#being able to connect with people over a cw show from 2007 is such a strange feeling
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Supernatural’s “Silent Majority” and Hating Misha Collins
Excerpted from: Chin, B. (2019). When hated characters talk back: Twitter, hate, and fan/celebrity interaction. In M. Click (Ed.) Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age. NYU Press. Google Books preview: 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 307, 308.
New characters are commonly introduced to long-running shows for a variety of reasons: to tell additional stories (e.g., when a lead actor eaves prior to the show’s end or when the stories are too dependent on a small group of characters) or to introduce a love interest for a lead character. These additions and changes sometimes divide fandoms, splintering fan groups into those who love, and those who hate, the changes.
Supernatural debuted on the CW [sic] in 2005. In its fourteenth season at the time of this writing, the show tells the story of Dean Winchester (played by Jensen Ackles) and Sam Winchester (played by Jared Padalecki), brothers who were trained by their father to hunt and kill supernatural beings after their mother was brutally murdered by a demon. Supporting characters in the form of love interests, other hunters, and demons have dropped in and out of the Winchester brothers’ nomadic lives, but it is their relationship with one another that drives the show’s main storyline. In the season 4 (2008) premiere, a new character in the form of an angel, Castiel (played by Misha Collins), was introduced and subsequently added to the main cast(4) thus introducing a storyline featuring the battle between angels and demons, which became deeply embedded into Supernatural’s overarching mythology.
The show’s online fandom is largely based on the website LiveJournal, which hosts numerous online communities for episodic discussions and the archival coverage of fan-creative works like icons, fan videos, and fan fiction(5). Tumblr has also become a popular platform for the fandom, particularly for image-based posts such as GIFsets. Aside from LiveJournal and Tumblr, a collaborative website in the form of Wikipedia known as Super-Wiki (hosted at www.supernaturalwiki.com) is also popular, documenting news and information on the show, the cast and crew, convention reports, as well as the norms, culture, and practices of the fandom.
As the show features a predominately male cast, slash parings -- particularly that of Sam/Dean (known collectively as “Wincest”) and Dean/Castiel (”Destiel”) -- are popular with fans(6). The two fan groups often have a publicly antagonistic relationship, with fans competing for each paring’s popularity on Internet polls and for legitimization from the producers. On the one hand, Destiel supporters argue that writers and producers imbue Dean and Castiel’s interactions with innuendo, which are then not followed through in then show. While Collins (Castiel) has openly engaged in conversations with fans about Destiel at numerous fan conventions and events, others (including the producers and Jensen Ackles, who plays Dean) appear to be less receptive of this fan reading, with Ackles frequently refusing to answer any questions related to the pairing or Dean’s sexuality at conventions(7).
On the other hand, some fans see Wincest at the accepted pairing in canon, as episodes such as the fourth season “The Monster at the End of the Book” (airdate April 2, 2009) addressed the show’s fandom directly, making tongue-in-cheek references to Wincest. Fans have been divided by the episode, according to Laura Felschow (2010, para. 1.2), with some viewing it as “playful and inclusive” while others see its representation of slash (Wincest) as “harsh and demeaning.” The show’s nods to Wincest, and the producers’ continual tease on Destiel, led to fans’ constant struggle for their reading of the text to be legitimated by producers and recognized as canon(8). Castiel is often credited by the popular press as a fan favorite, but some fans, however, view the inclusion of Castiel as an impediment to the development of Sam’s storyline and to the Wincest paring(9), particularly when Destiel supporters frequently campaign for the recognition of their paring online and during conventions, confronting producers on their refusal to embrace the Destiel paring but continuing to tease fans with homoerotic subtext anyway(10). This has often resulted in ire, not just directed at Destiel shippers but also at Castiel (and by extension, Misha Collins, the actor). This character has seen the formulation of such groups as the “SPN Silent Majority,” established at the end of the show’s seventh season in 2012 by fans who felt that the writing quality on Supernatural had declined and that the addition of Castiel (as well as other supporting characters) robbed “the emotional resonance and quality” (SPN Silent Majority 2012a) of the show. These Castiel anti-fans believe the show should be grounded in the relationship between the Winchester brothers, rather than those with other supporting characters (in particular, Castiel, whose friendship with Dean forms an integral part of the show’s story arc in later seasons). Although SPN Silent Majority’s strategy involved writing to the show’s producers, studio and network, as well as directly tweeting Supernatural’s executive producers and writers, the campaign was linked to a “I hate Misha Collins Day” movement. Anonymous messages were left on Supernatural fans’ Tumblr blogs announcing an organized effort to vocalize and share the hate by tweeting the CW, the network’s publicist, and the show’s producers, calling for Collins (Castiel) to be removed permanently from the show. In retaliation, the actor’s fans organized a “We Love Misha” countermovement and reported a suspected Twitter account for spreading hate speech(11). As the Twitter hate campaign caught the attention of several Internet-based entertainment websites(12), SPN Silent Majority, who was accused of organizing the actions, declared the campaign to be a hoax spread by Destiel shippers to subvert their campaign to restore the show to its original focus on the brothers:
We’ve seen over and over again how determined one group of fans on one side of the ship war is trying to pull us into their trenches. ... After a week of these attacks, our theory is that a handful of fans are trying to hold parts of the fandom in a chokehold have been proven true. These are very dirty tactics and have no place in a community. [SPN Silent Majority 2012b]
The attention to the “I Hate Misha Collins Day” brought on by the reports on Internet-based entertainment sites and fans tweeting the actors directly also caught the attention of several cast members, such as Jim Beaver (Bobby Singer) and Richard Speight, Jr. (The Trickster/Gabriel), who, along with Collins, tweeted in response to the fans’ action of spreading hate (Beaver #1, #2, #3, #4; Speight #1; Collins #1).
Alice Marwick and danah boyd argue that part of Twitter’s appeal for fans is the perception that fans get direct access to celebrities and are able to interact with them: “Famous people mention fans to perform connection and availability, give back to loyal followers, and manage their popularity” (Markwick and boyd 2011, 145). The proliferation and immediacy of the medium also makes it a good tool for fans to organize campaigns, as both the “I Hate Misha Collins” and “We Love Misha” movements make Twitter their main platform for spreading the hate (and love). The media industry’s presence on the platform -- the CW network, its publicity department, Supernatural’s producers, and many of the show’s regular and recurring cast members -- makes Twitter a convenient space in which frustrated fans can air their grievances. In this case, Twitter is also used to counteract the anti-fan campaign to have Collins (Castiel) fired, as well as to call out the fan faction that is unhappy about his inclusion to the cast.
By tweeting the cast members directly and informing them of the hate some fan faction were determined to spread, fans were highlighting the hate to others who may have no knowledge of the campaign previously, potentially inciting interfactional hate within the Supernatural fandom as fans rushed to defend the show, its producers, and cast members. The hate campaign towards Misha Collins (Castiel) exemplifies the complex makeup of fan identity, whereby hate is very intricately linked to love. SPN Silent Majority’s campaign, it can be argued, stems from altruism: to return the show to its original emphasis (i.e., the brothers), thus calling for the exclusion of, or reduced screen time for, other characters whom they see as a threat and impediment to the advancement of the original storyline and, more important, the brothers’ relationship. In this case, it can be argued that fans adopted the strategies of anti-fandom to try and sway media producers to support their readings of the text. The actions of the Castiel haters resemble the definition of anti-fans advanced by Theodoropoulou (2007), whereby the fan becomes an anti-fan of the object (in this case, the character and, by extension, the actor) that threatens their love of the source text.
Collins’ tweet above could be interpreted as a way of telling anti-fans that his position in the show is secure and that the hate campaigns would not affect him in any way (i.e., the fans are powerless). Having said that, despite the public rebuttal of the hate campaign by the actors, none of the fans involved were individually named or tagged (on Twitter) by the actors who commented on the issue.
[...]
Derek Johnson asserts that “fans attack and criticize media producers whom they feel threaten their meta-textual interests” (Johnson 2007, 298), but I argue that through social media, fan frustrations can also manifest toward actors who portray characters whom they hate and feel are taking attention away from other beloved characters or pose a threat to fans’ favorite pairings. With the proliferation of social media networks like Twitter, fans are increasingly taking their frustrations with storylines and characterizations directly to media producers and actors on the platform, utilizing official hashtags as well as organizing hate campaigns to make their feelings known.
But just as hate campaigns such as Supernatural fandom’s “I Hate Misha Collins Day” can be organized, or anti-fans of H50′s Catherine Rollins can appropriate the show’s hashtag to criticize her character, fans opposed to the hate can likewise bring the actor’s attention to the hate, as Supernatural fans did when they alerted the show’s actors active on Twitter to the Misha Collins hate campaign. Likewise, the actors can choose to respond directly (in the case of Michelle Borth) or indirectly (as in Misha Collins). Both cases show that fandom can very often shift into anti-fandom when fans feel their concerns and opinions about the show and its direction are not being taken seriously by those involved in the production. This isn’t to say that fans shifting emotions toward their favorite shows are anything new; rather, the case studies above indicate that social media networks like Twitter and Tumblr have enabled fans to organize hate and counterhate (as well as save-the-show) campaigns, and just as much as Twitter is used by fans to express their love toward a show, character, or actor, social media networks are also used to express frustration, dislike, and hate toward actors and producers. What is also distinct is that social media like Twitter provide a platform with which actors and producers can directly respond to these expressions of hate and love.
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4. For some fans, the inclusion of Castiel intervenes with the family dynamics of Sam and Dean, as Castiel was introduced as Dean’s savior, fans felt Sam was sidelined to develop Dean and Castiel’s connection and friendship.
5. The show also has an active offline fandom that centers on conventions (with the first Supernatural-centered convention occurring in Chicago in 2007) in various cities across North America, as well as in Europe, Australia, and South America. These conventions occur throughout the year and often have cast attendance. A collection of some Supernatural fan fiction has also moved to the website Archive of Our Own (https://archiveofourown.org) which, as of May 2014, stores close to seventy thousand stories (with over twenty-five thousand of those stories featuring the slash pairing Destiel), while the website Fanfiction (www.fanfiction.net) has around ninety-four thousand stories.
6. Catherine Tosenberger argues that Supernatural’s format alludes to to classic male buddy series like Starsky and Hutch, and “the fact that Sam and Dean are brothers in no way detracts from the slashy vibe. In fact, as brothers, they are given a pass for displays of emotion that masculinity in our culture usually forbids, which intensifies the potential for queer readings” (Tosenberger 2008, para 1.2).
7. Supernatural Wiki (n.d.) has documented some of the earlier exchanges in the show that comment on the relationship between Dean and Castiel, including the reception of the pairing among producers and the cast. Misha Collins (Castiel) has also spoken at length in an interview about why he engages with fans on the topic with Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis (2014). Fans who want the pairing acknowledged as canon have accused the producers of “queerbaiting” -- a term, as described by the website Fanlore, used by fans to describe the “perceived attempt by canon creators ... to woo queer fans by introducing a character whose sexuality seems, early on, to be coded as something other than one hundred percent heterosexual (Fanlore, n.d.). For an example of this kind of discussion, which is a complicated issue that I do not have the space to get into here, see Veronika K. (2013).
8. “The Monster at the End of the Book” is by no means the only episode that features a representation of Supernatural’s fandom. In the course of the show’s airing history, six other episodes have referred to, or commented on, the show’s fanbase, represented through the recurring character of Becky.
9. I’m not suggesting here that fans who hate Castiel are immediately supporters of Wincest, Rather, there are also fans who felt that the inclusion of Castiel intervenes with the brothers’ story, specifically, that Sam’s characterization is often sacrificed for the development of Dean and Castiel.
10. A recent public confrontation among fans, anti-fans, and the producers can be seen during CW’s Supernatural promotion for the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con, which resulted in CW having to cancel the #AskSupernatural hashtag on Twitter. The incident was reported by Cruz (2014) and Romano (2014).
11. See, e.g., Sup3rnatural (n.d.) for an example of a “We Hate Misha Collins Day” declaration. Also see r/Supernatural (n.d.); and Wilken (2012).
12. In a possible separate lead-up to these events, threats toward Misha Collins were sent anonymously to various Castiel fans and Destiel shippers, intimating that the actor be set on fire. See r/Supernatural (n.d.); and Wilken (2012).
#acafandom#misha collins#fandom problems#from the archives#fandom wank#google books#broken base collection#long post
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10 Years Later, Here's How The Writers Strike Indelibly Changed TV
New Post has been published on https://writingguideto.com/must-see/10-years-later-heres-how-the-writers-strike-indelibly-changed-tv/
10 Years Later, Here's How The Writers Strike Indelibly Changed TV
In late 2007, “How I Met Your Mother” co-creator Craig Thomas faced an unusual situation. After penning the script for Episode 11 of the CBS comedy’s third season alongside fellow creator Carter Bays, he found himself handing off the pages they’d written. The scenes were to be filmed without his presence on set — or any of his writing staff, for that matter.
“We tried to get the script as tight and manageable as possible with the knowledge that there would be no writers on set to punch up any of the jokes or fix any of the words,” he explained. “At a certain time of the night, we just had to hit send and the script went to our producer and director and we said, ‘Have a great shoot week. We’ll be picketing outside of the lot.’”
Thomas and Bays were two of roughly 12,000 TV and film and television writers who were striking on behalf of the East and West unions of the Writers Guild of America, a walkout caused by stalled negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that all but ground scripted television like “HIMYM” to a halt in late 2007 and 2008. (Members of HuffPost’s union are represented by WGA East.)
The organizations were in the midst of negotiating a new three-year contract. But after the AMPTP, the trade association affiliated with corporations like CBS and NBCUniversal, failed to meet the demands of the guilds, writers embarked on a 100-day stalemate.
During that time, guild writers no longer took work. In terms of television, that meant there were no new scripted episodes available for the networks to air besides those commissioned before the strike. More than 60 TV shows shut down as a result, and ratings and ad sales plummeted. By December 2007, most scripted series were off the air and not set to return for months. The CW’s “Gossip Girl” and “One Tree Hill” faced shortened seasons; NBC’s “Heroes” only completed 11 episodes of the 24 expected for Season 2, and was off the air for nine months; the third season of Fox’s “Bones” was cut short as the show went on a four-month hiatus. Late-night programming all but disappeared (until hosts like Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert fought to return without writers citing the financial struggles of their non-writing staff), and award shows like the Golden Globes were canceled.
In total, the strike cost the state of California over $2 billion and 37,700 jobs, according to nonprofit economic think tank the Milken Institute.
For a show like “HIMYM,” the prospect of a lengthy pause was daunting.
“Everyone had to stop [working] and that was scary, as the show was just gaining some momentum,” Thomas said.
CBS Photo Archive via Getty Images
Neil Patrick Harris playing Barney Stinson on a 2008 episode of “How I Met Your Mother.”
But there were larger interests at stake.
Audiences used to watching movies in theaters and TV at designated times in their homes were getting acquainted with a new kind of viewing experience: streaming video. Industry experts at the time predicted that so-called “new media” content ― shows and movies distributed online or viewed on computers, cell phones and other devices ― would eventually supplant DVDs in terms of profits. (Spoiler alert: They did.)
Initially, the big studios ― MGM, Sony, Warner Bros. and Disney, among others ― took home most, if not all, of the profits of this “new media” content; the WGA had no formal agreement with the companies on how to compensate writers for this kind of online or on-demand distribution. So when it came time to renegotiate a contract in November 2007, this issue was key.
According to the WGA, the AMPTP began negotiations by offering paltry residuals for new media and expressed a desire to deny the guilds future jurisdiction over scripts written for the internet. And the group felt as though it had no choice but to strike.
“It was one of the most important strikes of the new century to date,” Lowell Peterson, executive director of the WGA East, told HuffPost. Although Peterson was not a part of the WGA East until after the strike ended, he was interviewing for the role of director during the walkout and was in communication with leadership throughout the entire process. He witnessed the picketing firsthand and considers the strike to be “the first major labor action of the digital age.”
“This was a bunch of employees confronting the impact of information technology and digital technology on their way of living, and that was something that resonated very deeply across the labor force and the labor movement,” he said.
The strike officially ended on Feb. 12, 2008. The guilds won a piece of digital revenues and established a percentage payment on the distributor’s gross, and shows like “HIMYM” resumed with their writing staff in tact.
“Our perception was that it was very successful,” Peterson explained. “That as a result of the strike, the guilds were able to win jurisdiction and residual payment terms that otherwise simply wouldn’t exist. It looked like a great victory.”
But, it wasn’t an easy road. Not only had writers been out of work, they’d returned to an industry indelibly changed by their fight.
Jeff Vespa via Getty Images
Entertainment news anchors Lara Spencer, Brooke Anderson, Jim Moret, Giuliana Rancic, Dayna Devon and Mary Hart at The 65th Annual Golden Globe Awards Announcement at the Beverly Hilton on Jan. 13, 2008, in Beverly Hills, California.
The Rising Tide Of Reality TV
While scripted television series were forced to take a hiatus during the strike, this was not the case for reality TV shows.
Once pre-strike commissioned episodes ran out and fictional series were on lockdown, broadcast and cable networks clamored for any original content they could find to fill their schedules. As a result, some industry watchdogs connect the writers strike with the boom of reality television, considering more than 100 unscripted shows ― from competition shows to dating shows to life improvement series ― either debuted or returned during that 2007-2008 season.
However, Eli Holzman, the current CEO of The Intellectual Property Corporation and the creator/developer behind series like “Project Greenlight,” “Undercover Boss” and “Project Runway,” has a slightly different take on the strike’s impact on reality TV. He believes the explosion of unscripted television in 2008 was a long time in the making.
“Nonscripted TV was on the march really from the early 2000s, with the advent of ‘Survivor,’ ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’ and ‘Big Brother,’” Holzman explained. “The genre came into its own and it mirrored the trajectory and growth of cable, and commissioning increased each year. Yes, the strike was one important factor in that. But to me, slightly less important than the growth of cable and the audience’s embrace of the genre.”
As Holzman described it, scripted television was in the doldrums beginning in the mid-aughts. Viewers, he said, were bored with the slog of too-similar sitcoms, cop dramas and medical shows. From 2005 to 2007, for example, “American Idol” reigned supreme while the high-rated “Grey’s Anatomy,” “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and “House” eventually slipped below “Dancing with the Stars.” According to Holzman, audiences craved a fresh start. Cue the rise in reality television projects, which hit their stride in the 2000s. They peaked in 2015, when 750 nonfiction programs (350 of them brand new) aired on cable.
“Suddenly, this genre — Oh my god, all these people are going to get left on an island with nothing and they have to vote each other off, and someone is going to win a million dollars? ― was new and different and we wanted new and different versus a copy of a copy of a copy,” Holzman said. “The strike is an easy moment to look at when suddenly we all became aware of a change that was going on that maybe we hadn’t noticed before. But that change was happening on its own.”
WGA East’s Peterson agrees with him.
“I would not say that reality TV was created by the writers strike. I would say that more people watched it because there was nothing else on,” he added, noting that reality TV was simply “the only alternative, other than reruns,” for networks to air in lieu of their regularly scheduled programming.
Still, Holzman admits the strike did help to advance certain reality programs. “Project Runway,” for instance, aired its fourth season from November 2007 to March 2008 and earned pretty solid ratings for Bravo. The finale roped in 6.1 million viewers in the 18-49 demo when Christian Siriano won. Later in 2008, Lifetime took over the series and ratings increased by nearly 30 percent. Episodes of NBC’s “Biggest Loser” moved from a one-hour slot to two in order to fill primetime space. CBS aired its first, and last, “Big Brother” winter season. “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” began its reign on E! “American Idol” capped off a historic season in May 2008 with 31.7 million finale viewers, helping Fox become America’s most-watched network for the first time ever.
“As the strike wore on, the [reality] business was robust,” Holzman reiterated. “As a typical Hollywood producer, I thought I was just really talented [Laughs]. I didn’t realize I was potentially riding a wave. I thought, ‘I’m so good at this! This is so easy!’ That was genuinely my impression, and I didn’t realize we were in the midst of what was going to be a boom.”o
Indeed, when guild writers returned to work, reality TV was no longer just a cloying trend. Thomas admitted that, as a scripted TV showrunner, it wasn’t easy to watch reality programs top the ratings week after week from there on out.
“I remember being really stressed out in the first couple of years of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ because we were losing to a reality show all the sudden,” Thomas recalled. “That show ‘Deal or No Deal’ was this huge sensation and we were like, ‘Oh man, we’re losing to suitcases of money being opened up!’”
Brian To via Getty Images
Eli Holzman.
The ‘Death’ Of The Baby Writer
There were other long-term effects of the strike, though, not just for veteran writers, but aspiring ones, too.
About 20 years ago ― a decade before the writers strike ― a handful of these promising writers’ assistants, or “baby writers” as they were sometimes called, were working with Holzman at Miramax Television on a Kevin Williamson project called “Wasteland.” The show, about a group of post-college pals, aired only three episodes in 1999 before ABC canceled it. But out of that particular wasteland came a crucial opportunity. Since the studio heads were still required to fulfill the 13-episode order for foreign buyers but no longer felt pressure to deliver top-level content, aspiring young writers were given the chance to pen the remaining scripts for the series.
“We were in a blowout game where you take the kids off the bench and you put them in because it doesn’t matter,” Holzman told HuffPost. “One of those writers’ assistants was Damon Lindelof, who would go on to create ‘Lost’ and has obviously had an extraordinary career. Here’s a voice that, because of that flourishing ecosystem, was able to be identified, nurtured and grown, and his writing was then brought to all of us: the audience.”
Unfortunately, the months of foot-dragging from AMPTP negotiators in 2007-2008 messed with that flourishing ecosystem, Holzman says, dismantling a once healthy community that fostered creators of all ranks.
“As the strike and the decline in commissioning wore on, the people who maybe had previously been a rung or two up the ladder were willing to take a job and come back at a lower level, a lower rate. If you’re running a show and have to staff it, you have the ability to hire a kid who’s promising but never done it before or someone who’s really competent and is going to take a pay cut to work at that level. You’re almost crazy not to hire that more seasoned person. So, that baby writer pathway into the business went away,” he said, “and that was tragic.”
Then-“baby writer” Nick Bernardone, however, was one of the lucky ones. “I got my first job as an office production assistant on ’30 Rock’ [in 2008] by literally walking into the office at the exact right time and asking if they needed someone. It was one in a million timing,” he told HuffPost. “The answer was something like, ‘Usually, this would be insane … but can you start tomorrow?’”
After working alongside the likes of Tina Fey, Bernardone went on to become a member of the writers’ room on her Netflix series, “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” He insists he wouldn’t have gotten the gig had he not worked similar jobs on shows like AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and Netflix’s “Bloodline” in the interim.
Thomas and Bays also entered the business relatively easily. They were hired as writers for David Letterman just a few months after graduating from Wesleyan University in 1997, well before the strike. And they opted to pay it forward.
“Through the run of ‘How I Met Your Mother,’ we promoted several of our writers’ assistants, mostly post-strike,” he said. “One of them was Matt Kuhn, who ended up being a writer on the show for the entire rest of the run after a couple of seasons as a writers’ assistant. We did the same thing with Craig Gerard and our personal assistant, Matt Zinman ― we promoted them to be full writers on the show for many years. And in the last couple seasons we promoted George Sloan.”
These days, Bernardone, who’s been nominated for four Emmy awards, believes breaking into the business is all about who’s willing to give you a slice of the pie.
“If someone likes an aspiring writer’s stuff, they’ll do their best to get them hired,” he said.
As unreliable as it might be, it’s a practice Holzman believes is necessary.
“It’s really important to nurture a new crop, a new generation of storytellers every year, because it takes a long time to get there and it takes a long time to learn your craft,” he said. “It’s like a bad year for grapes — in 10 years, we won’t have that vintage.”
Brent N. Clarke via Getty Images
Creators of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ Carter Bays (L) and Craig Thomas attend the 12th Annual New York Television Festival held at Helen Mills Theater on October 24, 2016 in New York City.
The Streaming Pathway To Prestige TV
Beyond the birth of the reality television boom and the increase in obstacles for up-and-coming writers, the strike ushered in an era that the guilds and industry insiders always expected: the era of streaming TV.
In 2007, Netflix was on an upswing. The company had launched in 1998 as a mail-order competitor to the then-popular but ultimately terminal Blockbuster, which rented out VHS tapes, DVDs and video games to the masses largely via brick-and-mortar stores. By 2005, 35,000 different films were available through Netflix’s subscription service; they reportedly shipped out 1 million DVDs every day. But soon enough, Netflix went the way of the internet, allowing its subscribers to browse through and watch films and shows by streaming them straight to their devices. By 2008, it had already identified its video-on-demand platform as the future. By 2013, Netflix had 27.1 streaming customers in the U.S.
Today, the company has more than 100 million subscribers.
In Thomas’ eyes, the writers strike was a pivotal turning point for the digital revolution helmed by Netflix, Hulu and other platforms. When the WGA refused to negotiate a contract without new media residuals, it signaled to the AMPTP and the entertainment industry at large exactly how powerful streaming services could be.
“We had front-row seats to this huge change, and I credit ’How I Met Your Mother’s success a lot to the influence of Netflix,” Thomas said. “The popularity of Netflix started to get so much bigger and in those next couple of seasons, ‘How I Met Your Mother’ got onto Netflix and was very, very popular on there. [It] enabled all these new fans to binge the first few seasons and catch up and we saw ratings on live TV, on CBS, bump up because of this streaming service.
“That was part of what the strike was about: making sure writers were fairly compensated for work that wasn’t created for Netflix but got on Netflix,” Thomas continued. “Right away, we saw how important that side of things would become ― even with helping shows do better on network TV.”
And as platforms like Netflix grew and enhanced, so did original content, leading to, as Thomas put it, the rise of prestige TV. Sure, standout shows like “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” predated the walkout, but he believes writers had “firmer ground” to work on following the strike and were able to experiment with a plethora of innovative scripted series in ways they weren’t able to before ― knowing that they have the option of pitching their shows to multiple networks, premium channels and streaming sites.
“It’s certainly true that for a while people were more worried that what we did was hand the industry over to reality TV, and that definitely has not happened,” Peterson added. “What we’ve seen since the strike is an enormous explosion of high-budget scripted television. Reality definitely supplanted scripted for a while but in the 10 years since the strike, scripted has just expanded beyond anyone’s dreams.”
Were writers brainstorming the next decade of prestige TV while on the picket line years ago? Although Holzman doesn’t know how many successful TV scripts were created during on-strike downtime, he believes there were ideas brewing.
“It’s not likely they were stockpiling scripts for things that weren’t commissioned, but were they writing for themselves and creating things? I’m sure. Just because Picasso goes out of fashion, I don’t think he stops painting. Similarly, if there isn’t a market for writers work, I don’t think that means that they cease to write. I wouldn’t be surprised if some great stuff originated during that time period.”
Thomas can vouch for that.
“Everyone had in the back of their head, ‘What if this goes on a really long time? What if our show goes away after this?’ You never relax. You have to prove yourself and fight for it, so you take nothing for granted,” Thomas said. “So I think everybody had a little panicked thought about what to do next. ‘Should I be thinking about possible alternative shows or features for after the strike?’ It was definitely a moment.”
Today, the effects of on-demand viewing are still a major concern for the WGA East and West.
“On-demand viewing seems to be supplanting virtually everything else, and that has changed the way our members do their work,” Peterson said. “It’s changed the nature of the shows. No one is constrained to, ‘It’s 8 o’clock on Wednesday, I’m going to watch CBS now.’ People watch what they want, when they want, and that’s given our members enormous opportunities.”
Handout via Getty Images
Bruce Miller accepts the award for Best Television Series, Drama for Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” in January.
In the spring of 2017, WGA and AMPTP negotiations once again hit a snag over issues of compensation related to new media.
According to Peterson, there were a few things that drove it, including the fact that average TV earnings were increasing, due in part to things like decreased costs as the average television season became shorter. Tens of billions of profits were not being shared with writers.
“We had this enormous ‘yes’ vote authorizing the committee to call a strike,” Person said of the 2017 negotiations. “I think it was 96.3 percent yes, which is really an affirmation that members were ready to take action.”
After threatening a walkout, the AMPTP agreed to some of the guilds’ demands, likely with knowledge of what another writers strike would do to its industry. The guilds made gains across the board, added funding to their health plan and increases in subscription TV residuals, high-budget SVOD residuals, and, for the first time ever, residuals for comedy-variety writers in Pay TV. Now, writers for late-night and shows like “SNL” could see payment for content that’s re-aired on subscription sites or the internet. The unions also pushed to restructure compensation terms for writers of shorter seasons, making sure creators saw a piece of the studios’ profits.
“The Writers Guilds East and West are committed to the possibility of striking if that’s what it takes to win gains for our members, and we make sure that’s clear to the AMPTP when we sit down with them,” Peterson said. “The studios and networks know that we mean it and will do it if necessary, and that’s a lesson from the 2007-2008 strike.”
Holzman, for one, is glad another strike didn’t happen.
“The macro feeling across the industry was a strike will be bad because if we’re looking at leisure activity and how people are spending their leisure time. Television has competitors in a way it never had before in the form of the internet and mobile,” Holzman said.
“We’ve seen, and continue to see, an enormous migration of advertising dollars out of proper television — cable, broadcast and otherwise — and onto the web,” he added. “There was a sense that a prolonged strike may result in the audience declining, which it has been anyway. Maybe if there wasn’t great TV being produced, maybe the audience wouldn’t come back. I think that was a collective fear shared by both the producers and the writers, which encouraged them to find common ground to avoid another strike.”
“It could’ve been quite bad,” he added.
Or good, if you consider the past.
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Comic book movies are more popular now than they have ever been before. For more than two decades, the on-screen adventures of fan-favorite superheroes have captivated audiences and garnered massive viewership. As many superhero movies as there are, it is no surprise that many actors have played more than one character. Maybe an actor's first outing isn't all that popular, so they try their hand at another character.
RELATED: DCEU: 10 Possible Villains For The Green Lantern Corps HBO Max Series
Maybe one character's journey has come to an end, and they are ready to begin another. Whatever the reason, fans love to point out when a familiar face appears in their favorite superhero movie. Some are well known like Ryan Reynold's transition from the Emerald Knight to the Merc with a Mouth, but others aren't as obvious to the masses.
10 Chris Evans - Human Torch/Captain America
Chris Evans is perhaps best known as the MCU's Star Spangled Man, but Steve Rogers is not his first Marvel role. In the 2005 Fantastic Four movie and its sequel, Chris portrayed a much less mature Johnny Storm (aka The Human Torch). These movies weren't the box office smashes Fox had come to expect with the X-Men series, but they still have their fans even to this day.
Chris was able to don the shield as Captain America, and it goes without saying this was a much more successful role for Evans. Fans will forever see Chris as Cap, but there are still a few who hear his name and want to shout, "Flame On!"
9 Josh Brolin - Thanos/Cable
While most actors have a few years in between their various hero roles, Josh Brolin's was practically at the same time. While fans were anxiously awaiting to see the conclusion of the Infinity Saga, they only had to wait to see Josh again for about a month. Playing a much different character, Brolin portrayed Cable in Deadpool 2.
RELATED: Marvel: 10 Strangest Friendships In Deadpool Comics
A far cry from the Titan, Cable was on a mission to prevent the death of his wife and daughter, and forms an uneasy alliance with Deadpool. Many fans are shocked to learn Thanos and Cable are one and the same, but seeing the angry grimace on either character's face, it is clear they are the same guy.
8 Tom Hardy - Bane/Venom
Tom Hardy was unrecognizable as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. Even though the movie is only about ten years old, fans still view him as one of the best versions of the character, and one of the most imitated.
This hasn't stopped Tom from stepping into the Marvel universe, however, portraying classic Spider-Man baddie Venom in his first solo movie. Being played as more of an anti-hero, Tom's version of Venom has been better received than the portrayal from Spider-Man 3 back in 2007. With an upcoming sequel gaining fan praise, it seems it will take no time at all for Tom Hardy's name to be synonymous with Venom.
7 Michael Keaton - Batman/Vulture
Arguably the most iconic Batman is Michael Keaton's take on the character in the 1989 film and its sequel. This film spawned the incredibly popular animated series and made mainstream audiences take the Caped Crusader seriously again. Decades later, Keaton portrayed another ariel creature when he played Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
RELATED: The Flash: 5 Reasons Michael Keaton's Return As Bruce Wayne Is Great (& 5 Why It's Not)
Fans and critics alike praised Keaton's role as the villain, and are looking forward to seeing him return in Morbius and beyond. As many times as he plays Vulture, however, he will have a hard time escaping the role that so many people see him as. With his return in the upcoming Flash film, it doesn't seem he is too keen on escaping it regardless.
6 Ben Affleck - Daredevil/Batman
With the immense success of Sam Rami's Spider-Man in 2002, the modern comic book movie was in full swing. Fox wanted to match this success with the Marvel characters they owned, one of which was Daredevil. The 2003 film starred Ben Affleck in the titular role, and fans were less than pleased. While the movie has its fans, his role as Batman years later seemed to be much better received.
RELATED: 10 Ways Daredevil Hides His Secret identity
While both roles have their critics, Batman is undoubtedly the better role. The three times he has played the character will go down as an enjoyable version of the Dark Knight, which is more than many people can say about Daredevil.
5 Willem Defoe - Green Goblin/Vulko
One of the biggest advantages of Sam Rami's Spider-Man was Willem Defoe as Norman Osborne/Green Goblin. Defoe's goofy turn as the villain instantly struck a chord with fans and is still praised to this day. While not as major a role as Goblin, his performance as Vulko in Aquaman stood out among some of the others in the film.
Defoe was much more reserved this time around, which is a much different method than his over-the-top evilness of Green Goblin. As of yet, he hasn't had much to do in the DCEU, but fans are hopeful to see Defoe's return in some capacity on the land of Atlantis.
4 Michael B. Jordan - Human Torch/Killmonger
When Fox rebooted Fantastic Four in 2015, fans were less than receptive. The movie was heavily criticized for various reasons, but even the harshest critics praise Michael B. Jordan as Human Torch. In a parallel to Chris Evans before him, Jordan got a second chance at being a Marvel star when he portrayed Black Panther villain, Erik Killmonger.
RELATED: MCU: 5 Scenes That Show Captain America & Black Panther Are Real Friends (& 5 Comic Fans Wish They Saw)
The film received huge praise for the performances, with Jordan also standing in this role. This is a testament to not only a great character, but also a great actor who can leave an impact, even when surrounded by such talent.
3 Jared Leto - Joker/Morbius
Fans are split on Jared Leto's interpretation as Joker. Love him or hate him, most agree he at least turned in a unique performance that makes the character his own. With the character's inclusion in Zack Snyder's Justice League, fans may not have seen the last of this version of the Joker.
Joining the long line of actors who have crossed between DC and Marvel, Jared Leto has nabbed the title role in Sony's Morbius film that supposedly connects to Venom and the MCU Spider-Man films. The film has been delayed due to COVID, so fans have yet to see Leto's performance as the Spider-Man villain, although reactions to the trailer show that it may be better than his turn as the Clown Prince Of Crime.
2 Brandon Routh - Superman/The Atom
After Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, Christopher Reeve left some big tights to fill as the Man Of Steel. The first actor to take this responsibility was Brandon Routh in 2006's Superman Returns. While the movie itself had mixed reviews, Brandon Routh was mostly praised for his role as Superman. He paid tribute to Christopher Reeve while giving his own interpretation.
RELATED: Every Show In the Arrowverse, Ranked According To IMDb
While only appearing in one movie, Routh was given another chance to shine as a lesser-known DC character, The Atom, in The CW's Arrowverse. This role proved more successful, and he even had a chance to play Superman once more in the Crisis On Infinite Earths crossover event.
1 Ryan Reynolds - Green Lantern/Deadpool
Perhaps the best-known example of an actor playing more than one hero is Ryan Reynolds. Reynolds portrayed the titular character in the 2011 Green Lantern film, and it has had more than its fair share of criticisms. Ryan Reynolds was a famous fan of the Marvel character, Deadpool, and jumped at the opportunity to play him in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
This version of the character is infamous in the comic community, and Ryan was finally able to do the character justice in the 2016 solo film. Deadpool quickly became one of the most successful R-rated comedies in history and cemented Ryan Reynolds as a superhero legend.
NEXT: 10 Strangest Romances In Deadpool Comics
Ryan Reynolds & 9 Other Actors Who Have Played More Than One Superhero (Or Villain) from https://ift.tt/33JYj0P
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anyway, fun fact, whenever any of you send in song recs that i really like (which is practically every time if we’re being really honest, hahaha) i typically save the songs in my “gg tunes” folder, which i initially only created for the soundtrack but now houses my favourite songs from the soundtrack as well as songs i would never have found without recs sent to this blog. it’s something i appreciate so much!!
#personal#being able to connect with people over a cw show from 2007 is such a strange feeling#but it's a nice one and i really like that it's something that running this blog has allowed me to experience#im emotional LKFGKLHGKLHGFKLH
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A Connection with Animals & More Paranormal Stories
Below is a blast from the past, from the HPI dusty case files. Let me blow the cobwebs away and sit back and enjoy these stories.
It seems like nowadays everyone is interested in the paranormal. All I have to do is open up my TV Guide and see all of the true and fictional TV shows on the paranormal. Here are some of the shows that are listed: Monster Quest, UFO Files – History Channel; Sci-Fi Channel has Destiny Truth and Ghosthunters aka T.A.P.S.; Most Haunted – Travel Channel; Medium – NBC; Lisa Williams – Life Among the Dead – Lifetime; Rescue Mediums – W Network; A Haunting – Discovery Channel; Saving Grace – TNT; Bio Channel has Ghostly Encounters, Haunted History, Psychic Investigators and Dead Famous; Psychic Detectives – Court TV; Supernatural – CW TV; New Amsterdam – Fox and now the upcoming Paranormal State by A&E. Everyone wants to believe in the afterlife. Everyone, including myself wants to believe that there is more than the life we have here on this world. We all seek immortality, if we admit it or not. I, for one have sought out the truth and discovered the truth. I know that there is such a thing as energy entities, as I would like to call them, instead of calling them ghosts, for I saw my first full body apparition in a home in Marysville. A lot of people have their own paranormal experiences, it may not have anything to do with hauntings or seeing a ghost. It may have to do with something that is on the dimensional level or frequency that energy entities may frequent. Let’s take for example my interview with Neko Wolf (nickname – not her real name). She calls herself an ‘animal whisperer’.
Neko at a young age knew she had a connection with animals. It wasn’t a connection that we may all experience with animals, but it was more a psychic connection. She feels she has an animal spirit inside her and one of her amazing abilities that she performed in front of me was the ability of imitating the sounds of snakes, dogs, cats, mules, a variety of birds and even a Cheetah! I was shocked to hear these realistic animal sounds coming from the throat of this young lady. Her story had me hooked. She even makes claims to making contact with real nymphs from the trees or the forest. She always felt like she had an animal spirit inside her and she also had the feeling of Deja Vu in regard to having a past life as a Bastet priestess from Egypt. She discovered her unusual powers when she was able to communicate with her family pet, a cat. She has always felt a strong bonding with all animals and nature itself. A bird once came to her and communicated that it had a broken wing and needed help, it perched on her shoulder and took up to her immediately. One of her other abilities is the body movements of horses from trotting to standing, with these horse like body movements, she is able to further her communication with horses. Emily is an amazing young lady and with the world of the paranormal, anything is possible, her story was consistent and very fascinating.
Being a paranormal investigator, I have opened the door to everything paranormal and I am willing to learn from my experiences and accept stories like Neko’s story with an open mind. But, besides hearing stories, I am willing to investigate paranormal activity with a scientific approach. That approach happens Friday, December 7, 2007. I am heading over to a residential haunting on F Street in Sacramento at 1900 hours. Shannon McCabe, President of HPI, brought this email to my attention:
Nicole Smith, occupant of this home writes:
“Hi, my name is Nicole. I have recently moved into my first apartment (about 4 months ago) on my own downtown. I live at XXX F Street. I know that this area is known to have a lot of activity. Recently a friend has been staying with me and we both have been having strange things happening. Andy (my friend staying with me) has been having reoccurring dream about a man coming around the corner from the kitchen and slowly walking up to her. The past few dreams the man has been getting closer and last time it told her that doesn’t want us to stay here. I live in a house that is split into 4 apartments. We have started taking pictures around the house and found what we think are orbs. We have been pretty apprehensive about calling them orbs, because we know that most orbs end up being dust. I will let you know that around Halloween time we had a séance, we did have some weird light changes. We video taped it and would be happy to provide you with a copy. Since then I have become uncomfortable alone in my house. I think that I am freaking myself out because of all the bad things that you hear. We hear lots of noises since we live downstairs we hear everything upstairs and we have gotten pretty good at distinguishing what noises are which, but we have one that we cannot figure out. The noise is a tapping that comes from the right hand corner of our living room. The tapping noise will last about 15-30 seconds at a time and about every couple of days this occurs. We have checked the exterior or the building and can’t figure it out. I apologize that I am all over the place in relating this story, but I keep remembering things and wanting to give you as much info as possible. I have talked to the neighbors about everything that has been occurring in my home. The couple right above me has not had anything unusual happen to them, but their roommate says he sees things all the time. I don’t think that if there is anything harmful here, the other people in the home have been here for 6 years and had no issues and the time that I have been here nothing has threatened or tried to hurt either one of us. I am just curious and would like your opinion on if we do have something paranormal happening here. I am afraid to cleanse the house because if there is something here, I don’t what to aggravate anything. I am already on edge with the seance. I would love to hear back from you. My house is open to you if you would like to take a look around or if you have any questions please feel free to contact me via email or you can call at XXX.”
My HPI posse arrives. They are core paranormal investigator/scouts Cherie Vincent and Donna Reynolds. Tonight I am the lead investigator of this investigation. Before arriving at F Street, I stopped at the residence of Shannon McCabe to get a full briefing of what we might expect at this investigation. The equipment that we have at our disposal are: 1 video camera, 1 EMF Reader, 2 digital cameras, 2 Listen Up sound enhancers, 2 audio digital recorders, 1 pendalum, 1 set of dowsing rods.
While I started my interview with the occupant, Nicole Smith, I had Donna set up the audio digital recorders in the back rooms. Nicole tells me that she moved into this residence in mid-August of 2007. In September the paranormal activity commenced. Nicole started feeling uncomfortable in her new surroundings, she had this constant feeling of being watched. Cupboards were opening and closing, she would hear footsteps in the kitchen. Her roommate, Andy, saw a shadowy figure brush up against her. Andy could only describe it as a dark figure of a man. One of her friends that came over to visit, started feeling nauseous, then started getting a feeling of sadness. Her friend claims to be an empath and could feel the presence of a sad small child in the apartment. This home that Nicole lives in was split into 4 apartments in 1952. Exactly how old is the structure is anyone’s guess.
During our investigation, I took over 100 photographs and I wasn’t getting any pictures that I would consider paranormal. We investigated the huge basement underneath this apartment and I managed to photograph a zillion dust orbs. Donna was not communicating with any entity using her pendulum or her dowsing rods. The Listen Up Sound Enhancers picked up no audible voices from an unknown source. As the time past on, I finally managed to get some orb pictures in the main living room. We still need to analyze these shots to rule out dust. There was one unusual photograph that I took… As I positioned my camera towards the ceiling, I snapped one photo and there was a clear picture of the ceiling that reflected the light from my flash. I took another and an ominous shadow was now in that frame of picture. I snapped another and the shadow was gone. Was this the dark shadow of a man that Andy had witnessed? Why would a shadow be projected on the ceiling, when the flash should eliminate all shadows? This one photograph was questionable.
As I got home, I received a call from Deanna Jaxine Stinson and told her my results so far, and that I was still waiting for the EVP results from Cherie and Donna. Note: The EVP results will be placed at the end of this article.
After I got off the phone with Deanna, I received a call from Rebekah Stephenson from Arkansas. I talked about Rebekah aka Becka in my previous article. I discussed how she may have summoned a demon in her life through the use of a Ouija Board. In my studies of demonology, I told Rebekah to get baptized, she has never been baptized. I explained to her how to cleanse her home. I told her the proper way to dispose of an Ouija Board. She tossed her Ouija Board into a river. One of the dreams that she had before tossing her Ouija Board into the river, is that the demon was tossing her into the river. Now that she has disposed of the Ouija Board, cleansed the house and received a baptism, she has no more reoccurring nightmares of this demon. She thanked me profusely and said she owes me her life. That was a stellar compliment and I am glad that Rebekah came to me seeking assistance. Her story was unnerving when I first heard it. The tingles went up and down my spine and I felt like getting on the first plane to Arkansas to help her get over this ordeal. I kept my cell phone next to my bed in case she needed to call me and I would be able to walk her through any encounter that she would have with this demon. Rebekah is planning on marrying a Marine from Camp Pendleton, California. I told her when she does get married, to let me know, because I want to be there at her wedding. She impacted my life with her incredible encounter with a demon. Since Rebekah and I, have gone through this together, I have made a new friend in Arkansas.
By Paul Dale Roberts, HPI’s Esoteric Detective
Halo Paranormal Investigations – HPI International.
www.facebook.com/#!/groups/HPIinternational/
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10 Years Later, Here’s How The Writer’s Strike Indelibly Changed TV
Gabriela Landazuri/ HuffPost Images: Getty Images
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In late 2007, “How I Met Your Mother” co-creator Craig Thomas faced an unusual situation. After penning the script for Episode 11 of the CBS comedy’s third season alongside fellow creator Carter Bays, he found himself handing off the pages they’d written. The scenes were to be filmed without his presence on set — or any of his writing staff, for that matter.
“We tried to get the script as tight and manageable as possible with the knowledge that there would be no writers on set to punch up any of the jokes or fix any of the words,” he explained. “At a certain time of the night, we just had to hit send and the script went to our producer and director and we said, ‘Have a great shoot week. We’ll be picketing outside of the lot.’”
Thomas and Bays were two of roughly 12,000 TV and film and television writers who were striking on behalf of the East and West unions of the Writers Guild of America, a walkout caused by stalled negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that all but ground scripted television like “HIMYM” to a halt in late 2007 and 2008. (Members of HuffPost’s union are represented by WGA East.)
The organizations were in the midst of negotiating a new three-year contract. But after the AMPTP, the trade association affiliated with corporations like CBS and NBCUniversal, failed to meet the demands of the guilds, writers embarked on a 100-day stalemate.
During that time, guild writers no longer took work. In terms of television, that meant there were no new scripted episodes available for the networks to air besides those commissioned before the strike. More than 60 TV shows shut down as a result, and ratings and ad sales plummeted. By December 2007, most scripted series were off the air and not set to return for months. The CW’s “Gossip Girl” and “One Tree Hill” faced shortened seasons; NBC’s “Heroes” only completed 11 episodes of the 24 expected for Season 2, and was off the air for nine months; the third season of Fox’s “Bones” was cut short as the show went on a four-month hiatus. Late-night programming all but disappeared (until hosts like Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert fought to return without writers citing the financial struggles of their non-writing staff), and award shows like the Golden Globes were canceled.
In total, the strike cost the state of California over $2 billion and 37,700 jobs, according to nonprofit economic think tank the Milken Institute.
For a show like “HIMYM,” the prospect of a lengthy pause was daunting.
“Everyone had to stop [working] and that was scary, as the show was just gaining some momentum,” Thomas said.
CBS Photo Archive via Getty Images
Neil Patrick Harris playing Barney Stinson on a 2008 episode of "How I Met Your Mother."
But there were larger interests at stake.
Audiences used to watching movies in theaters and TV at designated times in their homes were getting acquainted with a new kind of viewing experience: streaming video. Industry experts at the time predicted that so-called “new media” content ― shows and movies distributed online or viewed on computers, cell phones and other devices ― would eventually supplant DVDs in terms of profits. (Spoiler alert: They did.)
Initially, the big studios ― MGM, Sony, Warner Bros. and Disney, among others ― took home most, if not all, of the profits of this “new media” content; the WGA had no formal agreement with the companies on how to compensate writers for this kind of online or on-demand distribution. So when it came time to renegotiate a contract in November 2007, this issue was key.
According to the WGA, the AMPTP began negotiations by offering paltry residuals for new media and expressed a desire to deny the guilds future jurisdiction over scripts written for the internet.And the group felt as though it had no choice but to strike.
“It was one of the most important strikes of the new century to date,” Lowell Peterson, executive director of the WGA East, told HuffPost. Although Peterson was not a part of the WGA East until after the strike ended, he was interviewing for the role of director during the walkout and was in communication with leadership throughout the entire process. He witnessed the picketing firsthand and considers the strike to be “the first major labor action of the digital age.”
“This was a bunch of employees confronting the impact of information technology and digital technology on their way of living, and that was something that resonated very deeply across the labor force and the labor movement,” he said.
The strike officially ended on Feb. 12, 2008. The guilds won a piece of digital revenues and established a percentage payment on the distributor’s gross, and shows like “HIMYM” resumed with their writing staff in tact.
“Our perception was that it was very successful,” Peterson explained. “That as a result of the strike, the guilds were able to win jurisdiction and residual payment terms that otherwise simply wouldn’t exist. It looked like a great victory.”
But, it wasn’t an easy road. Not only had writers been out of work, they’d returned to an industry indelibly changed by their fight.
Jeff Vespa via Getty Images
Entertainment news anchors Lara Spencer, Brooke Anderson, Jim Moret, Giuliana Rancic, Dayna Devon and Mary Hart at The 65th Annual Golden Globe Awards Announcement at the Beverly Hilton on Jan. 13, 2008, in Beverly Hills, California.
The Rising Tide Of Reality TV
While scripted television series were forced to take a hiatus during the strike, this was not the case for reality TV shows.
Once pre-strike commissioned episodes ran out and fictional series were on lockdown, broadcast and cable networks clamored for any original content they could find to fill their schedules. As a result, some industry watchdogs connect the writers strike with the boom of reality television, considering more than 100 unscripted shows ― from competition shows to dating shows to life improvement series ― either debuted or returned during that 2007-2008season.
However,Eli Holzman, the current CEO of The Intellectual Property Corporation and the creator/developer behind series like “Project Greenlight,” “Undercover Boss” and “Project Runway,” has a slightly different take on the strike’s impact on reality TV. He believes the explosion of unscripted television in 2008 was a long time in the making.
“Nonscripted TV was on the march really from the early 2000s, with the advent of ‘Survivor,’ ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’ and ‘Big Brother,’” Holzman explained. “The genre came into its own and it mirrored the trajectory and growth of cable, and commissioning increased each year. Yes, the strike was one important factor in that. But to me, slightly less important than the growth of cable and the audience’s embrace of the genre.”
As Holzman described it, scripted television was in the doldrums beginning in the mid-aughts. Viewers, he said, were bored with the slog of too-similar sitcoms, cop dramas and medical shows. From 2005 to 2007, for example, “American Idol” reigned supreme while the high-rated “Grey’s Anatomy,” “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and “House” eventually slipped below “Dancing with the Stars.” According to Holzman, audiences craved a fresh start. Cue the rise in reality television projects, which hit their stride in the 2000s. They peaked in 2015, when 750 nonfiction programs (350 of them brand new) aired on cable.
“Suddenly, this genre — Oh my god, all these people are going to get left on an island with nothing and they have to vote each other off, and someone is going to win a million dollars? ― was new and different and we wanted new and different versus a copy of a copy of a copy,” Holzman said. “The strike is an easy moment to look at when suddenly we all became aware of a change that was going on that maybe we hadn’t noticed before. But that change was happening on its own.”
WGA East’s Peterson agrees with him.
“I would not say that reality TV was created by the writers strike. I would say that more people watched it because there was nothing else on,” he added, noting that reality TV was simply “the only alternative, other than reruns,” for networks to air in lieu of their regularly scheduled programming.
Still, Holzman admits the strike did help to advance certain reality programs. “Project Runway,” for instance, aired its fourth season from November 2007 to March 2008 and earned pretty solid ratings for Bravo. The finale roped in 6.1 million viewers in the 18-49 demo when Christian Siriano won. Later in 2008, Lifetime took over the series and ratings increased by nearly 30 percent. Episodes of NBC’s “Biggest Loser” moved from a one-hour slot to two in order to fill primetime space. CBS aired its first, and last, “Big Brother” winter season. “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” began its reign on E! “American Idol” capped off a historic season in May 2008 with 31.7 million finale viewers, helping Fox become America’s most-watched network for the first time ever.
“As the strike wore on, the [reality] business was robust,” Holzman reiterated. “As a typical Hollywood producer, I thought I was just really talented [Laughs]. I didn’t realize I was potentially riding a wave. I thought, ‘I’m so good at this! This is so easy!’ That was genuinely my impression, and I didn’t realize we were in the midst of what was going to be a boom.”o
Indeed, when guild writers returned to work, reality TV was no longer just a cloying trend. Thomas admitted that, as a scripted TV showrunner, it wasn’t easy to watch reality programs top the ratings week after week from there on out.
“I remember being really stressed out in the first couple of years of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ because we were losing to a reality show all the sudden,” Thomas recalled. “That show ‘Deal or No Deal’ was this huge sensation and we were like, ‘Oh man, we’re losing to suitcases of money being opened up!’”
Brian To via Getty Images
Eli Holzman.
The ‘Death’ Of The Baby Writer
There were other long-term effects of the strike, though, not just for veteran writers, but aspiring ones, too.
About 20 years ago ― a decade before the writers strike ― a handful of these promising writers’ assistants, or “baby writers” as they were sometimes called, were working with Holzman at Miramax Television on a Kevin Williamson project called “Wasteland.” The show, about a group of post-college pals, aired only three episodes in 1999 before ABC canceled it. But out of that particular wasteland came a crucial opportunity. Since the studio heads were still required to fulfill the 13-episode order for foreign buyers but no longer felt pressure to deliver top-level content, aspiring young writers were given the chance to pen the remaining scripts for the series.
“We were in a blowout game where you take the kids off the bench and you put them in because it doesn’t matter,” Holzman told HuffPost. “One of those writers’ assistants was Damon Lindelof, who would go on to create ‘Lost’ and has obviously had an extraordinary career. Here’s a voice that, because of that flourishing ecosystem, was able to be identified, nurtured and grown, and his writing was then brought to all of us: the audience.”
Unfortunately, the months of foot-dragging from AMPTP negotiators in 2007-2008 messed with that flourishing ecosystem, Holzman says, dismantling a once healthy community that fostered creators of all ranks.
“As the strike and the decline in commissioning wore on, the people who maybe had previously been a rung or two up the ladder were willing to take a job and come back at a lower level, a lower rate. If you’re running a show and have to staff it, you have the ability to hire a kid who’s promising but never done it before or someone who’s really competent and is going to take a pay cut to work at that level. You’re almost crazy not to hire that more seasoned person. So, that baby writer pathway into the business went away,” he said, “and that was tragic.”
Then-“baby writer” Nick Bernardone, however, was one of the lucky ones. “I got my first job as an office production assistant on ’30 Rock’ [in 2008]by literally walking into the office at the exact right time and asking if they needed someone. It was one in a million timing,” he told HuffPost. “The answer was something like, ‘Usually, this would be insane ... but can you start tomorrow?’”
After working alongside the likes of Tina Fey, Bernardone went on to become a member of the writers’ room on her Netflix series, “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” He insists he wouldn’t have gotten the gig had he not worked similar jobs on shows like AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and Netflix’s “Bloodline” in the interim.
Thomas and Bays also entered the business relatively easily. They were hired as writers for David Letterman just a few months after graduating from Wesleyan University in 1997, well before the strike. And they opted to pay it forward.
“Through the run of ‘How I Met Your Mother,’ we promoted several of our writers’ assistants, mostly post-strike,” he said. “One of them was Matt Kuhn, who ended up being a writer on the show for the entire rest of the run after a couple of seasons as a writers’ assistant. We did the same thing with Craig Gerard and our personal assistant, Matt Zinman ― we promoted them to be full writers on the show for many years. And in the last couple seasons we promoted George Sloan.”
These days, Bernardone, who’s been nominated for four Emmy awards, believes breaking into the business is all about who’s willing to give you a slice of the pie.
“If someone likes an aspiring writer’s stuff, they’ll do their best to get them hired,” he said.
As unreliable as it might be, it’s a practice Holzman believes is necessary.
“It’s really important to nurture a new crop, a new generation of storytellers every year, because it takes a long time to get there and it takes a long time to learn your craft,” he said. “It’s like a bad year for grapes — in 10 years, we won’t have that vintage.”
Brent N. Clarke via Getty Images
Creators of 'How I Met Your Mother' Carter Bays (L) and Craig Thomas attend the 12th Annual New York Television Festival held at Helen Mills Theater on October 24, 2016 in New York City.
The Streaming Pathway To Prestige TV
Beyond the birth of the reality television boom and the increase in obstacles for up-and-coming writers, the strike ushered in an era that the guilds and industry insiders always expected: the era of streaming TV.
In 2007, Netflix was on an upswing. The company had launched in 1998 as a mail-order competitor to the then-popular but ultimately terminal Blockbuster, which rented out VHS tapes, DVDs and video games to the masses largely via brick-and-mortar stores. By 2005, 35,000 different films were available through Netflix’ssubscription service; they reportedly shipped out 1 million DVDs every day. But soon enough, Netflix went the way of the internet, allowing its subscribers to browse through and watch films and shows by streaming them straight to their devices. By 2008, it had already identified its video-on-demand platform as the future. By 2013, Netflix had 27.1 streaming customers in the U.S.
Today, the company has more than 100 million subscribers.
In Thomas’ eyes, the writers strike was a pivotal turning point for the digital revolution helmed by Netflix, Hulu and other platforms. When the WGA refused to negotiate a contract without new media residuals, it signaled to the AMPTP and the entertainment industry at large exactly how powerful streaming services could be.
“We had front-row seats to this huge change, and I credit ’How I Met Your Mother’s success a lot to the influence of Netflix,” Thomas said. “The popularity of Netflix started to get so much bigger and in those next couple of seasons, ‘How I Met Your Mother’ got onto Netflix and was very, very popular on there. [It] enabled all these new fans to binge the first few seasons and catch up and we saw ratings on live TV, on CBS, bump up because of this streaming service.
“That was part of what the strike was about: making sure writers were fairly compensated for work that wasn’t created for Netflix but got on Netflix,” Thomas continued. “Right away, we saw how important that side of things would become ― even with helping shows do better on network TV.”
And as platforms like Netflix grew and enhanced, so did original content, leading to, as Thomas put it, the rise of prestige TV. Sure, standout shows like “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” predated the walkout, but he believes writers had “firmer ground” to work on following the strike and were able to experiment with a plethora of innovative scripted series in ways they weren’t able to before ― knowing that they have the option of pitching their shows to multiple networks, premium channels and streaming sites.
“It’s certainly true that for a while people were more worried that what we did was hand the industry over to reality TV, and that definitely has not happened,” Peterson added. “What we’ve seen since the strike is an enormous explosion of high-budget scripted television. Reality definitely supplanted scripted for a while but in the 10 years since the strike, scripted has just expanded beyond anyone’s dreams.”
Were writers brainstorming the next decade of prestige TV while on the picket line years ago? Although Holzman doesn’t know how many successful TV scripts were created during on-strike downtime, he believes there were ideas brewing.
“It’s not likely they were stockpiling scripts for things that weren’t commissioned, but were they writing for themselves and creating things? I’m sure. Just because Picasso goes out of fashion, I don’t think he stops painting. Similarly, if there isn’t a market for writers work, I don’t think that means that they cease to write. I wouldn’t be surprised if some great stuff originated during that time period.”
Thomas can vouch for that.
“Everyone had in the back of their head, ‘What if this goes on a really long time? What if our show goes away after this?’ You never relax. You have to prove yourself and fight for it, so you take nothing for granted,” Thomas said. “So I think everybody had a little panicked thought about what to do next. ‘Should I be thinking about possible alternative shows or features for after the strike?’ It was definitely a moment.”
Today, the effects of on-demand viewing are still a major concern for the WGA East and West.
“On-demand viewing seems to be supplanting virtually everything else, and that has changed the way our members do their work,” Peterson said. “It’s changed the nature of the shows. No one is constrained to, ‘It’s 8 o’clock on Wednesday, I’m going to watch CBS now.’ People watch what they want, when they want, and that’s given our members enormous opportunities.”
Handout via Getty Images
Bruce Miller accepts the award for Best Television Series, Drama for Hulu's "The Handmaid's Tale" in January.
In the spring of 2017, WGA and AMPTP negotiations once again hit a snag over issues of compensation related to new media.
According to Peterson, there were a few things that drove it, including the fact that average TV earnings were increasing, due in part to things like decreased costs as the average television season became shorter. Tens of billions of profits were not being shared with writers.
“We had this enormous ‘yes’ vote authorizing the committee to call a strike,” Person said of the 2017 negotiations. “I think it was 96.3 percent yes, which is really an affirmation that members were ready to take action.”
After threatening a walkout, the AMPTP agreed to some of the guilds’ demands, likely with knowledge of what another writers strike would do to its industry. The guilds made gains across the board, added funding to their health plan and increases in subscription TV residuals, high-budget SVODresiduals, and, for the first time ever, residuals for comedy-variety writers in Pay TV. Now, writers for late-night and shows like “SNL” could see payment for content that’s re-aired on subscription sites or the internet.The unions also pushed to restructure compensation terms for writers of shorter seasons, making sure creators saw a piece of the studios’ profits.
“The Writers Guilds East and West are committed to the possibility of striking if that’s what it takes to win gains for our members, and we make sure that’s clear to the AMPTP when we sit down with them,” Peterson said. “The studios and networks know that we mean it and will do it if necessary, and that’s a lesson from the 2007-2008 strike.”
Holzman, for one, is glad another strike didn’t happen.
“The macro feeling across the industry was a strike will be bad because if we’re looking at leisure activity and how people are spending their leisure time. Television has competitors in a way it never had before in the form of the internet and mobile,” Holzman said.
“We’ve seen, and continue to see, an enormous migration of advertising dollars out of proper television — cable, broadcast and otherwise — and onto the web,” he added. “There was a sense that a prolonged strike may result in the audience declining, which it has been anyway. Maybe if there wasn’t great TV being produced, maybe the audience wouldn’t come back. I think that was a collective fear shared by both the producers and the writers, which encouraged them to find common ground to avoid another strike.”
“It could’ve been quite bad,” he added.
Or good, if you consider the past.
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Leigh Blickley
Senior Entertainment Reporter, HuffPost
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10 Years Later, Here’s How The Writer’s Strike Indelibly Changed TV
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10 Years Later, Here’s How The Writer’s Strike Indelibly Changed TV
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In late 2007, “How I Met Your Mother” co-creator Craig Thomas faced an unusual situation. After penning the script for Episode 11 of the CBS comedy’s third season alongside fellow creator Carter Bays, he found himself handing off the pages they’d written. The scenes were to be filmed without his presence on set — or any of his writing staff, for that matter.
“We tried to get the script as tight and manageable as possible with the knowledge that there would be no writers on set to punch up any of the jokes or fix any of the words,” he explained. “At a certain time of the night, we just had to hit send and the script went to our producer and director and we said, ‘Have a great shoot week. We’ll be picketing outside of the lot.’”
Thomas and Bays were two of roughly 12,000 TV and film and television writers who were striking on behalf of the East and West unions of the Writers Guild of America, a walkout caused by stalled negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that all but ground scripted television like “HIMYM” to a halt in late 2007 and 2008. (Members of HuffPost’s union are represented by WGA East.)
The organizations were in the midst of negotiating a new three-year contract. But after the AMPTP, the trade association affiliated with corporations like CBS and NBCUniversal, failed to meet the demands of the guilds, writers embarked on a 100-day stalemate.
During that time, guild writers no longer took work. In terms of television, that meant there were no new scripted episodes available for the networks to air besides those commissioned before the strike. More than 60 TV shows shut down as a result, and ratings and ad sales plummeted. By December 2007, most scripted series were off the air and not set to return for months. The CW’s “Gossip Girl” and “One Tree Hill” faced shortened seasons; NBC’s “Heroes” only completed 11 episodes of the 24 expected for Season 2, and was off the air for nine months; the third season of Fox’s “Bones” was cut short as the show went on a four-month hiatus. Late-night programming all but disappeared (until hosts like Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert fought to return without writers citing the financial struggles of their non-writing staff), and award shows like the Golden Globes were canceled.
In total, the strike cost the state of California over $2 billion and 37,700 jobs, according to nonprofit economic think tank the Milken Institute.
For a show like “HIMYM,” the prospect of a lengthy pause was daunting.
“Everyone had to stop [working] and that was scary, as the show was just gaining some momentum,” Thomas said.
CBS Photo Archive via Getty Images
Neil Patrick Harris playing Barney Stinson on a 2008 episode of "How I Met Your Mother."
But there were larger interests at stake.
Audiences used to watching movies in theaters and TV at designated times in their homes were getting acquainted with a new kind of viewing experience: streaming video. Industry experts at the time predicted that so-called “new media” content ― shows and movies distributed online or viewed on computers, cell phones and other devices ― would eventually supplant DVDs in terms of profits. (Spoiler alert: They did.)
Initially, the big studios ― MGM, Sony, Warner Bros. and Disney, among others ― took home most, if not all, of the profits of this “new media” content; the WGA had no formal agreement with the companies on how to compensate writers for this kind of online or on-demand distribution. So when it came time to renegotiate a contract in November 2007, this issue was key.
According to the WGA, the AMPTP began negotiations by offering paltry residuals for new media and expressed a desire to deny the guilds future jurisdiction over scripts written for the internet.And the group felt as though it had no choice but to strike.
“It was one of the most important strikes of the new century to date,” Lowell Peterson, executive director of the WGA East, told HuffPost. Although Peterson was not a part of the WGA East until after the strike ended, he was interviewing for the role of director during the walkout and was in communication with leadership throughout the entire process. He witnessed the picketing firsthand and considers the strike to be “the first major labor action of the digital age.”
“This was a bunch of employees confronting the impact of information technology and digital technology on their way of living, and that was something that resonated very deeply across the labor force and the labor movement,” he said.
The strike officially ended on Feb. 12, 2008. The guilds won a piece of digital revenues and established a percentage payment on the distributor’s gross, and shows like “HIMYM” resumed with their writing staff in tact.
“Our perception was that it was very successful,” Peterson explained. “That as a result of the strike, the guilds were able to win jurisdiction and residual payment terms that otherwise simply wouldn’t exist. It looked like a great victory.”
But, it wasn’t an easy road. Not only had writers been out of work, they’d returned to an industry indelibly changed by their fight.
Jeff Vespa via Getty Images
Entertainment news anchors Lara Spencer, Brooke Anderson, Jim Moret, Giuliana Rancic, Dayna Devon and Mary Hart at The 65th Annual Golden Globe Awards Announcement at the Beverly Hilton on Jan. 13, 2008, in Beverly Hills, California.
The Rising Tide Of Reality TV
While scripted television series were forced to take a hiatus during the strike, this was not the case for reality TV shows.
Once pre-strike commissioned episodes ran out and fictional series were on lockdown, broadcast and cable networks clamored for any original content they could find to fill their schedules. As a result, some industry watchdogs connect the writers strike with the boom of reality television, considering more than 100 unscripted shows ― from competition shows to dating shows to life improvement series ― either debuted or returned during that 2007-2008season.
However,Eli Holzman, the current CEO of The Intellectual Property Corporation and the creator/developer behind series like “Project Greenlight,” “Undercover Boss” and “Project Runway,” has a slightly different take on the strike’s impact on reality TV. He believes the explosion of unscripted television in 2008 was a long time in the making.
“Nonscripted TV was on the march really from the early 2000s, with the advent of ‘Survivor,’ ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’ and ‘Big Brother,’” Holzman explained. “The genre came into its own and it mirrored the trajectory and growth of cable, and commissioning increased each year. Yes, the strike was one important factor in that. But to me, slightly less important than the growth of cable and the audience’s embrace of the genre.”
As Holzman described it, scripted television was in the doldrums beginning in the mid-aughts. Viewers, he said, were bored with the slog of too-similar sitcoms, cop dramas and medical shows. From 2005 to 2007, for example, “American Idol” reigned supreme while the high-rated “Grey’s Anatomy,” “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and “House” eventually slipped below “Dancing with the Stars.” According to Holzman, audiences craved a fresh start. Cue the rise in reality television projects, which hit their stride in the 2000s. They peaked in 2015, when 750 nonfiction programs (350 of them brand new) aired on cable.
“Suddenly, this genre — Oh my god, all these people are going to get left on an island with nothing and they have to vote each other off, and someone is going to win a million dollars? ― was new and different and we wanted new and different versus a copy of a copy of a copy,” Holzman said. “The strike is an easy moment to look at when suddenly we all became aware of a change that was going on that maybe we hadn’t noticed before. But that change was happening on its own.”
WGA East’s Peterson agrees with him.
“I would not say that reality TV was created by the writers strike. I would say that more people watched it because there was nothing else on,” he added, noting that reality TV was simply “the only alternative, other than reruns,” for networks to air in lieu of their regularly scheduled programming.
Still, Holzman admits the strike did help to advance certain reality programs. “Project Runway,” for instance, aired its fourth season from November 2007 to March 2008 and earned pretty solid ratings for Bravo. The finale roped in 6.1 million viewers in the 18-49 demo when Christian Siriano won. Later in 2008, Lifetime took over the series and ratings increased by nearly 30 percent. Episodes of NBC’s “Biggest Loser” moved from a one-hour slot to two in order to fill primetime space. CBS aired its first, and last, “Big Brother” winter season. “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” began its reign on E! “American Idol” capped off a historic season in May 2008 with 31.7 million finale viewers, helping Fox become America’s most-watched network for the first time ever.
“As the strike wore on, the [reality] business was robust,” Holzman reiterated. “As a typical Hollywood producer, I thought I was just really talented [Laughs]. I didn’t realize I was potentially riding a wave. I thought, ‘I’m so good at this! This is so easy!’ That was genuinely my impression, and I didn’t realize we were in the midst of what was going to be a boom.”o
Indeed, when guild writers returned to work, reality TV was no longer just a cloying trend. Thomas admitted that, as a scripted TV showrunner, it wasn’t easy to watch reality programs top the ratings week after week from there on out.
“I remember being really stressed out in the first couple of years of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ because we were losing to a reality show all the sudden,” Thomas recalled. “That show ‘Deal or No Deal’ was this huge sensation and we were like, ‘Oh man, we’re losing to suitcases of money being opened up!’”
Brian To via Getty Images
Eli Holzman.
The ‘Death’ Of The Baby Writer
There were other long-term effects of the strike, though, not just for veteran writers, but aspiring ones, too.
About 20 years ago ― a decade before the writers strike ― a handful of these promising writers’ assistants, or “baby writers” as they were sometimes called, were working with Holzman at Miramax Television on a Kevin Williamson project called “Wasteland.” The show, about a group of post-college pals, aired only three episodes in 1999 before ABC canceled it. But out of that particular wasteland came a crucial opportunity. Since the studio heads were still required to fulfill the 13-episode order for foreign buyers but no longer felt pressure to deliver top-level content, aspiring young writers were given the chance to pen the remaining scripts for the series.
“We were in a blowout game where you take the kids off the bench and you put them in because it doesn’t matter,” Holzman told HuffPost. “One of those writers’ assistants was Damon Lindelof, who would go on to create ‘Lost’ and has obviously had an extraordinary career. Here’s a voice that, because of that flourishing ecosystem, was able to be identified, nurtured and grown, and his writing was then brought to all of us: the audience.”
Unfortunately, the months of foot-dragging from AMPTP negotiators in 2007-2008 messed with that flourishing ecosystem, Holzman says, dismantling a once healthy community that fostered creators of all ranks.
“As the strike and the decline in commissioning wore on, the people who maybe had previously been a rung or two up the ladder were willing to take a job and come back at a lower level, a lower rate. If you’re running a show and have to staff it, you have the ability to hire a kid who’s promising but never done it before or someone who’s really competent and is going to take a pay cut to work at that level. You’re almost crazy not to hire that more seasoned person. So, that baby writer pathway into the business went away,” he said, “and that was tragic.”
Then-“baby writer” Nick Bernardone, however, was one of the lucky ones. “I got my first job as an office production assistant on ’30 Rock’ [in 2008]by literally walking into the office at the exact right time and asking if they needed someone. It was one in a million timing,” he told HuffPost. “The answer was something like, ‘Usually, this would be insane ... but can you start tomorrow?’”
After working alongside the likes of Tina Fey, Bernardone went on to become a member of the writers’ room on her Netflix series, “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” He insists he wouldn’t have gotten the gig had he not worked similar jobs on shows like AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and Netflix’s “Bloodline” in the interim.
Thomas and Bays also entered the business relatively easily. They were hired as writers for David Letterman just a few months after graduating from Wesleyan University in 1997, well before the strike. And they opted to pay it forward.
“Through the run of ‘How I Met Your Mother,’ we promoted several of our writers’ assistants, mostly post-strike,” he said. “One of them was Matt Kuhn, who ended up being a writer on the show for the entire rest of the run after a couple of seasons as a writers’ assistant. We did the same thing with Craig Gerard and our personal assistant, Matt Zinman ― we promoted them to be full writers on the show for many years. And in the last couple seasons we promoted George Sloan.”
These days, Bernardone, who’s been nominated for four Emmy awards, believes breaking into the business is all about who’s willing to give you a slice of the pie.
“If someone likes an aspiring writer’s stuff, they’ll do their best to get them hired,” he said.
As unreliable as it might be, it’s a practice Holzman believes is necessary.
“It’s really important to nurture a new crop, a new generation of storytellers every year, because it takes a long time to get there and it takes a long time to learn your craft,” he said. “It’s like a bad year for grapes — in 10 years, we won’t have that vintage.”
Brent N. Clarke via Getty Images
Creators of 'How I Met Your Mother' Carter Bays (L) and Craig Thomas attend the 12th Annual New York Television Festival held at Helen Mills Theater on October 24, 2016 in New York City.
The Streaming Pathway To Prestige TV
Beyond the birth of the reality television boom and the increase in obstacles for up-and-coming writers, the strike ushered in an era that the guilds and industry insiders always expected: the era of streaming TV.
In 2007, Netflix was on an upswing. The company had launched in 1998 as a mail-order competitor to the then-popular but ultimately terminal Blockbuster, which rented out VHS tapes, DVDs and video games to the masses largely via brick-and-mortar stores. By 2005, 35,000 different films were available through Netflix’ssubscription service; they reportedly shipped out 1 million DVDs every day. But soon enough, Netflix went the way of the internet, allowing its subscribers to browse through and watch films and shows by streaming them straight to their devices. By 2008, it had already identified its video-on-demand platform as the future. By 2013, Netflix had 27.1 streaming customers in the U.S.
Today, the company has more than 100 million subscribers.
In Thomas’ eyes, the writers strike was a pivotal turning point for the digital revolution helmed by Netflix, Hulu and other platforms. When the WGA refused to negotiate a contract without new media residuals, it signaled to the AMPTP and the entertainment industry at large exactly how powerful streaming services could be.
“We had front-row seats to this huge change, and I credit ’How I Met Your Mother’s success a lot to the influence of Netflix,” Thomas said. “The popularity of Netflix started to get so much bigger and in those next couple of seasons, ‘How I Met Your Mother’ got onto Netflix and was very, very popular on there. [It] enabled all these new fans to binge the first few seasons and catch up and we saw ratings on live TV, on CBS, bump up because of this streaming service.
“That was part of what the strike was about: making sure writers were fairly compensated for work that wasn’t created for Netflix but got on Netflix,” Thomas continued. “Right away, we saw how important that side of things would become ― even with helping shows do better on network TV.”
And as platforms like Netflix grew and enhanced, so did original content, leading to, as Thomas put it, the rise of prestige TV. Sure, standout shows like “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” predated the walkout, but he believes writers had “firmer ground” to work on following the strike and were able to experiment with a plethora of innovative scripted series in ways they weren’t able to before ― knowing that they have the option of pitching their shows to multiple networks, premium channels and streaming sites.
“It’s certainly true that for a while people were more worried that what we did was hand the industry over to reality TV, and that definitely has not happened,” Peterson added. “What we’ve seen since the strike is an enormous explosion of high-budget scripted television. Reality definitely supplanted scripted for a while but in the 10 years since the strike, scripted has just expanded beyond anyone’s dreams.”
Were writers brainstorming the next decade of prestige TV while on the picket line years ago? Although Holzman doesn’t know how many successful TV scripts were created during on-strike downtime, he believes there were ideas brewing.
“It’s not likely they were stockpiling scripts for things that weren’t commissioned, but were they writing for themselves and creating things? I’m sure. Just because Picasso goes out of fashion, I don’t think he stops painting. Similarly, if there isn’t a market for writers work, I don’t think that means that they cease to write. I wouldn’t be surprised if some great stuff originated during that time period.”
Thomas can vouch for that.
“Everyone had in the back of their head, ‘What if this goes on a really long time? What if our show goes away after this?’ You never relax. You have to prove yourself and fight for it, so you take nothing for granted,” Thomas said. “So I think everybody had a little panicked thought about what to do next. ‘Should I be thinking about possible alternative shows or features for after the strike?’ It was definitely a moment.”
Today, the effects of on-demand viewing are still a major concern for the WGA East and West.
“On-demand viewing seems to be supplanting virtually everything else, and that has changed the way our members do their work,” Peterson said. “It’s changed the nature of the shows. No one is constrained to, ‘It’s 8 o’clock on Wednesday, I’m going to watch CBS now.’ People watch what they want, when they want, and that’s given our members enormous opportunities.”
Handout via Getty Images
Bruce Miller accepts the award for Best Television Series, Drama for Hulu's "The Handmaid's Tale" in January.
In the spring of 2017, WGA and AMPTP negotiations once again hit a snag over issues of compensation related to new media.
According to Peterson, there were a few things that drove it, including the fact that average TV earnings were increasing, due in part to things like decreased costs as the average television season became shorter. Tens of billions of profits were not being shared with writers.
“We had this enormous ‘yes’ vote authorizing the committee to call a strike,” Person said of the 2017 negotiations. “I think it was 96.3 percent yes, which is really an affirmation that members were ready to take action.”
After threatening a walkout, the AMPTP agreed to some of the guilds’ demands, likely with knowledge of what another writers strike would do to its industry. The guilds made gains across the board, added funding to their health plan and increases in subscription TV residuals, high-budget SVODresiduals, and, for the first time ever, residuals for comedy-variety writers in Pay TV. Now, writers for late-night and shows like “SNL” could see payment for content that’s re-aired on subscription sites or the internet.The unions also pushed to restructure compensation terms for writers of shorter seasons, making sure creators saw a piece of the studios’ profits.
“The Writers Guilds East and West are committed to the possibility of striking if that’s what it takes to win gains for our members, and we make sure that’s clear to the AMPTP when we sit down with them,” Peterson said. “The studios and networks know that we mean it and will do it if necessary, and that’s a lesson from the 2007-2008 strike.”
Holzman, for one, is glad another strike didn’t happen.
“The macro feeling across the industry was a strike will be bad because if we’re looking at leisure activity and how people are spending their leisure time. Television has competitors in a way it never had before in the form of the internet and mobile,” Holzman said.
“We’ve seen, and continue to see, an enormous migration of advertising dollars out of proper television — cable, broadcast and otherwise — and onto the web,” he added. “There was a sense that a prolonged strike may result in the audience declining, which it has been anyway. Maybe if there wasn’t great TV being produced, maybe the audience wouldn’t come back. I think that was a collective fear shared by both the producers and the writers, which encouraged them to find common ground to avoid another strike.”
“It could’ve been quite bad,” he added.
Or good, if you consider the past.
Download
BEFORE YOU GO
Leigh Blickley
Senior Entertainment Reporter, HuffPost
Suggest a correction
MORE:
TelevisionMoviesWriters Guild Of America EastWriters' StrikeAlliance Of Motion Picture And Television Producers
See more source :
10 Years Later, Here’s How The Writer’s Strike Indelibly Changed TV
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