General Hospital writer says the soap is now using “scab writers”
Actors from daytime soaps aren't currently on strike with the rest of SAG-AFTRA, so they can keep filming as long as they have scripts
Aux News General Hospital
It has almost been three months since the Writers Guild Of America went on strike, with the writers standing up against the AMPTP—an organization representing the biggest movie and TV producers—for better pay, better job security, and protections against AI (among other things). And, over the course of those three months, it seems like venerable soap opera General Hospital has completely run out of scripts. Rather than choosing not to film new episodes, though, striking General Hospital writer Shannon Peace says the show has started using “scab writers” who crossed the picket line.
Peace (who Us Weekly says has been involved with the show since 2021) made the allegation on Instagram, saying that the episode that aired on July 20 was the last one she wrote before going on strike and that everything going forward (until the strike ends) will apparently be written by scabs. Peace notes that soaps face a “unique conflict” with this strike, because the real writers don’t want to see their “characters and storylines handed over to ‘writers’ who cross the picket line,” but at the same time, Peace suspects that a prolonged hiatus could spell the end of all soap operas.
But there are more reasons that soaps are complicated during a strike like this. For one thing, as a Deadline article from June explains, actors on daytime soaps operate under a different agreement than the SAG-AFTRA members who are currently on strike (it’s the same deal that talk shows, reality shows, and game shows have). That means these soaps aren’t struck projects for actors, so they can keep filming as long as there are scripts… but therein lies the problem, since they are struck for the WGA.
The Deadline story offers up the possibility of using scab writers very casually (more of a “they’re obviously doing this” than “it sure would be bad if they did this”), noting that the soaps will still be “churning” out scrips “using Fi-core and other non-member writers.” (Fi-core, or Financial Core, is basically when you resign from the union but still retain all of the protections that the union contract offers, meaning you get the benefits without doing anything to support your fellow workers, and you can continue working during a strike.) WGA West has a list of Financial Core writers (including some current daytime soap writers), and it explains that choosing to go Fi-core during a strike is “forever,” meaning they will not be allowed to rejoin the union later.
The A.V. Club has reached out to Disney, which produces General Hospital, but the studio has not yet released any sort of public statement on this.
41 Comments
This may be a stupid question, but are they called scab writers because they’re covered in scabs?
No, because they write.
Jack London, generally attributed
“After God finished the rattlesnake, the toad, the vampire, He had some awful substance left with which He made a scab … When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and the Devil shuts the gates of Hell to keep him out. No man has a right to scab so long as there is a pool of water to drown his carcass in, or a rope long enough to hang his body with.”I think the idea is that if a union of workers is to be considered a body, someone crossing the picket line is like a lesion on its ass. Or maybe if you get beat down by enough picket signs, you end up kind of scabby, things were different back in London’s days.
Apparently it has its basis in Old Norse, and refers to a person of Low Moral Character.
I think it’s because they are there to be the dried pus and blood covering the gaping wound that is the rift between corporate and striking employees.
Priding themselves on being a factually accurate drama, they’re hiring people called scab writers because these writers specialise in writing about hardened, dried clots that form over wounds as part of the healing process.
Because you don’t “pick at scabs” and “scabs don’t picket”
They could have just hired the regular writer’s evil twins…..
Doubtful drop in quality.
This headline was so shocking I came down with a case of explosive amnesia!
So…you detonate every time you forget something?
I think I’d remember something like that.
Or what we call in Austria Kopflegshlagen.
I understood that reference!also “He was decapitated! I looked it up!”(I saw Soapdish twice at the cinema in two weeks back when it was released.)
soapdish is a damn classic.
Soap operas are probably the media most in danger of being replaced by AI writers with no one noticing, which is why this shit needs to be put into agreements.
Next week on Procedurally Generated …
Trademark that immediately.
It would be amusing to see if someone could completely automate both the dialog and CG animation and make a shitty web soap opera.
This sounds like the perfect test case for AI writing. Clearly the soap opera audience has a wider tolerance than many for bizarre plotlines, unrealistic situations and characters who can suddenly change for no clear reason. So the oddities of AI generated writing might not be as obvious or bothersome as they would be to a wider audience. Soap opera scripts might be something the current state of the art is capable of doing.
Right? There’s no way the studios aren’t trying to AI their way out of this as we speak. I feel like it’s conceivable that within ten years ALL the soaps will be written by specific AI models trained to write exclusively one series. And then in 2041, the first daytime Emmy delivered to a non-human, and in 2045, Skynet goes online and it’s game over for everyone.
I wouldn’t put it past them, but really I can’t imagine we’ll have any network daytime soaps in ten years…
That’s…unfortunate.
I’m sure Bob Iger would be as surprised to learn that Disney produces General Hospital as I was just now, but fuck him anyway.
If ever there was a great case for striking in sympathy, this is it. Whatever the arrangements that allowed the cast of the soaps to keep working with SAG-AFTRA approval, the time has come to support the writers. Even from a purely selfish view, soap actors can’t afford to let the studios win this fight.
They also can’t afford to strike, though, since soaps are already in such a precarious position. If they strike, they’ll 100% be cancelled.
Exactly. And especially in this day and age of slashed soap budgets, a lot of the regular soap actors barely make a living wage— I know that’s true of the vast majority of actors of course, so is kinda a terrible excuse, but unless you’re a “legacy” character, if you have a regular gig on a soap you aren’t making the equivalent of most other scripted TV programming—and working much longer hours (even if with all the budget cut backs they’ve largely done away with things like, oh you know, rehearsing the show in the morning before taping at all, which they actually used to do twice, etc…)
Fair enough. I wasn’t putting down the actors, more encouraging them to strike as well, but I guess SAG-AFTRA has its reasons for exempting the soaps. Thanks for helping me understand.
I am a lapsed daytime soap fan—I just don’t think any of the remaining ones are any good at all (and really even when we still had my fave, All My Children, it’s last years mostly… weren’t great either.) There’s a variety of reasons for this—lower budgets, but also oddly as ratings continue to dwindle they’ve largely gotten more conservative (AMC had an abortion story in the early 70s, but in its final years on ABC the writers were told to not even use that word.)
But this is nothing new for soaps. I can think of a time in the 80s and in the 2000s when the scab writers had to write during a writer’s strike (sometimes this has just meant that the exec producer takes over writing.) And, yeah, both those periods were pretty disastrous creatively. (And yes, I get the joke that this must sound like to non-soap fans who probably think the writing is just always bad…) Among soap fans there are infamous examples of weird things the scab writers have done to derail the writing that was being set up by the official headwriters—including killing off major characters.
But I think the writer quoted here is right. Soap people always blame the endless pre-emptions for the OJ trial as the start of the end of a sort of golden age for soaps, but really of course there are many other reasons (like even by that point far less of an audience at home to watch them live in the daytime, and the fact that now you can get your serialized fix on higher budget primetime shows when there used to be a time that soaps were virtually the only serialized TV.) But regardless, whenever there’s a long break without new episodes, it does break a lot of fans from the soap opera habit (especially when the shows themselves are all pale shades of their classic selves)–one that nowadays they simply don’t return to.
Curious. Does anyone you guys reach out to ever respond?
I read an interview with a soap opera writer recently and she said that for writers, much like actors, the soaps can be a godsend. She talked about how she could barely make a living in L.A. let alone own a house despite having worked on a ton of shows. Now she lives in New York, owns a nice house and makes a good living. She also commented that from a craftsman’s standpoint writing for soaps does take actual talent just to keep all of the characters true to themselves and keep all the plot balls in the air and that whenever the writers returned from a strike they had a real shit mess to clean up from the scabs who invariably ran the shows into the ground. I can’t stand the shows but respect the fact people make an honest living working on them.
It was a big story during the 2007-08 WGA strike when John Ridley, who had built himself a brand of being something of a holier-than-thou social justice type, went fi-core so he could continue working during the strike.
What these writers really need to understand is that this will stick to them forever. Everyone in the WGA is going to know their names, and will never let them get any work once the strike is over.
I totally hear you, and this was my feeling for a long time, as a striking WGA features writer: “fuck those traitors.”But a few weeks ago I was at a picket with a lot of soap writers, and learned why it is so many soaps writers go Fi-Core — basically, they know as soaps writers that no one else in town respects them, so they don’t really have a concern about the WGA publishing their names — they already know they AREN’T going to get any work that isn’t on one of the four remaining soaps. One of my friends got his first writing gig on a soap, and since leaving described it as “career suicide” since even with strong samples (and a writing award) no one takes him seriously.
I’m definitely not defending scabbing, but their scabbing is coming from a place of already being so disrespected and looked over (the strike is largely about the future of the industry, and their particular niche doesn’t really *have* a future) that there isn’t much to motivate them beyond a paycheck. The writers I met on the picket line were pretty non-judgmental towards their scabbing colleagues — everyone on the line was either young and hopeful they could eventually transition to prime time or seasoned veterans who made a bunch of money and could withstand a prolonged strike. But your average midlevel soaps writer doesn’t have a brighter future to look forward to, even if we win.tldr: sucks to scab but also sucks to work your ass off and never get respect.
Peace suspects that a prolonged hiatus could spell the end of all soap operas.Wait but… why though?
Probably because It’s kind of a dying genre, there are only 4 left, one of which isn’t on linear tv anymore and the ratings keep going down.
Because soap viewers are largely creatures of habit. Even with people now watching online, or almost all on DVR at night after work, or whatever, much of the appeal of the shows is they’re a constant in your life (after all a lot of the watchers still out there grew up watching with their grandparents or mothers, and that remains some of the appeal.) Whenever there has been a reason they haven’t aired for extended periods before (past strikes, the OJ trial literally pre-empting months of filmed soap opera, etc) ratings (which are tiny now anyway due to a lot of factors) tumble and never return to their previous numbers.
Add to that that’s it’s no secret that soaps no longer are big money makers for the networks (in their top era–late 70s and much of the 80s, they *literally* funded the networks’ primetime programming.) And they’re keen to replace them with cheaper programming or selling that time back to the affiliates.
Fi-core, or Financial Core, is basically when you resign from the union but still retain all of the protections that the union contract offers, meaning you get the benefits without doing anything to support your fellow workers, and you can continue working during a strike.Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe states that don’t have “Right to Work” laws extend union-negotiated protections to non-union workers in the same shop.
Kinda the opposite: in “right to work” states you can’t be compelled to join a union for a particular job. In states that don’t have “right to work” laws, you have to join the union to work in a unionized shop.
“it explains that choosing to go Fi-core during a strike is ‘forever,’ meaning they will not be allowed to rejoin the union later”This is interesting because where is the downside if they still get the union protections regardless? I’m surprised that this “Fi-core” business is allowed in the first place? Do they at least pay dues? Is that why it’s called “Financial”? And the benefit is that the union gets this dues money? Otherwise I can’t see the benefit of allowing them to scab while still getting union protection.
Maybe the scabs are from that underground city or wherever.