The Labor Stoppage Should Remind Us Hollywood is A Business. The Talent Chose to Forget It

 

I’ve written repeatedly in the past year in various formats about how much so many intelligent people have complete misconceptions about Hollywood.  All of the right-wing talking heads who argue about how elitist and liberal people in film and television are seem to have forgotten that Hollywood is at its core conservative.

I don’t mean socially conservative, though we have learned quite a lot about that in the past decade. I mean fiscally conservative. Everything in Hollywood since its inception is about letting the free market control the product.  This has been true from a technological standpoint to the kinds of films and shows that dominate the market to even the fact of so many of the culture wars that so many in the internet and news rail against. The only reason Hollywood makes Black Panther or Barbie is the same reason they make The Fast and The Furious: they think there’s money in it.  It might seem like virtue signaling but trust me, they made a female Ghostbusters because they thought there was money in. That’s also the reason they made Ghostbusters: Afterlife. It was a market course correction.

The reason we forget that Hollywood is a business is because they have spawned so many industries around it that feed on the idea it isn’t. The critics who review their work; the magazines and websites that follow every aspect of it; the paparazzi, the entertainment shows; the social media; even the awards they give each other are designed to make you believe that Hollywood is about art and entertainment rather than a business. And it could not succeed without one critical element that is fundamentally unchanged after more than a century: the fact that the face of the industry – the actors – go along with it every step of the way.

I think that the deal that every actor makes with themselves when they get discovered is that they will never reveal that they are working for a living. I’ve been reading articles and memoirs about the history of Hollywood all my life and no actor has ever once said that acting is anything but an art rather than a job. The writers and directors might say so when they are being interviewed late in their careers; particularly those who have not worked in a long time, but the actors have never acknowledged it, not publicly.  Furthermore, they will always go along with the promotion of their product and say the lines of the PR firms no matter what they truly think of their project. In the space of a year, Scarlet Johansen was in Avengers: End Game, Marriage Story and JoJo Rabbit.  Not once in any late show appearance did she say that one project was better than the other, nor did any late night host or writer even think to ask the question.

Hell, Hollywood is so good at making people believe their lie that even when they make movies and TV shows that lay bare the truth about the industry they work in, our society views them as artistic works not a reflection of a business.  Nearly three quarters of a century later, we see Sunset Blvd as an artistic masterpiece; whatever message Wilder was trying to say about the business he worked has been washed away as the film itself has become an industry.

I’ve come to many conclusions about the labor stoppage in Hollywood that I have shared over the weeks and months with you. I can understand, at some fundamental level, that the purpose of a union is to protect workers from being exploited by the powers that be that are the evil corporations. Whether it works in practice has been a subject of debate, but I understand why people who work for McDonald’s or Starbucks or Amazon for minimum wage would need it. I have never been able to see the members of the WGA or SAG-AFTRA as anywhere near the same position. Not merely because I think the loudest voices were millionaires or that most of them had skills that the working stiff can’t fall back on. Not because I thought that they were being exploited in any true sense of the word.  No, the biggest reason is one that has become very clear to me as a TV critic over the last decade.

To be exploited in the traditional sense means that everyone in the industry has no choice but to do what management tells them to do. And if you have followed the era of Peak TV at all, you know that every single condition that the WGA and SAG-AFTRA have struck over this past year was the result of a series of choices that all of them have been making for decades. Furthermore all of those choices were ones that they willingly made for artistic freedom rather than considering of the industry they worked in.

When the revolution began in the late 1990s when HBO began to change how television as we know it worked with its trifecta of The Sopranos, The Wire and Deadwood some of the greatest talents in the industry were offered something the only other source – network television – could not. Complete artistic freedom. Not merely in the use of language, nudity and violence that network television still can’t, but the ability to tell stories in a way that network television would never let them. Stories that were about the death of the American Dream like The Sopranos and The Wire. Stories that spoke to specific markets such as Sex and The City.  When FX then took on its own journey with The Shield – a show just as groundbreaking as any on HBO – the race was on. Every cable network in existence began to embrace the possibilities of artistic visions.

And as a result, we got some of the greatest shows of all time: Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Homeland, Battlestar Galactica and so many more. Because the networks were trying to follow the money they tried variations on these models and in the first decade of the 2000s were more than able to do so with such extraordinary works as 24, Lost and lesser shows (critically if not audience wise) such as House and Boston Legal.

But to quote Trey Parker and Matt Stone, artistic freedom isn’t free. There were going to be consequences when more and more talent ended up going to cable.  You want fewer episodes to tell your story? Fine, but that means there are going to be fewer episodes to get residuals from later on. It also means that writers and directors will not have as many opportunities to earn credits on episodes to earn those said residuals.  And you have the freedom to kill off characters early and often – but that means those actors will have less job security in their roles. And most importantly when most of the talent sees all of the good shows on cable with fewer restrictions, they will eventually stop coming to networks where there are.

And that’s what happened in the 2010s. The best talent was almost exclusively on cable and there were fewer quality network shows worth a damn. This led to network increasingly investing not only in procedurals but in the middle of the decade reboots of original shows. Much can be said about the lack of creativity on network television, but as their piece of the pie has been shrinking more and more, they have next to no room to be imaginative any more.

This leads to the next part. When every network that exists has so many shows, eventually there will be too many for anyone to even try to follow. By the middle of the 2010s, even networks heads were admitting that were just too many shows to watch on television any more.  Furthermore, even the best of these shows could never earn a huge amount of money, which meant so many of these cable networks were operating at a loss. This led to the next completely foreseeable consequence that has been unfolding over the past decade: cable networks have begun to stop producing original shows altogether.  As I write this article, basic cable is beginning to come with only a handful of exceptions, the barren wasteland is was before the revolution. Very few networks do anything other than syndicated series and the few that are only can do so because they themselves have been swallowed up by larger corporate bodies.  There has been a slow but steady complaint over the past few years by talent as to how few opportunities there are in recent years.  From a free market standpoint, it makes perfect sense.

And it is here I get to the 900 pound gorilla: streaming. Here I must also give voice to the biggest lie that every streaming network has been telling you since Netflix debuted House of Cards a decade of go. There are a lot of great shows on streaming; I’m not going to pretend they’re aren’t. I have worshiped The Crown and The Kominsky Method on Netflix. I have seen brilliance in Transparent and Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon. I see the genius in Ramy and Dopesick and all the other limited series on Hulu; the brilliance of Ted Lasso and Black Bird on Apple TV and I was even willing to subscribe to Peacock to get Poker Face.  They are all great shows.

What none of them are is groundbreaking the way that The Sopranos and The Wire were; the way that 30 Rock and Lost were.  I’m not saying that all of these shows aren’t brilliant. But there’s nothing in any of them that could not be done just as well on any cable service at any time. Anyone of these series would have been outstanding on HBO or Showtime had they been developed for that network, and as some of you may know House of Cards, Orange is the New Black and The Crown were all offered to HBO first.

The only difference is Netflix was willing to give House of Cards what its creators wanted: a two season guarantee. I grant you that might seem daring both at the time and in retrospect, but Netflix had nothing to lose by doing so.

So what’s the difference between a show like Bloodline and Damages? They were made by the same production team and followed the same style of television. The only difference seems to be how they were distributed. You could watch Bloodline all at once.

Now I’m not going to argue against binge-watching as a style of TV viewing, but as a business model it always seemed like a horrible idea. It did not seem like the kind of thing that was sustainable financially long-term, which has proven to be the case.  Furthermore, considering the only source of numbers we had for Netflix shows was Netflix, it seemed obvious that we should take them with a grain of salt, which indeed we should have. But by the time we did, everybody had jumped on the streaming band wagon trying to create the next House of Cards.  They decided because they could; they never thought if they should.

And its worth remembering there were more than  a few tech companies that failed. Yahoo’s original programming collapsed in a little more than a year. Facebook has a few shows that didn’t last much longer. Remember Qibi? It was there and gone.

Considering there was no real difference between the creative freedom you got from streaming and cable, I think the only real reason so many people jumped was job security.  When your series gets renewed for another season within days of its premiering, I can see why that would be tempting to actors and writers who might have had to wonder weeks and months if their show would be picked up for another season. That said, when all of these talents argued that a full decade after the streaming revolution began they were being exploited, I truly have to laugh.

Let’s consider Shawn Ryan. His show The Night Agent dropped on Netflix this year and has become one of its biggest hits. (Again I don’t trust the source but let that go.) When the strike began Ryan was one of the loudest critics of Netflix, saying that he had not gotten his fair share from the series.

Excuse me Shawn but you signed up for this in 2022. By that time, Netflix’s vulnerabilities were becoming known to the world. You chose to sign with them anyway. I have little doubt you had your people go over every word of the contract before you chose to sign it. You have only Netflix’s word that millions of people have watched your series: for all you know, most of them watched the first episode and never went back to it.  And to be clear, you didn’t write or produce the show for free. You were paid, handsomely, and probably more than most of the others writing. And you have the nerve to say that you were exploited by Netflix?  At any point in the process did someone put a gun to your head and tell you this was all you would get?

You are an intelligent man. You knew what you were getting to in when you signed. You don’t get to fart and blame the dog.  And yet somehow all of these thousands of supposedly smart people were shocked – shocked! – that they were not getting their fare share from streaming. To be clear, there’s no evidence there is money in streaming in the conventional sense -  I have spent the last decade questioning any service that uses it as a business model  - but everyone working in Hollywood seems to have reasoned like this:

1.       These corporations made our projects.

2.      They are multi-billion dollar corporations.

3.      Ergo, they must have billions of dollars that they are withholding from us.

This brings me to the next point. Hollywood wasn’t healthy before the strike.

Throughout the industry networks have been being absorbed by bigger services – Paramount took over Showtime late last year. They have been restructuring original programming across the board, firing many of the people who spent the past decade creating the shows you built. Networks and services have been cancelling shows left and right because they can not afford to produce so many low-rated, creatively brilliant series at a loss.  The last thing Hollywood needed was a labor stoppage.

Which is exactly what happened.  You took a look at a shaky industry and put your collective needs before the good of it. You’d spent decades of claiming you were artists and craftsmen, and it is only now that the business opportunities are starting to dry up that you’ve decided that you are workers.  You spent six months claiming this was about respect and the future when it all it was about was making sure you had money in the present.  This was not some struggle for labor; it was a shakedown.

And worse still, even now some of your members don’t want to take it. Justine Bateman spend a long time on TV last night arguing that the deal was a bad one because it did not offer adequate protection against AI. In other words, you’re only now starting to worry about machines taking your jobs.

Let’s see. Hollywood starting using the images of dead actors in commercial in the early 1990s. You made noise but you didn’t object. They started using CGI for extras in crowd scenes in the late 1990s. You didn’t object. Hell David Chase used footage of Nancy Marchand in The Sopranos after she died.

Computers have been taking the work of animators, make up artists and effects people for years. Automation has been wiping out jobs of your industry. But its only when it coming for your specific job that you’re saying we have to do something?  I’m not judging you for not seeing the future; I’m judging you for ignoring the present for thirty years! It’s one thing trying to be Canute holding back the tides, but at every step of the way you have helped make the waves higher.

But anyway you got what you wanted. Now Hollywood can go back to doing what it does best: making the world forget it is a business. It helps that award show season is nearly upon us: now you can spend the next two months walking red carpets, accepting shiny trophies and making speeches saying how humble you all are to be working in this art form. And you don’t have to worry about repercussions from your public: all they ever cared about was getting to see their favorite shows again and now that will happen.

To be sure, there are consequences. There will no doubt be almost no new series for the 2024 broadcast season and networks may not recover. It’s going to be a while before several of the major shows such as Yellowjackets or The Last of Us  have their next seasons on pay cable. And streaming, which you fought so hard to get money from, is still no healthier than it was before – Hulu and Disney are merging next year. And there will be endless cancellations as the restructuring continues – helped by the fact you have caused so much of Hollywood to operate at a loss. But what does that matter? You’ve made your money. Now you can keep saying you’re doing this for art. Trust me, the rest of the world will forget soon enough. That’s what this was all about, right? So you  could keep getting paid to pretend.