Here’s my attempt to summarize the context of the Hollywood
writers strike in three sentences. First, the entertainment business, floated
on easy money and encouraged by the unusual conditions of the COVID-19 era,
committed itself to an unsustainable expansion — the great streaming
experiment, in which every major brand would have a Netflix of its own.
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Then, as the unsustainability of this growth became
apparent, the studios and streamers began wringing more and more out of their
writers, at longer and less-predictable hours and with fewer long-term rewards,
even as the corporate suits looked hopefully to artificial intelligence to
render certain writerly duties obsolete.
This context makes the writers’ demands appear reasonable
and just, but it also means that the striking scribes could lose while winning
— wringing concessions around pay and working hours as a prelude to a larger
contraction, a collapse in the number of scripted shows that Hollywood puts
out.
What does this strike mean to all of the arts?
The question for those of us who watch and write about TV
shows and movies, rather than creating them, is what this conflict means for
the art that justifies all of this commercial wrangling.
If you care about originality, that’s the real lose-while-winning scenario for this strike: Writers end up with a fairer share of an industry pivoting further from creativity.
One narrative sees an opportunity in the strike to
reconsider the larger way that Hollywood has evolved, especially the Marvel-era
fixation on franchises, reboots and “presold” storytelling, which is variously
attributed to a profit-mad venture capital mindset taking hold in Hollywood or
the effects of consolidation in the film business.
Against this backdrop, monopoly critic Matt Stoller argues
that the goal of the strikers should be finding allies in the cause of big,
structural change — breaking up the vertically integrated corporate behemoths,
separating production and distribution once again and thereby making the alchemy
of the midbudget movie more competitive with the superhero sweatshop.
A superhero sweatshop corporate strategy
A somewhat more pessimistic analysis, offered by writers
like Sonny Bunch and Jessa Crispin, emphasizes that the superhero-sweatshop
corporate strategy evolved because it’s giving audiences what they want. The
people are buying tickets for comic book movies and “Super Mario,” Bunch points
out, not “Air” or “The Last Duel.” The fan culture that sustains these
projects, Crispin argues, often seems to prefer its writers to be replaceable
cogs in a content machine.
And so even if the strike is an opportunity for
reconsiderations, it’s probably not a lever that can change the system as a
whole.
Personally, I would like to see the strike lever a
different Hollywood system into being. But I would settle for a
return to the entertainment landscape that existed around 10 years ago, before
the streaming takeoff — when the downsides of the special effects franchise era
in cinema were partly compensated for by the emergence of richer, deeper, more
ambitious television.
My viewer’s impression of what’s happened since then is that
the streaming expansion first delivered a welcome surfeit of small-screen
ambition but then increasingly felt as if it was spreading creative talent too
thin, working it too hard or both.
Sometimes the shows of the peak-TV era start out brilliantly
but then struggle to sustain their dynamism even in a second season. (HBO’s
“Westworld,” for instance, or lately Showtime’s “Yellowjackets.”) Sometimes
they play like thin imitations of the previous decade’s antihero dramas.
(Netflix’s “Ozark,” say.) Or they take on the character of the theatrical
experience but somewhat worse — with too-big-to-fail franchises that nobody
really enjoys. (“Obi-Wan Kenobi,” say, or “Rings of Power.”) Or they ask too
much of a talented showrunner, who’s paid more and more to deliver a spread of
content rather than concentrating on a single story. (The evolution of Taylor
Sheridan’s “Yellowstone” and its disappointing spinoffs fills this bill.)
The question for those of us who watch and write about TV shows and movies, rather than creating them, is what this conflict means for the art that justifies all of this commercial wrangling.
In theory, the strike-and-aftermath scenario I sketched
above — where the writers win better working conditions and higher pay but then
the overall number of shows contracts as streaming platforms fold or merge —
could bring some kind of resolution to this spread-too-thin problem.
It could yield a world where writers room talent is better
compensated and more concentrated, where showrunners don’t have as many
empire-building opportunities, but the shows they make are better for it.
Fewer writing jobs
Obviously, this isn’t the outcome the union is hoping for,
because it would mean fewer writing jobs. But for the viewer, a world with somewhat
fewer shows might also be a world with better ones.
The darker scenario, though, is that any streaming
contraction could combine with an intensified television imitation of the
big-screen franchise model. In that case, we could get more and more blockbuster
television as a safe-seeming but uncreative bet while losing some of peak TV’s
serendipitous experiments — like the happy accident of “The White Lotus,” whose
resort drama came into being as a way to film in isolation during COVID, or the
brilliance of “Andor,” a “Star Wars” show without a brand name or a Baby Yoda.
If you care about originality, that’s the real
lose-while-winning scenario for this strike: Writers end up with a fairer share
of an industry pivoting further from creativity.
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