The Speculative Labor of Screenwriters in Iran’s New Streaming Economy

Introduction

In late 2020 the Iranian series Qurbāgheh (The Frog) broke new ground. The series’ first episode, which premiered on the local subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services Namava, set a record in the country’s competitive streaming economy with more than 40 million minutes of viewing time in its first two days (Behtoui 2020). A gritty crime thriller inspired by Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1996), The Frog was celebrated by critics as “a turning point in the history of the production of Iranian series” (Naderi 2021). It also marked the first time acclaimed film director Houman Seyyedi brought his talents to the Home Viewing Network, a system of media distribution in Iran that includes streaming services. The series’ success extended beyond Iran’s borders when the American film company The Exchange represented it at the 2021 Cannes Film Market (Wiserman 2021). Although the series ultimately failed to secure international distribution, it signaled new possibilities for Iran’s television industry, which had never achieved the local or global fame of the country’s film industry.

Despite its success, The Frog faced numerous disruptions and delays before it reached audiences. From pandemic interruptions to regulatory disputes—and even alleged sabotage by Namava’s competitor Filimo—the series remained in limbo for years (ISNA 2020a, 2020b). A last-minute court order delayed its December 2020 release even further, reportedly due to disagreements with regulatory bodies over content changes, though Namava insisted it had met all requirements. The true cause of the delay emerged later: the CEO of Sarmayeh Bank, one of the series’ chief financiers, had been arrested on corruption charges (Mashreq News 2020). The Frog finally premiered on December 23, 2020 to widespread acclaim, but the controversies surrounding its release highlighted the challenges of working within Iran’s tightly controlled and fiercely competitive streaming economy. For Iranian creative workers, especially screenwriters, navigating this environment requires the ability to manage the intersecting pressures of state censorship, private financing, audience expectations, and algorithms—all of this on top of technical expertise and creativity.

This landscape is shaped by a screen ecosystem that is highly regulated yet saturated with global content. Iran’s two leading SVOD services, Filimo and Namava, are locally based and privately owned, with reported user bases of 8 and 5 million respectively (Semati and Moosavitabar 2024). While these streamers face little direct competition from global services—since sanctions restrict access to services like Netflix—Iranian audiences move fluidly between formal SVOD services and widely-used pirating sites. As Iran is not a signatory to any international copyright agreements, viewers tend to prioritize content over distribution channels (Salamati 2022). This places pressure on local services to produce content that is original and compelling, able to attract attention in an environment flooded with global media. Filimo and Namava must appeal to subscribers while also navigating regulations imposed by state agencies, including the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG) and the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting’s (IRIB) Audio and Visual Regulatory Authority. The result is an ecosystem where streaming services simultaneously function as market-driven services, cultural repositories, and extensions of state oversight (Salamati 2022).

This article explores what I call the speculative labor of Iranian screenwriters who operate at this nexus of censorship, market pressure, and evolving streamer demands. Speculative labor refers to the anticipatory, affective, and intellectual work screenwriters perform when the conditions of acceptance and success are uncertain. It involves imagining what kinds of stories might pass censorship and align with algorithms and audience expectations—often before a script is even submitted. Adkins (2017) describes speculation as acting on the future without stable referents or predictable outcomes. In such contexts, creativity becomes a way of navigating volatility through provisional decisions and continual adjustment. Appadurai (2013) adds that the future can press into the present, especially when the present feels blocked or saturated. For Iranian screenwriters, this pressure stems from regulatory opacity, economic precarity, and global esthetic expectations. Speculative labor involves interpreting market and regulatory forces while crafting stories that remain viable across conflicting logics. Berlant’s (2011) concept of cruel optimism clarifies the emotional stakes: the desire for creative freedom becomes entangled with structures that limit it. This labor unfolds through habitual recalibration—what Berlant (2011) calls “the zoning of the everyday” (p. 101). Rather than waiting for constraint to lift, speculative labor adapts within it, shaped by risk, doubt, and a persistent sense of possibility.

The concept of speculative labor builds on a growing body of scholarship on streaming production cultures that examines how creative workers respond to opaque data systems, platform demands, and unstable working conditions. Studies by Rasmussen (2025), Navar-Gill (2020), and Idiz and Poell (2025) explore how algorithmic governance and platformization introduce new frictions, dependencies, and forms of anticipatory adjustment within screen industries. Szczepanik’s (2024) notion of streamer imaginaries is especially relevant, showing how workers operate under “imagined assumptions” about a streaming service’s logics, metrics, and audience preferences, shaping their labor around perceived rather than confirmed expectations. While closely aligned, speculative labor extends this framework by attending to the affective and creative dimensions of anticipation in environments shaped not only by platform opacity but also by political regulation and censorship. The term foregrounds the embodied, emotional, and narrative strategies screenwriters use to navigate competing institutional pressures. Despite the rapid growth of domestic streamers in Iran, the field remains understudied. To date, only two academic studies—Salamati (2022) and Semati and Moosavitabar (2024)—have addressed Iran’s streaming services and their entanglement with state control and platform governance. By centering screenwriters, this article brings creative labor in Iran into global conversations about streaming cultures and algorithmic uncertainty.

Fieldwork Under Constraint

This article draws on three semi-structured interviews with Iranian screenwriters working in the country’s expanding streaming industry. ¹ All interviews were conducted via Zoom in 2024 and lasted between sixty and ninety minutes. Participants were recruited through professional networks and social-media outreach, though access remained difficult. As one Iran-based scholar noted, “Even those of us based in Iran are unable to talk to such people.” Screenwriters operate largely behind the scenes and at the junction of regulation and finance, where opacity is both institutionalized and strategic. Although a sample of three is modest, the depth of these conversations offers rare insight into writers’ day-to-day negotiations with censorship, market pressure, and algorithms. Speculative labor, by definition, demands qualitative and interpretive methods: it is not visible in output metrics, instead taking shape through perception and affective reasoning. These are precisely the kinds of interior processes that in-depth interviews help surface.

Conducting research on Iranian media industries today requires methodological flexibility and awareness of the limits imposed by political and infrastructural constraints. Long-term fieldwork and participant observation—the gold standard for production studies—are increasingly difficult in Iran, if not impossible, given tightening state control over cultural institutions and limited access for foreign or diaspora-based researchers. This likely contributes to the scarcity of studies on the everyday labor of Iranian screen workers. My initial plan involved asking interviewees to keep work diaries alongside our conversations. These diaries, shaped by the writers’ own narrative sensibilities, would have offered textured insight into the rhythms of their daily labor. However, due to sanctions on Iran, I was unable to compensate participants for this additional work and was unwilling to request unpaid writing from workers already under significant pressure. The resulting research, then, is shaped by constraint, both the institutional barriers facing media workers in Iran and the practical limitations I encountered as a researcher based in Lebanon during an ongoing war. These conditions demanded improvisation and adjustment, a mode of scholarly labor that mirrors the speculative labor of the screenwriters I study.

The Paradox of Possibility

Ali, a screenwriter with over a decade of experience in Iranian television, fumbled for words as he tried to explain the creative possibilities offered by local streaming services like Filimo and Namava. Normally animated, he paused, lifting his left hand to form a steady horizontal line before raising his right hand slightly higher. “This is what is up for grabs,” he said, gesturing to the narrow space with a laugh. I laughed, too, even as his small gesture unsettled my assumptions about Iran’s SVOD-produced series. His visual metaphor captured the central tension of Iran’s streaming economy: the paradox of possibility. While modest new spaces for creativity have opened, they remain tightly bracketed by commercial and regulatory constraints. For years, these services have been celebrated in popular and scholarly sources as more daring and less censored than state-sponsored IRIB television (e.g., ISNA 2021). Yet Ali’s gesture suggested a different reality. While streaming services allow screenwriters to explore themes unthinkable on state TV, the creative freedoms they promise are fleeting. As my interviews revealed, these freedoms are quickly constrained by the services’ commercial demands. Pressures to attract audiences and ensure viability often outweigh artistic risks, leaving screenwriters to navigate a narrow space where new freedoms emerge only to be swiftly closed off.

Viewers and screenwriters agree that streaming services in Iran suffer from less state censorship, particularly around social issues, gender norms, and everyday life, and therefore offer new possibilities for storytelling. A survey conducted by the Iranian Student News Agency (ISNA) gathered viewer opinions about Home Viewing Network shows. Respondents described them as “closer to the truth,” “more relatable,” “better made,” and “more up-to-date” than state television series (ISNA 2021). One respondent noted that the Home Viewing Network has “more open space,” can “represent more social problems,” and is “a bit closer to reality” (ISNA 2021). In interviews, screenwriters echoed this view. Babak, a Tehran-based writer with more than two decades of television experience, said streaming services allowed him to explore previously taboo subjects, such as the harassment of women. He also noted fewer restrictions on depictions of clothing, a significant shift in a country with mandatory veiling laws. This relative creative freedom has positioned streamers as an exciting alternative to state television, promising both viewers and screenwriters a space to engage with stories that more closely reflect contemporary realities.

Indeed, the promise of creative freedom is enticing for screenwriters, even if it remains limited. As Ali explained, all the writers he once worked with on IRIB programs have now migrated to streaming services—not for higher salaries, as the pay is comparable, but for the chance to tell stories with fewer restrictions. Yet according to Ali, this shift has yielded limited results. Screenwriters have struggled to make meaningful creative strides under the conditions imposed by local SVOD services, especially since the red lines are constantly shifting and must be anticipated rather than followed. Regulatory bodies assert control without clear jurisdiction or transparency, relying on licensing delays, takedowns, and ex post enforcement. Rather than publishing explicit guidelines, they govern through ambiguity and pressure, creating an atmosphere in which screenwriters must self-censor or risk retroactive punishment—including, in high-profile cases, imprisonment (Salamati 2022; Semati and Moosavitabar 2024). These conditions give rise to a form of speculative labor, in which writers must continually anticipate shifting red lines and adjust their choices accordingly. As a result, the differences between streaming and IRIB content are minimal. Amir, another Tehran-based screenwriter, echoed this view, adding that claims of progressiveness in SVOD series often boil down to superficial changes, like clothing and makeup, since the state continues to tightly control locally produced material.

Beyond state regulation, Iranian screenwriters face constraints from commercial priorities that shape streaming content. Unlike IRIB shows, which are publicly funded, SVOD series and films depend on subscription fees and private funds (Semati and Moosavitabar 2024), making screenwriters beholden to both viewers and investors. As Idiz and Poell (2025) explain, cultural producers operate under “limited access to data and lack of control over content visibility,” placing them in “a fundamentally weak position” (p. 376). In this context, creative workers must align their choices with opaque systems they cannot interrogate, shaping their pitches around perceived rather than confirmed expectations. Babak joked that “the algorithm” is his boss, noting that producers cite audience data when evaluating work. For screenwriters, this emphasis on audience preferences changes the creative process from one marked by artistic expression to one of relentless effort to satisfy market demands. This leaves little room for risk or innovation

Amir echoed the same sentiment. He emphasized that competition for viewers is fiercer than ever and that the financial stakes for streaming content are high. As a result, he often pitches safe, reliable ideas rather than exploring more innovative or daring topics. For screenwriters, these commercial pressures narrow the scope of creative freedom, as artistic exploration yields to market-driven compromise. Amir gave the example of pitching a romantic comedy with familiar tropes, such as a young couple navigating societal pressure to marry. While the idea had broad appeal and aligned with popular trends, Amir admitted it was a calculated choice. He had originally considered a darker, more experimental story about the psychological toll of economic hardship on relationships but feared audiences might find it too heavy or alienating. He chose the safer option to improve the series’ chances with viewers accustomed to lighter, globally inspired content. This kind of anticipatory adjustment is also shaped by asymmetries in how performance data circulates. Rasmussen (2025) describes streaming industries’ “highly selective disclosure of information,” where screen workers are asked to respond to data they never actually see (p. 7). Producers invoke metrics to justify creative decisions, yet screenwriters remain excluded, which in turn reinforces a climate of speculation and guesswork. Amir’s choice, then, was an adaptive response to a system that rewards conformity while withholding the terms of evaluation.

Indeed, the market-driven compromises made by screenwriters are shaped by the fact that Iranian audiences, often accessing global television through informal channels, have developed expectations influenced by international trends. In other words, when viewers seek alternatives to state television on local streaming services, they project global expectations onto local content. These expectations come from two sources. First, the Iranian government has granted local streamers the unique right to distribute global content, including censored versions of original Netflix series. Thus, on services like Filimo and Namava, Iranian-produced material appears alongside dubbed or subtitled global shows. According to screenwriters, these mixed catalogs generate an expectation that all content conform to the global standard of so-called “quality TV,” including high production value, complex narratives, and genre hybridity. Second, for nearly two decades, Iranian audiences have accessed American series through torrenting and DVDs. As a result, they now expect the production quality, narrative complexity, and character development typical of global series. Screenwriters feel pressured to emulate these international standards, often at the expense of uniquely local stories or experimental forms

Indeed, the screenwriters I interviewed admitted they often prefer watching American, British, or South Korean series over what is produced locally. As Ali explained, “One of the core problems of the industry is that screenwriters do not carefully follow Iranian productions but look to the United States or East Asia for inspiration.” This preference for global content reinforces the same market-driven compromises that constrain creative freedom on streaming services. In seeking to emulate the production quality and storytelling techniques of global series, screenwriters inadvertently contribute to the very limitations they hope to escape, further narrowing the space for locally resonant storytelling. What is lost in the process, they noted, are the textures of everyday Iranian life: its humor, rhythms, dialects, and contradictions. “There’s so much drama in our own streets,” Babak told me, “but we keep chasing other people’s genres instead of building our own.”

Streaming services in Iran operate in an ambiguous space between cultural liberalization and state regulation. As Salamati (2022) argues, they are part of a state-led strategy to offer controlled alternatives to unsanctioned global media, curbing the influence of pirated content while maintaining ideological oversight. Streamers like Filimo and Namava provide access to both censored global series and local productions, creating the illusion of openness while enforcing limits on what stories can be told. For screenwriters, this dual function produces the very paradox they face. On one hand, streaming services promise creative freedom by allowing content that pushes the boundaries of traditional state television. On the other, the presence of global content reinforces expectations that local shows meet international standards while staying within state-approved narratives. As Babak noted, “It’s not just that we have to please the audience. We also have to satisfy the censors who ensure the services don’t cross the government’s red lines.”

This regulatory dynamic places screenwriters in a precarious position. Their precarity is shaped by both material insecurity and threats to personal safety. Financially, the stakes are high. As Amir explained, “If we miscalculate and the censors reject our work, we lose months of effort and risk losing future opportunities with producers.” A single rejection can mean unpaid labor, delayed projects, and even reputational harm. Crossing red lines can lead to blacklisting and legal consequences, thus causing long-term damage to a writer’s career. Under such circumstances, writers must weigh shifting regulations against market demands and audience expectations, often retreating from innovative ideas in favor of what feels safe. What emerges is a mode of creative labor defined less by vision than by vigilance. It is an ongoing effort to avoid loss, manage risk, and survive the process of getting a project to screen.

Imagining Constraints

In one of our conversations, Babak described the mental exercise he performs at the start of every project. “I picture myself walking into a maze,” he said, tracing invisible lines with his finger on the table. “The walls are the red lines: audiences, censors, the platform’s algorithms. My job is to find the paths that haven’t been closed off yet.” This visualization orients him to the creative process a puzzle to solve, rather than as a rote set of tasks to complete. “Some walls are higher than others,” he added with a smirk, “but you can always climb them if you’re clever enough.” For Babak and other Iranian screenwriters, creative labor entails more than developing characters and plotlines; it also involves navigating the constraints on storytelling in the country’s streaming services. Unlike directors and producers, screenwriters do not usually interface directly with censors or financiers. Their understanding of artistic limits is largely imagined, but no less real in how it shapes the work.

It is important to study how screenwriters perceive their constraints, because these interpretations actively shape how they navigate, resist, or adapt to the challenges they face. This emphasis on perception aligns with broader scholarship on how cultural workers conceptualize their audiences. Ang (1991) argues that institutions construct simplified versions of audiences rather than engage with their full complexity. While Ang focuses on institutional abstractions, the Iranian case highlights the speculative labor of individual screenwriters, who must imagine viewership within a shifting and constrained media landscape. For the writers I interviewed, anticipating audience response was a relatively new dimension of their work. Under state television, censorship was the primary concern, and audience preferences mattered less; programming was treated as a public good rather than a market-driven product. As Alikhah (2018) notes, IRIB content was produced with broad, cross-cutting audiences in mind, meaning screenwriters rarely had to tailor their work to specific segments. In contrast, today’s streaming services require writers to anticipate both censorship and shifting viewer expectations, often without clear data or feedback.

The rise of privately financed series on streaming services has meant that writers now feel constrained by audience desires. To illustrate this, Ali pointed to the 2024 hit Dar entehā-ye shab (At the End of the Night), released on the local streamer FilmNet. He claimed that the romantic drama—about a middle-class couple navigating debt, a troubled marriage, and raising a child with ADHD—must have been written without an audience in mind. The show avoids cliffhangers or sentimental resolution. Its pace is slow and the dialog spare. The emotional stakes are grounded in everyday frustrations rather than dramatic twists. For Ali, this refusal to cater to audience expectations—no moralizing, no crowd-pleasing monologs—was precisely what made the series refreshing.

At first glance, Ali’s comment might seem to contradict the idea that perceived audiences constrain screenwriting. But beneath the surface, he’s suggesting the opposite: that audience expectations suffocate innovative storytelling. Elsewhere, he noted that he imagines his audience as “a specific class” (tābeqeh-ye khāsi), one very different from his own. Writing with an audience in mind, then, means compromising on his own tastes, preferences, and styles—and those of his peers. As Wayne and Uribe Sandoval (2023) note, streaming success often depends on imagined global audiences shaped industry norms and commercial imperatives not by audience research. These imagined figures influence creative choices from the outset, filtering what kinds of stories are seen as viable or worth pursuing in the first place.

Other screenwriters agreed with Ali that audience expectations constrain their storytelling, even as they imagine very different kinds of viewers. Amir, for example, said he writes for audiences like himself—someone who “ravenously” consumes high-quality series from the U.S. or South Korea. He admitted this sets him up for failure, since low budgets and heavy censorship mean Iranian series often “pale in comparison” to the glitzy global shows some viewers expect. Still, Amir acknowledged that these imagined constraints can also spark creativity. “When I realize we can’t match the production quality of an HBO show, I have to lean on what we do best,” he said, referring to the cultural specificity and intimate storytelling that Iranian dramas often excel at: stories unfolding within the tight spaces of domestic life, with characters caught in moral or existential binds that rarely resolve cleanly.

Rather than striving for direct replication, Amir suggested that Iranian screenwriters can innovate within their limitations by creating stories that resonate with local audiences while subtly nodding to global trends. He pointed to narratives rooted in intergenerational family dynamics or the struggles of everyday life in Iran, enhanced by globally appealing techniques like non-linear timelines, ensemble casts, or morally ambiguous protagonists. Babak highlighted the rise of absurdist series, which blur the line between realism and satire, as another form of innovation. The 2023 Filimo series Mageh ʿomr chand tā bahāreh? (How Many Springs Are There in a Lifetime, Anyway?), for instance, pushes the boundaries of plausibility with its surreal premise and stylized performances. In doing so, it creates a tone that oscillates between humor and despair, channeling frustration with contemporary life through disorientation and estrangement rather than direct critique. This strategy is well suited to the opaque constraints of Iran’s streaming services.

Similar to what Rasmussen (2025) describes as “counter-data,” Iranian screenwriters employ their own tools to navigate the perceived demands of audiences via algorithmic systems. These tools include intuition, such as predicting audience reactions based on cultural norms or historical precedents, and localized storytelling techniques, like drawing on Persian literary traditions or incorporating socially resonant motifs such as familial loyalty or struggles of everyday survival under economic hardship. This dual approach allows screenwriters to navigate their imagined constraints—whether they are conceptualized as audience demands or global comparisons—by carving out a space where compromise and creativity coexist.

For the screenwriters I interviewed, the algorithm was often imagined as an invisible yet omnipresent critic, dictating what stories might succeed on Iran’s streaming services. Babak referred to it as “the boss you can’t argue with,” emphasizing how its data-driven decisions are treated as final, even by producers. He explained that streamers track engagement—clicks, watch times, drop-off points—and use these metrics to decide which projects to greenlight or cancel. “The algorithm doesn’t just predict what audiences will like,” Babak said. “It teaches producers to think only in terms of numbers, not stories.” This reliance on algorithmic feedback creates a distinct pressure, one that feels more rigid and depersonalized than the vague, often contradictory idea of “the audience.” While imagined audiences can be navigated—appealed to, resisted, reimagined—the algorithm presents itself as fixed logic. For Ali, this distinction mattered: writing for an audience left room for negotiation or creative intuition, while writing for the algorithm felt like submitting to a faceless, automated directive. He recalled rewriting a pitch after being told “the algorithm favors comedy over drama right now.” For him, that demand echoed censorship: “You’re not writing for your story; you’re writing to please a system.”

The perception of the algorithm as a gatekeeper has fostered a sense of resignation among some screenwriters. Amir expressed frustration at what he sees as the system’s preference for safer, more marketable stories over riskier ideas—a judgment reinforced by the emphasis on audience metrics and commercial viability. “They’ll tell you they want something fresh,” he said, “but the numbers always point to the same formulas: love triangles, family dramas, nothing too dark or experimental.” Yet even as they bemoan these constraints, screenwriters acknowledge the algorithm’s role in shaping their craft. Babak noted that catering to algorithmic demands has taught him to focus on pacing and engagement—skills now integral to contemporary screenwriting. “I don’t love it,” he admitted, “but it forces you to be efficient, to think about what keeps people watching.” In navigating these pressures, Iranian screenwriters reiterate concerns raised by creatives in other contexts, such as Hollywood television writers, who initially saw data-driven services as liberating but later recognized the constraints embedded in those systems (Navar-Gill 2020).

For many screenwriters, censors in Iran are imagined as unpredictable and subjective arbiters of creative work. Babak described the process as “walking through a fog,” where the boundaries of acceptability shift with political moods, personal biases, or even the day of the week. “One day, a scene might pass without question; the next, it’s flagged as too provocative,” he said. This uncertainty forces writers to self-censor, often overcorrecting in anticipation of objections. Amir similarly described censors as an invisible presence during the writing process, shaping decisions long before a script is submitted. “It’s not just about what they might cut,” he said. “It’s about what I don’t even bother writing.” For these screenwriters, the imagined censor is not a single entity but a looming specter, casting a shadow over creative choices and limiting their ability to explore certain themes. This perception fosters a culture of preemptive compromise, where red lines are not fixed rules but ever-shifting, invisible barriers.

Taken together, these imagined constraints—audiences, algorithms, and censors—reveal how screenwriters inhabit a paradoxical space where creativity and compromise are intertwined. By preemptively adapting to perceived limitations, they engage in speculative labor that shapes narratives before a single word is written. While it would be easy to brush this process aside as purely restrictive, in reality it fosters a form of adaptive creativity, where constraints become generative forces that push writers toward innovation. In imagining their audiences, platforms, and censors, screenwriters construct the very frameworks in which contemporary Iranian storytelling unfolds. This imaginative work underscores their central role in navigating tensions between local specificity and global relevance, artistic freedom and structural constraint, and, ultimately, what is possible and permissible.

Conclusion

In Iran state censorship, audience expectations, and algorithmic imperatives converge in unpredictable ways, sometimes reinforcing familiar norms, sometimes pulling in contradictory directions. Screenwriters must account for this volatility without reliable data or transparent regulations. They build working assumptions from fragments—producer feedback, past experience, informal networks—and adjust their ideas accordingly. This is not a one-time calculation; it is a continuous process that shapes how writers pitch, draft, revise, and collaborate. The labor part of the process lies in the effort to synchronize with a system that offers little stability and no clear rules, only shifting signals and opaque gatekeepers.

Speculative labor names this ongoing work. It captures the creative strategies, embodied habits, and emotional calibrations required to stay viable under conditions of uncertainty. Writers must act before they know, adjust before they receive feedback, and anticipate forms of power that are difficult to localize. Szczepanik’s (2024) “streamer imaginaries” describe one part of this dynamic: the mental models writers form about audiences and streaming services. Speculative labor extends further, drawing attention to the full scope of practices through which creative workers absorb risk and manage precarity. In Iran, these dynamics are especially pronounced, but their structure resonates across media industries shaped by platform governance, political oversight, and structural opacity. Speculative labor makes visible the ongoing, uneven work required to produce within systems that offer little clarity, where creative effort hinges on endurance, adaptation, and sustained attention to opaque demands.