How The Writers Strike of 2007 Helped Change The Course of TV History

 

I have been well aware of the labor problems affecting Hollywood, both the writers strike that began in May and the Screen Actors Guild strike that started yesterday.  Considering how much this directly affects the world I focus in, some of my readers might think it odd I have yet to comment on it directly, besides my messages of support for the WGA at the end of many of my columns the last two months.

In a sense, I have been wondering how to express my thoughts. I am aware of the stakes of the battle being waged regarded AI. I know that Hollywood, because it is a business and thinks as little of labor as every other business, will do everything possible to squeeze its workers until they can force them to take lesser terms, despite how vitally they depend on their labor is to their product. I also know that, in a sense,  the viewer and the niche audience, amplified by streaming, is in a large way responsible for how this current crisis has begun.

But as someone who actually lived through the last major strike of the Writers Guild in 2007, I am very aware of the consequences that may lie in store. You’d think that so many of the people who suffered from it last time would have learned the lesson, but as we all know, history has a habit of repeating itself.  So for the benefit of those of you who might either have forgotten or been unaware, I will give a brief history of the 2007-2008 writer’s strike: why it happened, how it ended, and what the consequences were short term and long term for one of the most vital parts of the industry: network TV. I will also intersperse some of my memories from that era, as well as the ramifications.

At the 2007 Emmys as The Sopranos took the prize for Best Drama for its final season, there is a real possibility that the heads of network television had begun to think the revolution that HBO had brought forth with The Sopranos might have been an insurrection that they had survived and put down. This might have been foolish optimism, but it was not entirely unfounded.

As  I wrote in a separate article last year when The Sopranos debut in 1999,  the broadcast networks reactions were to go to war. They did so by decided to try and fight HBO on its own terms with quality series that while they could not break the barriers that Tony Soprano had done, could at least compete in quality.  It may shock the current viewer to know that for the next eight years the major networks were fighting HBO to a draw and maybe even winning.

The West Wing premiered that September and became NBC’s powerhouse. ABC was willing to fight on the same lines with shows like Once & Again and Alias before they had taken control of the narrative in 2004 with the trio smash hits: Desperate Housewives, Lost, and Grey’s Anatomy. Other series such as Boston Legal would pick up ground at awards shows. Fox quickly joined the fight with 24 and eventually House would become a similar hit. And while CBS mainly would stay with the procedural that was started with CSI, every so often they would find a different audience with series like Joan of Arcadia or Without A Trace. The WB had been firing on all cylinders with Buffy,  Gilmore Girls, Felicity and Everwood all of which would net Golden Globes nods.

By 2007, it was beginning to look like HBO’s time in the sun was starting to end. Six Feet Under and Deadwood were gone; The Sopranos had been gone well before that and The Wire was in its final season. Sex and the City had also ended and there had yet to be a new hit drama or comedy in its place: Carnivale had proven to be a disaster and John From Cincinnati, David Milch’s follow-up to Deadwood had been a fiasco.  At the same time, while there were many basic cable series that had been challenging HBO for supremacy, particularly on FX and Showtime, none of them had yet to make inroads into the Emmys. The Shield would never be nominated for Best Drama, and while series like Rescue Me and The Riches would make inroads, the network had been having its share of failures. Showtime was making inroads at the awards front – Weeds had upset Desperate Housewives at the Golden Globes in 2006 and Blythe Danner had taken two consecutive Supporting Actress Emmys for Huff – but neither network had yet had a series nominating in either Drama or Comedy at the Emmys.

Indeed, aside from the Sopranos victory in Best Drama, the 2007 Emmys had been a celebration of network TV almost from top to bottom. For the first time since 2000 every single acting award in the drama category was won by a performer in a network series. This even surprised some of the winners: James Spader accepted his second Emmy for Boston Legal by starting his speech: “I feel like I’ve just stolen from the mob” and Katherine Heigl mouthed an obscenity as she walked up to the stage to pick up her Best Supporting Actress prize for Grey’s Anatomy. The other two winners were also from ABC: Sally Field for Brothers and Sisters and Terry O’Quinn for Lost. While HBO had taken the male acting prizes in comedy (Ricky Gervais for Extras; Jeremy Piven for Entourage), the female awards had gone to network shows: America Ferrara for Ugly Betty and Jaime Pressly for My Name is Earl.  Meanwhile 30 Rock, which had been considered a certain disaster when it had debuted on NBC the previous fall, had become the first series to win the Emmy for Best Comedy in its freshman year since Frasier’s first season in 1994.

And indeed, there was little sign going into the fall of 2007 that this trend would not continue: ABC, in particular, had the strongest lineup for its fall since 2004. Pushing Daisies had already been labeled by TV Guide as the best series of the 2007-2008 season, and as we shall see, they had several other shows in their lineup that were nearly as good.

But there was a cloud on the horizon, one that loomed darker and darker as the 2007-2008 season began.

In the 1980s, the WGA had been asked to take an 80% pay cut in residuals for VHS tapes to boost the then booming home video business. By the 1990s, VHS tapes prices had dropped to below $10. When the DVD market burst on to the scene, residuals were not renegotiated, and the writers got less. By the early 2000s, the Internet and streaming was beginning to loom, and though it was a shell of what it is today, the studios were fighting to get their shows to my generation. (Not me, for the record, I didn’t start watching shows online until 2013. But that’s neither here nor there.)

The WGA knew well enough that television might soon move away from the traditional medium and they knew this very well might bankrupt them. They asked for an increase in percentage on the residuals they would make, from 2.5% to 5%. Showing the same blindness towards labor that every other corporation does, the studios refused. On November 5, 2007 the WGA went on strike and Hollywood ground to a halt.

I remember this period very well, though I also remember regarding it with detachment at first.  The networks had episodes in reserve so I knew it was going to be at least until January or February of 2008 that the viewer would feel the pinch.  It became more obvious on late-night when all late night shows stopped broadcast for two months and just aired reruns. It is a measure of how foolish networks seemed that NBC chose to air several reruns from the first two seasons of Jay Leno even though that had nearly killed the franchise at the time. In January, late night did return but refused to play by the rules: David Letterman and Conan O’Brien had grown beards and said that they would not shave until the strike was resolved; Jon Stewart essentially did The Daily Show with none of his correspondents.

(On a purely cynical side note, part of me really believes that there was so much interest in the 2008 presidential race, particularly in the primaries, because there was nothing else on in prime-time to watch during this period. I was (and still am) a political junkie but I often wonder if so many other Americans just tuned into the coverage because Grey’s Anatomy wasn’t running).

I was concerned up to a point as 2007 ended and 2008 began, particularly because I wondered what would happen when the vaults were empty.  There were quite a few series I was scared would never come back; I worried that Battlestar Galactica, which I had become invested in, would never get its final season aired; I was concerned whether this would effect if and when 24 returned for its seventh season (a valid concern, as you’ll see) and I was particularly frightened about what this would do to the fate of the fourth season of Lost, which had ended on what was one of the greatest cliffhangers in TV history and where both the writing and filming had stopped right around November.

That said, I had a hunch as to how it would end and when Hollywood would blink. I was certain that before the Academy Awards aired at the end of February, the studio heads would come up with a compromise that was close to what the WGA wanted. 

It’s worth remembering that, even in 2008, the Academy Awards had begun its march to the stiff and humorless celebration it is today, something that fewer and fewer people wanted to actively host. Jon Stewart, whose 2006 stint had been considered tepid at best, had been named to come back in 2008 mainly because it was increasingly becoming hard to find anyone who wanted the job.  They were being criticized as ridiculously long, completely stilted and, with the films it was nominating, approaching obsolescence. But I was cynical enough to know even then that this was Hollywood’s biggest show, and the last thing they wanted was for it to be postponed or cancelled, particularly by a labor stoppage.

My hunch was confirmed by the utterly disastrous 2008 Golden Globes, which was more or less held in the lobby of a hotel. It was not  a ceremony but a press conference that barely lasted half an hour. No one watched even though it was technically broadcast on NBC that night. By this point, I had been religiously following it for a decade; I didn’t tune in. That said, it is worth going over the nominees for TV because it was a sign of the shape of things to come.

In Best Drama, the major nominees were Big Love, Damages, The Tudors and Mad Men, which ended up taking Best Drama. Jon Hamm took the Golden Globe for Best Actor, Glenn Close Best Actress for her role in Damages.  Nominees that would be at the center of the awards circuit for years to come included Michael C. Hall for the second season of Dexter; Holly Hunter and Kyra Sedgwick for Saving Grace and The Closer, respectively and Tina Fey, who took her first Golden Globe for her role on 30 Rock.  The night should have been a treasure for ABC – Pushing Daisies was nominated for 3 Golden Globes, including Best Comedy; Christina Applegate had been nominated for Best Actress in a Comedy for Samantha Who? and Donald Sutherland had been nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Dirty Sexy Money. ABC had received. ABC had in fact been second to HBO with total nominations from the Golden Globes with 10. But no one had paid attention.

By late January the public, which had initially supported the writers, began to turn against the guild. The cancellation of the ceremony may have actually helped shift momentum back when the co-chairman of NBC complained to Ryan Seacrest about that: “Sadly, it feels like nerdiest, ugliest, meanest kids in the high school are trying to cancel the prom. But NBC wants to try and keep that prom alive.” This quote probably was all the press the WGA needed and by the start of February the studios were back at the table, working out a deal by February 11^th. (Of course, if you were to ask them at the time, I’m sure it was just a coincidence the Academy awards were two weeks away.)

The ripple effects would be felt throughout television for years to come, and to be fair not all of them were horrible. Friday Night Lights, which was at the time going through a disastrous second season, managed to right the course because of the strike and got another three years. Vince Gilligan who had been working on the first season of Breaking Bad before the strike had unfolded made it clear when the series was about to end that if the first season had gone to its end, he would have taken the show in a direction so drastic it might never have been the same. Perhaps best of all, Lost, which ended up debuting right around the time frustration towards the studios was at its peak, was held up as just how great scripted TV. After it’s first season, the Emmys had passed over it for Best Drama the next two years; it was nominated for Best Drama for its last three seasons, something nearly unprecedented in the Emmys history.

But the consequences for so many of the series that had debuted in the 2007-2008 season were immediate and far more harsh. While many of those series had been renewed for a second season because of immense critical or ratings, after the strike was resolved, the networks refused to resume shooting any more episodes for the remainder of 2008. They would also air no reruns in the interim leading up to the 2008-2009 season. As a result, the lion’s shares of these series lost a huge number of their viewership.

I have often read blogs about how many series that viewers miss and considered cancelled too soon. Perhaps it should not come as a shock how many of those shows were victims of this strike. They include not merely Pushing Daisies, Dirty Sexy Money and Samantha Who? but also Eli Stone, a fascinating Johnny Lee Miller vehicle. The only series of the 2007-2008 season to have a run longer than two years was Private Practice, and I have always believed it was more out of loyalty to Shonda Rhimes than anything else.

Nor was this limited to ABC. NBC’s fascinating show Life, CBS Jericho, Fox’s’ The Sarah Connor Chronicles and the CW’s Reaper would all end up disappearing after the 2008-2009 season.  There is also a web theory that the plan for Heroes second season had been scuttled by the strike. The show, which had been a smash on NBC’s beleaguered 2006-2007 lineup, dwindled and was cancelled in 2010 with little notice.

Now while I could blame the networks dwindling decision to keep producing the similar quality series because of the strike, I don’t entirely believe that’s true.  Mad Men and Damages had, in fact, premiered well before the strike began and Breaking Bad which would be a major force on television had debuted in January. No one questions the that both AMC’s series are among the greatest in history and I have contended for years that Damages is at their level.  And I have written, in some of my earlier columns that in part the decision for networks to stop producing the same quality series that they had before the strike may have been aided and abetting by the Emmys. From 2012 to 2016, not a single network series was nominated for Best Drama despite the fact that there were many formidable contenders (including The Good Wife and Parenthood) as well as several ratings pop culture sensations that would have in earlier years dominated (I’m thinking of Nashville and Empire, both of which were nominated for Best Drama by the Golden Globes but never were by the Emmys.) Network television got the lesson loud and clear: why should we spend so much time and energy on major dramas when we get no rewards for it?

But looking back on it and in light of what is happening today, I am inclined to think that much of those cancellations of great shows in the aftermath of the strike and networks decisions to stop trying as hard to compete were in least in part retribution for the strike of 2007-2008. It was the network’s way of getting back at so many people who they considered traitors and scabs for what had happened.  That they were essentially cutting off their noses to spite their collective faces to do so was of no consequence: based on everything we know about television, the people essentially consider viewers as consumers of their products who will eat anything they offer them. (I sometimes wonder if the heads of these services are looking for a way to use AI to create viewers for their shows and not have to bother pleasing us at all. At this point, I think some of them would show a blue screen for thirty minutes if they though they could make money airing it.)

The fact that this strike is going on is just another example of Hollywood’s decision to be penny-wise and pound-foolish.  They would rather save millions  now than earn billions in a few months.  If that means having fall-lineups with no scripted shows, cancelling series they’ve already greenlit,  airing nothing but reruns of late night shows from ten years ago, well, they’ll do it. And if that means that their business end up losing money, that some of them lose their jobs, that their entire industry might collapses – well, what do they care? They’re already wealthy. Most of their ‘menial labor’ – the people who create the product that helped make them wealth - isn’t. They’ll come back to the table for less than their worth eventually.

And when this happens again, ten years or fifteen down the track, what will they care? Most of them will be working elsewhere or enjoying their golden parachutes. I imagine the heads of Netflix and Hulu today will be giving the same advice they got from the heads of ABC programming back then: “Don’t give the bastards a cent. They need us more than we need them.”

And to be clear, there will be some in the fan community in agreement. This is, like most labor struggles, an abstract concept until it hits home.  We’ll all be fine supporting the WGA and the SAG members until we start running out of shows to watch. Then we will turn on them, call them overpaid and demand they get back to work, pulling their lifeblood and energy for ridiculously low sums for products that we increasingly don’t want to pay anything for. Then even when they’re back, we’ll do what we’ve been doing for years: complaining there’s nothing good on TV.