The sun rose and set over Los Angeles, but not a writer in the town picked up a pen or a keyboard.
For 100 days in 2007 and 2008, the Writers Guild of America, the union representing most of Hollywood’s scribes behind your favorite TV shows and films, went on strike, bringing the entertainment industry to a halt. Late night comedians had no jokes for their monologues. Movie stars had no lines to read on set. Reality and foreign TV shows (not represented by the union) ruled the airwaves. And it could all happen again on May 1.
That’s because the WGA’s current contract with the major Hollywood studios is expiring, and negotiations between the guild and Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which bargains on behalf of the nine largest studios, don’t seem like they’re headed toward an agreement. That means that writers of everything from network series like CBS’ “NCIS” to Marvel movies to streaming series including Netflix’s “Stranger Things” could leave their desks and hit the picket lines for the first time in 15 years.
Hollywood has changed significantly since 2008, led by the rise of streaming services. This has upended the traditional pay structure in the industry and, as the WGA argues, has led more writers to work harder and longer for less pay (streaming series can take longer to make but result in fewer episodes, and therefore often less pay for writers). At the same time, entertainment conglomerates are seeing financial losses and cutting jobs and shelving TV shows and movies left and right.
We answer every question about a potential strike, from the odds it will actually happen to how it will affect you when you click on your TV.
Will a writers’ strike happen?
Talks between the WGA and the AMPTP began March 20, and have so far not resulted in a contract. (Talks typically heat up as a deadline approaches.) Amid a two-week break in negotiations, the WGA began a strike authorization vote on April 11, the first step before a potential work stoppage. However, that is no guarantee that the guild will strike – writers voted to authorize a strike in 2017 during contract negotiations but an agreement was ultimately reached .
What TV shows and movies will be affected by a writers strike?
If a strike happens, viewers will first notice the effects on late night talk shows: Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and others depend on writers and produce shows the day they air. So a strike would immediately force a shutdown. NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” which has three episodes scheduled for May, could also shut down for the remainder of the season. Reruns would fill those slots. Daytime soap operas would also run out of new episodes within a few weeks.
More:Is your favorite network TV show renewed, canceled or ‘on the bubble’? Our 2023 status report
Most broadcast shows, such as NBC’s “Law & Order” and ABC’s “Abbott Elementary,” will finish their seasons, as their finale episodes have already been written and filmed. But a prolonged strike could affect how soon they return in the fall. (A handful, including NBC’s “Quantum Leap,” are already producing episodes for next season in preparation for a possible strike.) Streaming shows operate with far longer lead times, meaning the delays caused by any work stoppage won’t be felt for months. But it’s uncertain whether actors (also unionized in the Screen Actors Guild) would agree to film projects from already completed scripts during a strike.
Movies have an even longer lag time, so titles set to release in 2024 and 2025 are most likely to be affected by a strike, forcing delays.
The longer a strike goes on, the more studios, streamers and networks will draw programming from non-WGA sources: Reality shows and foreign TV. During the 2007-08 strike, there was a boom in reality shows that lasted long after the writers returned to work.
What does the WGA want?
Writers are primarily looking for more compensation, with many pointing to the rise of streaming as having a negative effect on their earnings. In TV, writers are often paid per episode, and where a broadcast series once produced 22 or more installments each season, streaming series are more typically eight to 13 episodes.
Residuals or royalties, which earn writers, actors and producers (among others) money after a TV show’s debut when it airs or streams elsewhere, are lower for streaming shows than for broadcast shows that air reruns on cable or syndication. These lower minimums were established when streaming was in its infancy.
In their pattern of demands, the guild also asked studios to standardize compensation for screenwriting – regardless of whether a film is released theatrically or on streaming – and increase studio contributions to the pension plan and health fund.
“Over the past decade, the companies embraced business practices that slashed our compensation and undermined our working conditions,” the guild wrote April 3 on Twitter. “We are asking to restore writer pay and conditions to reflect our value to this industry. The survival of our profession is at stake.”
What do the studios want?
The studios are approaching the negotiations with “the long-term health and stability of the industry as our priority,” AMPTP said in a statement shortly before the talks began, and it’s been a shaky time in the industry. Entertainment conglomerates and streaming services are looking to bolster their bottom line, ratcheting back a spending spree on new content that has hurt profits. Many have reported losses to Wall Street in recent months and laid off thousands of employees. Most recently, Disney began the process of laying off 7,000 workers.
From 2017:Hollywood writers’ strike averted after ‘tentative’ deal reached
