I read that, last year, there were 600 scripted series made last year.

That's just a crazy amount of content being churned out.

Are there even enough people to watch these things in significant numbers? Even at the poverty wages being paid out some of them, I'm not sure how most of them could even be viable. And, remember those six hundred series are out there competing against reality content, music programming, news, and all of the stuff that was released before 2022.

What kind of residuals do the writers, directors, and actors deserve for something that's only going to get a few dozen watches?

I would compare it to music streaming.

Artists complain about how little they're being paid for streams of their songs, but Spotify costs ten bucks a month. If someone listen to Spotify for two hours a day, that's around thirty songs. Do that every day of the month, and it's nine hundred songs. And there probably people that have it playing in the background for longer than two hours, so they're playing, potentially, two or three thousand songs a month. When you're looking at that kind of volume spread out over ten dollars, the math just doesn't work out for a huge payday for anyone with the AYCE model.

And, going back to the streamers, it seems really disingenuous that someone like Netflix can hand Harry and Meghan a one hundred million dollar development deal and Ryan Murphy a three hundred million dollar deal, and, at the same time, claim they can't afford to pay out better residuals.

At $15.49 a month for a standard plan, with some 250 million subscribers, that comes down about $46 billion in revenue. Which actually makes those Harry and Meghan and Ryan Murphy deals seem not unreasonable. Granted, that's 250 million subscribers globally, and they produce content for specific countries.

Streaming deals aside, I read that the top 10 actors/actresses make more than the top 10 studio executives. There's an imbalance there as well. It's more NBA than NFL so maybe they need salary caps.

Nobody in the history of motion pictures has ever purchased a ticket to a movie because of who the studio executives were that greenlit the project.

We do need a salary/compensation cap in this country, for executives.

Not good enough. Such c-level suit phbs/mbas will just set up the headquarters in a different jurisdiction where such caps are not active.

One would have to have worldwide enforcement of such caps, with an absolute death penalty for any violation.

This gets back to a point I made about these strikes earlier that maybe not everyone gets to have a streaming channel. And maybe the industry needs to shrink a little to sustain it. Basically “do we pay 100 people 1 dollar or 1 person 100 dollars?”

I vote for fewer streaming channels, WAY fewer executives and fewer shows so creatives can be compensated more fairly for their work.

^^ I think fewer streaming channels is going to be a thing sooner or later. One HUGE problem for streaming is allowing people to jump on / jump off. You can't do that with cable so you just take the financial hit every month. If streaming is going to make it, they have to find a way to keep the customer committed to their channel for at least a year straight (and that commitment can't be because the streaming company is giving you such an amazing price).

Isn't this kind of an American problem? At least in places like Japan, CEOs don't seem to make the same multiples (though culture plays a big role too, I don't think we really have the concept of shame here anymore). It's so ridiculously insular too, in many cases the pay is decided by a panel of your peers, who also will get a bump if the average pay rises.

From an outsider's perspective, there is probably some value in discussing the residuals system and asking why this industry in particular has residuals (which is something that was asked before), though just like something like tipping service workers, it is probably so ingrained in the industry that it will never be given up, and if it did happen the up front money given to talent would have to increase. The real issue here is the drastic change between traditional tv and streaming, and trying to make streaming as lucrative as regular tv. It is probably true that there is just way too much stuff produced and there needs to be a cutback which means less jobs, but better paying jobs. We'll see what happens.

When people were screaming for a la carte cable approach - which eventually led to all of these streaming channels, I said be careful what you wish for.

I'll say the same thing here. The problem is that Netflix is the only one that isn't tied to live sports. All of the other major ones have live sports, which is a huge driver as they split up the various pieces of that. And Para+, Peacock, Hulu are all tied to cable/broadcast entities. Apple+ is not, but then you have the HBO, Showtime, and STARZ stuff too.

Live sports is the driver of getting people to commit long-term to these streamers for many. Otherwise, unless you are desperate to discuss shows as they air, you can dump in and out and just binge at your leisure. I did that for Netflix about 6 months ago (no live sports) - I left it and they gave me a much better deal to come back.

So easier said than done. And so again, be careful what you wish for. And I won't even get into the password sharing aspect of things.

The last time I left Netflix they didn't offer me anything My big concern with all this isn't price increases, which are manageable so long as the real dragon doesn't show up: mandatory minimum subscription periods. I don't care about sports at all, so Prime Video adding football, so far as I am concerned, destroys value rather than adds it, because Prime Video is going to cost more because of a very expensive something I don't want. I also hate the trend of decontenting ad-free services by moving content to FAST services, in some cases original content like Bosch: Legacy.

My Netflix went up to 14.99. I canceled it because there was nothing left I really wanted to watch. So I dumped out. They kept e-mailing me to come back at 9.99 so I just waited until there were shows I wanted to watch that were built up. Then I resubscribed.

I dumped out of Amazon Prime in January. I placed an Amazon order in April and they offered me a free month of Prime to come back. So I did - to catch up on a few things. Then I canceled it. I'll probably come back in September when football season starts for TNF. By then the latest season of Jack Ryan should be complete so I can watch that then.

It's been complete for a couple weeks already. Short season.

OK. Thanks. I'm in no hurry. I'm not one that needs to watch one episode per week and discuss it online. I prefer binge watching.

Yes, and that's the big problem now. The Unions now have a massive amount of members writing for all these shows, and everything indicates scripted is going to get cut massively in the next few years. "streaming" pullbacks have already hurt, but the strike will hurt it even more. Look at last Pilot season, only a handful of shows were even ordered compared to the 80+ of a decade ago. Let's look at the future - smaller episode orders (shows are more expensive now after COVID), less scripted ordered at streaming, less scripted ordered at broadcast, cable networks like FX/FREEFORM/TNT/PARAMOUNT/MTV etc. are all reducing or getting out of the business altogether. Unscripted is way cheaper, gets similar (or better) ratings, can be replayed constantly, and have less residuals.

Why do you think there is a strike forcing writers rooms to have double the amount of writers? Unions need those dues!

But in almost any other industry, when there are cutbacks, people lose their jobs and some find new careers. But not here. The union wants every single writer to be employed so they can keep getting that money. Many of these writers would not even BE writers if not for the massive surge in the past 6-8 years, which is now going away. Back to being a barista or something where they can work 5 days a week and have a steady paycheck and not bitch that their $5,000 a week over 12 weeks isn't enough to sustain their "career" where no other writers room will hire them after.

Anyways, this forum is firmly planted in the WGA can do no wrong and they every demand is amazing. Next few weeks will be a bloodbath when force majure allows the studios to get out of these stupid ass deals.

What happens in other industries is that the head honchos lay off regular workers, pile on the work onto the remaining workers, and pocket the difference while burning out their employees. It's amazing how top heavy some of these companies are getting. The only counter to this is a strong union that says, no, we're not taking on extra work because you want a bigger payout. The money is THERE. Stop believing these lies that shit has gotten more expensive. They're just taking more for themselves. You have completely and totally bought into corporate propaganda.

WGAE and WGAW combined have about 29,556 members. With 600 shows, there'd need to be about 50 writers per show, which even the union isn't arguing for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writer...f_America_West
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writer..._America,_East

The union's role isn't to make sure every union member has a job, it's to make sure those jobs that are available are fair, as in they don't overwork the writers, and they offer fair compensation. It's why there's no fixed size for a writer's room in the union's demand, but instead it scales up so that individual writers aren't burdened with too many episodes to write.

The studios used the excuse of streaming being "new" to avoid paying writers what they deserve, and shrinking writer's rooms, etc. Now they're using the downturn of the glut of content they produced, content they were able to produce by exploiting both cast and crew, as an excuse not to provide fair compensation and decent jobs. The union shouldn't settle for shitty terms in the hopes that more overall jobs exist, since those jobs will all be shitty jobs that writers can't sustain a career on. Far better for the number of scripted shows to shrink to something that's sustainable and fair for studios and writers and actors.

The current trend, especially with streaming, seems to be shorter seasons, often around six or eight episodes, that are closer to miniseries than traditional episodic tv series that aren't produced on the same season cycle that traditional broadcast tv is. So having smaller writers rooms, or even a single writer, would seem to be beneficial for those types of programs. And, even then, these series can take two or more years between seasons, so the writers probably aren't being overworked.

Even the six hundred scripted shows last year that gets tossed around, most of those are short seasons, but it's still a lot of programming.

But if the glut ends, then a lot of those writers and actors will be out of work. Higher pay, but a more competitive field that's going be even more difficult to break into. It feels like a no-win situation.

Well, there's such a thing as "crunch," so writers could be both overworked for the periods they're employed, and underemployed. It's partly why I referred to the quality of the job, instead of just the number.

Also, what the WGA proposed for minimum staffing may seem excessive, but keep in mind that the AMPTP refused to make a counteroffer. Not like, made a counteroffer of a smaller minimum number of writers per show, but just outright rejected the concept. So the WGA may accept a smaller minimum number or writers and/or a slightly different scale for calculating the number of writers, but in negotiations you tend to start high and expect the other side to go low, except in this situation the AMPTP just refused to counter.
https://www.wgacontract2023.org/the-...as-of-5-1-2023

So painting this particular WGA "demand" as unreasonable is a bit of a misdirect since it's actually the AMPTP that's refusing to budge on their position of zero minimums for a writers' room.

When there's an industry downturn, there's typically not a "win" situation for anyone in the industry. It's more about making sure the jobs still available are still worthwhile for members, and aren't going to be exploiting them. Keep in mind that whatever new contract is going to be for a decade to come, so they can't let the current streaming downturn dictate worse terms for a decade. Even if the studios currently overextended themselves in the streaming market and need to temporarily scale back, I don't think that anyone could state with a straight face that streaming still isn't the future and where the industry is trending, and OTA and cable viewership isn't going to continue to decline. The rationale that writers and actors should continue to accept far worse deals for streaming shows than they do for OTA or cable shows doesn't hold water anymore, if it ever truly did. The AMPTP is crying hard times right now, but it's not like the studios were willingly sharing in the wealth of the previous good times with the writers and actors.

Actors have more far more leverage in Hollywood, writers are considered afterthoughts. The last writer's strike more or less began the end of scripted content dominating television and now we have this strike.

Expect far more shows written by 20-somethings with zero life experience going forward. That trend has only been growing and will accelerate once this strike is finished.

Most of the shows we all grew up on were handled by seasoned professionals who had worked in the industry for decades. Those days are unfortunately over and never coming back.

That’s every job. No one is working for people with decades of experience anymore.

I sell on various platforms like eBay, Mercari, Facebook etc. and when someone makes such a ridiculous offer (like trying to double the amount of writers per episode), I also choose not to respond.

Considering that not making a counter-offer means you don't get to sell anything at all, that seems like a weird way to run a business.

So, is there some other pool of writers AMPTP can choose from instead of WGA writers? Because all the evidence suggests films and TV shows ceased production when the writers went on strike. This isn't eBay, where there's another buyer around the corner that make make a more reasonable offer. The only hope the studios have is to wait out the writers and hope they cave first.

Like, even if you think the particular numbers WGA asked for are absurd, the only reason to refuse to counteroffer is because they don't think any minimum number of writers on a show is reasonable. Like, they could've reached an impasse with the WGA after offering a more "reasonable" minimum number and/or scale, but they just outright refused to engage at all, with their only source of writers.

Also, your claim of "double the amount of writers per episode" is BS. The numbers the WGA proposed are in line with what network TV shows had for decades, and the scale allows for lower numbers for less episodes. A writers' room of that size was thought of as just standard, normal, and it wasn't until studios were able to exploit "streaming" as this magically different form of TV production that didn't need to hire the same number of people, for the same length of time, for the same pay, that it even became contested. You're defending writers' room sizes that have only existed for a few years, and the writers are saying aren't actually sustainable because they don't give the writers in those jobs enough money to actually make a living on, both in terms of up-front pay and residuals.

All your arguments are in a vacuum, and ignore that even if the studios caved to all the writer's demands right now, it'd amount to a small fraction of both the costs of production, and the revenue the shows bring in. The studios are just being unreasonably greedy, because they've gotten used to the exploitation they've gotten away with in streaming the past few years.

Writers are a vanishingly small percentage of the budget for most Hollywood productions. The real problem with doubling the number of writers would be its negative effects on the creative process. About the only programs anymore with a real creative vision are headed by at most 2-4 writers/producers handling everything. Serialized content works better with fewer writers in the mix. It may help procedural and formulaic shows, but those are more about commerce than art anyway.