Many of you will be too young to remember the WGA strike of 2007-08, or simply expunged it from🅺 your memory. The Writer’s Guild oℱf America is the union that protects writers across film and television, and while you probably don’t know that many scriptwriters by name the way you do actors and directors, the previous strike highlighted how crucial they are to the entertainment ecosystem - and we’re going to feel their loss once more.
The demands of the strike are quite simple, and also very reasonable. The WGA wants a set number of writers on staff for every streami꧒ng show, as well as a minimum number of guaranteed employment wee꧋ks to work across the year. Its suggestions were six to 12 writers, and ten to 52 weeks.
These proposals were rejected by streaming studios, who did not even make a counter offer. Right now, the studios are attempting to make writing into gig 💛work, where staff are paid a day rate and can be hired and fired on the spot - it’s a system not dissimilar to Uber, and means writers have no stability or chance of liveable income in the highly expensive cities they need to live in for work. It’s also going to🅰 lead to shows with no identity or consistency, as a writer might be here for one episode but gone for the next.
The WGA estimates that its proposals will cost $429 million a year. So far this year, Netflix has made $8.16 billion. That’s before you get to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Disney Plus, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Amazon Prime, and Apple TV, who are far larger businesses with a streaming platform on the side. 𝓀This is easily affordable. There’s just a lack of priority from studios. Some other demands, like script fee allowances, regulation of AI, and salary changes, have at least been negotiated, but the st⭕udios and the Guild are still very far apart.
You could point to the fact there has been a decline in the overall quality of entertainment at a general level over the past few years. Just look at the various Netflix O🐎riginal movies, or listen to the stories of Jenna Ortega having to patch up her own scripts and mix storylines on Wednesday. If you’re realising this, you’re looking at the problem the wrong way.
It’s very shallow to say ‘TV sucks now, so writers deserve less money’. Firstly, no it doesn’t. Nobody can shut up about 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us or Succession. Even if you just limit it to streaming, the recent talk of the town wa♔s the Netflix show Beef. At the 2021 Oscars, Apple TV’s CODA won Best Picture ahead of Netflix’s hotly tipped The Power⛦ of the Dog. We pause our lives for Stranger Things, and WandaVision is the best Marvel thing this side of Endgame.
But also, did you ever consider why streaming churning out so many shows and movies a week might lead to inferior quality? These are excell🧔ent writers who are being pushed beyond burnout and paid minimally for it. If you think things are bad now, they’re about to get so much worse without any writers in the room.
From the 2007-08 strike, there♎ are three ma♊in players you need to know about - Conan O’Brien, Donald Trump, and Heroes.
O’Brien is the most interesting case - American TV, even more so than today, was dominated by late night talk show hosts in the ‘00s. These shows could continue without writers, as a good bulk of them were made up of interviews with guests. However, they would open with monologues or other set-pieces written by writers, and now no one could write them. O’Brien was a professional writer himself, most notably working on the Golden Age of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Simpsons, bu🍷t he vocally supported the strike so chose not to write his own material.
Instead, O’Brien went on night after night and made sure the audience was aware that the show felt empty without writers. He would spin his wedding ring to try to 🐠break the record for longest televised ring spin, he challenged Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart t💙o a fight on-air, which they then accepted. He was just making it up as he went along. It was hilarious, but the joke was ‘we have no writers’. Every other show floundered.
Then th🌟ere’s Donald Trump. Due to the WGA strike, a lot of shows were cancelled. Pushing Daisies and Gilmore Girls are often cited as the largest victims. However, television couldn’t just shut down, so that airtime had to be filled, and it was filled by Donald Trump. Back then, Trump hosted The Apprentice, a middling reality show about wannabe en⛎trepreneurs trying to impress him with vague business challenges. Few people watched it, but those that did tuned in because Trump was controversial.
In the wake of the strike, the dead air was filled with a bigger version - Celebrity Apprentice. It was this show that solidified Trump as an ಌicon and without it he probably wouldn’t have become President. It might sound like I’m blaming the strike for꧑ that, but what I’m pointing out is streaming platforms will soon be throwing any old shit at the wall.
Then there’s Heroes. Oh, Heroes. How I miss you. Heroes was one of the be🍬st TV shows I have ever seen. For the first season, everything lined up perfectly, mechanically constructed. It was creative, grounded, 🍌charismatic, and had real depth. It was led by Hayden Panettiere and Zachary Quinto in breakout roles, and I don’t think they’ve ever been as good since. This show could have been an all-timer. Then the strike happened.
Unlike Gilmore Girls and Pushing Daisies, Heroes was not cancelled. At lea🐻st then it might have been a Viking funeral. Instead, it was kept alive without writers, and quickly became a💖n embarrassing mess. The show waddled around with this mess in its trousers for a few more seasons, and by the time it ended, few mourned it.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:James Bond’s Quantum of Solace was a similar story, having been drafted ahead of the strike and then filmed without any of the usual work done to it, instead being patched up on the fly b🍒y star Daniel Craig and director Marc Forster. It’s still recognised now as the messiest Bond story where it’s difficult to describe exactly what happened and why.
Again, I’m not laying the blame at the strike’s door for this. Heroes was so fantastic in the first place because of excellent 🌌writers, and that decline in quality is on studios who didn’t want to pa💖y them fairly and instead paid with the disaster that their absence led to… and then surrendered and paid fairly anyway.
If the last strike taught us anyt🌠hing, it🔥’s that writers are crucial to the entertainment ecosystem. Without them, get ready for an empty few months. Your favourite shows will be cancelled or turned into zombies, all the talk show hosts are going to be found out, and some angry reality TV celebrity we never heard of is going to be President in a decade and demand to build a wall along the Canadian border. Or we could just pay writers what they’re worth.