I Don’t Want to See Dark Shapes Bumping in the Night on My TV

The writers strike is about how we value human labor

The people who write streaming and TV shows are on strike. The strike comes as public support for organized labor in the United States is at its highest point since the 1960s. 

You should support them as this confrontation between workers and management will reverberate throughout the economy in coming years.

Ten years from now you don’t want to be looking back and saying we could have stopped the combination of AI and the gig economy from ruining our livelihoods, wherever we used to work. Will corporate greed become the be-all and end-all? 

This situation provides a good opportunity to examine coverage in the media. The focus of too much coverage is about how the entertainment “industry” and consumers will suffer, while ignoring the corporate malfeasance behind it all.

The New York Times casts the stoppage as “breaking the labor peace.” 

• A prolonged production shutdown could also prove damaging to local economies, particularly the workers who help support productions, such as drivers, costume dry cleaners, caterers, set carpenters and lumber yard workers. When the writers last went on strike, for 100 days in 2007, the Los Angeles economy lost an estimated $2.1 billion.

We’re told about late night shows being on hiatus, leaving viewers to subsist on an unrelenting diet of reality and internationally based programming.

Over at the Guardian, a preview of next gen programming discusses the Peacock Network’s latest reality pilot under consideration.

• According to Deadline, Sex in the Dark is a “raunchy social experiment” where a blindfolded person embarks on “intimacy tests to judge their connection, chemistry and attraction with a number of different suitors. The show culminates in a final night in complete darkness, as the singleton bed-hops with the remaining suitors to see if smell, touch, physical connection and energy is all you need to fall in love…”

• …Shows like this exist for no other reason than blunt titillation. Obviously nobody has seen Sex in the Dark yet but, at least judging by Deadline’s description, it essentially sounds like televised dogging. And not to be indelicate, but if we really wanted to watch a bunch of strangers grope and sniff each other under an artificial veil of intimacy, don’t we already have 90% of the internet for that?

While the Washington Post provided a look at the solidarity in support of the strike, you’ll have to look long and hard for insight into existing conditions and deprivation by workers and their families. 

• Nearly 98 percent of the guild’s voting members authorized a potential walkout last month as they worked to negotiate a new contract before the deadline — which came at midnight Pacific time. Their goals included raising writers’ minimum wages and ensuring that writers who work on streaming shows earn compensation comparable to their peers whose work appears in theaters.

The Los Angeles Times ran a story featuring interviews with members of the union’s negotiating team. The same opportunity was afforded to Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, who declined to participate.

Here’s Ellen Stutzman, chief negotiator for the union:

• We look at the industry over a very long period and see just how prosperous and profitable it’s been. The content that writers and others in this town create has tremendous value. The companies have monetized it to great success globally and will continue to do so. It’s not for writers to pay for the poor decision-making of companies who decide to pursue expensive mergers or take on large amounts of debt. Those are short-term things that will change, and we have to negotiate a contract that will live on for decades.

An article in the New Yorker views job conditions through the eyes of an actual writer:

• For newer writers, there’s a sense of having shown up at the party too late. Alex O’Keefe, who is twenty-eight, grew up poor in Florida and worked as a speechwriter for the senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey and as Green New Deal campaign director before getting staffed on FX’s “The Bear.” 

• “It should be this beautiful rags-to-riches story, right?” he told me. “Unfortunately, I realized not all that glitters is gold.” During his nine weeks working in the writers’ room for “The Bear,” over Zoom, he was living in a tiny Brooklyn apartment with no heat; sometimes his space heater would blow the power out, and he’d bring his laptop to a public library. (He was never flown to set.) He thought that he was making a lot of money, but, after reps’ fees and taxes, it didn’t add up to much. “It’s a very regular-degular, working-class existence,” he said. “And the only future I’m seeking financially is to enter that middle class, which has always been rarified for someone who comes from poverty.”

• Last month, “The Bear” won the W.G.A. Award for Comedy Series. O’Keefe went to the ceremony with a negative bank account and a bow tie that he’d bought on credit

Like many American workers, once you account for inflation, the rate of pay in the entertainment industry has been declining;  writer pay has declined 14% in the last five years, writer-producer pay is down 23% over the last decade.

The system of creating and producing entertainment content has led to profound changes in the industry. What used to be years-long employment is now truncated to a couple of months in many instances. The creative process has been crammed into a framework much like that of working conditions for Uber drivers. Streaming has effectively ended residual payouts for writers. 

Mary McNamara, writing for the Los Angeles Times (best coverage among the dailies), uses the  boom and bust of the gold rush as a metaphor:

• A loss of residuals, shortened seasons, smaller writers rooms, commissions for entire seasons that were never made turned the boom to bust. For many TV writers, getting a full-time job in their chosen profession became even more difficult than it had been before television took over the world.

• It is deeply unfair and, more critically, unsustainable. Streaming exists only because television became a wonder of the modern world. And that happened because it drew some of the most talented, visionary writers and offered them a chance to tell the best stories they could.

• That will not continue if studios and streaming platforms expect established writers to work as spec script-writing freelancers, while offering spec script-writing freelancers no chance of becoming established writers. Too often, writers find themselves dismissed before a show even goes into production, depriving them not only of wages but also the opportunity to see how television is actually made, which in turn limits their ability to progress up the career ladder.

• Streaming leveraged television’s Golden Age to change the world.

My choice for a metaphor would be something along the lines of Aesop’s The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg.

The struggle involved in this strike speaks to a bigger picture, namely the enshittifacation of yet another aspect of the culture. 

Looking ahead, writers want some guardrails around the creative process as the use of artificial intelligence becomes more widespread. I’m not sure how long a finger in the dike will hold that process back, but simply ignoring creators will ultimately be a losing proposition for most of us.  And this process isn’t limited to entertainment.

The present era of entertainment started when upstart Netflix capitalized on increasing internet speed to offer viewers the opportunity to watch anything anywhere at any time. The business model of all the companies jumping on that wagon was content-first, to heck with the cost. Coming out of the pandemic, a period of reconstruction is underway wherein the unlimited possibilities for consumers are being constricted via higher fees, ads, and shorter seasons.

Investors on Wall Street are looking at entertainment companies’ balance sheets with a jaundiced eye, putting pressure on them to reduce costs. Letting the creative occupations’ working conditions and pay atrophy is one way of cutting corners, which is why the industry has simply said no to many negotiating points.

This strike will be a long one with so much at stake for management and workers. The solidarity being shown by other unions, like the UPS drivers who won’t cross a picket line, will be a big part of whatever conclusion is reached.

From an article in Variety guessing on how long the strike will last:

• Guild member Abdi Nazemian sees the WGA strike as part of a larger battle over growing income inequality and efforts to “devalue” labor.

• “This is about more than writers,” says Nazemian, whose credits include 2017’s “Call Me by Your Name” and the NBC sitcom “Ordinary Joe.” “It’s about how we value human labor. It’s about the truly alarming rise in wealth disparity. It’s about keeping unions strong so we can revitalize our middle class. And it’s about standing up to corporate greed, which impacts everyone everywhere these days.”

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More News I Discovered Along the Way

What Do Women Need? Via Jill Filipovic. “Better men. Until then, we'll freeze our eggs.” Women typically don’t put off having kids due to career conflict; often (outside of health concerns) they’re hoping for a more suitable father.

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It’s the End of a World as We Know It Via the New York Times.

• Astronomers spotted a dying star swallowing a large planet, a discovery that fills in a “missing link” in understanding the fates of Earth and many other planets.

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Vivek Ramaswamy* Paid To Get Soros Connection Erased From Wikipedia Page: Report Via Huffpo (*He’s running for the GOP nomination for president and repeating the usual GOP mythology)

• The Wikipedia article’s version history shows that in February, an editor identified by Mediaite as Jhofferman removed lines about Ramaswamy receiving a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans in 2011.

• Since Paul Soros is the older brother of billionaire George Soros, who funds many progressive causes, it’s understandable Ramaswamy wouldn’t want potential voters to be aware of that connection.

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Inside big beef’s climate messaging machine: confuse, defend and downplay Via the Guardian.

• Since at least 2006 … the industry has been borrowing tactics from the fossil fuel playbook,” Jacquet wrote in a 2021 Washington Post op-ed. “While meat and dairy producers have not claimed that climate change is a liberal hoax, as oil and gas producers did starting in the 1990s, companies have been downplaying the industry’s environmental footprint and undermining climate policy.”

• Of the major meat lobbies, the beef industry has arguably done the most to mobilize on the topic of climate. The Guardian’s review of strategy and funding documents from the past decade shows that the cattle business sees itself as perpetually under attack by a variety of hostile forces – with environmental issues of increasing concern.

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Clarence Thomas Had a Child in Private School. Harlan Crow Paid the Tuition Via ProPublica. They haven’t been able to determine the total paid, but if it was for four years, $150,000 sounds about right.

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Lead image via Twitter of writers for the newer series of Star Trek.