Ope Pardon, No. 27: Strikes & Streaming

I may be France-pilled, but you don’t really need to give me a reason to support a strike. I’ll support just about any strike, I don’t give a fuck.

Apart from the French, I generally believe no one actually wants to strike. Mostly because most of the time, those on strike feel the pain more profoundly (or at least more immediately) than the powers they are striking against. Or, as Jason P. Frank put it in a Vulture article on the recently-launched Writers’ Guild of America strike, “The most powerful tool labor has is to withhold its labor. The difficulty is that unlike a hammer with a cushion grip, this is more like a knife you have to hold by the blade.”

Which is just to say, I don’t need much more reason to support a writers strike than the fact the WGA have deemed it necessary. They know their industry and situation — in this case, Hollywood — far better than I.

However, if I was the kind of person that required reasons to justify a strike, the WGA would still have some pretty good ones. I found GQ’s explainer on the strike to be very accessible and Vulture’s to be more technical, but I personally would summarize it as being about two things: compensation and craft.

The first is rather simple and seemingly irrefutable. Writers, like everyone else involved in TV production, used to enjoy relative financial security from royalties derived from syndication (i.e., reruns on broadcast TV). Now they don’t.

Streaming services pay single, fixed residuals and notoriously do not share viewer numbers — or any information about a show’s success — which obviously makes it hard for anyone involved in the creation of a show to leverage success for compensation. Writers also receive no cut when the shows move between platforms for record sums of money let alone when they become profitable in other ways.

Residuals/royalties is the umbrella concern but dig even a little deeper into the streaming platform practices and the ways they are doing writers (and again, basically everyone involved on a show’s production) dirty more than justifies a strike.

(One of the alleged reasons Netflix shows are frequently cancelled after two seasons is because that is when contracts are up for renegotiation and even without concrete numbers, certain success can’t be denied — especially when Netflix marketing is working overtime to tell everyone else half the world watched your show.)

Then! There is the question of the role and/or craft of the writer — what it means to be a writer or in a writer’s room. (Writers’ room? Writers, help.) I will not go into detail I don’t fully understand, but studios allegedly want to minimize the role writers play in a production or on set using something called “mini-rooms,” turning them as much as possible into gig workers on contract work and of course, giving them less time to do their jobs for lower pay.

This has ripple effects on the quality of the shows. If writers are not involved throughout the whole process, they cannot make on-set changes or participate in the writing of, say, a finale episode that is produced after their contract ends. It also appears to be a broad truth writers are desperate for you to accept that there is about 1000% less improv or actor input on set than you think. Things change from the first draft, sometimes drastically, often in response to the performers, but those changes are still written by a writer.

But it also effects the development of a writer’s skills and career. Most showrunners begin as writers and it stands to reason we are going to be facing an objectively worse (less experienced, less prepared, less knowledgeable, less connected, possibly even less empathetic) crop of showrunners if they no longer have the opportunity to observe and participate in the ins and outs of production. (Here is a thread of interesting things writers learn and do on set that I, for one, did not know about.)

In sum: That means worse shows for us.

Yet despite what seems to be clear and reasonable demands, there have been some, in my own personal opinion, very stupid responses to the strike.

That the “Hollywood” of it all makes this a poor little rich kid strike, out of touch with the true working class. Beyond being not true (most writers are striking for a livable wage), even if the writers were striking to be paid millions of dollars, that would be fair when they are producing billions of dollars for the studios and streamers.

The argument has shades of people complaining about athletes’ salaries. Yes, it is objectively absurd that someone could make close to 200 million over four years “for playing a game” however a) “playing a game” — like writing — takes skill and also b) as long as billions are going to be made by said game (or show) and until those billions are redistributed according to need in a communist dream state that will never exist, maybe ever, but certainly not in the foreseeable future, I think it best that the majority — and at minimum, a fair share — of the money produced go to those who actually produced the product.

And forgive me, because honestly I am making a false equivalency even here: The writers aren’t asking for $200 million over four years — they are asking for a livable wage. They are asking for a reasonable adjustment to reflect a tectonic shift in the industry’s business model.

(Also worth remembering: This is historically the only way to get fair compensation. The WGA pretty much has to go on strike every time there is a new distribution technology — TV in 1960, cable in 1973, home videos in 1980s, first-gen streaming in 2007 — because lord knows the studios aren’t going to offer up fair shares of their own volition every time the game changes.)

Another dumb response has been that TV writing or a lot of writing on TV is bad now and so, I guess, writers don’t deserve to be paid for their work if you don’t like it? Which is simply not how the world works and also let’s not forget the viewing public watches the hell out of “bad” TV — which, I could argue, also requires immense skill to write — and if the public watches it, it is making studios and streamers money, of which the writers deserve a fair cut.

Finally, there is AI. Negotiating AI is both a priority for the writers’ striking (related to the craft idea) and a dumb “we don’t need writers anyway” argument. First, any viral clip of entertainment produced by AI is, at best, soft plagiarism but more often just…not good? Beyond the inability of AI to write a decent script, I refer you back to the long list of things writers do and adjust and change on the fly based on their expertise; knowledge of the story, characters and motivations; ability to interpret and adapt to situations; and — perhaps most crucially — their humanity.

So: A strike.

Unlike 15 years ago, the strike is happening at the end of the television season, so we won’t necessarily see the immediate impact or the traces of the strike years from now. (You know when you are watching an old show and randomly the season is 7 episodes long and ends abruptly? That was 2007!)

Similarly, the nature of how we consume TV these days (i.e., the central issue of streaming) means that we will not feel the absence of new programming immediately. Short term, it will probably feel like during the pandemic. First, there is the backlog of already-finished work the studios can release, then we can all transition into rewatching (or watching for the first time!) everything that’s been on our “list” forever.

While we’re watching The Sopranos, however, is when the studios will begin to feel the pain. Broadcast fall TV will be effected and even the faucet of foreign productions could risk getting turned off. According to Vulture, the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain advised its members not to scab or produced work in any context for American companies, but it’s unclear how the other countries in which those American companies operate, particularly Netflix, will respond.

(“Say less.” - The French, I expect)

In any case, what does crossing the picket line mean for the average viewer? I don’t know! At the moment, I haven’t seen any do’s or don’ts on how to support the writers apart from financial donations to afford them the ability to continue striking.

At some point, I wonder if it will escalate to asking folks to boycott the streamers. Ultimately, this seems a small price to pay for the long term quality of the industry. Most of us have sky-high stacks of books to read. Alternatively, we could probably all do to touch some grass. It is almost summer after all.

Mostly though, I feel like this is a timely reminder of how precarious our access to our most beloved (not to mention historical, educational or culturally significant) entertainment is in the age of streaming. I have been thinking for awhile about writing something about the churn and erasure of shows and media from streaming platforms, about physical media and the real risk that underpins the annoyance of “leaving this month” announcements. That, itself, related to a knot of anti-streaming sentiment I will one day untangle into a coherent argument.

In the meantime, the idea of a boycott — which again, as far as I know is currently only in my spiraling lizard brain — has me thinking even more about the shows I don’t want to lose.

Because no disrespect to 16-year-old me, but I do not want to be stuck watching my teenage collection of How I Met Your Mother and Criminal Minds seasons for the rest of my life.