Here’s what happened last time there was a writers’ strike in Hollywood
The 100-day long writers' strike in 2007-08 offers a glimpse at the industry's possible future
Aux News Entertainment, Culture
As the Writers Guild Of America prepares to reenter negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, many across the industry are preparing for the worst but hoping for the best.
Per the Los Angeles Times, studios, networks, and television producers are preparing for a possible walkout by speeding up production schedules, stockpiling scripts, and leaning on international productions. Shooting schedules for shows have been bumped up and writers’ rooms opened early in order to secure scripts for upcoming seasons. Some networks renewed series earlier than usual to get the ball rolling on production, such as NBC’s Quantum Leap.
In anticipation of the worst, it’s been a bit of a mad dash to procure content ahead of the negotiations, which start on March 20 before the contract expires on May 1. Writers are not the only ones working in Hollywood with a contract running out this year; the unions overseeing actors and directors will also enter new negotiations ahead of the June 1 deadline, in what’s anticipated to be a “difficult” and “complicated” process.
If the 10,000 unionized writers do stage a walkout as part of the negotiation process, scripted television production would effectively halt across the board, from sitcoms to late-night shows. On the film side of things, features already have longer production timelines, giving them a little more wiggle room than scripted television.
In many ways, previous strikes, as well as the shutdown that happened as a result of COVID-19 have given studios a roadmap to deal with a work stoppage. Nonetheless, a lengthy strike would eventually delay premiere schedules, and depending on director and actor schedules, cause production to fall apart completely. As an alternative, reality TV projects offer one way for studios to fill in any gaps from paused production.
As always, a strike is not an inevitable part of labor contract negotiations, and usually depends on a company’s reluctance to guarantee its employees a living wage, reasonable benefits, and see them as human beings with needs and rights. The streaming age has drastically changed the industry over the last decade, and writers are looking to reevaluate how they are compensated as residuals continue to deplete. In preparation for our potential future, let’s look back 15 years, to the last time the writers walked out of their rooms.
The last writers’ strike occurred over 100 days in 2007-08, running from November 5 to February 12. The strike saw the complete shutdown of shows such as Saturday Night Live, which went without a new episode for the duration of the strike, laying off many employees in the process. Late-night television hosts were placed at the frontlines of the strike and pushed to make hard decisions regarding the well-being of their non-unionized staff, with most returning to their shows without writers after an extended hiatus. As the strike went on, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and David Letterman all paid their non-striking staff out of their own pockets in the face of layoffs.
Several scripted shows, such as Bryan Fuller’s Pushing Daisies, were taken out at the knees by the strike. Fuller’s whimsical procedural show starring Lee Pace was given a full-season order just days before the strike. With only nine of the 22 allotted episodes written by the time Nov. 5 rolled around, Fuller had to cut the season short and edit the ninth episode into a much-too-soon finale. When the spring ushered an end to the strike, the show had not been able to return with the same momentum and was subsequently canceled by ABC. We of course understand and support the writers’ strike, but knowing that we missed out on (at least) 13 episodes of Pushing Daisies still hurts.
Pushing Daisies was far from alone in airing a truncated season, with popular shows such as Lost, Friday Night Lights, Gossip Girl, Heroes, Breaking Bad, and 30 Rock also trudging on with shortened seasons, resulting in several incoherent storylines and rushed endings. However, some shows ended up being saved from themselves, with Breaking Bad averting the death of Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) due to its shortened first season.
While a late-March shutdown would leave many award ceremonies in the clear this year, the 2007 walkout disrupted the entire awards cycle, with many organizations pushed to cancel events. Ceremonies such as the SAG Awards and the Film Independent Spirit Awards were given waivers by the WGA to hire writers due to their previous solidarity with the union’s efforts. However, the Golden Globes ceremony was canceled and pared down to a press conference after its waiver fell through. The Academy Awards lucked out, as the strike ended just 12 days before its airtime.
As aforementioned, reality TV offers a crutch to studios still looking to produce series, and 2008 saw the rise in viewership of many reality programs, including Donald Trump’s The Celebrity Apprentice. Other shows such as The Amazing Race, American Idol, and the first season of Keeping Up With The Kardashians greatly benefitted from the lack of competition from scripted programs.
Finally, with several months of downtime, some writers took to creating other forms of content outside of the studio. 30 Rock cast members performed live shows on the picket lines, and Joss Whedon self-funded the internet production, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, Felicia Day, and Simon Helberg. Concerning the possibility of a writers’ strike in 2023, there are a few things we know to be true: Writers are insanely creative and scrappy, hard bargainers, and essential to the programming we know and love.
45 Comments
“many across the industry are preparing for the worst but hoping for the best.”Some drink champagne, some die of thirst.
No way of knowing which way it’s going!
Big Star: I support the writers!Same Big Star: [furlows entire production staff without pay]
Ooh, I love Bible quotes!
Man the writer’s strike screwed Heroes so bad 🙁
But helped Lost.
Ehh.Writers strike caused some wonky CGI at the end of S4.Also meant they lost Lance Reddick to Fringe (who may have originally meant to be the Man in Black 🤷♂️). Writers Strike did save Big Bang Theory, Supernatural, and got us 13 more episodes of Pushing Daisies.
Heroes was always a poorly written, poorly paced, poorly acter show. The writer’s strike only made all those ‘poorly’ things more obvious. As someone who caught like ten minutes of it recently, holy crap it is terrible.
It’s hard to argue with you on that.
What other things did you dislike before it was cool?
I can remember all the hype around the first season, and all the talk of how it was going to change things and break new ground, and looking back, I struggle to think of another series that so utterly fell off from the promise of that first season. Well, I can think of one: The Walking Dead, which absolutely never recovered from cutting Frank Darabont loose after season 1, and never came close to the same level as that firs season.
The thing is, I don’t think the first season was all that great. I mean, almost all the characters were some form of cringe. They had no idea what they were doing with Nikki, Hiro was….I don’t even know what Hiro was but I cringe at the way that character is written. I think it had potential, that in a much more capable showrunner’s hands, it would’ve been a great show. But Tim Kring was not that guy. He wrote half-baked X-Men storylines, then claimed he never even heard of X-men and all his eyes were super original!
The main thing I remember, was all the chatter over how big all the stars of that show were going to be. Like Zachary Quinto and Hayden Panettiere. Quinto made out alright, but the rest kind of settled back into various levels of B or C list celebrity.
Yeah, most have made a pretty solid tv career at least, save for the guy who played Hiro who I think was a recurring character on Hawaii-Five-O along with Hurley from Lost. I don’t blame any of them for the bad acting…The writing couldn’t really give you much.
True story.
Heroes had gold in the first season with the whole “save the cheerleader, save the world” catchphrase. It was pithy and fun, and it drew you in instantly. Where they lost me was the total anticlimax of a battle in the season finale, and then opening Season 2 by adding a bunch of new boring characters and splitting up most of the old ones (after spending a whole year bringing them together).I remember watching that Season 1 finale, and you’re waiting and waiting for the battle to come together, and then next then you know we’re in the hall listening to the sounds of fighting in another room. It was a Game of Thrones level letdown.
Nah.The choice to change the ending due to the strike screwed Heroes.If they had stuck with the plan, they could have recovered.The change and dumb story choices to start S3 killed Heroes.9 times out of 10, a show only gets screwed when they change their mind about a plan they have.
What was the planned ending that was changed?
The Shanti virus was going to escape, the town was going to be quarantined, some heroes would die/lose powers, and the character Maya who was being built up all season through her uncontrolled poison power was going to be the answer to the virus.There’s more detail here https://www.reddit.com/r/Heroes/comments/3dajft/inside_the_alternate_ending_of_generations_and/But the plan on paper was good and they messed because they didn’t think the virus escaping was a big enough cliffhanger and they knew they wouldn’t be back until fall 2008.
Another big problem with ‘Heroes’ is they wimped out on the idea of having a whole new cast of characters in season 2, which I believe was the original plan, in favour of continuing with the ones we already knew. The problem was they’d wrapped up those storylines and had nothing interesting to do with those characters any more.
That was the other big problem but I also get it.I can’t think of a show that has successfully changed casts and still stayed a ratings juggernaut.Keeping Sylar is the big fuck up.
Heroes is one of those shows which I remember loving during Season 1 and then feeling like it fell apart early in Season 2.
Considering there’s like 10x as much TV as there was back then, I’d wager if writers strike, things could be much worse.
The big thing I remember from the last writer’s strike is how crappy the picket signs were. Like these were professional writers working at a very high level and they couldn’t come up with really smart or funny things to write on their signs?
You want wit you gotta pay for wit.
*Looks at the enormous backlog of shows on my ‘to watch’ list*I’m ready.
“If the 10,000 unionized writers do stage a walkout as part of the negotiation process, scripted television production would effectively halt across the board”
No, it wouldn’t. And you’ve already explained in the article WHY it wouldn’t:
“Per the Los Angeles Times, studios, networks, and television producers are preparing for a possible walkout by speeding up production schedules, stockpiling scripts, and leaning on international productions. Shooting schedules for shows have been bumped up and writers’ rooms opened early in order to secure scripts for upcoming seasons. Some networks renewed series earlier than usual to get the ball rolling on production, such as NBC’s Quantum Leap.”
ALL of that is being done specifically to ensure that production DOESN’T effectively halt across the board. ALL of that preparation is being done so that there is minimal disruption to production. This is EXACTLY the same as it was when the last strike happened.
daniel craig and the director basically had to write quantum of solace on-set.
No wonder he’s such a grump.
Oh, is that why it sucked?
Pretty much. Craig has admitted as much over the years.
As I recall they had a basic first draft of a script but that was about it. Huge amounts of it were re-written on-set, which really shows.Still, it’s got some really cool bits but the film as a whole doesn’t totally work.It plays best when watched back-to-back with Casino Royale.
I have a weird fondness for that movie, and this makes me like a bit more. It does also explain why the structure of it feels so messy.
I rewatched it recently (along with all the other Craig Bond’s) and what made it bad for me was the editing. The chase and fight scenes had cuts every like 0.2 seconds. I literally had to start just skipping them or looking away because it was giving me a massive headache. It was like staring at a strobe light.
If there’s another writer’s strike, sign me up as a strikebreaker, just like my granpappy!
Are you prepared to tie an onion to your belt?
A yellow one
Writers are … essential to the programming we know and love.Pretty rich, coming from a G/O Media site, but in case they needed a reminder: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2022-01-15/av-club-go-media-jobs-the-onion-wga-digital-media-hollywood-unions
*Reads title of article**Starts writing angrily*Oh, this article sucks! I can’t believe you didn’t make a mention of how it screwed…*Gets to the part where Pushing Daisies, the most wonderful show ever made, is mentioned prominently*…how it screwed… … Heroes…? I guess? Yes, I’m angry and I already put my foot on it, I’m going with Heroes…
I wonder if they’ll have an AI try writing some scripts. It could be amusing.
The writers strike sadly led to the end of one of my favourite shows of that era – Journeyman. Great series but at least we got the 13 episodes they produced.It has an ending of sorts but man I would have loved a few more seasons of that.
It certainly gave us some of the best late night TV I’ve ever seen, with Bearded Conan.
If crappy reality TV (and the rise of Trump’s popularity) was the unwanted outcome of the writer’s strike, what will be this one?Probably the rise of shitty self published YouTubers into mainstream TV. *shudders*
“[L]eaning on international productions”.