The Disruption Series Conclusion: Now That The WGA Strike is Over, Please Tell Us What You Won. Seriously.

 

When it was announced last night that the WGA and the studios had reached a tentative deal that seems certain to end the strike that has lasted more than five months, I was surprised by my feelings.

I expected to feel relief that television would return to some degree of normality within a few months and that this nightmare was over. I expected to feel some empathy for the writers who have spent all this time on the picket lines for an uncertain future. I expected to feel something resembling happiness. But that wasn’t my first reaction.

No what I feel is a combination of visceral contempt and a white-hot rage that this stoppage had to go on as long as it did. And I’m more surprised that the majority of my negative feelings are not directed towards the corporate bosses but rather the writers that have been on strike for so long and the actors that have joined them on the picket line.  Then again, maybe I shouldn’t be. Over the last several weeks I have become very aware of just how contemptible and elitist the behavior of these guilds have been towards everybody – not just the studios, but the people who work on their sets who don’t have the benefit of working for guilds, members of the political left, fans of their work,  even their own membership who dared the voice anything resembling opposition, and every element of their industry. I expect that within a few weeks or months this may fade, but I do fear that these artists have  incurred damage that will be felt in the years to come and that they were either blind to these consequences or knew of them and didn’t care.

I was going to write this article in a kind of mock celebratory tone at first: to make it very clear how utterly hollow this ‘victory’ is for everybody. But at this point, I don’t think these people – particularly the WGA  - deserve to have this subject treated with humor. This was a deathly serious matter that deserved to be handled with kid gloves. Instead, their policy was pure scorched earth. So while my rage is still fresh, I’m going to explain why all of you people working in the guilds who’ve spent the last five months on picket lines, truly have had your heads up your asses since the beginning.

Now keep in mind, my first job is that of  a TV Critic. I love much of your work and I do appreciate everything you have done for me and people like me for so many years. The thing is,  I know that you are capable of the complete obliviousness that so many people have when they think they’re absolutely right in their position and decide to willingly blind yourself to reality.

First I want to congratulate on something truly remarkable. That you managed to convince your allies on the left that two guilds whose  combined membership have less than half the population of the city of Boston are the face of organized labor, worthy to be talked about as those who are punished for unionizing at a Starbucks or walking a picket line in Detroit. I suppose I shouldn’t be you work in Hollywood and you’re very good at constructing believable if completely fictional narratives.  Which is what the left completely bought into from day one.

Honestly, this says far more about the left’s own blind spots then their own, but I would expect nothing less from people who believe a company with such a problematic racist and bigoted history as Disney as their idols because their decision to have the title character in their live-action Little Mermaid be African American or that one of the most blatant product placement movied in history was actually one of the most brilliant feminist stories of all time. There was no truth to either, but both concepts made the far right heads’ explodes, and that was good enough.  But considering the real problems that organized labor is facing around the country, you’d think even the most extreme progressives would think twice about deciding to back the membership where one prominent member says he is suffering because he has to sell ‘one of his houses.’ That is the kind of tone deaf phrase that the left loves to mock Republican candidates when they say they understand working class struggles. But because it came from Billy Porter, they let it go untouched.

The WGA and SAG-AFTRA have gone out of their way to frame this as a struggle for the soul of their industry against exploitive corporations.  Bullshit. It was bullshit when I first heard it and its bullshit now. Bill Maher had it dead on when he said this was not some struggle where the guilds were some versions of Che Guevara or Ceasar Chavez.  As someone who appreciates everything these guilds do for my entertainment, I was surprised how little empathy I was able to find for them for their struggles.

And that’s because they aren’t really, not the way those at Amazon and Starbucks are facing, not the ones that the UAW is now.  Everyone who worked at the Guild had skills and fallback positions that the people who work in these unions just don’t and they know it.  No one’s lifelong ambition is to work on as a barista or on an assembly line. Everyone on this picket line realized dreams that millions of people around the world would kill for.  Anyone of them could live for weeks or months on ‘the exploitative pay’ that so many members were complaining about. I am reminded of a line I heard from the horror-parody Bodies Bodies Bodies I saw earlier this year. A bunch of Gen Z women are terrified that there is a killer among them and they start shouting at each other about which of them is the biggest victim. One of them shouts about a book the other wrote about coming up from poverty. “You were never poor!” she shouts with contempt. “You’re middle class!” Infuriated, the woman says: “Lower middle class!”
 

No this was not about the future of the industry, mainly because no one can see the future. This was a cash grab. And really the privilege has been showing since the start. Shawn Ryan complained that he wasn’t receiving any money from Netflix for The Night Agent, even though it was a hit series. Aaron Paul telling interviewers he hadn’t received any money from Netflix for Breaking Bad. You couldn’t have given away the game more clearly if you tried. This was never about some kind of exploitations but people wanting more than they thought they were entitled too.  When the loudest voices complaining are millionaire talents, its really hard to argue that this is about the rank and file.

I really would like how the argument for this strike was framed to its membership, particularly everything we increasingly learn about streaming services.  You want to argue that talent isn’t getting their fair share from Netflix? How do even know that Netflix is making untold billions of your labor? The only source for Netflix viewership for years was Netflix and in the last couple of years not only has it been learned that the numbers were inflated but the company’s prizes have been dropping. We have no idea what viewership for so many other streaming services, we basically have little more than the word of the companies.  For all the guilds know for sure, the reason no one has been giving them a fair wage for streaming is because theirs far less money in it than you think there is.  And it’s not like you got nothing for your work: you were all made something for this. No, what you want is the ‘residuals’. That thing that no one else but someone creative makes.  A cashier at McDonalds doesn’t get a bonus from every Big Mac they sell.

A residual is the definition of privilege. Every time someone spends their paycheck paying for a movie or show you appeared in you get money. Kind of makes you slightly exploitive, too. Yes I know the studios and the streamers are benefited off the sweat of your labor.  Like you could have somehow made a Breaking Bad or House of Cards or The Bear with no one willing to give your more money than you needed to anybody. Or are you going to take the critics’ point of view that the art is done for their sakes and no one else’s? Either way, it’s pure elitism.

But I get why you framed this as a struggle between the poor and the studios. Neither one of you could blame the people truly responsible: the viewers.  The fragmenting of the TV audience has been great for your work and art but its increasingly led to smaller and smaller paychecks.  And considering that everyone wants to pay as little possible for anything, when you create a system where the cost to watch an entire series is practically negligible, of course millions of Americans will jump on board.  All of you – the studios, the streamers, the writers, the actors – went to where you thought the money was.

Now the money’s drying up. Your industry has been as a result getting shakier and shakier, particularly over the last few years.  Mainly because you are too good at your jobs: there are hundreds of shows out there, far too many for any one person to hope to follow. Executives have been alarmed about this trend for a while. I imagine they won’t have to worry about it for much longer: this strike has been a huge economic loss for the industry and networks and services have been cancelling shows right and left.

I have little doubt you will frame this in the weeks to come as purely punitive, and it may well be. But it doesn’t change the fact that your actions over the last several months have done much to financially undermine an industry that has been struggling across the board for the last several years. Stephen Amell took an immense amount of a heat a couple of months when he argued about a labor stoppage being ‘reductive and myopic’.  I argued that he knew this better than most because his most recent series Heels was on Starz, a network that has been struggling financially over the recent years.

Well, last night the other shoe dropped. Starz cancelled four series – one of which hadn’t finished filming – because of the strike. One of them was Heels. Other networks have followed suit in recent days mainly because of the financial losses of the strike.  The Guilds might have argued that they were trying to provide financial security for the future  but its going to be hard for security if there are fewer shows and by definition, fewer jobs.

And all of this comes after a loss of $12 billion to the state of California which has been felt in the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of workers who rely on the film and television industry to make a living but do not have the protections of a union. Almost nothing has been said about them, and those who have tried to argue for them have been stomped down and silenced. Drew Barrymore attempted to start her talk show in order to provide a living to the people who worked for her who hadn’t seen a paycheck in five months. The reaction of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA was to essentially shame her on social media and bully her into reversing her course of action.  You didn’t do the same to Bill Maher but the left was more than willing to do that for you because they already hate him. And the fact that Stephen King decided to take him to task is just offensive. A millionaire castigating another millionaire for thinking of the people who work for him instead of his fellow writers is a line most of you would think to stupid for some of your movies.

All of this is just going to do more short term and long term damage to an industry that has been on shaky ground for years.  None of this has done anything to help any of the problems, short term or long term, Hollywood might face but it’s never been about this. It was about doing what so many accuse the rich of doing: getting as much money out of the industry before the lights go out.

 This may very well be the tipping point for Peak TV: you and your ilk have been whining about having fewer options before, I can’t imagine you’ll have more now.  For network TV, this strike could be the nail in the coffin; cable has been undergoing more and more mergers causing the market to shrink, and who knows what the future of streaming will be going forward.

 I don’t know if the general public noticed or truly cared about the labor stoppage the last several months. But I think we’ll find out very soon. They’re pissed that the fall season has been ruined, and they’re impatient for new shows (which make no mistake is why you got the deal you did now).  The public has a short memory and maybe by the time new seasons finally start airing again, they’ll have forgotten what this is all about. And if I were you, I’d hope so. Because right now, I am royally pissed at what you claim to have done in the name of the future of your industry but was really all about getting more money in a field where many of you make more of us in a month than the average American sees in a lifetime. You’ll celebrate your victory while millions of us (myself included) continue the long search for a job that most of you would probably consider beneath you to work at.

And do celebrate what you’ve accomplished. You managed to drive an entire industry to a standstill for five months. You caused hundreds of people to suffer a loss of income and several of your future shows to be cancelled, causing future loss of income. You snuffed out every voice of opposition and managed to maintain complete loyalty to your cause even though members on the picket lines must have had constant doubts. And you did all of this in name of a slight raise of income for your work in an industry that is already in trouble and that the lion’s share of the people who watched as a distraction if they had time when they came home from dinner after their ten-hour grind at work.   I guess the progressives are right. You are the face of organized labor.

But I am professionally grateful for this stoppage. Because of your immense desire to force the industry to make more money for you than you were getting,  the Emmys have been postponed until January. Which means I’ve had more time than usual to get caught up so many of the series I usually don’t get a chance to because of the lack of time. Thanks to your bull-headedness, I managed to see Welcome to Chippendale’s, Poker Face and can now finish series like Andor and Wednesday in a leisurely fashion rather than the rush-rush I usually can. I can watch series I wouldn’t normally, like Bad Sisters and Daisy Jones & The Six and I can take my time watching the most recent seasons of The Crown and Only Murders in the Building. So when I finally have to do my Emmys briefing (in December) I can write a position of more confidence than usual.  So you did make at least one person’s job easier as a result of your stupidity: mine.  I know that this was far from your intention, but let’s be honest: much of this was done without any real thinking of consequences for people. So an earnest thank you for that if nothing else. I’m truly grateful. Please don’t let the circumstances repeat  any time soon.