The Writer’s Strike Is Over: Who Won?
Speaker A: When I got The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman on the line, I had one big question for him.
Speaker A: I wanted him to tell me how big of a deal it is that Hollywood writers seem to have eked out a new contract with their studio bosses, potentially putting an end to one of the longest strikes in Writers Guild history.
Speaker A: Michael he put it like this they.
Speaker B: Have gotten much of what they wanted, and it was a really long, hard, taxing, emotional fight.
Speaker A: All summer long, Michael has been calculating the cost of that taxing emotional fight.
Speaker B: I mean, I was in Los Angeles a week or two ago, right after Labor Day, and I could sense this feeling of, like, total exhaustion.
Speaker B: I’m friends with TV writers who just felt like, okay, we’ve been striking all summer, and now Labor Day’s come and gone.
Speaker B: The summer’s over.
Speaker B: This really needs to end.
Speaker A: There was a pain point.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker B: And so when they all got back in the room and the CEOs of the companies were showing up finally, like, Bob, Iger Ted Sarandos from Netflix.
Speaker B: It seemed like it was really for real.
Speaker A: It turns out those Hollywood bosses were feeling the pain too.
Speaker A: Staring down as much as $1.6 billion of lost revenue at the box office.
Speaker A: Early on, they’d talked a big game, calling the guild’s demands unrealistic.
Speaker A: One exec told a reporter they were prepared to let striking workers bleed out, lose their homes and apartments before sitting down and coming to an agreement.
Speaker A: In the end, that nearly had to happen.
Speaker A: In the last few weeks, strike funds were reportedly overwhelmed with requests.
Speaker B: Being a TV writer or screenwriter in Hollywood doesn’t mean you have endless money, and that’s kind of the point for many people.
Speaker B: It’s a middle class job.
Speaker B: And so, yeah, after five months of not having income, of course people were feeling it.
Speaker B: And I think again, once the fall started, people kind of looked toward the end of the year and were like, oh, God.
Speaker A: I’ve heard the writer strike called a bitter strike, and it made me wonder, from your perspective, if this strike has been bitter, how soon before that bitter taste fades away in Hollywood?
Speaker B: Well, let me ask you which strike is not bitter?
Speaker B: The writers have spent five months really riled up, and they’ll go back to work.
Speaker B: Of course, looking at Hollywood as a whole, it’s sort of like a half victory because the actors are still on strike, and so things aren’t going back to normal quite yet.
Speaker A: Today on the show, the writers are leaving their picket lines.
Speaker A: But is that a wrap on the drama in Hollywood?
Speaker A: I’m Mary Harris.
Speaker A: You’re listening to What Next.
Speaker A: Stick around.
Speaker A: Can we step back for a second?
Speaker A: And can you tell the story of maybe just one of the writers you profiled that explains why this writer’s strike became one of the longest in history?
Speaker A: Like, why it was necessary?
Speaker B: Yeah, sure.
Speaker B: Well, at the very beginning.
Speaker B: I talked to this young writer named Alex O’Keefe who wrote on the first season of The Bear, and yet he was never on set.
Speaker B: He was never physically in a room with his fellow writers.
Speaker B: It was a short job that left him at the end with kind of nothing next.
Speaker B: And when they won a WGA Award for the writing staff, he had to get a bow tie on credit.
Speaker A: You said he had a negative bank.
Speaker B: Account, right, he had a negative bank account.
Speaker B: He was getting ready last I spoke to him to work at a movie theater to have some income during the strike.
Speaker B: I think he was a great spokesman for how precarious that job is.
Speaker B: What really struck me as someone with a lot of writer friends who moved out to Hollywood, like, ten years ago because it was this gold rush to take part in the glorious era of prestige television, is how this cool, lucrative seeming job had really degraded over the past decade, and how the streaming economy had made it a very unpredictable, rocky way of making a living.
Speaker A: It was interesting to me.
Speaker A: You talked to people who were not just like, work a day, new to the industry people, but people who had really clawed their way up and done interesting and good work and started show running.
Speaker A: And even those people were frustrated with where things had landed.
Speaker B: Oh, yeah, everyone was feeling it.
Speaker B: Obviously, the junior sort of writers were just having trouble making a living.
Speaker B: But then even showrunners were telling me, like, okay, because studios are not allowing them to hire writers and then bring those writers onto the set for production, they’re having to do this all alone.
Speaker B: And yes, there are some showrunners who love doing it all alone, like Mike White for The White Lotus, taylor Sheridan for Yellowstone.
Speaker A: They just sit in a room and spit out a season.
Speaker B: Yeah, but that is traditionally not how television works.
Speaker B: It’s a collaborative medium with a writer’s room who can go off and each know takes a different episode and they come back.
Speaker B: It’s a huge effort.
Speaker B: And I think one of the things that had disappeared was also the sort of ladder that you traditionally could climb, where you could learn how to be a showrunner by doing, by being on set, by being in post production and understanding what this job entails.
Speaker B: And so that meant that a lot of people were being elevated to showrunner who just didn’t have the experience to even know how to do it.
Speaker B: They hadn’t built up those muscles.
Speaker A: It’s interesting because in the stories you’re telling, you can kind of see the impact of COVID Like COVID meaning people aren’t getting together in person, and then also the sort of financial pressure of like, let’s have fewer people here.
Speaker A: Let’s do things faster.
Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker B: COVID meant that this was a remote job now, and it kind of remained mostly a remote job.
Speaker B: So there was not a lot of camaraderie, not a lot of people just sitting around in an office with each other.
Speaker B: And writing for a TV show can often be very personal and people need to feel like they can be vulnerable if they have a story from their own life they want to put out there or even just an idea that feels kind of risky to not really know your colleagues.
Speaker B: It just kind of drains that feeling of mutual trust.
Speaker B: So yeah, that was one of the things that has made it a less fun job.
Speaker B: I don’t know if that’s something that the resolution of the strike will fix and the resolution of the strike also probably won’t fix the larger issues in the streaming economy that were feeding these problems.
Speaker B: The era of peak TV has peaked and a lot of these streamers are cutting costs, reining in the amount of, sorry to use this word, content they are making and there aren’t going to be as many TV shows as there were five years ago.
Speaker A: So party’s over no matter what.
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think these CEOs, they need to figure out how to make money off of these streaming platforms and they kind of haven’t everyone sort of like raced to copy Netflix and that left people with this sort of new economy where it’s a lot harder to make money.
Speaker B: But for the writers who have jobs in that field, they now have a lot more security.
Speaker B: And presumably now if you’re working in television, it means that you can make a decent living off of it and that you’re not going to be just replaced by AI or spend a year having to live off of the no residuals that you get from your hit show.
Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, with a massive caveat that most details haven’t been released yet.
Speaker A: Can you just tell me what we do know about what’s in this deal and how it would address some of the concerns raised by the people you’ve been talking to?
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean the things that have been at the top of the priority list seem to have been met like a minimum number of staffers on shows, some kind of compensation for a show that’s a huge hit even if it’s streaming.
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, this is one of the issues.
Speaker B: Know Alex O’Keefe on The Bear, that show just took off like wildfire.
Speaker B: It doesn’t translate into a windfall for him.
Speaker B: This has been a problem with actors and writers in streaming because the residuals model that has traditionally kept people afloat in the sort of network TV model that didn’t exist in streaming and suddenly people are not getting the spoils of having worked on a big hit show and having done something great.
Speaker B: So that, I think, will change in some way.
Speaker B: I’ve also seen that there’ll be some kind of transparency on viewership data which is tied to know so much of the struggle to know what you’re worth has to do with nobody knows how many people are watching these shows on streaming.
Speaker A: Right.
Speaker A: There’s no Nielsen for streaming.
Speaker B: Exactly.
Speaker B: And that’s really thrown off the traditional way of doing business.
Speaker B: And then I think there will just be basic salary increases, which is sort of for any sort of contract negotiation.
Speaker B: That’s a big part of it, too.
Speaker B: And then I’m really curious to see sort of what was resolved with artificial intelligence, because that is such a tricky topic that obviously there’s been a lot of interest in.
Speaker A: Yeah, artificial intelligence wound up being one of the final sticking points for the guild.
Speaker A: Right.
Speaker A: Like that was what they were really hammering out at the end.
Speaker B: At the beginning it felt like, okay, what are we talking about?
Speaker B: Robots are going to write succession.
Speaker B: Come on.
Speaker B: But as I’ve talked to people, both writers and actors, it is so clear that this is like a real threat.
Speaker B: This is something that people were really freaked out by, especially when they just got a whole lot of nothing from the studios on AI guardrails.
Speaker B: It’s so tricky because AI is so new and we don’t know how it’s going to be used in TV and movies, but it’s clear that something’s going to happen with it.
Speaker B: And I think both of these guilds were smart enough to know that the time to set some rules, some gram rules, is now, not when it’s ubiquitous in three or six years.
Speaker A: You talked about how one of the things we know is in this deal is this minimum guaranteed staffing level for Episodic TV shows.
Speaker A: And my understanding is those were considered a long shot back when strikes started up.
Speaker A: So how big of a deal is it that the union seemed to have gotten that and in general seems to be celebrating right now?
Speaker B: The reason why minimum staffing levels became such an issue is because it was a kind of defensive tactic and the writers saw that writers rooms were being whittled down to almost nothing.
Speaker B: These mini rooms where they would be paid less for less time, and then they would just be sort of cut off and no longer working on the show as it went into production, if it did go into production.
Speaker B: And so there was this fear that, okay, these writing room budgets are just going to be squeezed until the writer’s room becomes essentially a relic of the past.
Speaker B: That cannot happen if there’s a minimum staffing requirement.
Speaker A: It sounds like they were afraid that the writers room is becoming like a study.
Speaker A: Carol with one person in it.
Speaker B: Yeah, and that was tough on everyone, including showrunners, who then had to sort of write their seasons all by themselves and then have no writers on the set to help.
Speaker B: I was on the set of succession once and there were a whole bunch of writers writing on the spot, like writing alternative lines for the scene in the moment that obviously makes TV better for that to happen.
Speaker B: And so it felt like this kind of nickel and diming way to cut down on budgets, but it really hit at the heart of what being in a writer’s room meant.
Speaker A: Yeah, it’s interesting because we don’t know everything about this deal.
Speaker A: We know just bare bones basics.
Speaker A: The thing that stands out to me the most that we know about this deal is that we see the union releasing a kind of celebratory statement about what just happened and the alliance of motion picture and television producers which bargains on behalf of the studios.
Speaker A: They’re just like, yes, a deal was reached very straight.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker B: I mean, I’m sure the studios are happy, but the victory is really the guilt because they’re the ones who got them from an absolute no to we’ll go far enough to satisfy you.
Speaker B: After these five months in the trenches.
Speaker A: I mean, the WGA really went out of its way to credit its members for their shoe leather activism.
Speaker A: What did that look like over the last few months?
Speaker A: Like, was there something notable to you as you watched those picket lines?
Speaker B: Well, first of all, the spirit on the picket lines was really up like they were theme days.
Speaker B: I went to a Bruce Springsteen day at Paramount.
Speaker A: Does that mean people are dressed up like Bruce Springsteen or playing a lot of his music or what?
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker B: And Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine was there playing a nice guitar.
Speaker B: People were dressed up like Born in the USA.
Speaker B: They were blasting Bruce Prieste music.
Speaker B: Like, every day had a different theme.
Speaker B: There was a lot of creativity and a lot of resilience and spirit.
Speaker B: When you talked to people more one on one, when they weren’t on the picket line, they sounded very exhausted and very tired and worried about how they were going to pay their bills.
Speaker B: But that coexisted with the solidarity.
Speaker B: It didn’t detract from it.
Speaker B: It coexisted.
Speaker B: I have no doubt that they would have kept on picketing.
Speaker B: I think for the people who have been on the picket line for five months, who haven’t worked, there’s a kind of mixture of relief and euphoria and shock because they have been, in this one mode, fighting and pushing and showing up every day.
Speaker B: I mean, I talked this morning to a friend of mine who’s a TV writer and a strike captain who said that at some point in the last five days, they got a call for everyone to really show up.
Speaker B: Like, everyone had to show up on the picket line to show that they had complete solidarity.
Speaker B: And on her drive over, she just started crying because she was so overwhelmed by the idea that this might actually happen.
Speaker B: And then she had to stop herself so she didn’t get into a car crash on the highway.
Speaker A: She was overwhelmed by the idea of everyone showing up at once or by the idea that maybe there might be a deal eventually both.
Speaker B: And then she called it exquisite torture for those five days because everyone was just hearing rumors, hearing this or that, and didn’t know when word would come.
Speaker B: And then it finally came on Sunday night.
Speaker B: People were calling it a Yom Kippur miracle.
Speaker A: After the break, the Writers Guild has reached a tentative agreement, but for the 65,000 still striking actors, celebrations may be a long way off.
Speaker A: You.
Speaker A: So the WGA has a deal now, but they still have to formally approve it.
Speaker A: It goes for a vote.
Speaker A: What does that process look like?
Speaker A: How fast will all that go down?
Speaker A: And is there a chance members say no?
Speaker B: Yes.
Speaker B: So there are a couple of formalities that this deal has to go through.
Speaker B: They are still working out the actual dotting the I’s, as the union said, so we don’t have the actual contract language, which is going to be codified and probably released on Tuesday.
Speaker B: Then it has to go through their board to be voted on to authorize a ratification vote for the membership.
Speaker B: Then it goes out to the membership to vote on.
Speaker B: I mean, I think from all indications, the writers will vote to ratify it.
Speaker B: We also don’t know quite yet whether they’ll be able to return to work during the ratification vote or if they have to wait for it to be totally done.
Speaker B: But as of this moment, they are officially still on strike, although they are not being asked to picket anymore.
Speaker B: And in the meantime, the WGA leadership is encouraging people to go support the actors on their picket lines.
Speaker A: Yeah, I noticed that it was like no picketing except with actors.
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, and the strike captain I just talked to this know, said as tired as she is, she’s going to do it.
Speaker B: She’s going to show up for I just I feel like for the writers, it’s a moment of relief and victory and taking stock of just how exhausted they are, but also they’re going to keep going until the actors have a deal as well.
Speaker A: What does it mean that the Writers Guild is settling their contract, but the actors aren’t?
Speaker A: Like, what does it mean in terms of what kind of quote unquote content I’m going to see?
Speaker A: But then also just what does it mean, kind of for the bigger picture?
Speaker A: Because part of the strength here was both of these unions striking at the same time.
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I don’t think it’s that surprising that the writers got a deal first because they’ve been on strike longer, like two months longer, I think.
Speaker B: I think hopefully whatever was worked out in the negotiations with the writers will help set some template or set the stage somehow for the actors to do know.
Speaker B: They have a lot of overlap in their issues, but they’re not quite the same SAG is a much it’s really big.
Speaker B: It’s bigger than the WGA.
Speaker B: And I think the fact that they’re all still on strike is still going to be felt in terms of the industry getting up and running again.
Speaker B: Even if the writers are able to start writing the know, like the end of a TV season or turning in a screenplay, production is going to be shut down until the actors come back.
Speaker A: Yeah.
Speaker A: And so I guess we’ll see things like Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert getting back to their regular degular shows.
Speaker A: Even Drew Barrymore, who faced so much pushback for trying to go back early.
Speaker A: Yes, but then it sounds like there’s a whole bunch of people who just who are the guests going to be on those know?
Speaker B: That’s a good question because the actors still can’t promote things that know, studio projects represented by the AMPTP.
Speaker B: So it’s going to be harder to get guests.
Speaker B: But I think we’re certainly going to know Bill Maher can finally go back.
Speaker B: Drew Barrymore dancing with the know.
Speaker B: It’s something.
Speaker A: Can I just ask here at the end, how are SAG members feeling now?
Speaker A: Because I feel like in some ways, this deal, you could see it as, oh, great, there’s a deal.
Speaker A: Maybe there’s a promise of a deal for us too.
Speaker A: It could also be seen as like, uh oh, like we’re out here on our own now.
Speaker B: I don’t know.
Speaker B: I mean, SAG is a very powerful big union, and Hollywood can’t do anything without actors showing up.
Speaker B: So I still think that SAG has a ton of leverage, and I imagine that this deal will only galvanize them to get a deal of their own.
Speaker B: I mean, it was incredibly significant that both guilds were on strike at the same time for the first time since 1960.
Speaker B: But just a SAG after strike alone is a giant deal that paralyzes the industry.
Speaker B: And so I think the pressure is still on the studios to get a resolution for that.
Speaker B: And certainly the actors are not going to start backing down now that they’ve seen the writers get this deal.
Speaker A: When will we know at the end of the day if the strikes have been worth it?
Speaker B: I mean, I think for the members, they’ll all tell you it was worth it, right?
Speaker B: Now they got this stuff that it took them five months to get.
Speaker B: They went from a hard no to a yes with probably some asterisks because they went on strike for five months and felt this pain.
Speaker B: So I doubt that you’ll find any WJ members complaining that it wasn’t worth you know, we’ll also see what it’s like when they start receiving the details and learning about what the deal actually know in terms of like, is TV writing now a sustainable career in a way that it wasn’t five months ago?
Speaker B: I don’t know.
Speaker B: I don’t know when that answer reveals itself.
Speaker B: Certainly it’s a better way to make a living than it was at the beginning of the year.
Speaker B: Is it ever going to get to the sort of gold rush at the peak of peak TV?
Speaker B: Probably not in the same way, because places like Netflix are not spending gargantuan amounts of money on as many scripted shows as they can make.
Speaker B: There is a contraction in the streaming economy, and so that will be felt.
Speaker B: But again, for people who are working on those shows and who especially work on a big hit show, it’s going to be better.
Speaker A: Michael Schulman, I’m super grateful for your time.
Speaker A: Thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
Speaker A: Michael Schulman is a staff writer over at The New Yorker.
Speaker A: And that’s our show.
Speaker A: What Next is produced by paige Osborne, Elena Schwartz, Rob Gunther, Madeline DuCharm and Anna Phillips.
Speaker A: We are led by Alicia Montgomery with a little help from Susan Matthews.
Speaker A: Ben Richmond is the senior director of podcast operations here at Slate.
Speaker A: And I’m Mary Harris.
Speaker A: You can go track me down on X.
Speaker A: I’m at Mary’s desk.
Speaker A: Thanks for listening.
Speaker A: I’ll catch you back here tomorrow.
