“Pay your writers or we’ll spoil Succession.” “Chat GPT doesn’t have childhood trauma.” “Don’t you want to know how Yellowjackets ends?” You can count on a group of writers to deliver when it comes to protest sign slogans. On May 2, 11,500 members of the Writers’ Guild of America put down their pens, turned off their laptops and headed to picket lines outside studio buildings in Los Angeles and New York, after weeks of negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers failed to reach an agreement.
America’s late night talk shows have gone dark, and work has stopped on major projects like the latest Game of Thrones prequel and the final season of Stranger Things. Industrial action has loomed for months. “I’ve been hearing since January just how dead the market is,” says Zack Arnold, a film and TV editor on Netflix’s Cobra Kai, one of the shows now on hold. “Essentially all the studios, whether it’s scripted or unscripted, have seen this coming… so they have not been greenlighting new projects.” He describes the strike as part of “a once in a generation reckoning of the way that the studios have dealt with creative professionals”.
