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Businesses Television The Almighty Buck Entertainment

TV's Golden Age Is Anything But, Say Writers Preparing To Strike (bloomberg.com) 200

Posted by msmash from the tussle-continues dept.
The world's largest media companies returned to the negotiating table Monday with Hollywood screenwriters, seeking to avert a strike that could cost the entertainment industry billions of dollars and take popular TV shows off the air indefinitely. From a report on Bloomberg: Hollywood is bracing for the worst-case scenario after the Writers Guild of America warned advertisers and investors of the financial fallout and said members will most likely walk out May 2 if the new round of talks fail. Major TV programmers, such as NBC and CBS' flagship network, are scanning their slates of upcoming shows to determine which ones can air without guild writers. Negotiators on both sides are counting on cooler heads to prevail as they seek to avoid a repeat of the 100-day work stoppage in 2007-08 that cost the entertainment industry more than $2 billion, according to Milken Institute estimates. Yet the entertainment business, specifically TV, has undergone myriad changes that are creating new sticking points since the last strike almost a decade ago, and the writers say they haven't benefited.
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TV's Golden Age Is Anything But, Say Writers Preparing To Strike More

TV's Golden Age Is Anything But, Say Writers Preparing To Strike

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  • I haven't seen a typical Network TV channel in literally months.

    Strike all you want, campers. I'm fine with it.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Why is it that people who don't watch TV are so damned proud of it that they need to announce it every time TV is mentioned? Please share, what else makes you special?

      • Re:Umm, okay... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ilsaloving ( 1534307 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @01:20PM (#54215711)

        You mean, apart from saving $1000+ a year, and not willingly subjecting ourselves to IQ squandering nonsense (ie: the typical news), and lowest-common-denominator sitcoms, leaving time free to do more useful things?

        • Re:Umm, okay... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by peragrin ( 659227 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @01:29PM (#54215835)

          I always took it as hyper bold that tv rots the brain. Then I watched the difference between people who watch tv all the time and those who don't watch much at all. The differences are enough that even though I don't have cable I am not planning on getting it or letting kids watch much of it.

          See both liberal and conservatives who watch a lot of tv and its political spins va those who don't.

      • Re:Umm, okay... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by DickBreath ( 207180 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @01:23PM (#54215761) Homepage
        It's like breaking an addiction. Or a bad habit. It's like when ex smokers say they never realized how many things they can smell now and how much better food tastes, etc.

        It's not pride. It's the revelation of how much better it is to not watch TV any more. The extra time you have. The fact that TV gives you nothing in return. It wasn't even that entertaining actually. Just an effort to find the least objectionable content. And the ads, OMG, the ads, don't get me started.

        If you watch some on-demand programming, you can get some better quality entertainment, in less time, and with no commercials. And get up and walk away from the TV because there are also other and better things to do.

        Even if I sit in front of the TV and just browse YouTube, it is amazing the great stuff I can find. Videos of presentations from various conferences. Class lectures. There is a guy with a great set of videos Introduction to Higher Math. Various tutorials. It's way better than couch potato cable TV.

        • Re:Umm, okay... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by penandpaper ( 2463226 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @03:12PM (#54216907) Journal

          The ads are absolute cancer. I never realized how bad TV ads were until I would visit the in-laws and sit down to watch whatever was on to pass the evening by. Holy shit. They hit all the right buttons to get my attention or to get me to stare at the screen and I felt stupid after a set of commercials. I don't know what it is but I know I don't want it in my life.

        • > Even if I sit in front of the TV and just browse YouTube, it is amazing the great stuff I can find. Videos of presentations from various conferences. Class lectures. There is a guy with a great set of videos Introduction to Higher Math. Various tutorials. It's way better than couch potato cable TV.

          [sarcasm]
          Oh yeah, after doing programming all day long and fucking around with docker, asterisk, postfix, nginx, etc. in the meantime, the first thing I want to do when i get home after 8-9 hours of that is d

      • these people are about as annoying as vegans

      • Please share, what else makes you special?

        Some of them are vegans.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Maritz ( 1829006 )
        Yeah. It's not quite up there with announcing you're vegan but it sure does seem to be a point of pride for people. Well done them.

      • Sometimes I have to remind people that we don't get broadcast or cable, since they assume the latest shows are a semi-mandatory part of the common culture. I'm not superior about it. We have our own time-wasting habits.

        Last time we had television service, it was expensive, the shows were almost unwatchable due to commercials, we had to watch on somebody else's schedule, and we couldn't get Minnesota Twins games. Getting the shows from Amazon Prime is much superior.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      The golden age of TV was in the 70's and 80's. Some stuff was cheesy but some stuff from that time was actually pretty good while still being cheesy and some was really good.

      Among the really good stuff was in my opinion Monty Python's Flying Circus, Kojak, MASH and Hill Street Blues. Good and Cheesy was Happy Days and then too many bad cheesy shows not worth to remember.

      And we didn't have all those age ratings everywhere and seldom a "Don't try this at home" except when something was really dangerous.

    • I haven't seen a typical Network TV channel in literally months.

      What makes you think that the people who write for Netflix and the other non-networks won't also go on strike?

  • The Evil Content Pirates(tm)

  • Same paradigms? (Score:3)

    by k6mfw ( 1182893 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @01:12PM (#54215603)
    It seems current of most TV shows are reality, infomercials, three themes of fiction (lawyers, cops, medical), and news-opinion (this being a news story breaks out and they get a few pretty talking heads to discuss implications but there really is no additional info on that breaking news story). There are cable channels for sports (don't really need writers for those) and movies (which they repeat the same movie few times a month). There is reruns of classic TV shows (no writers needed). Then there is PBS which Trump wants to defund.

  • Free Market at Work (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LeftCoastThinker ( 4697521 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @01:18PM (#54215691)

    This is how the free market should work. If wages are really too low, the strike will cost more than just raising the pay for the writers and the networks will cave. If the writers are overpaid, there are still a lot of unemployed people looking for work, the networks can go find new talent who don't belong to the union (they call it guild, but it is acting as a labor union right now).

    Notice that unlike the teachers union, the screen writers guild can't pour in cash to elect their bosses who then kick back raises and benefits, regardless of what is best for the larger organization. This is why all public sector unions need to be banned and why so many Democrats in the past were strongly against public sector unions.

    • Exactly, to avoid a $2B loss, just pay less than $2B to the writers. Problem solved!

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      FYI - WGA is a democracy. The members elect their (non-paid) leaders who volunteer their time in service of there fellow writers. There is no structure where the elected leadership can grease their own pockets at the expense of the members.

      The total amount of money being fought over is a drop in the bucket compared to both current increases in profits as well as anticipated losses if there was a strike.

      I suspect that if the markets really were "free" that there would be less acrimony over these negotiations

    • You want to go after public sector unions, start with the police, not the teachers.
      • False dichotomy. Both.

        • Correct. Public sector unions should be ILLEGAL. There is really no rational argument for them at all.

          They already have a direct say in their employer, its called VOTING.

          The worst part is just before elections, where the public sector unions pour tons of their own members
          money into political parties, while at the same time trying their best to make their pay an election 'issue'.

          If you want a union, work in the private sector. Believe me, its a very different world out here.

    • Great, so say the writers settle for an extra billion....
      Now, the directors (yes, they also have a guild) want theirs..
      Next, of course, the actors.
      Sound, Cameramen, Editors...

      And we haven't even scratched the surface, those are just people working DIRECTLY on the productions..

      So yeah, great thinking there.
      I wonder when they will realise that broadcast television is in big trouble, and they are busy helping to push it off the cliff?
      My guess is about a year after their jobs are gone..

      • That's my point though, there are a lot of young, talented millennials who would love to have those jobs at the current wages. Writers can easily work remotely, and if I were the networks, I would start putting out calls for new writers and submissions of new content and let this whole mess of entitled writers collapse under their own weight and go work at McDonalds for the last 5 years of their careers. I hope Netflix and Amazon pull something like this if it goes to a strike.

    • Except it's not about wages being too low, but instead about other things.

      For example, for ages, writer's contracts have been exclusive for the year/season. but shows have gone from 24 episodes a season to 10 episodes a season. So effectively, their income was cut in half, even though their salary was still the same amount of money per episode.

      More importantly, capitalism does NOT work the way you think it does. Capitalism is more about marketing than it is about skill, particularly when it comes to art.

      • Capitalism works exactly how I stated. The difference is some artists want to make money, so they make art that people want (Fifty Shades of Gray or the movie Titanic are two examples) and others make art that they like personally but sells poorly. Marketing is a part of capitalism, but you can only up-sell a turd so much. The reason Fifty Shades and Titanic did well was that they tapped into a basic desire/instinct inherent in many women and fed it just the way they wanted it to be fed. If you are not

  • We NEVER watch broadcast TV. I don't know why the programming is so bad, whether it's the writers, the producers who invent the paradigm or the sponsors. It might be nice to revisit some of the old programs like Mary Tyler Moore, Gunsmoke. and others. If you get MeTV over the air many of these programs are shown there. The problem the networks will have is that these programs took up much more of the half-hour or hour than programs do today and commercial time would be reduced if they were shown in their or

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by H3lldr0p ( 40304 )

      That's an easy one to answer.

      The reason the good content has fled for cable and/or the Internet is because of commercial concerns. The first concern is the palette of the masses. You don't want to be too controversial or too radical or you don't get the broadest audience. Or if you go too far in the opposite direction and have too narrow of an audience. Both of those are a problem for the second concern, selling the commercial space. These programs aren't created to be entertaining, they're created to pass

      • Excellent points. I forgot about appealing to an audience that would sell what the sponsors want to sell without much, or any, controversy. All this leads to dull content. I don't mean the audience is dull or not intelligent. Others have made that connection. Then again, half the population has an IQ less than 100 and that's a significant population with some money to spend.

  • TV IS DEAD (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jim Sadler ( 3430529 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @01:45PM (#54216005)
    Traditional TV is dead as a door nail. the programs are so sparse and aimed at dullards that anyone with a nickel in their pocket is on cable or satelite with premium channels added. Regular TV programing went into the ditch when too many ads were run making the shows a nightmare to watch. As viewers declined the programming got worse and they ran ever more ads. Greed killed TV and it isn't doing much for theaters either.

  • who cares (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Revek ( 133289 )

    I'm not trolling but I couldn't care less about it. If they strike and shows don't get made it will have little or no impact on my time. Its all just empty filler where you're real life should go.

    • But my life is just useless filter to where an unconscious eternity will go, I need entertainment to distract myself from that fact.

  • Most need to be shown the door, not a higher paycheck. Especially those from network TV. Fire them all. Replace them with starving book writers.

  • We've already been here - and the networks without writers gave birth to the abomination known as "reality TV".
    But really, I don't watch much TV. Seasons are down to like 6 episodes, you can't even get drawn into characters or plots in that little time. Then it takes so long for the next "season", I just forget about it and watch something else on Netflix.

  • I always thought that crap's been generated by not too sophisticated Perl script.

  • TV's Golden Age is Long Long Over (Score:3)

    by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @04:03PM (#54217419)
    the Golden Age of TV was in the 1960's & 1970's (before the internet) when most everybody spent their free time in the evening watching their favorite TV shows before bed time, TV is like the Radio now, people mostly ignore it unless they want local news & weather, the internet wont lill TV, like TV did not kill radio, it will just fall back to a secondary source of entertainment and news and information

  • It's not like the Writer's Guild has actually done anything worth a shit since their last strike (which got Heroes well-fucked.) Even most Anime has more substance than 99% of the shit Hollywood has had its writers putting out in this day and age.

  • Other english speaking nations could see an influx of US support and interest.
    Sharks, history, food shows? Lifestyle shows on building homes, restoring cars?
    A US presenter who lives in that nation and has no need to return to the USA. Good US voice, local connections.
    How real can any part of Canada feel for a US crime, medical show or other drama?
    How many US actors in Canada can hold a well written show together?
    Will US advertisers accept any content between their ads? Will people in the US pay

  • So what? (Score:3)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @07:35PM (#54218715) Journal

    Go ahead and strike, we don't really give a shit.

    Doctors, firefighters, police, people that build and fix things...if they go on strike, we care. They actually do things that matter.

    But a bunch of Hollywood script writers threatening to go on strike? Who gives a fuck?

  • Yes! Please!

    Let it fail! TV is a time-suck disaster anyway, and it's exactly what the industry needs in order to shake up some more and slough off viewers.

    The more down-time from the boob tube the better.

  • This article doesn't talk much about the basic issues that are pushing the writers toward a strike. A big driving force is that they are making less money because of the shorter seasons on cable and streaming; people are only getting paid for 10 or 12 episodes instead of 22, and that means a big pay cut. Often they are still tied down by exclusivity agreements, which means that they can't make up for the shorter season by doing some work for another show. So there is more work for writers because more shows

  • The last time this happened, the average TV season went from 22 episodes per year to 11. A few more iterations and we'll have to measure it in years-per-episode.

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