He's playing on H Highing yo How streaming caused the TV Riter strike Daytime excuse aware wait I thought I thought I S What's gotten us to this place is the the rug was pulled out from under writers and to a degree actors in the last 10 15 years. It's the Advent of streaming CH Question: age of chat chat I Saw on Twitter Hasan reacting to clips of uh that are on Kick with full of band streamers H How can you do that? Are you allowed to do that now to watch full on vods of people that are ban like I don't get it Television: One of the first Dreaming original shows was House of Cards Spoiler alert when they pushed K Mara in front of that train it it seemed like groundbreaking television and it was fastpaced and it it looked beautiful and it had huge Stars Artistically it's opened up the worldbe there used to be 80 shows in a year. now you're up to 500 550 shows in a year. and for writers it was good cuz it gave people entry and a lot of those people were diverse.

Young Voices Who would said how you should come out to move to LA or New York places where the cost of living is extremely high and you have a seat at the table for years created careers for people. Now what it doesn't exist like that anymore. What's the difference between a network show and a streaming? Show Network is the TV we all grew up with ABC NBC CBS and it's the season that begins in September and runs 22 Episodes and ends in in May That's a season uh, especially for procedurals that everyone knows like Gray's Anatomy or or Csis. TV seasons always began in September and that had something to do with auto sales.

By the way, the new car Seasons came out and they were going to advertise heavily so you wanted new TV The network model worked for a very long time and gave people I feel he dumbed that down so much I don't even know what the is relevance you if you get a car you want a new TV stable career I Broke in on Law and Order Criminal Intent I was on staff there four years, became showrunner there. so you get paid by the episode or by the week you'll make $115,000 and I thought that was it I didn't know they meant for every episode I I didn't understand what I stumbled into so I was able to make a living start raising a family in New York I Think those doors have closed now A So the upside of streaming creatively was you didn't have to worry about commercial breaks. Have five commercial breaks in an hour of TV Something has to happen at the end of that act. To make sure people come back, your writing has to conform to the advertising that pays for it.

If you write for streaming, you don't have to worry about commercial breaks. You get to write a different structure. Maybe it's just an organic 3A structure to an hour. Now you're down to eight.

Episode runs, six episode runs shorter Seasons Where you could Arc a story across Eight Episodes You can go a little darker, you can go a little deeper. that part of it was great and writers from movies FL to it and novels FL to it. But as the episode orders have shrunk, what used to be 40 weeks out of the year that you were working is now 20 weeks. So try having to go from finding one job a year to finding multiple jobs a year to maintain the same status quo that you previously had.

It's tough I Don't think anyone's asking to go back to 20 episode Seasons But the stability and the longevity of those jobs is the model that we're asking for and that we think is best for writer. wait wait wait wait. Okay so no no it's not that you need multiple job wait. you can have the same job, you just have to find people that and then you have to orchestrate.

You have to have to schedule it right but at the same at it's the same workload and best for the product. No can you explain what's changed on paper? It's the same workload if you work out of hours. The function of the writer's room is the exact same like it is a group of writers coming together to break story to craft a season, and to write episodes of television. When you get your first job writing on a TV show, you're almost always a staff writer.

Um, which is the lowest level in the room and then the next rung on the ladder is story editor. From story Editor to Executive story editor Co Yes, the one job is shorter right? but if you have three of them and you layer them, it ends up being the same workload. It just. it's just.

it's segmented. That's all right. Producer, Producer, supervising producer, coex executive producer, and then executive producer is the highest in showrunner. Obviously the creative process is people coming together, having a conversation about is it the dark comedy? Is it 1 hour? Is it a half hour, breaking story and really writing your whole season? The next phase is production.

When you bring all of your crew together, bring all of your actors, grab your directors, and you shoot the TV show. and then the final stage is post production. When you take that thing you shot, you sit with your editor. Okay, wait a minute into what people see on TV Okay Broadcast: CH I Don't want to sound like I'm entitled or like or or I'm I'm saying the problem.

The problems are nothing but. Isn't it the same for people who do camera work? Everything else like people who do camera work like aren't they show up on on the job and getting the same if not even less hours than before. Like if there's less episodes. Whatever, there's less film so there's less filming.

So that s applies to these guys that the camera. So where so, where's their? where's their Strike shows Kind of used to be the entire TV space. So if you were on a show like Lawn Order SVU Or if you were on a show like friends, your show was being filmed, it was in production concurrently while you were in the writer room. Writers are going back and forth and really learning the ropes of what it is to produce a TV show.

You know, and it might be in the moment when you're watching a scene and an actor might come up to you and say like this line just isn't working for me. The job of the writer at that moment is to talk to the actor, figure out what isn't working and write them a new line. The writer is working with the actor at all times. Okay, okay chck chck.

If the space changes and the the the system, the infrastructure changes right then I mean what's the solution? Uh I don't know, it's still Freel People have to adapt the actor that was cast and should be there when that actor is giving life to those words. Financially, of course it would cost Studios to keep writers on and to pay those extra weeks to keep doing their job. It seems like their favorite place to cut the budget is with writers robbing them of creativity than robbing them of people training up to be the the showrunners of future shows, writers are now being separated from wa. wait That makes no sense at all.

Well I'm so confused. So you're tell me that everything the everything shortens but that only affects the writers. How does that not affect the camera? Crews The What? How does How does these? If these guys have less to work, How does that not affect them I don't he said it does. but only them are getting cut.

Favorite place to cut the budget is with writers robbing them of creativity and robbing them of people training up to be the the showrunners of future shows. writers are now being separated from production employed for fewer weeks. Fewer weeks means less income. and when a show like Game of Thrones costs so much money and takes so much time to to make, that's a longer period of time between seasons And so that means these writers have a longer period of time before they are employed again.

Story-wise there is something. wait, nice wait. So if there, if there's 500 shows, I'm sure there's there's other job opportunities they can fill to make that Gap up. If you know for a fact your job ends here, you have no job for all of this.

can't Can't They make sure they have another block right there and just bing bing bing as best as they can. I Mean What? That's not three jobs? That's still one full-time job. It just about having all of your episodes written before you start to produce. It really gives you a nice scope of the Season You know where all your locations are going to be and if something happens in the last.

I'm so confused bro. this is like contractual work SL Contractor SL Being a a freelancer, that's how these people make ends meet this. Their job description is is to adapt and be able to make it work. It's it's part of that's part of not having to deal with all the rest of the of that other jobs have right? No.

I'm I Don't get it. Am I Confusing that you realize there's a nice way to plan early in the season you can go and play with that episode. On the other hand, not having your writers continue to be there and do the work that happens in production hurts the production and it hurts the writers. There was this staff writer who was on the Bear which is a streaming show on Hulu and he had a story about how I it last pause okay okay then what you guys are asking me then is that technically if you think this is evil then I'm evil too then because I imploy some some some guy to make emotes for me right? and I stopped for months because we don't need any new emotes right? Because emotes are now.

we are pretty much capped out and then later on I rehire them to get more Otes or whatever right? I mean I have to I have to pay for all their living expenses and I have to give them hundred thousand of dollars for the years or month they didn't work in between because then I only employed them here and over there and in between they have no job. So now I'm evil I'm I'm laying them down. How's that not the same? I don't get it, my artist said not the same. Oh okay now after working in this room even though it was this critically acclaimed show and they were winning an award, he went to the award show broke and had to rent a bow tie.

What I thought was so interesting about that story was that it wasn't the Pay Per Se That was the issue in that hey here's here's the actual Chad would to do the right Um, what the oh never mind hi was wasn't the Pay Per Se That was the issue in that situation. it was the length of the room you went from having 40 weeks of guaranteed work to maybe 8 to 10. It is always very difficult to work in our industry. writers, directors, actors often have long stretches of idle time periods where you're either looking for your next job, the next room that you're going to go right in, or the next feature that you're going to pitch.

Residual checks are what let you do that. Residuals, which are how actors and writers tie themselves over during lean times, have basically been decimated. When TV first began, there was a big strike in 1960 and that strike resulted in writers getting residuals. The reason my network residual is so healthy is because that was negotiated a long time ago when that was the only other way an episode could be rewatched if you wrote for friends or Seinfeld these shows that are on all all the time.

Every single time it's used, you get a check. the number of runs your show has, the size of the check decreases. The show is generating income for NBC Universal and so you will see some of that income now. Streaming comes in there.

Okay, so if you if you do good it goes hard. If you don't it doesn't So it's like right, terrible formula. If you work on a good thing, you go hard. It goes hard sale from the studio to the stream.

so is it a skill you? It sits on the platform for year and you get one check no matter how many times it's watched. If you write a show for Hulu it's a you get paid to write it and you might see $0000 for the next 3 years as opposed to a network rerun which might be for an hour show might be $224,000 I Have talked to fellow writers who came up years before and it was the difference between buying a house or not, between sending your kid to school or not. and and for me, it just seems like this pipe dream of getting residuals for for the work that I've done. Chat, hold up, hold up, chat, chat.

I'm going to get canceled for this take. Okay, but I'm going to say anyway. What if what if companies say okay of y'all all of y'all then um, nobody's hired anymore. Uh, because they they know they they think and know for a fact somebody will do it.

If it's not somebody like them, somebody else will do it right. and then some will come in and they'll do boom boom Boom and they'll find a way to make it to make it. and then they'll boom boom boom and the show will still run What? That's just what guys guys. that's kind of like how Corporate Cible disposable right? So that um, mother sucker guy comes in, boom, contractor, do this.

Boom boom boom and and it gets done right? Um, that's just how it's going to turn out. I Feel like like, no all whatever. Is that a sweatshop? Tak It This strike seems to be catching fire because it mirrors the discontent a lot of workers feel about this yawning wage gap between the top and the bottom. Then the shows are bad, then they readjust and the world that has an ibrium boom secondarily.

Um, but correlated is that it's about the art that we're making. and if we're not given the time and the resources that we need to make good television, you're not going to have the diversity of voices. the diversity of ideas. I Think that we want to make sure that art isn't coming from only voices Who can afford to do this as a job? Um, the Amtp DPT member companies remain United in the desire to reach an ideal, the M beneficial to the writers and the heal of launch of video industry and award thousand.

Okay, so okay, so generally do people expect the companies to um to give a nonadaptive salary of the current market that is based on the Old Market that they don't make money off of because of ads to the new one and then go operate at a loss until the company goes bankrupt and everybody sped at at the same time? I mean I don't I don't get it is is that is that the point that they just speedrun bankruptcy and then fight everybody at once? I Got into writing because I was an actor and still am I've worked on the adventures of Puss and Boots trolls. The Beat goes On Channel Zero for sci-fi I did a bunch of CBS procedurals and uh, most recently I was the showrunner of one of Bus is Lying On Peacock Law and Order Criminal Intent. Then I went to intreatment and did a show I called lights Out for FX and then I wandered back into the Law and Order family and went to SVU on June 16th 20. Interesting okay feeling down seem to shake it wa on my CH I can't fake it life s sometimes it feels just like a TR I keep pushing what's up here we go now.

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