Streaming Is Responsible For The WGA Strike. But Not For The Reasons You Think

The WGA went on strike this week and guess who is not the least bit surprised?

This guy.

It was sort of inevitable given the confluence of streaming-based factors that were combining to make TV writers' lives miserable. 

Let’s start with the more tangible one, which is lifestyle.

Or, to be more accurate, the lack thereof.

In a business that was all about the “gig economy” long before that was even a thing, a steady job on a network TV series was the closest thing a writer could get to a normal full-time job.

Series ran from September to June and the writers got the summers off.

This was ideal for anyone with kids and/or a significant other, as it was in line with school schedules and holidays, thus allowing for something close to a normal life.

Streaming, OTOH, is far more erratic. Series can go eight months or eighteen months between seasons. Seasons themselves are much shorter. 

Losing that sense of agency, that you are in control of your own life, is tough. Yes, many of the streaming shows are high prestige gigs that can ensure a longer career, but most are not.

They’re just 10 or 12 episode seasons of a series that might stay on the air for three seasons at best.

So not a whole lot of stability and a whole lot of need to constantly be hustling for your next gig.

Which, I would have to imagine, makes it pretty tough to focus on the scripts at hand.

So that’s Problem A and it is in many ways tied to Problem B: the shift to streaming also does away with the TV writer’s pot of gold—syndication.

Syndication is where writers, actors, producers and the rest of the cast and crew made their real money off of a hit show. Once you’d hit about 100 episodes (figure around five seasons) the show was eligible for syndication, both overseas and in the U.S.. 

Those deals, which could net an individual writer tens of millions of dollars over time (think Friends) are fading quickly. 

Netflix, for example, has planted its flag in over 100 countries. So they are their own international syndication. Plus series and seasons are shorter.  Happy Days has enough episodes (255) to stand up an entire FAST channel, but a show like Ted Lasso which will have less than 40 episodes in total, will not be as valuable in syndication long-term.

Take away that shot at the pot of gold and you lose the reason most people get into the business.

(Those of you who’ve known me for a while will remember that many years ago I got into a heated debate with a Famous 00s-era Web Evangelist Professor who was going on about how great the collapse of the music industry was going to be, because the new incarnation would make it possible for a lot more people to make an okay living as musicians. I pointed out that most people joined bands with the dream of becoming actual rock stars, not merely “making an okay living” and that as a result, fewer people would choose that path. He was offended and dismissive. I was right.)

There’s another sub-issue with the internationalization of streaming, which is that many of the series shown in the U.S. are written and created outside of the U.S. Hits like Squid Game (South Korea), Fauda (Israel) and The Crown (UK) are all non-US productions and the amount of overseas programming on streaming services in the U.S. is expanding rapidly. In addition to reducing the number of jobs for American writers, they’re also being written in countries where six to 10 episode seasons have always been the norm and writers have no other expectations.

Anyway, there is, unfortunately, a third problem, which is that without carriage and retrans fees, the current economics of the television industry no longer make sense.

That’s the tough one, the one no one in the industry really wants to talk about, but as a result of the Cable Act of 1992, the MVPDs paid all the broadcast and cable networks tens of billions (not a typo) of dollars to carry their feeds or retransmit their broadcast signals. 

Or more accurately, you and I paid them, as those fees were just passed on to consumers in the form of higher cable bills.

Streaming, on the other hand, has no carriage and retrans fees.

Meaning that while it can be a very profitable business, it will never be anywhere near as profitable as television was during the heyday of the cable era.

That is a reality that everyone in the broader TV industry is going to have to come to terms with, as everything from salaries to production budgets to the spreads on the craft services tables will need to shrink.