By Lucy Joliff
Elm Staff Writer
The current contract of the Writers Guild of America, which represents approximately 10,000 members, with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the organization that represents Hollywood film studios, expires on May 1. According to Variety, the film and television industry is experiencing “a perfect storm of financial pressures.”
After a pandemic-related boom in content-watching, the other side of the curve is causing chaos in the industry. The pressures on studios include devastating share price falls after many streaming services saw their first drops in subscribers, according to The Verge. In addition, the Directors Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA have their own contracts to renegotiate with studios by June 30.
The last WGA strike, which lasted from Nov. 2007 through Feb. 2008, caused positive change in the industry, most notably getting “new media,” or anything created for online distribution, covered by the agreement. At the same time, the disruption caused by the strike caused a number of scripted shows to dramatically cut their seasons, destroying carefully laid story arcs in shows like “Bones” and “Heroes,” and costing members who were laid off millions in lost wages.
Here is why experts think the renewal negotiations will lead to another writers’ strike, and what the results might be.
The royalties paid to writers for repeat airings of a TV episode or a movie are one of the steadiest sources of income for members of the WGA, providing a financial cushion while they are between projects. However, the major changes that streaming television brought to the industry disrupted that stability.
With older television relegated to streaming services’ back catalogs, and new shows going straight to those platforms, traditional syndication on networks has all but disappeared, according to the LA Times. For writers, it used to be possible to make money every time an episode they wrote was re-aired.
If this issue ends up as a sticking point for the WGA during negotiations, streaming services may be pressured to release viewing figures, which they are famously cagey about according to The Hollywood Reporter. This would be an interesting shift in the landscape of streaming, as the lack of transparency around this information makes the success of streaming shows and movies very difficult to gauge.
Just a few years ago, a standard season of television was 22 episodes long. Now, many dramas and sitcoms have around ten episodes. A common complaint about many of Netflix’s sitcom attempts is that 10 episodes is just long enough for a show to figure itself out and start to hit its stride. With only half of a typical season length, none of these shows then get the chance to reach their potential before cancellation.
As for writers, shorter seasons have completely changed their jobs. According to Variety, prior to the rise of streaming, TV networks would commission a pilot episode, and then a writers room would be assembled to write 22 episodes over the course of the next year. Now, pilot episodes are rarely shot, and a small group of writers will be brought together in so-called “mini-rooms,” to write the season over a much shorter period of time.
This pattern has recently been broken by the second seasons of two shows: ABC’s “Abbot Elementary” and Hulu’s “How I Met Your Father,” and it seems likely that more shows will follow their lead if the WGA succeed in introducing minimum payments and a minimum staff size relative to the number of episodes ordered.
One of the most prominent recent issues in the entertainment industry has been the sudden and unexpected cancellations of filmed projects. Sparked by the shelving of the completed “Batgirl” and “Scoob: Holiday Haunt” by Warner Bros. Discovery, other studios have followed suit in taking a tax write-off by killing in-progress projects, including fully filmed seasons of television, that they do not think would be profitable according to Deadline.
For writers, as well as everyone else involved in a project, work never reaching the public is a big hit both financially and emotionally. Following HBOMax’s unexpected cancellation of “Minx” during the filming of Season 2, actor Jake Johnson shared on Instagram that they would finish shooting while hoping to find a new distributor.
“We love making the show and hope to continue to,” Johnson said, thanking fans for their support. “It’s a crazy business and that’s partly what’s so additive about it.”
Producer and director Steven DeKnight suggested on Twitter that the WGA, DGA, and SAG-AFTRA would be cracking down on the practice during negotiations.
His suggestion? Distributors engaging in cutting of residuals, mini-rooms, and cancellations should be forced to pay “huge financial penalties” to cast, crew, and creatives. It remains to be seen if the WGA will negotiate on this issue, but if they do not, television audiences can anticipate changes in their viewing habits.
Photo caption: The Writers Guild of American previously went on strike in 2007, causing cancellations and shortening seasons for multiple big name shows, including “Breaking Bad,” “Lost,” and “Ugly Betty.”
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.