What's gotten us to this place is the rug was pulled out
from under the writers and, to a degree, actors in the last 10 or 15 years.
It’s the advent of streaming, the golden age of television.
One of the first streaming original shows was “House of Cards”.
Spoiler alert: when they push
Kate Mara in front of that train
it seemed like groundbreaking television...
and it was fast paced
and it looked beautiful and it had huge stars.
Artistically, it's opened up the world.
Maybe there used to be 80 shows in a year
and now you're up to 500, 550 shows in a year.
And for writers it was good because it gave people entry.
And a lot of those people were diverse young voices...
who Hollywood said you should come out to move to LA or New York
places where the cost of living is extremely high
and you have a seat at the table that for years created careers for people.
Now...
it doesn't exist like that anymore.
What's the difference between
a network show and a streaming show?
Network is the TV we all grew up with:
ABC, NBC, CBS...
and it's the season that begins in September
and runs 22 episodes and ends in May.
That’s a season
especially for procedurals that everyone knows
like Gray's Anatomy or CSI.
TV seasons always began in September...
and that had something to do with auto sales, by the way.
The new car seasons came out...
and they were going to advertise heavily.
So, you wanted new TV.
The network model
worked for a very long time and gave people a stable career.
I broke in on “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”.
I was on staff there for 4 years, became showrunner there.
So you get paid by the episode or by the week.
They said you will make $15,000.
And I thought that was it.
I didn't know they meant for every episode.
I didn't understand what I'd stumbled into.
So I was able to make a living, start raising a family in New York.
I think those doors have closed now.
So the upside of streaming creatively was
you didn't have to worry about commercial breaks.
If I write an SVU, we have five
commercial breaks in an hour of TV.
Something has to happen at the end of that act
to make sure people come back.
You're writing has to conform
to the advertising that pays for it.
If you write for streaming
you don't have to worry about commercial breaks
but you get to write a different structure.
Maybe it's just an organic three-act structure to an hour.
Now you're down to an 8 episode run
6 episode run, shorter seasons...
where you could arc a story across 8 episodes.
You can go a little darker, you can go a little deeper.
That part of it was great
and writers from movies flocked to it and novels flocked to it.
But as the episode orders have shrunk
what used to be 40 weeks out of the year
that you were working is now 20 weeks.
So try having to go from finding one job a year
to finding multiple jobs a year
to maintain the same status quo that you previously had.
It's tough.
I don't think anyone's asking to go back to 20 episode seasons
but the stability and the longevity of those jobs
is the model that we're asking for
and that we think is best for writers and best for the product.
Can you explain what's changed
and how the writers room looks different in each model?
The function of the writers room...
is the exact same.
Like it is a group of writers coming together...
to break story, to craft a season
and to write episodes of television.
When you get your first job writing on a TV show
you're almost always a staff writer
which is the lowest level in the room.
And then the next rung on the ladder is story editor
from story editor to executive story editor...
co-producer, producer, supervising producer...
co-executive producer
and then executive producer is the highest.
And showrunner, obviously.
The creative process is people coming together
having a conversation about— is it a dark comedy?
Is it one hour or is it a half hour?
Breaking story and really writing your whole season.
The next phase is production.
When you bring all of your crew together
bring all of your actors, grab your directors...
and you shoot the TV show.
And then the final stages is post-production.
When you take that thing you shot, you sit with your editor...
turn it into what people see on TV.
Broadcast shows
kind of used to be the entire TV space.
So if you are on a show like “Law & Order: SVU”
or if you are on a show like “Friends”
your show was being filmed.
It was in production concurrently while you were in the writers room.
Writers are going back and forth
and really learning the ropes of what it is
to produce a TV show.
And it might be in the moment when you're watching a scene
and an actor might come up to you and say, like
“This line just isn't working for me.”
The job of the writer at that moment is to talk to the actor
figure out what isn't working, and write them a new line.
The writer is working with the actor at all times.
He's conjuring the character.
He's meeting the actor that was cast and should be there...
when that actor is giving life to those words.
Financially...
of course, it would cost studios to keep writers on
and to pay those extra weeks to keep doing their job.
But it seems like their favorite place to cut the budget
is with writers robbing them of creativity
then robbing them of people, training up
to be the showrunners of future shows.
Writers are now being separated from production
employed for fewer weeks.
Fewer weeks means less income.
And when a show like “Game of Thrones”...
costs so much money and takes so much time to make...
that's a longer period of time between seasons.
And so that means these writers have a longer period of time
before they are employed again.
Story wise, there is something nice
about having all of your episodes
written before you start to produce.
It really gives you a nice scope of the season...
you know where all your locations are going to be
and if something happens in the last episode of your season...
that you realize there's a nice way
to plant earlier in the season.
You can go and play with that episode.
On the other hand, not having your writers continue to be there...
and do the work that happens in production...
hurts the production and it hurts the writers.
There was this staff writer who was on the “Bear”...
which is a streaming show on Hulu, and he had a story about how
after working in this room, even though it was this
critically acclaimed show and they were winning an award...
he went to the award show broke and had to rent a bow tie.
What I thought was so interesting about that story was that
it wasn't the pay per se
that was the issue in that situation.
It was the length of the room.
So you went from having 40 weeks of guaranteed work
to maybe 8 to 10.
It is always very difficult to work in our industry.
Writers, directors, actors often have long stretches of idle time.
Periods where you're either looking for your next job
the next room that you're going to go right in
or the next feature that you're going to pitch.
Residual checks are what let you do that.
Residuals, which are how actors and writers...
tie themselves over during lean times...
have basically been decimated.
When TV first began, there was a big strike in 1960
and that strike resulted in writers getting residuals.
The reason my network residual is so healthy
is because that was negotiated a long time ago
when that was the only other way an episode could be rewatched.
If you wrote for “Friends” or “Seinfeld”
the shows that are on all the time...
Every single time it's used, you get a check.
The number of runs your show has
the size of the check decreases.
The show is generating income for NBC Universal...
and so you will see some of that income.
Now, streaming comes in and there is a terrible formula...
based on a percentage of the sale
from the studio to the streamer.
So it sits on the platform for a year and you get one check.
No matter how many times it's watched.
Do you write a show for Hulu?
It's a you get paid to write it
and you might see $400 for the next 3 years
as opposed to a network rerun, which might be for an hour show
it might be $24,000.
I have talked to fellow writers
who came up years before...
and it was the difference
between buying a house or not
between sending your kid to school or not.
And for me, it just seems like this pipe dream
of getting residuals for the work that I've done.
This strike seems to be catching fire
because it mirrors
the discontent a lot of workers feel about this yawning wage gap
between the top and the bottom.
Secondarily, but correlated is
that it's about the art that we're making.
And if we're not given the time and the resources
that we need to make good television...
you're not going to have the diversity of voices, a diversity of ideas.
I think that we want to make sure that art isn't coming from...
only voices who can afford to do this as a job.
I got into writing because
I was an actor and still am.
I worked on “The Adventures of Puss in Boots”, “Trolls”, “The Beat Goes On”.
“Channel Zero” for SyFy.
I did a bunch of CBS procedurals, and most recently
I was the showrunner of “One of Us Is Lying” on Peacock.
Law & Order: Criminal Intent.
Then I went to “In Treatment”
and did a show called “Lights Out” for FX.
And then I wandered back into the Law & Order family
and went to SVU.