How streaming caused the TV writers strike

[Music] thank you [Music] what's gotten us to this place is the the rug was pulled out from under writers and two degree actors in the last 10 15 years it's the Advent of streaming the Golden Age of Television one of the first streaming original shows was House of Cards spoiler alert when they pushed Kate Mara in front of that train it it seemed like groundbreaking television and it was fast-paced and it looked beautiful and it had huge Stars artistically it's opened up the world there used to be 80 shows in a year now you're up to 500 550 shows in a year and for writers it was good because it gave people entry and a lot of those people were diverse Young Voices who Hollywood said oh you should come out to move to LA or New York places where the cost of living is extremely high and you have a seat at the table that for years created careers for people now it doesn't exist like that anymore what's the difference between a network show and a streaming Show Network is the TV we all grew up with ABC NBC CBS and it's the season that begins in September and runs 22 Episodes and ends in in May as that's a season especially for procedurals that everyone knows like Gray's Anatomy or csis TV seasons always began in September and that had something to do with auto sales by the way the new car Seasons came out and they were going to advertise heavily so you wanted new TV the network model worked for a very long very law people a stable career I broke in on Law and Order Criminal Intent I was on staff there four years became show runner there so you get paid by the episode or by the week they said you'll make fifteen thousand dollars and I thought that was it I didn't know they meant for every episode I didn't understand what I stumbled into so I was able to make a living start raising a family in New York I think those doors have closed now so the upside of streaming creatively was you didn't have to worry about commercial breaks if I write an SVU we have five commercial breaks in an hour of TV something has to happen at the end of that act to make sure people come back your writing has to conform to the advertising that pays for it if you write for streaming you don't have to worry about commercial breaks you get to write a different structure maybe it's just an organic three-act structure to an hour now you're down to eight episode run six episode runs shorter Seasons where you could Arc a story across Eight Episodes you can go a little darker you can go a little deeper that part of it was great and writers from movies flat to it novels flock to it but as the episode orders have shrunk what used to be used to be now 20 weeks so try having to go from finding one job a year to finding multiple jobs a year to maintain the same status quo that you previously had it's tough I don't think anyone's asking to go back to 20 episodes seasons but the stability and the longevity of those jobs is the model that we're asking for and that we think is best for writers and best for the product can you explain what's changed how the writer's room looks different in each model the function of the writer's room is the exact same like it is a group of writers coming together to break story to craft a season and to write episodes of television when you get your first job writing on a TV show you're almost always a staff writer which is the lowest level in the room and then the next rung on the ladder is story editor from story Editor to Executive story editor co-producer producer supervising producer co-executive producer and then executive producer is the highest in showrunner obviously the creative process is people coming together having a conversation about the dark comedy is it one hour is it a half hour breaking story and really writing your whole season the next phase is production when you bring all of your crew together bring all of your actors grab your directors and you shoot the TV show and then stages post-production when you take that thing you shot you sit with your editor turn it into what people see on TV broadcast shows kind of used to be the entire TV space so if you are on a show like Law and Order SVU or if you are on a show like friends your show was being filmed it was in production concurrently while you were in The Writer's room writers are going back and forth and really learning the ropes of what it is to produce a TV show you know and it might be in the moment when you're watching a scene and an actor might come up to you and say like this line just isn't working for me the job of the writer at that moment is to talk to the actor figure out what isn't working and write them a new lie the writer is working with the actor at all times he's Conjuring the character he's meeting the actor that was cast and should be there when that actor is giving life to those words financially of course it would cost Studios to keep writers on and to pay those extra weeks to keep doing their job it's seems like their favorite place to cut the budget is with writers robbing them of creativity then robbing them of people training up to be the the showrunners of future shows writers are now being separated from production employed for fewer weeks fewer we weeks means less income and when a show like Game of Thrones cost so much money and takes so much time to to make that's a longer period of time between seasons and so that means these writers have a longer period of time before they are employed again so story wise there is something nice about having all of your episodes written before you start to produce it really gives you a nice scope of the Season you know we're at all your locations are going to be and if something happens in the last episode of your season that you realize there's a nice way to plant early in the season you can go and play with that episode on the other hand not having your writers continue to be there and do the work that happens in production hurts the production and it hurts the writers there was this staff writer who was on the bear which is a streaming show on Hulu and he had a story about how after working in this room even though it was this critically acclaimed show and they were winning an award he went to the award show broke and had to rent a bow tie what I thought was so interesting about that story was that it wasn't Pay Per Se that was the issue in that situation it was the length of the room so you went from having 40 weeks of guaranteed work to maybe eight to ten it is always very difficult to work in our industry right as director's actors often have long stretches of idle time periods where you're either looking for your next job the next room that you're going to go right in or the next feature that you're going to pitch residual checks or what let you do that residuals which are how actors and writers tie themselves over during lean times have basically been decimated when TV first began there was a big strike in 1960 and that strike resulted in writers getting residuals the reason my network residual is so healthy is because that was negotiated a long time ago when that was the only other way an episode could be re-watched if you wrote for friends or Seinfeld these shows that are on all the time every single time it's used you get a check the number of runs your show has the size of the check decreases the show is generating income for NBC Universal and so you will see some of that income now streaming comes in and there's a terrible formula based on a percentage of the sale from the studio to the streamer so it sits on the platform for a year and you get one check no matter how many times it's watched do you write a show for Hulu so you get paid to write it and you might see four hundred dollars for the next three years as opposed to a network rerun which might be for an hour or so it might be twenty four thousand dollars I have talked to fellow writers who came up years before and it was the difference between buying a house or not between sending your kid to school or not and and for me it just seems like this pipe dream of getting residuals for for the work that I've done [Music] this strike seems to be catching fire because it mirrors the discontent a lot of workers feel about this yawning wage gap between the top and the bottom and secondarily but correlated is that it's about the art that we're making and if we're not given the time and the resources that we need to make good television you're not going to have the diversity of voices the diversity of ideas I think that we want to make sure that art isn't coming from only voices who can afford to do this as a job I got into writing because I was an actor and still am I worked on the adventures of Puss in Boots trolls the beat goes on Channel Zero for sci-fi I did a bunch of CBS procedurals and most recently I was the showrunner of one of Us's lying on peacock Law and Order Criminal Intent then I went to in treatment and did a show called lights out for FX and then I wandered back into the Law and Order family and went to SVU

Channel: Vox

Views: 877,089

Keywords: Law & Order, Netflix, Peacock, Vox.com, WGA, Writers Guild of America, abc, amazon, apple, cbs, comedy, demands, explain, explainer, film, late night, movie, nbc, network, protest, residuals, script, streaming, strike, television, tv, union, vox, writer, writers, writers guild, writers room, writers strike

Id: ILaU78Oo7XM

Length: 10min 32sec (632 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2023

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[u/Kimky]

Lol, this made me laugh. Streaming isn't what cause TV strike, big network wanting more and more profit and pay less, and less their talent is where the problem is. If they made more money they wouldn't have given more money to writers, that's just pure bs.