What's gotten us to this place is
the rug was pulled out from under the writers and, to a degree,
actors in the last 10 or 15 years. It’s the advent of streaming,
the golden age of television. One of the first streaming original shows
was “House of Cards”. Spoiler alert: when they push Kate Mara in front of that train it seemed like
groundbreaking television... and it was fast paced and it looked beautiful and
it had huge stars. Artistically, it's opened up the world. Maybe there used to b
e
80 shows in a year and now you're up to 500,
550 shows in a year. And for writers it was good
because it gave people entry. And a lot of those people
were diverse young voices... who Hollywood said 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
that for years created careers for people. Now... it doesn't exist
like that anymore. What's the difference between a network show and
a streaming show? Network i
s 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 May. That’s a season especially for procedurals
that everyone knows like Gray's Anatomy
or CSI. 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 a stable care
er. I broke in on “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”. I was on staff there for 4 years,
became showrunner there. So you get paid by the episode
or by the week. They said you will make $15,000. And I thought that was it. I didn't know they meant
for every episode. I didn't understand
what I'd stumbled into. So I was able to make a living,
start raising a family in New York. I think those doors have closed now. So the upside of streaming
creatively was you didn't have to worry about
commercial
breaks. If I write an SVU,
we 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. You're 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 but you get to write a different structure. Maybe it's just an organic three-act
structure to an hour. Now you're down to
an 8 episode run 6 episode run,
shorter seasons... where you could arc a
story
across 8 episodes. You can go a little darker,
you can go a little deeper. That part of it was great and writers from movies flocked to it
and novels flocked 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 writers
and best for the product. Can you explain what's changed and how the writers room
looks different in each model? The function of the writers 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 sta
ff writer 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-producer, producer,
supervising producer... co-executive producer and then executive producer is
the highest. And showrunner, obviously. The creative process is
people coming together having a conversation about—
is it a dark comedy? Is it one hour or 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 stages
is post-production. When you take that thing you shot,
you sit with your editor... turn it into what people see on TV. Broadcast shows kind of used to be
the entire TV space. So if you are on a show
like “Law & Order: SVU” or if you are on a show like “Friends” your show was being filmed. It was in production concurrently
while you were i
n the writers room. Writers are going back and forth and really learning the ropes
of what it is to produce a TV show. 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. He's conjuring the character. He's meeting the actor that w
as 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. But it seems like their favorite place
to cut the budget is with writers robbing them
of creativity then robbing them of people,
training up to be 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 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 nice 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 episode of your season
... that you realize there's a nice way to plant earlier 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 after working in this room,
even though it was this critically acclaimed show and
they were winning an awa
rd... 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 situation. It was the length of the room. So 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
goi
ng 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 y
ou wrote for “Friends”
or “Seinfeld” the shows that are on 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
and there is a terrible formula... based on a percentage of the sale from the studio to the streamer. So it sits on the platform for
a year and you get one check. No matter how many times it's
watched. Do you write a show for Hulu? It's a you get paid to write it and you might see $400
for the next 3 years as opposed to a network rerun,
which might be for an hour show it might be $24,000. 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 for me, it just seems like
this pipe dream of getting residuals for the work
that I've done. This strike seems to be catching fire b
ecause it mirrors the discontent a lot of workers
feel about this yawning wage gap between the top and the bottom. Secondarily, 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, a 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. I got into writing because I was
an actor and still am. I worked on “The Adventures of Puss in Boots”,
“Trolls”, “The Beat Goes On”. “Channel Zero” for SyFy. I did a bunch of CBS procedurals,
and most recently I was the showrunner of
“One of Us Is Lying” on Peacock. Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Then I went to “In Treatment” and did a show called “Lights Out” for FX. And then I wandered back
into the Law & Order family and went to SVU.
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