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As of midnight on May 2, the Writers Guild of America went on strike. According to this AP story, the guild represents 11,500 writers who write the movies, TV shows, and late night talk and variety shows that we all watch and feverishly blog about. According to that same article, writer pay has dipped 14% over the past five years.
A lot of this has been exacerbated by the move to streaming services. In the past, when TV shows were rerun, writers could count on residuals to help make up for their sporadic work. TV shows used to have long, multi-season runs, which gave writers more stability. Think back to “Grey’s Anatomy,” which had 24 episodes per season or “ER,” with 22 episodes per season. Now think about streaming shows like Succession, which had about 10 episodes over its four seasons. Or the 12 total episodes of Fleabag over two seasons. And streaming services have no qualms about canceling popular shows early or even before they have even aired.
Given that studio and streaming execs cite nervousness around the economy as a reason to not meet the writer’s contract negotiations, let’s take a look at some executive pay, shall we? Surely, they’re biting the bullet as well, and taking pay cuts, right? Hm…, what’s that? CEO Reed Hastings actually saw a compensation increase from 40.8 million dollars in 2021 to more than 50 million in 2023? Surely, you watched “Stranger Things” because of Hastings, and not the writing, right? How about HBO? You watch Succession not because of the stellar writing, right? You’re watching because of Warner Brothers Discovery head honcho, David Zaslav. That’s why he’s worth almost 40 million dollars for 2022.
Of course, these overpaid executives can keep up the caliber of good writing by paying writers nothing and rushing to AI to have glorified pattern recognition algorithms spit out generic conglomerations of billions of data points that result in a mass of generic mash, right?
And here I am, sitting down to write my daily blog post, knowing that I will be getting paid pennies on the blog post if anything at all. Of course, I’m not only writing these blog posts for money. How could I, since I don’t really have a large enough audience to be able to charge anything meaningful for the work that I put into writing. But doing this daily writing exercise makes me realize how hard this work is.
Good writing is hard work. Watching a well-written TV show or movie is an amazing escape for literally billions of people in this world. The writers that are critical to that experience should be fairly compensated. I 100% support the writers' strike, and I hope that they get the pay increases and security that they’re seeking.
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