Television in Turmoil: Writers’ Guild of America Strike

Daytime is another matter. Soap operas are particularly vulnerable to strike-induced damage. Think back to the mid-nineties, when prolonged preemptions for news coverage of the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial completely derailed any existing momentum for the soaps on all three networks. When they returned to regular daily telecasts after more than one year of recurring chaos, much of their collective audience had kicked the soap habit—and it has been downhill ever since. The soaps were in great shape before the O.J. trial began, and they still took a hit. Tellingly, most of them at present are struggling to survive. Another mass audience defection will be a disaster. That chill in the air is not the arrival of winter. It’s the approach of a soap apocalypse.

There are all sorts of factors working against the writers and their product at this difficult time. It doesn’t help public perception that a strike has been called less than two months after the start of a television season that has already left millions of television viewers disappointed with what they have seen. There are no breakout hits among the more than twenty-five new series that launched this fall on CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, and the CW, and only a few critical successes. Many once-reliable returning series seem oddly to have lost their pizzazz.

Had this strike occurred last year at this time, as buzz was building about several exciting new series including Heroes, Ugly Betty, 30 Rock, Jericho, and Brothers & Sisters and television writers appeared to be at the top of their game, the public response to their plight might be something more than all that yawning you heard yesterday. As for movie writers, don’t even go there. How often do you walk out of a movie these days marveling at the storyline and the dialogue?

There is something huge that WGA members did not need to think about during their last strike (a twenty-two-week walkout way back in 1988): An ever-increasing number of digital-driven young people don’t care if writers work or not, because they hardly watch any television at all, except for a few reality efforts on basic cable. Generation D is largely busy playing video games on its television sets and viewing viral videos, exploring virtual reality, downloading music, and interacting with itself on its computers. Further, Gen D has instant access to tens of thousands of existing movies online and on DVD when it feels the need for a pursuit of greater substance.