Writers are striking

 All around us

And now we pull back the camera lens to the wider entertainment industry wherein- oh my god, everything is on fire and people are screaming blue bloody murder in an attempt to save themselves from the destruction of everything: who could be responsible for this disarray and disorder? Oh- it's the executives of the industry who pushed just that step too far and watched the back of the camel break once again. Yes, the writers of Hollywood are striking, and given that LA and it's guild of union writers are the biggest producers of scripted content in the world, that pretty much means the entertainment industry is going to grind to a halt whilst wagons are circled and lines in the sand are drawn. What proceeds is going to be yet another stand-off, with which the longer it lasts the more damage is going to done for the next generation of content.

Because I think all of us have memories of the consequences of the last writers strike, don't we? I remember being really into the show Heroes, along with just about everyone else in my world at that time, and the feeling of disquiet 'grin and bear it' we all felt when the second season rolled around and everything started slipping out of cohesion, characters no longer made sense and you stopped caring about the mystery of it all. (With 'mystery literally being the draw factor of the first season.') When I did my James Bond series watch through a few years back; I stood aghast at how absolutely broken of a movie 'Quantum of Solace' was; with an impenetrable plot, lacklustre set pieces and dull dialogue choices. Both of those drastic shifts in quality compared to content before it (And after, in James Bond's case) was down to the fact that the Writers of the industry went on strike. And the consequences were wide reaching back then.

First off, shows like Heroes never recovered from that momentary lapse in writing quality. It meandered on for a bit longer before being killed off, then was revived again many years later in a short lived revival that also died off. Secondly, the worst kind of television was lionized in the space of actual scripted shows because reality TV don't require no writers, baby; just idiots desperate to become famous in the easiest possible way! All those pathetic shows following around pockets of disenfranchised families with the intent of laughing at their idiosyncrasies on a national stage? Indirectly thrived thanks to the writers strike. Such shows also proved increadibly inexpensive to produce in return for a large audience captivated by the spectacle of a largely overlooked class of people that, in a deeply egocentric way, makes the rest of us feel better about our place in life- thus rewiring the brains of executives to think what 'valuable' content looked like. Oh, it also got Donald Trump elected.

Okay, that's a bit of a misnomer- the writer's strike didn't exactly fund Donald Trump's campaign and personally drive him to the inauguration in a hummer- but it did save his show, the Apprentice, from impending cancellation at the time. That same show would go onto, many years later, be the lynch pin in the series of events that led to Trump announcing his presidential campaign as a negotiation tactic against those show runners; only for the campaign to spin wildly out of control- bish-bash-bosh= next president. What a nutty consequence of writers being mistreated and not given what they deserve? Imagine what might happen if that sort of thing happens again, what sort of nutjob could rise up in that space today? Well imagine no further, because we're living it baby! Writer's strike 2.0 could potentially lead to the wackiest season of the reality show called 'life' yet!

And what are the hot button issues this time around? Many, one of which being the rise of streaming service shows and how they've effected the livelihood of the industry. You see, syndicated network TV shows are subject to the typical arrangements of royalty payments; a good show that is syndicated often will grant residual checks to those who worked on it- streaming shows have a different arrangement. Regardless of the success of the show, how many viewers it draws in, how many times it's streamed or how much traffic it brings the hosting platform, writers are offered only a flat fee; disincentivising the effort that goes into making such shows. And as the world becomes gradually overrun with streaming, this relationship becomes more and more untenable for the writing industry.

Oh, and then there's the little issue of writer jobs simply not paying as much as they used to thanks to a bunch of seemingly pointed matters. Series lengths have been cut in half across the board with few shows producing more than 10 episodes a season anymore (which some could argue is to the benefit of these shows) but writers suffer the brunt of that. Whatsmore, writers aren't typically kept on retainer anymore, but are rather hired for each episode and let off from the payroll before production starts. That means you'll have a lot of shows run into full production without a writer on set, which divorces the act of writing and production for the creators, robs valuable experience the writer would have gotten and creates situations where on-set changes and shifts can't happen in the moment and instead need to be ridden out until bad audience feedback results in expensive reshoots and awful tacked together sequences like the ending of Quantumania.

But that isn't all, we also have the 'flashiest' reason for a strike to commence: for fear of automation taking over jobs. AI generative algorithms have exploded in the hands of the public and whilst they're not quite ready to convince a human reader of it's impassioned soul, the proliferation of these tools have already touched further than you might expect. We've had essay plagiarists around colleges, internal company emails going the automation route and now those throwaway content farm articles which populate the internet are being AI written and published. Hollywood writers have been through enough in the past few decades to know that their employers are hungrily eyeing up these developments just waiting until the tech is strong enough to do away with writers altogether, and they're not having it. Keeping AI from taking writers jobs is a big enough issue that the government should probably slide itself in with some regulatory measures, but in that absence the people's strike will have to suffice.

What worries me most about all of this isn't the many halted productions that have resulted; less late night talk shows is a good thing as far as I'm concerned- I'm worried about the productions that aren't halting and instead are speeding ahead. Just like Heroes did all those years ago. To the surprise of literally no-one, Rings of Power Season 2 is marching ahead without it's writers because we all know that first season was written on the back of a napkin in broad bulletpoints over an afternoon, the second probably only took brunch to clean off. But then we have Andor Season 2 going ahead. But the first season was so darn good- don't ruin it! (The writer is actually still abroad as a producer, but he cannot give assistance within the role of a writer.) Within the years to come we'll really see what the effect of Hollywood's most recent overreach has on entertainment, and given the track record of the last strike, the world. I'm going to put my money down now that in the next year we get the pickled head of Donald Trump in a jar being coronated as the next British Monarch. There's my prediction, line up to pay me come 2033.