In May of this year, the Writers Guild of America went on strike. For weeks, TV and film writers have been walking in picket lines in Los Angeles and New York, and the strike threatens to bring TV and film development to a screeching halt. Historically, strikes both reflect history—the ever-changing business models behind the media we consume—and change history. The 2007-8 strike famously accelerated the rise of reality TV. Today’s guest is Matt Belloni, the host of the Ringer podcast The Town and a writer with Puck News. He breaks down what’s at stake for writers and studios and answers my deeper questions about how this strike could change the future of TV and film.
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In the following excerpt, Derek and Matt Belloni discuss the writers strike and what it means for Hollywood.
Derek Thompson: So we’re talking writers strike, and I want to cover some basics here before we discuss some of the deeper implications. For those that are still catching up, what kind of writers are on strike and what are they protesting?
Matt Belloni: So these are members of the Writers Guild of America, which covers a lot of things. But these contracts are for film and television screenwriters, and television includes the streaming services, because they are now members of the studio coalition that signs the deal every three years with the writers. Rights come up every three years. The last time it came up in 2020, there was the pandemic, so everybody punted, and a lot of these issues probably should have been resolved then. They had three years to fester as we all stayed at home, and now they’re coming to the fore in a big way.
Thompson: And what are they protesting? What are the main issues here that they’re striking for?
Belloni: Well, there’s a lot of specifics, but a big ballpark is that the writers believe that the streaming revolution has left them behind; that the way that the television industry has evolved, and the film industry to a certain respect as well, has changed the economics of the business in a way that the streaming companies have found a way to make this work for them, but it doesn’t work for the writers.
And there’s a bunch of different reasons for that. There are fewer episodes of television series now, because the model is not to sell advertising against these shows; the model is to bring in subscribers and keep those subscribers. So you got to have a lot of shows, but you don’t need very many episodes or seasons of those shows.
There is the issue of the way television is produced, which used to be by a large writers room that would sit for months at a time and crank out dozens of episodes of shows. Now that doesn’t happen. If there are writers rooms, they’re smaller and they’re more pointed. There’s this concept called the mini-room, which is where a couple of writers get together before a show goes into production and they crank out what the beats of the show are going to be. Then it gets turned over to an experienced producer that finishes the show, and that leaves the writers out of the equation, and they don’t like that.
And then there’s just the standard-issue money questions. They believe they should be paying more. They believe inflation has outstripped what the increases in their contract are. So there’s a lot of different things. The way that residuals are calculated in the streaming universe are also less than traditional television, because when they were determined, there wasn’t necessarily a model around this. So there’s a lot of questions on both the financial side and the existential question of how writers are going to be treated going forward, and that’s a very specific one. It gets into the AI question as well. The writers also believe they should have protections against AI.
Thompson: And we’re going to get into the AI bit in a few minutes. I want to put a pin in the fact that one of the themes I’m so interested in about the history of entertainment is how the economics of distribution determines everything. So you said in ad-supported television from 20 years ago, 30 years ago, even 10 years ago, you had fewer shows, more just Office, NCIS, but they were longer seasons.
Now, with subscription-supported TV, how do you get subscriptions? You need churn. You need a lot more people coming in to see new titles. You need more shows. But more shows mean shorter seasons. Shorter seasons means that the average writer on that show is making less money. And so this domino effect between the business model, which is ads versus subscriptions, can have completely different implications for the economics of being a writer, being a worker in this industry.
One big question that I have not heard answered well to my satisfaction is this. There are more original shows than ever. I think by some counts, there’s five to six times more original shows than there were 15 years ago.
Belloni: Five hundred scripted shows as of last year, although that is now starting to decline.
Thompson: Starting to decline. We’ve probably seen peak originality when it comes to original shows. But that number was at 100 or below, I think, 15 or 20 years ago. So the number of original scripted dramas and comedies has exploded in the streaming age. Writers are writing those original scripted dramas and comedies. How do you explain this dynamic where there are more shows than ever, and therefore presumably more lead writers than ever, but many of the writers are doing worse, which is motivating this strike?
Belloni: Couple of things there. First, objectively here, there are more writers working in film and television than there ever have been. That is something even the guild would acknowledge. They’re not saying, “We have fewer members” or “People aren’t out there writing.” There’s a lot of writers, and by most measurements, the makeup of that Writers Guild is more diverse than it’s ever been, it’s more female than it’s ever been, and there have been big gains towards diversifying the people who are given access to this industry.
The question is, what is available to those people once they become writers? And what happens here is that typically you are a young writer, you get on a show, you get to write on that show as a staff writer or as a junior writer/producer, something like that, and it’s a stepping stone. You then work on that show. You get to graduate to writer/producer on the next show. Then you get to graduate to an executive producer. Then you’re a showrunner. Then you create your own show.
That’s the traditional hierarchy, and what’s happening now is there isn’t that path to grow because of these things that I’ve mentioned: the mini-rooms where you’re not actually working on the show; these six-episode shows where they don’t actually need a staff writer or junior people. It’s The White Lotus, and Mike White writes the entire thing himself, or it’s a Marvel show and they really just need a little mini-room to sketch out the beats of the show, and then they turn it over to a director/writer/producer who effectuates the entire show. That’s the one side.
The second side is just the bare economics. If you’re on a show that has 13 episodes a season, it doesn’t matter if you’re making 20 grand, 30 grand, 50 grand an episode; that’s not a middle-class lifestyle for a writer in a way that being on 24 episodes of NCIS used to be. That’s the big difference here.
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Matt Belloni
Producer: Devon Manze
Subscribe: Spotify
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