Once the writers’ guild strike began, the ATX TV Festival had to change many elements of its lineup. Notably, they added a panel specifically about the strike, which began in May.
On Saturday, Beau Willimon, the former president of the Writers Guild of America, East, moderated a conversation between Zoanne Clack and Julie Plec of WGA West and Greg Iwinski of WGA East, who sits on the negotiating committee.
“We don’t have a focus group. We didn’t go in and ask a management company what we should be asking for,” said Iwinski, who has written on “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” and “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” explaining that she asked the 11,000 members they asked for and got 7,000 surveys back. “We took these arguments to the studios and presented our solutions. And I had gone in expecting that it was going to be a really tough negotiation, and that we’d get into a situation where we’d get a deal that wasn’t great, but hard to say no to. And that’s not what happened. We negotiated for six weeks and at the end we were still incredibly far apart.
Clack, the lead writer of ABC’s “Station 19,” stated that they are pushing for more people in the writers’ room since no one writer should be expected to write every episode. “If we don’t have enough people investing in our health care system and in our pension plan, that’s going to disappear. We need to have people working to buy that in so we can keep that flush for our future,” she explained. “The other reason is to let people learn and show the fruits of their labor and not just be gig workers – which is fine if that’s what you want to do. But I think most of us got into this for our careers.”
Plec, currently known for running “The Vampire Diaries” and creating the upcoming Max series “The Girls on the Bus,” also spoke about the healthcare issues, in addition to pay.
“We’re angry,” she said. “When I speak I want to make it clear that I am speaking on behalf or in the mind of the people who have struck in the past to give us the benefits we have today, the people who are striking today just to hold on to their own livelihoods and the people we strike for, who are next generation… The lack of concern for the artists and content creators of this company has reached a breaking point – not just in writers, but across all labor guilds.”
She later noted a big difference between the 2007 strike and today’s: “There was a sense that the city was still run by people who cared about artists… There were people in that mix who really believed in the spirit of art and the creation of art and that there was money to be made for anyone who was successful. I think that’s all gone, and that’s not good for the people who support this union and the members of the union.”
Plec noted that a showrunner recently told her that writers in the post-streaming era have been “slowly dehumanized” for so long that it’s “no wonder we’re looking at the threat of a robot being our biggest villain here.”
Iwinski addressed the rise of AI and the concerns within the WGA. “The threat of being replaced is not that they will match our quality. Our bosses won’t care,” he explained.
“I don’t really understand. I don’t know where it’s going, but it seems really important. And if we don’t get something codified into a language that a human needs to do our job, we’re never going to get that language and we’re never going to get any protection,” Plec said. “I think other unions are starting to understand that too. So it really is the clarion call, the mockingjay of this strike.”
As the panel went around, the group talked about how TV fans – most of the public – were also affected by the strike.
“The streaming era has screwed you guys in a lot of ways,” Iwinski said. “It has taken audiences out of television’s feedback loop. Because in a world where there are no ratings and the success or failure of a show is based on what the numbers team can put out through a press release, in a world where you don’t have the ability to permanently buy shows you love on physical media and keep them, in an era where shows are serialized to create cliffhangers, but then pulled into season 2 so you never get the satisfaction of knowing what’s happening in this world – you guys get cut out and it doesn’t work.
He continued: “We have to push for ratings on television… There are so many shows by people of color, there are so many shows by marginalized communities, everyone I know in that community is watching and they cancel it [because] “No one was watching.” Prove it. Show us.”