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Writers Strike Officially Over
CNN is reporting that the 100-day Hollywood writers walkout is now officially over. The new contract managed to snag two of the three major points the Writers Guild was looking for. The writers will now have "jurisdiction" for content created especially for new media (Internet, cell phones, etc) and will get paid for the reuse of content on new media when the studios get paid. "Leslie Moonves, chief executive officer of CBS Corp., told The Associated Press, 'At the end of the day, everybody won. It was a fair deal and one that the companies can live with, and it recognizes the large contribution that writers have made to the industry. [...] It's unclear how soon new episodes of scripted programs will start appearing, because production won't begin until scripts are completed, the AP reported. It will take at least four weeks for producers to get the first post-strike episodes of comedies back on the air; dramas will take six to eight weeks, the AP said.'"
Future generations will look back at this strike as "the year we almost lost Hollywood and no one really gave a crap."
Now I'll get to see the new episodes of Star Trek!
What? What do you mean "cancelled?"
OK Battlestar Galactica. No? How about Babylon...
Oh hell. Somebody please point to a nerd show I can watch tonight?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I'm still not going to rush back to my television set over this.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I can get back to enjoying "The Daily Show" and the "Colbert Report", instead of those generic knock-offs, "A Daily Show" and the "Colbert Report".
Im sorry, but its too late.
I took the plunge and got rid of 'pay-tv' once and for all right before this strike, and its amazing how little I actually miss it. And amazing how I was spending over $70/month for just regular ad-laced channels. Yes, paying to watch advertisements is not how I want to spend my money anymore. That INCLUDES the 'ads' that get thrown right into the shows, soap opera style(thats how they got their name after all).
The internet is now my primary tool of information sourcing and entertainment. The TV industry missed the boat, the same way the music industry did. The only thing that made it take as long as it did was the bandwidth difference between audio and video.
The TV is dead, long live TV!
Everyone talking about the strike is talking about the terms for Internet streaming/new media.
I'm curious as to why nobody's mentioning the writers' other big demand, for an increased royalty on DVD sales. Did they drop that demand as part of a compromise?
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Unrelated to the writers strike, I got rid of my television and cable. I use the internet for news and watch movies with a digital projector. After a couple of months, I not only didn't miss it, but realized a big quality of life increase. More time with the kids, actually eating at the dinner table, etc.
I wonder how many people turned to other entertainment venues due to the strike. If there is NOTHING good on, I am sure some people cut back on their tv watching. Now that viewers have so many options (ie netflix, internet downloads, itunes tv, youtube, dvd kiosks, etc) this could not have come at a worse time. I am curious if this writers strike was the tipping point for a lot of people to ween themselves from their tvs. Not from shows all together, but the old standard of scheduling your life around when your show comes on and sitting through commercials.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
The audiences. The studios will try to gouge us to recoup any concessions they made, and the pipeline for new stuff has run dry.
We'll have a drought of work over the next little while. Eventually, they'll go back to writing the same old tired sitcoms. The content won't magically get any better, in fact, the studio system will fall back more on formulas to try to get greater return on investment.
On the plus side, the studios will have resurrected the Oscars before their entire awards season is a bust.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
...anyone involved in Reality TV would go on strike. Permanently, and forever. It's hard to imagine anything more anti-geek than Reality TV.
Welcome back writers. Congrats on your win. We need you, more than ever.
One thing I don't see mentioned in the comments is the fact that during the strike many writers were fired, and many shows were cancelled. 24 has decided not to air this season and will continue next season.
It may be a win for some people, but for others they are now out of a job. I don't have a pony in this race, but the strength of the writer's guild is in serious question. One Presidential candidate after another crossed the picket line in favor of publicity. They did not protect the jobs of those who they sought to protect. Actor/Writers crossed the picket line for fear of losing their jobs. And most importantly - many high value shows seemed to be airing new episodes in the middle of the strike.
I'm all for TV coming back, but make no mistake - this strike did not end well for the union. It seems that every labor union in the last several years that has gone on strike (save the port workers who affect the global economy when on strike) has yielded either poor results (eventual acceptance of offers barely different than what was available pre-strike) and in a loss of jobs for unionized workers.
I hate to turn this into a political thing, but the strength of unionized labor vs. corporate dollars has shifted dramatically in favor of corporate dollars.
Amazing how many people share that same assumption. You may want to spend some time and take a hard look at the lifestyle you are providing to your children.
Maybe you missed what I said in stating the importance of the INTERNET over the importance of TV in providing the same services. Perhaps you should be more concerned that the rest of the kids in your childs age group are comfortably using the internet as a replacement for TV, while your children are starting blankly at a screen.
Im sorry to hear about the parenting your children received, but that was your choice.
You can't take the sky from me...
I've only watched (part of) one episode of Numb3rs, but that was enough for me to totally write off the show.
The scenario was a guy robs a gas station. He holds a gun over his head and fires up into the sky. There is no video of it, just stories from the witnesses. The math guy rambles off a bunch of math terms, says algorithm a lot, then draws on a map, marking off a couple of places that the bullet was most likely to land.
The explanation of what he was doing was just random words strung together that didn't make any sense. "A guy fired a bullet into the sky" is no where near enough info to find a bullet.
After that, he went off into another "derivative algorithm sine cosine algorithm mean median algorithm integral algorithm" rant, so I changed the channel and never looked back.
Your first paragraph pretty much sums up what this was all about. The writers guild was coerced into striking by the studios. They didn't want to and worked without contract for months, but the studios refused to negotiate. So they felt a need to flex their muscles and went out on strike.
The studios felt they were saddled with dead weight in the form of long-term development deals that were going no where. Sure you get a good show or two out of them, but there were too many for the product that was being produced. There were some that were three years into their deals and had no product yet. All of those deals have "act of god" or "force majeur" clauses in them and most were 90-days (from what i was told by the Universal Studios folks).
After 90-days those deals were killed, the people had all been laid off earlier and now, amazingly, 10-days later the strike is settled. The WGA was a puppet used to smack down the small production companies.
The tiny concessions given to the writers have been estimated to amount to about $3,000 per year for a constantly working writer of average pay. And even in those concessions there are loopholes for the studios - like they get to wait a month after releasing a show for the web before they have to pay anything to the writer. Look for lots of "pay for it on iTunes or get it free after a month" deals from now on. So basically the writers sold out tens of thousands of actual hard-working people (grips, food workers, etc.) for hollow concession to feed their damaged egos.