Cynthia Nixon, Wanda Sykes, and many more take to 30 Rock and speak amid writers’ strike

Three weeks into the writers’ strike, the Writers Guild of America took over New York City’s legendary Rockefeller Plaza to make one thing crystal and rightfully clear to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP): They’re not backing down.

The WGA East organized a vibrant rally on May 23 below the iconic 30 Rock building, home to Saturday Night Live, The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, Late Night With Seth Meyers, and the NBC and Comcast offices. It’s also the structure that inspired NBC’s long-running, beloved sitcom,
30 Rock (a show that, a decade ago, was impacted by the previous strike). The adrenaline-filled energy from solidarity just can’t be beaten, and thankfully, the WGA wasn’t alone. Members of the SAG-AFTRA, IATSE, and other labor unions showed up in numbers to support the writers demanding fair compensation for their work. What else did corporations promoting AI over real writing talent expect?

The 30 Rock rally witnessed impressive speakers, from And Just Like That…’s Cynthia Nixon to Broad City’s Ilana Glazer, from playwright Tony Kushner to Good Omens’ Neil Gaiman. The A.V. Club did some boots-on-the-ground reporting to bring you rousing, insightful quotes from everyone who took the stage supporting the WGA, including exclusive comments from Girls5eva and SNL’s Paula Pell and rally emcee Josh Gondelman, former writer at Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.

[The following speeches have been condensed.]

Sal Gentile, Late Night With Seth Meyers writer, mocks Max

“The moment that the nation has been waiting for with David Zaslav. Today is the day HBO Max becomes Max. Can you feel the electricity in the air? They said America couldn’t do it, but we finally did it. We came up with a name dumber than Quibi. Who is signing up for it now that it’s just Max? That tells me something. That tells me the struggle over naming it tells me that people don’t care about the name. They care about the shows on the service that people aren’t looking for HBO Max or a Max. They’re not looking for the streaming service that’s run by David Zaslav. They’re looking for the shows that writers and artists create… And so if you desperately want your favorite late-night shows’ take on something in the news that we’ve missed, something like George Santos getting indicted or Rudy Giuliani ordering Viagra by the pallet or whatever, tell the AMPTP to give us a fair contract.”