A Strike Scripted by Netflix
Three months into the Hollywood writers’ strike, there is at last some sign of movement. When the writers walked off the job on May 2, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (the organization representing the studios) ended negotiations, and no talks have happened in the 14 weeks since. But on Tuesday, the AMPTP informed the Writers Guild of America that it wanted to meet “to discuss negotiations,” as the guild told its members. That meeting is supposed to happen today.
What the AMPTP (which is also dealing with an actors’ strike) will have to say is anyone’s guess, but we know what the two sides will ultimately be arguing about: streaming. Because, at heart, this is a clash over the way streaming has changed the movies and, more important, television.
Writers, for instance, want to enjoy a share of the upside when streaming shows become hits, just as they once enjoyed sizable residuals—a continuing share of revenue from rights when broadcast shows they wrote went into syndication. (At the moment, writers get small residual payments for streaming shows but reap no additional benefit if a show becomes a huge hit.) But that would require streamers to provide viewership data for their shows—information they would prefer to keep to themselves.
When studios hire a showrunner to develop a show, the WGA wants a minimum number of writers hired for the “pre-greenlight room,” where scripts are nowadays routinely written before a show is officially picked up. And, perhaps above all, the union wants studios to return to creating bigger writers’ rooms when shows are in production. That would involve adopting minimum-staffing requirements and abandoning the decade-long trend toward so-called mini rooms.
These may seem like wonky issues, but they boil down to a simple idea. The writers are trying to reclaim the ground they’ve lost because of the ascent of one company: Netflix.
We’re all used to the idea that Netflix has changed the way TV is consumed. But it has also changed the way TV is produced.
[Xochitl Gonzalez: The businessmen broke Hollywood]
Netflix’s seasons are shorter—not just shorter than the traditional 22-to-24-episode seasons common on broadcast TV, but shorter even than the 12-to-13-episode seasons that used to be standard on pay-cable networks such as HBO. Netflix habitually pays more for its productions up front, but because it did away with the syndication model and keeps its viewership data to itself, it has also limited the upside for writers.
Most important, at least as far as the strike goes, Netflix ignores the social norms that had long governed TV production: It has generally done away with big writers’ rooms, replacing them with mini rooms. As the name suggests, mini rooms (which were pioneered by AMC but have now become widespread in the industry) have fewer writers. Whereas in the past, a typical TV show might have had 10 to 12 writers, mini rooms might have only three or four.
But the changes go beyond that. In traditional writers’ rooms, which still exist on some TV shows, writers are paid through the actual production of the show. Individual writers commonly also act as the show’s producer on specific episodes, and even junior writers get the chance to learn the ins and outs of making TV: They are on set while shows are filmed, and they work with showrunners on editing and post-production. In effect, writers’ rooms are not just about writing scripts. They are also about training the next generation of writers to make and run their own shows in the future.
A mini room is very different. Writers’ tenures are shorter, and their job scope is narrowed: They’re there purely to write, or in some cases just buff, scripts. The opportunities to learn other aspects of show production have mostly vanished.
Writers’ rooms, in fact, were never written into any WGA contract, seemingly based on an assumption that business would continue as usual. But Netflix, perhaps because it was coming from outside the industry, had no interest in business as usual. So it discarded the old norms. And as other studios tried to keep up with Netflix, they did the same.
One result is that despite an explosion in the number of TV series being produced (and therefore an increase in the number of people writing for television), the amount of money going to writers has not really risen in recent years. On top of that, shows employ fewer writers, and writers now get a lot less hands-on experience.
[Gavin Mueller: The Luddites of Hollywood]
So the WGA wants to bring back the writers’ room. The guild’s contract proposals include minimum-staffing requirements (one writer per episode, plus another writer for every two episodes after six, up to a maximum of 12 writers) and a demand that not less than half of the writers stay employed throughout the production of the show, with at least one writer staying through post-production. This, the WGA argues, wouldn’t just be good for writers; it’d also be good for the industry as a whole, because it would encourage the steady production of new showrunning talent.
That’s not wrong. But the problem for the writers should be obvious: Netflix is the only streaming company that’s earning substantial profits from its business. (In fact, Netflix and, to a lesser extent, Hulu are the only two major streaming companies that are profitable at all.) That’s in part because streamers are investing heavily up front to build content libraries and acquire subscribers. Even so, Netflix’s stock has the highest valuation and the highest price-to-earnings multiple in the industry. The company has become a bellwether for the studios, the model that everyone else—explicitly or implicitly—is trying to copy. Accordingly, to convince Netflix that it should stop making shows the way it’s been making them, and to convince the other studios that they should not emulate Netflix, will be a challenging task.
That’s especially so because the writers are trying to roll back changes that have already happened—with results that Netflix and its investors are pretty satisfied with. (If the writers had written minimum-staffing requirements into their contracts in, say, 2007, and the studios were only now trying to get rid of writers’ rooms, the dynamic would be very different.) And although it’s true that the disappearance of writers’ rooms will probably hurt the quality of new shows in the future, that’s an industry-wide issue. Even if the studios collectively benefit from young writers getting broader on-the-job training, any individual company would prefer that everyone else pays for that training, which it could then get a free ride on.
[Sonny Bunch: Why the studios are risking everything]
The issue is not that going back to bigger writers’ rooms would actually cost that much money—the amount studios spend on writers is a tiny fraction of their overall budget. It’s that the practice runs counter to the optimizing, efficiency-maximizing ethos that Netflix brought to the industry. And that same conflict is at the heart of another battle between the writers and the studios, this one over AI: The WGA has proposed rules barring AI from writing or rewriting literary materials, or being used as source material; the studios have said only that they’ll commit to holding annual conversations about technological advances.
As far as we know, no studio is yet using AI in place of human writers, and at present, any attempt to do so seems unlikely to result in a good script. But the writers can foresee, and are trying to forestall, the day when efficiency-hungry studios will use AI to generate rough drafts that writers will then be asked to polish. As with mini rooms, that wouldn’t be ideal for creativity or quality, but it would certainly be more efficient.
Thinking about the kind of deal the studios and the WGA might eventually reach, it’s easier to imagine the studios compromising on AI than getting rid of mini rooms. The WGA may be able to keep robots from writing scripts in the future; much less clear is whether they’ll be able to win a deal for more humans to write them.