Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Miscellaneous Blogs -> Jeremy Blachman's Brand New Weblog

Miscellaneous

: Jeremy Blachman's Brand New Weblog

Scripted Television Is A Dying Industry

By jeremyblachman

Or maybe it's not.

But the strike probably isn't helping, since a bazillion people are watching Gladiators, and it costs a heck of a lot less to produce Gladiators (even with the cost of the steroid testing) than it does to produce Journeyman.  And it costs a heck of a lot less to throw seventeen hours a week of American Idol on the air than it does to make sixteen CSI spinoffs.  Apparently the '88 strike led to the start of reality television, as networks were forced to find new formats -- news magazines, COPS, America's Funniest Home Videos.  And I guess the worry -- or at least my worry -- is that the longer this goes, the more time the networks have to find formats that are cheaper but just as entertaining to viewers as scripted programming.  There was a New York Times article yesterday or today where Ben Silverman, who seems to talk to reporters without much of a filter on what he says, for better or worse, said that in most countries, unscripted TV makes up the majority of the programming.  I'll assume he's right without checking, but even that being said -- it's also true that other countries are buying and airing our scripted TV more often than we're buying and airing their unscripted programming.  So I'm not sure it says anything about anything if France doesn't have the same proportion of scripted to unscripted TV as we do, except maybe that the television writing industry in France is still in an earlier stage of development, or that the economics of it don't happen to make scripted TV as viable... advertising dollars... how the networks are run... all sorts of variables, I suppose.  So that's not really my point I guess.  Except that it is. 

And I don't blame networks for looking for cheaper programming that's going to make them more money, and I certainly don't blame viewers for watching it.  I watch American Idol.  I watch Top Chef.  I watched Kid Nation.  People have every right to watch what entertains them.  My concern is just that this gives the networks the need to find more alternatives, and the opening to really find enough alternatives that the scripted television business won't come back from the strike looking the same as it did beforehand.  Normal change happens slowly.  If unscripted television, in the long run, is going to be cheaper and better than scripted television in some greater proportion of the schedule than it is now, maybe that change takes twenty years to fully take hold.  But the strike makes it all move faster, as networks are forced to find these alternatives.

Heck, Conan and Colbert have been really funny without writers.  Jon Stewart's been funny but his show really seems awfully written for a show without writers, and Leno admitted he's writing a monologue.  But, anyway, Conan's been awesome and Colbert too.  I've been DVRing both of them and I wasn't before the strike.  And it concerns me that if they can do so well with no writers, then maybe when the strike is over the studios say, okay, obviously you need writers because you can't sustain this, but maybe instead of ten writers, you can do just as well with six.  Maybe Leno doesn't need nineteen writers, he only needs nine.  Maybe repurposing Dexter from Showtime onto CBS isn't just a strike tactic but if people who don't have Showtime start to like it, maybe that'll happen post-strike too -- stuff gets aired on network and on cable, two timeslots for the price of one, and that cuts into writer jobs.  Lots of scenarios, none of them nefarious in any way, that lead to fewer jobs for writers of scripted television.  And that's not even looking at pilot season and whether that gets impacted, and whether the entire process of paying five hundred writers to write scripts, a hundred and twenty get filmed, thirty five get on the air -- whether that process shrinks dramatically.  Thus further shrinking the pool of opportunities for writers of scripted television.

The past few days have seen a bunch of articles about studios force majeuring some writer deals -- in English, they're taking advantage of a provision in their long-term deals with writers to develop shows that allow them to cancel the deals in the event of a strike that lasts more than six weeks.  So traditionally writer X, who worked his way up the ranks on a show, might get a deal from ABC Studios to write pilots and develop shows, say, three years, a guaranteed $500,000 a year, and anything he earns counts against that guaranteed salary but once he earns back the salary, he gets paid whatever he earns beyond that.  It's a nice situation to be in, providing a degree of stability in the unstable life of a TV writer, since things are canceled all the time, not necessarily because the writer sucks.  But, anyway, the past few days a bunch of studios have taken some of these deals and canceled them.  So writers who thought they were pretty set, at least for a few years, to earn some real money even if their shows didn't get anywhere, they're not set anymore.  They're scrambling for their next check like everyone else.  You can make the perfectly valid argument that these deals are stupid because most of them lose money for the studios.  But the studios made these deals in a free market.  And now they're using the strike as a way to get out of some of them that ended up, financially, to not work out.  Which seriously sucks for the writers affected.  And, again, if those deals don't come back after the strike -- if the studios say, hey, we cut loose our lousy deals, let's be a lot more careful going forward and make fewer deals, for less money, because the writers need us regardless and they have less leverage than they used to, because there are fewer scripted writing jobs anyway... then, again, not good for someone trying to do this stuff.

I feel pretty confident there will be a market for scripted television for the next fifty years.  People watch it, people like it, advertisers pay money for it.  No matter how cheap Gladiators is as compared to Grey's Anatomy, enough people watch things like Grey's Anatomy that there will be a market for it.  There will be scripted programming on the air.  I just worry there'll be less of it (and less security in what there is of it), that shrinking market accelerated by the strike.  So I worry that in the end, the writers may not get a contract that's all that much better than what would have happened without a strike, and we will have hurt ourselves in the long run by proving to the networks that we're less vital and indispensable than we think we are, and that they need us a lot less than we need them. 

On the flip side, there are writers playing with the Internet and coming up with ways to get product out there without the studios, and maybe the strike has accelerated that piece of it, and in the end, writers will more quickly have found new ways to get content out there, and the scripted television market will grow as people watch more and more videos on their computers and aren't limited by network schedules and studio middlemen but people can create TV-quality content on their own, charge viewers directly, and the business becomes even better for writers than it is now.  That's certainly a possible outcome.  I worry it's not the more likely outcome, partly because I think it's going to take a reasonable amount of time for people to grow out of the habit of depending on the television networks to present content to them on their television sets as opposed to turning on their computers and looking for it.  And partly because most writers probably aren't businesspeople in the sense that we're going to want to spend our time and energy figuring out the most effective business models of web distribution, at least not when there are jobs still out there where we can get paid merely to write and to worry about the creative end of things.

But hopefully I'm wrong about all of this.  Hopefully the eventual deal (and I'm confident there will eventually be one, and the strike will eventually end, someday) will be a leap forward for the writers from what we would have gotten without striking.  And hopefully scripted programming with return in the same quantity as it was pre-strike, and new development deals will be signed, and pilot season will continue to exist.  And at the same time writers will find new ways to distribute content outside the studio system, and people will watch it, and the studios will turn out to need us and our cooperation more than we'll need them, because we'll have alternative outlets to distribute content and make money from it and reach an audience, and they'll be the ones struggling to survive.

We'll see.  Rumor is the DGA (Directors Guild) has reached a deal with the AMPTP that they'll announce tomorrow.  And then the WGA will look at those terms and see if they're reasonable, and if they are, the strike might actually end soon.  And if they're not, the strike might end in 2009.  Oy.

Full post as published by Jeremy Blachman's Brand New Weblog on January 15, 2008 (boomark / email).