The Land of Enchantment may be an ideal case study for the production spending boom that fueled the Peak TV and Streaming Wars eras in Hollywood — as well as the dramatic pull back that occurred after the dual actors’ and writers’ strikes hit the industry in 2023.
New Mexico, the home of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, saw growth in studio spending during the prestige cable years and stocked up on its share of series (including multiple seasons of blockbuster Stranger Things) after Netflix picked Albuquerque for a major production hub in 2018. During the early pandemic years, as Netflix’s rivals tried (and failed) to emulate its playbook to compete in a scale game for subscribers, the state also was a beneficiary.
Vince Gilligan brought his Apple TV series Pluribus to New Mexico and AMC has now wrapped filming on five seasons of its detective drama Dark Winds, while Christopher Nolan shot his Oscar best picture winner Oppenheimer on-location in Los Alamos. More recently, Netflix’s Western romance Ransom Canyon has used the state as a backdrop for Texas Hill Country over the course of multiple seasons.
But since the strikes, studios have generally cut back on big-ticket productions, especially in the scripted TV space, across the board. That retrenchment hit lots of markets, including California, but New Mexico saw a particularly notable drop in production spending. For the past two years, producer Steve Graham (Walker: Independence, Black Summer) has led the New Mexico Film Office, working with studio partners to manage this transition to a new normal. That also includes attracting more commercial and post-production work as well as microdramas going forward. Graham spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about the major trendlines, as “we’re in the middle of a change in the way the industry is working.”
