The strike by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (Sag-Aftra) inconveniences a lot of people. It effectively shuts down production on hundreds of films and TV shows, which means that thousands of crew members will be out of work. The lack of stars willing to promote their work mean that the festival circuit is functionally kaput. Worst of all, it means that new original scripted content will soon dry up, and I will be forced to write about all sorts of worthless true crime documentaries. This, I’m sure you will agree, is the real tragedy here.
Nevertheless, as inconvenient as it may be, the strike feels vital for the future of the acting industry. As with the Writers Guild of America strike (when we learned that a writer for critical darling The Bear was paid so badly that it left him overdrawn and he had to work in an apartment with no heating after the studio refused to fly him to the writers’ room in Los Angeles), details are emerging about the difficulty of being a working television actor in the age of streaming.
