still failed to reward their actors handsomely, unless you count the Shiva Bowl Trophy as a bonus.
As Duplass explained during the interview, The League started before the two largest acting unions in America, the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, merged in 2012 and increased the bargaining power of sitcom actors significantly. As such, the compensation that Duplass and his The League co-stars earned wasn’t even as competitive as The League itself.
“They had AFTRA contracts so that they could basically pay you a lot less,” Duplass explained. “My agents brought me the contract, and they’re like, ‘You’re not going to believe this.’ And it was $8,000 an episode, which was criminally low by leaps and bounds.” While $8,000 to star in a half-hour episode of a single-camera sitcom about a bunch of guys drinking beer and talking about sports may seem like a good deal, over a measly six-episode first season, that’s barely ”quit your day job” money for a guy who is front-and-center on a cable TV show.
Nevertheless, Duplass, who was still in search of his his big break by the time he got the call from FX, was in awe of that $8,000 figure. “I saw it, and I was like, ‘We’re rich! This is incredible!’ Because Katie (Duplass’ wife) and I were making double salaries as a couple. So that’s what we worked for on the first season,” Duplass explained.
To put that salary into perspective, today, the current SAG-minimum day rate for a performer who speaks so much as a single line in a TV show is $1,204, but considering that each episode of a sitcom can take a week or more to film, Duplass’ rate as a star of The League was less than it would be if he was consistently booking supporting roles such as “Guy Carrying Boxes” on Law and Order post-merger.
So, while sitcom actors today certainly get the short end of the streaming stick, at least they have a union that can strike better deals than Andre when he traded Ronnie Brown for an imprisoned Plaxico Burress.
