WGA Strike Commentary
10 11 2007I’m a bit of a TV nut, in case you hadn’t noticed. While I don’t often associate the medium with the trancendant qualities of my fellow TV nuts, I think it leaves interesting clues about our culture.
The writers strike hasn’t been going for a week and I’m already starting to get antsy. The greatest casualty so far has of course been late night shows, made all the more tragic with Robert Reich getting bumped from the Daily Show.
Earlier this week, Medialoper raised a few interesting points:
It’s no secret that in the past few years, we’ve been living in an era with the best Television ever created. And while I think that era actually peaked in 2004-2005 (since then, we’ve lost The Sopranos, Deadwood, Veronica Mars, The West Wing) (and we are on track to lose The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, Scrubs), the Writers Strike will hasten the demise. And not just because the networks will flood the airwaves with reality shows.
I have no idea how Rome got left off of that list of recently ended fantastic shows, but otherwise that sums up my concerns quite well. With some of my favorite shows already scheduled to end this season I’m concerned about next year. Many of the new shows this season are clunkers, but just this last summer there were a few really quite tremendous ones, specifically Burn Notice and Mad Men, suggesting that the well has not yet run dry for promising new ideas.
But with the possible loss of momentum and with so many shows finally coming in to their own, the future looks less bright. Many if not most of the best shows out there right now weren’t great at first but got better as the cast and crew got things figured out.
The writers have posted a series of short videos explaining their position and getting the word out on YouTube. This is the best of them, I think:
I don’t think they’re asking for anything unreasonable here, if anything it seems like they should be pushing for more.
Especially considering that not very long ago there was an ad campaign about how piracy takes money right out of the pockets of everyone who worked on that product. The lesson here seems to be that it doesn’t matter if I pay to download from one of their irritating official sources or I download it from a P2P network, because the people who worked so hard to make it happen won’t get paid. This is just ridiculous.
I hope that this is all over soon, but in the meanwhile I’m going to be looking overseas for some new material. Someone was talking to me the other day about a CBC show called ‘Intelligence’ that is supposed to be quite good. I looked it up and one of the stars is Max Headroom, so I’ll probably love it.
There’s a massive post that’s well worth reading on this subject over at the Carpetbagger Report, by writer Thomas McKelvey Cleaver. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
With 90% of the writers voting to strike, this is one strike that might go for a long time. The writers are very certain that their position is correct.
I agree with them for what it’s worth but man, when Fox starts in with their reality shows every hour, on the hour, we’ll all be paying for the strike. =)