Now heading into the third week of the WGA writers strike, the industry is facing an indefinite stretch of time before negotiations are resolved and a new agreement is reached. So what lengths will media companies go to compensate for programming they had once planned on but won’t have ready in the coming months?
To unpack the current status of negotiations and what they mean for studios and writers, Variety Intelligence Platform hosted the “Writers Strike: Now What?” webinar on LinkedIn Live on May 12. VIP+ senior media analyst Gavin Bridge held a wide-ranging discussion with Variety Co-Editor-In-Chief Cynthia Littleton and Variety’s own labor expert, Gene Maddaus, who have each extensively covered the current, and past, strikes. This was a follow-up to VIP+’s first webinar on the strike two weeks earlier.
It’s still relatively early in the strike, and expectations about its length are mixed. While many studios have varying amounts of completed shows in their pipelines, they will need creative solutions to fill programming schedules and keep streaming subs engaged.
Littleton, who authored the book “TV on Strike: Why Hollywood Went to War Over the Internet,” which chronicled the 2007-08 WGA strike, anticipated seeing companies creatively promote revisits of past shows and try to license and cross-distribute content from streaming services to TV networks, particularly between a conglomerate’s other owned properties.
“So many of these things are in-house that you will see Paramount+ shows on CBS; Peacock’s “Poker Face” could easily air on NBC,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some deals had built-in flexibility to air [a show] on any screen [owned by the company]. Studios, in their effort to generate as much as they can, are patchwork-quilting the distribution [across linear and streaming], just to try to get it in as many places as possible.”
And as was done in past strikes, studios are also expected to rely on unscripted and international productions, including foreign-produced English-language shows, British co-productions and foreign-language productions with subtitles.
Another one of the issues discussed — and central to the disagreement between writers and studios — is the WGA goal of creating a minimum staffing requirement for writers rooms hired to a develop scripts for a film or TV project.
For writers, this has been a petition designed to preserve the fundamental continued existence of writers rooms with multiple writers — a debate that not so long ago would probably have seemed absurd.
“Even 10 years ago, if you told members they would be fighting over the definition of a writers room, they would think the idea you’re even debating this is ridiculous,” said Littleton.
For their part, studios have been unwilling to negotiate on a minimum for writers rooms, wanting to avoid filling a quota that might not be creatively necessary for every project and believing that showrunners should be the ones to decide, Maddaus noted.
The push for writing room minimums is partly in response to the shift to writer mini rooms — and more recently, the so-called “Mike White model,” where a single writer might be expected to come in to pen an entire show. Notable auteur writers like “White Lotus” creator Mike White are recognized as being outliers, even as writers believe studios will use his example as motive to hire fewer writers.
Amid peak TV’s heightened demand for content, writers have seen a greater supply of opportunities since around 2010. It’s in that environment that mini rooms have become a growing reality. But that rising popularity hasn’t translated to stable work or sustainable finances for writers, with the impact being felt by young and inexperienced writers as well as veterans.
“What we’re seeing is a classic up-and-coming and middle-class squeeze in the way that compensation structures for writers have changed dramatically with the way television is produced,” said Littleton. “What drove that home for me especially was talking to veterans — seasoned writers, people who have been showrunners on their own, senior writer-producers — telling me that they’re cobbling together a year’s worth of salary on three or as many as four mini rooms a year.”
That marks a serious change to what might’ve been a previous lifestyle of employment on a project for half a year or eight months — and helps underscore the current strike’s “gig economy” rhetoric.
Watch the full webinar above for more expert commentary from Littleton and Maddaus, and keep following Variety’s ongoing coverage of the WGA strike as negotiations continue. For more insights and information from VIP+, see the special report below, done before an impasse was a certainty, and a new installment of industry survey results gauging the sentiments of those working in entertainment (and be sure to gauge it against our previous one, done in March).
• Survey: WGA vs. studios — who’s winning favor with the industry?
• Get writers strike coverage from all angles — pick a story
• See VIP+’s pre-walkout special report on WGA-AMPTP issues …
