There are two major forces driving Hollywood today: diversity and Peak TV.

Peak TV is the massive expansion of programming driven by dot coms like Netflix and Amazon, and the old studios like Disney and Warner still trying to compete with them. With dot coms like Netflix and Amazon casually throwing billions in investor cash at programming slates, the cost of production has soared. Episodes now cost more than many indie movies and there’s a shortage of people, especially experienced and trained ones, and the pandemic’s chaos has only played further havoc with the labor force.

Diversity mandates, driven by the intensified culture war of the past few years, led to a system for rapidly hiring and promoting unqualified and inexperienced people based on their race, gender, perceived gender, and all the usual nonsense. 

Combine the two together and you have a situation where productions, especially smaller ones and indies with less money to spend are short of qualified people, and have people on set who shouldn’t be there.

Lethal accidents have obviously happened long before this, but the combination of Peak TV which created a huge artificial labor demand and inflated costs, with diversity quotas, is creating dangerous conditions, especially on smaller productions, with unqualified people behaving dangerously on sets, and the only surprise is that no one has been killed until now.