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TV's Golden Age Is Anything But, Say Writers Preparing To Strike (bloomberg.com)
The world's largest media companies returned to the negotiating table Monday with Hollywood screenwriters, seeking to avert a strike that could cost the entertainment industry billions of dollars and take popular TV shows off the air indefinitely. From a report on Bloomberg: Hollywood is bracing for the worst-case scenario after the Writers Guild of America warned advertisers and investors of the financial fallout and said members will most likely walk out May 2 if the new round of talks fail. Major TV programmers, such as NBC and CBS' flagship network, are scanning their slates of upcoming shows to determine which ones can air without guild writers. Negotiators on both sides are counting on cooler heads to prevail as they seek to avoid a repeat of the 100-day work stoppage in 2007-08 that cost the entertainment industry more than $2 billion, according to Milken Institute estimates. Yet the entertainment business, specifically TV, has undergone myriad changes that are creating new sticking points since the last strike almost a decade ago, and the writers say they haven't benefited.
I haven't seen a typical Network TV channel in literally months.
Strike all you want, campers. I'm fine with it.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I thought that Hollywood and the unions were on the same side here. Don't they both donate overwhelmingly to liberal political campaigns? Don't they both believe in supporting the little guy? What gives?
Ok, but does any of this affect HBO, Netflix, or Syfy? If not, who the fuck cares. With or without the writers the shows on the major networks will suck
is a GOOD thing.
TWD is off till next Oct, etc....
Not much new content to watch in summer anyway, so, let them strike.
Just curious, do streaming services like Netflix/Amazon Prime have to bother with writers unions/guilds? If not, well, certainly a boon to them, they can keep churning out what is becoming more and more good independent content that is worth watching.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The Evil Content Pirates(tm)
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Are these the same people who rallied against the Gutenberg printing press? And do they consider themselves indispensable? Well, maybe they can find work as flagmen, walking in front to warn of the approaching horseless carriage.
Who would fill my cable TV guide with lots of look-alike shows which I am not interested in?
Seriously, how important do these people think that they are? Based on the quality of today's TV, and the splintering of the formats, perhaps they're overpaid as-is?
It seems current of most TV shows are reality, infomercials, three themes of fiction (lawyers, cops, medical), and news-opinion (this being a news story breaks out and they get a few pretty talking heads to discuss implications but there really is no additional info on that breaking news story). There are cable channels for sports (don't really need writers for those) and movies (which they repeat the same movie few times a month). There is reruns of classic TV shows (no writers needed). Then there is PBS which Trump wants to defund.
mfwright@batnet.com
I don't use cable or watch over the air TV. Everything I watch was bought on Amazon and nicely packed on a media playback device. All the shows/movies I love are right where I want em with no commercials and no cable/internet required. Strike away! Heck, collapse the entire industry for all I care. It's mostly reality TV type shows anyway these days.
I'm wondering if Netflix and Amazon are itching to license their backlog to the networks if the latter can't fill their timeslots.
Can we really call Netflix/Amazon Prime 'independent' anymore?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The title made sense to me. It didn't seem obfuscated.
Dear Writers, please, Please, PLEASE, for the love of God, PLEASE strike. Permanently. Maybe find shows on Netflix, Prime HBO, or Fox News that need good creative writers.
I got rid of cable TV some time ago. Don't miss it actually. I never realized how much time something like CNN, for example, takes up to tell the same news I can read in about seven minutes on Google news, or other online sources. The endless talking heads, droning on and on and on.
I think it would be quite amusing to watch the whole broadcast model just implode. And a lot of their problems they brought on themselves. Broadcast (even Cable) is so 20th century.
I'm not sure what to make of your subject line.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
This is how the free market should work. If wages are really too low, the strike will cost more than just raising the pay for the writers and the networks will cave. If the writers are overpaid, there are still a lot of unemployed people looking for work, the networks can go find new talent who don't belong to the union (they call it guild, but it is acting as a labor union right now).
Notice that unlike the teachers union, the screen writers guild can't pour in cash to elect their bosses who then kick back raises and benefits, regardless of what is best for the larger organization. This is why all public sector unions need to be banned and why so many Democrats in the past were strongly against public sector unions.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
When they strike now, what do you think will air in autumn? Stuff has to be written, then shot, edited and then broadcasted. If nothing is written today, then sometime in autumn there is nothing to broadcast anymore and your summer reruns become all year reruns into summer 2018.
We NEVER watch broadcast TV. I don't know why the programming is so bad, whether it's the writers, the producers who invent the paradigm or the sponsors. It might be nice to revisit some of the old programs like Mary Tyler Moore, Gunsmoke. and others. If you get MeTV over the air many of these programs are shown there. The problem the networks will have is that these programs took up much more of the half-hour or hour than programs do today and commercial time would be reduced if they were shown in their original format. I guess technology could fix that. And as far a movies are concerned, dialog is almost non existent, it's just gun fights, car chases and unrealistic CGI; maybe that's cheaper than writing dialog for a good story or writers and others involved in making movies have no imagination.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
...which would almost make sense if the shows they were going to write next week were scheduled to air this summer, but that is not the timeframe. The writers are smart: they are timing their strike to have the most impact on what the industry knows as the "up fronts," in which networks show off and promote their pending line-up of shows to advertisers. "Now, here's a show we think is going to be HUGE, about a vampire cowboy and his lesbian hacker sister, based on the indie graphic novel... we think it makes sense to charge top-dollar for the ad time..." They can't do that if the writers strike, as they will have nothing to show and/or there will be uncertainty amidst the ad-dollar-spending community over whether a TV ad buy makes as much sense as a placement in some other medium.
Coming in the next few months:
Summers on TV are great now, not like when we were kids.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Yeah right. Entertainment is the new opiate of the masses and now that Trump is in office the liberal extremists in Hollywood want to do what little they can to piss people off.
Also, don't the TV shows follow a specific lock-step format? What is to keep the writers guild from getting booted and some lit major college grads to write stuff that is likely far better in quality anyway?
Maybe TV needs a year like what 1983 did to the video gaming industry.
It's Rubbish.
Let them go. They need the time to take night classes for writing.
Where you have 150 channels, 60% of them are shopping networks or foreign languages, and the majority of the remaining 40% are garbage not worth watching. /MIGHT/ be something tolerable on.
Every great while there
Golden Age my ass.
What will I do?
I need my sitcoms, with their over-contrived scenes and laugh tracks.
I need my "reality" tv shows that are heavily scripted.
I need my talkings heads shows, that gloss over issues and read jokes form the interwebs.
summer reruns only happened because the studios were busy filming new episodes and doing pilots for potential new series. The writers know exactly when to strike.
Also, don't the TV shows follow a specific lock-step format? What is to keep the writers guild from getting booted and some lit major college grads to write stuff that is likely far better in quality anyway?
I like that idea. We might get some TV episodes that are new and fresh.
If the writers go on strike, then as long as the strike lasts, try out different non-professional writers as substitutes. It would be fun to see what they come up with.
What prevents they guys that run the Screenwriter's Union from doing just that? Nothing, except their constituents don't allow it. The teachers and policemen unions don't either. Anyone who tells you that is lying to you so they can bust the Unions. And you don't understand how Unions work. The reason they can't just hire scabs to write for them is the workers have solidarity. They'll blacklist anyone who breaks ranks (e.g. you'll never work in that town again). Unless the labor market's tight there's only two ways Unions work: solidarity or laws (or both). Otherwise the owner class just uses people's desperation against them. Dems were against Unions in the past because the pro-worker & pro-capitalist parties switched sides.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It is about time that those hacks let us have nice things.
A problem is that talented writers like funny comedians are few and very far between.
Another problem is that the demand for talented writers WAY exceeds the supply. Sturgeon's law ends up exceedingly optimistic when applied to writers.
Another problem is writers now grew up as fans and are "writing" what they know.. which is someone else's work.
Add in tight writing schedules and we are hosed. The guy who can crank out 60 episodes of absolute garbage will gt hired before the guy who can write 6 great episodes.
So you get hacks just sitting back and copying everything they have seen on TV/movies without asking "Is this stupid?". Almost all of them are plagiarists/copy monkies who do not think at all.
Then there is the target audience who will love the dumbest shit if it is packed full of contrived artificial drama Drama DRAMA!!!! "Thanks for fucking us like this "reality" TV!!"
Then there are terrible directors. The people who demand garbage and bad acting... and explosions. Sorry, Mr Bay.. no I'm not.
All that said, a writers strike is probably the best thing that can happen to TV and movies right now.
Let Joss and those like him crank out some quality web content while they wait for the strike to end.
A few indies will pop up and get great careers out of this.
So the 3-4 good shows we watch are delayed, so what? The last season of Game of Thrones seemed to be in a Hollywood nose dive with dead characters returning from the dead (I guess they ran out of books and handed it over to the "writers"). The Archer people need a break to recoup and drink some mojitos, judging from the Magnum PI season. This down time is a plus not a minus. They should do this every five or so years.
All episodes already in the can (so to speak), so no worries. Let'em strike!
The Hollywood fat cats need to loosen the purse strings and pay these folks appropriately.
Traditional TV is dead as a door nail. the programs are so sparse and aimed at dullards that anyone with a nickel in their pocket is on cable or satelite with premium channels added. Regular TV programing went into the ditch when too many ads were run making the shows a nightmare to watch. As viewers declined the programming got worse and they ran ever more ads. Greed killed TV and it isn't doing much for theaters either.
Who cares, most "real" shows are going into summer reruns here soon if not already.
TWD is off till next Oct, etc....
Not much new content to watch in summer anyway, so, let them strike.
You do realise it takes quite a while to make a scripted TV show, right? A strike now will make itself felt a lot later in the year.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Who cares if any if it ever comes back? So much to see and do in this world the last thing worthy of consideration is whether these glorified advertising vectors air with 20 minutes of "new" content. Listen to podcasts, read a book, watch the thousands and thousands of hours of already released content, play the latest vidya, watch YouTube, go to the park, fly a kite, take a picture every day, play with your kids, tend to a garden, learn something new, volunteer somewhere, go talk to your neighbor, go fishing, go bird watching, lose ten pounds, write the next great app, call your mom, get high, change your own oil, ask your significant other how they feel, go watch the ballet, go protest something in front if city hall, better yet run for mayor, get a penpal, pick up litter, listen to the radio, go geocaching, write a short story, hell write a book, paint a picture, ride a bike, clean your ears, pet you pet, learn origami, shitpost on slashdot. But for the love of God don't worry about television.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
They'll get pretty well zero sympathy from anyone who has any power to improve their situation. The government is still overrun by people drunk on power from November and looking for a chance to attack the unions. If they want to keep their jobs they'll have to tough it out at least until the current administration falls apart - though that may well not be far into the future.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'm not trolling but I couldn't care less about it. If they strike and shows don't get made it will have little or no impact on my time. Its all just empty filler where you're real life should go.
Who cares, most "real" shows are going into summer reruns here soon if not already.
Right, because they're getting started with pilots and writing season now. This is how there are shows in fall. They are filmed and edited in advance.
Replied to a FP troll to be unburyable. What a douche.
it is mandatory that all cord-cutter threads start with that 17-year-old Onion article
Karma from point of post deducted
Not much new content to watch in summer anyway, so, let them strike. ....
Summers on TV are great now, not like when we were kids.
Exactly. Whoever is striking can go fuck themselves. Hell they should probably stop writing. There is way too much trash on TV as it is. Also you missed Rick and Morty as well as Expanse (pretty epic if you are into it). Which reminds me, I missed the last episode ;)
One of the most insightful and wise /. posts ever.
Was there a writer's strike in 2009? I didn't notice. I won't notice this time.
Life is too full of great things to worry about television, as so brilliantly described above.
I would think most of the writing of those fall shows had already taken place by now and were in the can...mostly ready for shooting....?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
-Doctor Who
You think the Writer's Guild of America is going to affect that show a lot, do you?
Since Doctor Who is a British show, I don't think it would affected by this strike.
Ol' Rick Dawson had a farm EIEIO
I'll reply to you, since everyone else with the same reply is AC...I'm replying to the first half of OP's comment, not the second half.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Most need to be shown the door, not a higher paycheck. Especially those from network TV. Fire them all. Replace them with starving book writers.
Agreed. I threw out the telly about 15 years ago, on the simple grounds that a 4:3 21" just didn't cut it anymore, and there simply wasn't anything interesting enough on anyway for me to schedule my life around it.
Never had any regrets. Television is for angstfilled people who don't know what to do with their lives and just need something to fill it with.
Netflix and Amazon series writers are all the same union as the broadcast nets. So it's more likely the new kids would look to license (more) archive material from the older networks, as the oldsters have a much deeper inventory. If recent Netflix and Amazon original shows make their way to the broadcasters more rapidly, the value of Netflix and Amazon original content to the consumer diminishes greatly.
One of the most insightful and wise /. posts ever.
Was there a writer's strike in 2009? I didn't notice.
Certainly. That season was full of sitcoms, reality shows, and half-baked plots. Prior to that, TV was, er, sitcoms, reality shows, and half-baked plots. Hmm.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Meh. To counter your examples, here's a list of the things I've enjoyed watching recently:
- Star Trek: TNG
- Star Trek: DS9
- a few minutes of Star Trek: Voyager until I threw up a little in my mouth
- metric tons of Blue Bloods reruns
- even more Big Bang Theory reruns than Blue Bloods reruns
- Emergency, until they rotated it off the all-reruns-all-the-time channels
- Leverage, also until they took it out of rotation
- Burn Notice
- Psych
Notice how many of these are current shows? Yeah, just two, and I'm mostly watching reruns of those anyway.
So a writer's strike is going to interrupt my enjoyment of these shows by approximately... not at all. (And, yes, a good portion of this is from Ion Television, MeTV, H&I, and other similar second-string DTV channels that I get for free. Netflix can go take a flying leap with the cable TV hucksters for all I care.)
Riiiiiiight, and those shows are written, filmed and edited right before they go on the air. No up-front work has to be done with writing scipts, since those pretty much write themselves, huh?
The big difference is that Netflix and Amazon don't rely on advertisers that expect an established release schedule for new material. If writers go on strike for a month or two, then Netflix and Amazon can postpone production for a month or two and suffer no loss real losses. If ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, etc. don't release new programs for a month or two, they lose revenue from those adverts.
We've already been here - and the networks without writers gave birth to the abomination known as "reality TV".
But really, I don't watch much TV. Seasons are down to like 6 episodes, you can't even get drawn into characters or plots in that little time. Then it takes so long for the next "season", I just forget about it and watch something else on Netflix.
Was there a writer's strike in 2009? I didn't notice.
You didn't notice? The last writers' strike gave us Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. That was a win in my book.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I always thought that crap's been generated by not too sophisticated Perl script.
Sure the ol'lady might be upset when the new season of "Spin Off III : Reno SND" doesn't premier till December but hey, that just means more time for Football, NASCAR, and Monster Trucks. None of that fancy script writing required.
You idiot, do you think television shows are just source code, and you hit 'compile', wait a few minutes, then upload the result for broadcast? They have to produce the content, you moron, when do you think that gets done for the Fall premieres?
I figured TV was pretty much dead, I never hear anyone talk about any TV shows currently airing, only stuff one can check out on Netflix (or Amazon Prime). I've sought my visual entertainment from other countries because I feel that American writers, producers, and even animators just can't make anything good anymore. And if they do, it's too far and too few.
Netflix and Amazon series writers are all the same union as the broadcast nets. So it's more likely the new kids would look to license (more) archive material from the older networks, as the oldsters have a much deeper inventory. If recent Netflix and Amazon original shows make their way to the broadcasters more rapidly, the value of Netflix and Amazon original content to the consumer diminishes greatly.
Probably won't affect Netflix, Amazon, or Hulu. Their contracts are not broadcast contracts like ABC, NBC, CBS, etc have. I would expect they have their own streaming contracts, and Netflix at least is known for offering better deals than Hollywood and the Broadcasters when it comes to making their original content. Joint-Developed content, however, might suffer though.
The irony is that it may prevent them from licensing material to the broadcasters though.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Sure thing, buddy. I work 40 hours a week (plus travel time), then train for bike racing (and race) anywhere from 7 to 15 hours a week (or more). Watching a show or two on the DVR is my 'downtime', and I usually sit and eat a meal while I'm doing so. Reading is done in bed to relax me before going to sleep at night. Other needful things are done when I have time to do so. But sure, I'll just stare at the wall while I'm eating dinner, and have nothing to say to anyone because there's no input whatsoever other than work of one kind or another. I'll be sure to invite you to the funeral for after I blow my head off from boredom and depression because some fuckwit decided visual entertainment isn't worth anyones' time. Say, would you do us all a favor, and not decide things for anyone other than yourself? KTHXBYE.
think it would be quite amusing to watch the whole broadcast model just implode.
You would, would you? So, you're going to pay for my streaming accounts, and a better computer that'll actually run 1080p content, all because you want to make obsolete the antenna I put on my roof when I cancelled cable TV years and years ago? Thanks so much, corporate America appreciates you voting for them making even more money, charging for streaming ***AND*** making people watch commercials, too. Really appreciate that.
Do us a real favor and help us all to stop people parroting the tired illusion of mandates. By not doing it.
I'm already doing you a favor: I'm interpreting your angle as someone rebuking an (implied) imperative, rather than someone playing victim.
Tune in next week when I angst at someone butchering the meaning of the phrase "excuse me" with their entitlement. You know it's time to pull the plug when six-year-olds are snubbing it: "You're excused."
Whether I want it or not, I believe that both cable and broadcast over antenna are not going to survive forever. They are simply obsolete. They won't disappear overnight.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
the Golden Age of TV was in the 1960's & 1970's (before the internet) when most everybody spent their free time in the evening watching their favorite TV shows before bed time, TV is like the Radio now, people mostly ignore it unless they want local news & weather, the internet wont lill TV, like TV did not kill radio, it will just fall back to a secondary source of entertainment and news and information
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
OTA television and radio will always exist because of federal government mandate, and rightly so. They exist so people at any income level can have access to television and radio, because they're information sources. There's even a federal law that says you can't outlaw antennas on people's homes, for the same reason. Your 'belief' is misguided and also technically incorrect.
>stare at the wall while I'm eating dinner
C'mon, you're a big kid now, you don't need us to pick out the matching examples in his relatively tiny list of spoon feed.
Ugh, fine. Here comes the airplane!
Zoooom~! >released content
Pshooo~! >youtube
Writing season is about now. Shooting typically starts in summer, while writing continues on later episodes. Even when shows begin airing in the fall, they likely don't have all the episodes in post-production yet or even finished filming.
Rick and Morty. Just discovered this gem (i know, third season). While it won't me to get cable, I will surely pay to watch it on Amazon instead of finding it via, uh, other means.
The longer a strike goes, the more people will stream old stuff, watch YouTube, look on Facebook, or maybe even, and I know this strikes fear: go outside or read an actual paper book.
I'm not anti-union, but I'm firmly anti-Hollywood and it's time to poke a few holes in their balloons, this being one of them.
Yeah, go ahead and strike.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
LOL
Vincent: Pilot? What's a pilot?
Jules: Well, you know the shows on TV?
Vincent: I don't watch TV.
Jules: Yeah, but, you are aware that there's an invention called television, and on this invention they show shows, right?
Vincent: Yeah.
Jules: Well, the way they pick TV shows is, they make one show. That show's called a pilot. Then they show that one show to the people who pick shows, and on the strength of that one show they decide if they want to make more shows. Some get chosen and become television programs. Some don't, become nothing. She starred in one of the ones that became nothing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
They exist so people at any income level can have access to television and radio, because they're information sources.
Maybe some of the various PBS programs, but really, not much else is an "information" source on TV.
Maybe people will just start singing "Wooly Booly"...
It's not like the Writer's Guild has actually done anything worth a shit since their last strike (which got Heroes well-fucked.) Even most Anime has more substance than 99% of the shit Hollywood has had its writers putting out in this day and age.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I'll reply to you, since everyone else with the same reply is AC...I'm replying to the first half of OP's comment, not the second half.
"Everyone else" = one comment? Technically true, but....
Enough with your anti-television talk. Why do you hate America?
Last year was the rise of the reality game shows and social 'experiment' shows. Reality games shows follow a simple game show format but are conducted in a workshop (frequently a stage) or the 'real world'. Social 'experiments' shows people put in highly personal situations with slightly odd circumstances: kissing unseen strangers, marrying total strangers, blind dates, naked 2-day dates. The strangest is watching people at home watching the same reality shows.
I noticed the most popular, a cooking contest, spent more air time on contestants bitching than the challenge at hand. Here, Tv consists of those unscripted shows and re-runs from years and even decades ago, although the 1960s shows have been retired. A few days ago, the annual viewing summary was released: The shows most watched don't suffer scripts and royalty fees. I find bitching about people, boring; I want a goal, a resolution (good or bad) and most of all, a narrative about the people involved. There's always a few shows which provide that, good television isn't gone; it's just not advertised by the networks.
News programs, dummy, all the networks have news departments, and most local stations (except the tiniest of them) have local news departments and broadcasts; broadcast TV and radio has a responsibility to serve the public. Also things like State of the Union addresses, emergency broadcasts, etc. Go research the subject before you stick your foot in your mouth like that.
Other english speaking nations could see an influx of US support and interest.
Sharks, history, food shows? Lifestyle shows on building homes, restoring cars?
A US presenter who lives in that nation and has no need to return to the USA. Good US voice, local connections.
How real can any part of Canada feel for a US crime, medical show or other drama?
How many US actors in Canada can hold a well written show together?
Will US advertisers accept any content between their ads? Will people in the US pay to watch people in Canada trying to be 1800 or 1980's or 2018 USA?
How many US actors would be needed for a new Canadian created drama, that looks 100% made in the USA for the US market?
Is digital work that expensive for a few skylines? Would other nations match funding just to get a production going and support new jobs for their workers and authors?
US writers should have ensured their content was out of reach in any other nation by ensuring more difficult to clone US only content.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Go ahead and strike, we don't really give a shit.
Doctors, firefighters, police, people that build and fix things...if they go on strike, we care. They actually do things that matter.
But a bunch of Hollywood script writers threatening to go on strike? Who gives a fuck?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
You do realise it takes quite a while to make a scripted TV show, right? A strike now will make itself felt a lot later in the year.
I don't care if they go on strike and stay that way for the next decade. Really.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
This is a serious comment? You're not just paraphrasing the Onion? Because you sound an awful lot like this
That got your attention, didn't it?
TWD?
Twerking with Dogs?
Toshiba Waving Diorama?
Till we Dance?
Tahiti Wave Drama?
Toronto Wine and Dine?
Most/All new Netflix and HBO programs are produced under WGA; so this strike will kill those too.
So crazy how many people proclaim 'I don't watch that crap' only to go on about premium services which will also be completely shut down by a writers strike. I'm not sure where this idea that it only affects the broadcast networks comes from; but the vast majority of the non-reality productions will shut down immediately putting thousands of people who have nothing to do with the writing (including myself) out of work.
Cheers!
Most/All new Netflix, Amazon and Hulu programs are produced under WGA; so this strike will kill production on those too (google New Media WGA and you can read about it yourself).
So crazy how many people proclaim 'I don't watch that crap' only to go on about premium services which will also be completely shut down by a writers strike. I'm not sure where this idea that it only affects the broadcast networks comes from; but the vast majority of the non-reality productions will shut down immediately putting thousands of people who have nothing to do with the writing (including myself) out of work.
Correct. Public sector unions should be ILLEGAL. There is really no rational argument for them at all.
They already have a direct say in their employer, its called VOTING.
The worst part is just before elections, where the public sector unions pour tons of their own members
money into political parties, while at the same time trying their best to make their pay an election 'issue'.
If you want a union, work in the private sector. Believe me, its a very different world out here.
TWD is off till next Oct, etc....
The Walking Dead has writers? I thought someone just shit on a bit of paper and they worked from that. And then passed it on to the Game of Thrones people.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
I don't watch much TV; I don't even own one. But I really enjoy Game of Thrones and I hope it gets finished. It's one of the few book-to-screen adaptations that's really good. Besides, at the rate GRRM writes I think either he or I will die before the book gets completed and I'd like to know how the story ends.
After that, the whole TV/Film/Streaming medium can die in a fire for all I care.
When they strike now, what do you think will air in autumn? Stuff has to be written, then shot, edited and then broadcasted. If nothing is written today, then sometime in autumn there is nothing to broadcast anymore and your summer reruns become all year reruns into summer 2018.
I guess they'll have to go to remakes, reboots and generic crap....oh wait.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
But sure, I'll just stare at the wall while I'm eating dinner, and have nothing to say to anyone because there's no input whatsoever other than work of one kind or another.
I'm going to give you one word that will blow your mind...
Music
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Most/All new Netflix, Amazon and Hulu programs are produced under WGA;
I cannot for the life of me figure out what the World Canadian Bureau have to do with all this.
Do the writers want more munneh? Maybe some of that internet munneh?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Riiiiiiight, and those shows are written, filmed and edited right before they go on the air. No up-front work has to be done with writing scipts, since those pretty much write themselves, huh?
Considering how I finally had to stop watching TWD this season, it sometimes sure seems like it.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Sorry but Dr Who? It's a BBC (UK) show largely written by British Writers working in the UK how is an American Writers Strike going to affect it?
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Yes! Please!
Let it fail! TV is a time-suck disaster anyway, and it's exactly what the industry needs in order to shake up some more and slough off viewers.
The more down-time from the boob tube the better.
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No more reality TV?
As if that's not scripted.
Let 'em strike. When they do sign, no more using old crap. Top of the list - Police/private dick murder show. Don't we already have way too many of these?
I have hundreds of channels and with a handful of exceptions - still NOTHING worth watching.
Let them strike and then they'll realize nobody really cares.
On the other hand, be prepared for more minimally-scripted "reality shows".
But production of those upcoming fall shows happens during the summer. If there is a strike for a significant amount of time, the fall premieres will be delayed.
This article doesn't talk much about the basic issues that are pushing the writers toward a strike. A big driving force is that they are making less money because of the shorter seasons on cable and streaming; people are only getting paid for 10 or 12 episodes instead of 22, and that means a big pay cut. Often they are still tied down by exclusivity agreements, which means that they can't make up for the shorter season by doing some work for another show. So there is more work for writers because more shows are being made, but at the same time it's becoming more difficult to make a good living at it.
That's one thing that a new Writers Guild contract could improve, by mandating a relationship between season length and the length of exclusive commitment that can be associated with it. So, for example, a writer who does a 10 or 12 episode season for one show might be allowed to do a second 10 episode show or pick up some individual episodes on other shows, while a writer who does a 22 episode show could be required to be exclusive for the entire year.
Can the government really mandate that radio and TV stations stay in business even as their business model implodes? I thought that TV stations were a business to make profit. They applied for an FCC license. In order to get it, they were mandated to have a certain amount of news and information. Doesn't their license expire periodically and need to be renewed? What if a TV station decided not to renew and shut down? I don't claim to deeply understand that industry. I would love to be corrected and add to my understanding.
The government doesn't mandate restaurants into existence.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Oh, get off your high horse. I have no great fondness for television. I rarely watch it, except in social situations - and only then if the other people in the room are actually paying attention to it. But no moral points are awarded for dismissing it.
I've seen television programs that are excellent works of art, just as I've read books that were inane wastes of paper. I've gone to parks and flown kites and taken pictures and played with children. I've knapped flint and painted houses and carved antler and plumbed bathrooms and written poetry. All of these can be worthwhile activities, and with some effort any of them can be rendered trite, dull, and meaningless, too.
Some people care about television programming and the writers' strike, just as some people care about professional sports, or the declining number of speakers of Gaelic, or space exploration. That is not a personal failing on their part, and exhorting them not to care only demonstrates a narrowness in your conception of human existence. And the same goes for your cheerleaders below.
I'm going to give you one word that will blow your mind...
... it is the thing that I like, and everyone else will like it too, because everyone is the same as me.
So many brave refusniks telling everyone else how much better their television-less lives are! Truly, Slashdot is the locus of enlightenment.
With a name like yours, I'm surprised by that.
We're talking about writers here, with current tv shows, and cable companies trying to make profit off them - if cable and antenna completely died outside of news stations, it'd be 'dead' in the sense he talked about - you're nitpicking.
No, but it an the alternative to TV and silence. If this guy can't think to do anything but stare at the wall in silence and misery if he doesn't have new shows to watch then he needs all the help he can get.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Given the profundity of gay and tranny scenes, the ridiculous interracial couples, etc, I don't really give a shidt what they do. Maybe keep your social engineering plans to yourselves A-HOLES!
It would be impossible for me to care any less. I very rarely watch TV shows or movies, and when I do, it's usually because someone else wants to watch it.
The last time this happened, the average TV season went from 22 episodes per year to 11. A few more iterations and we'll have to measure it in years-per-episode.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere