Hope you love reality TV and sitcom reruns

Hollywood’s writers have decided to strike.

After a final day of failed negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) announced that its roughly 11,500 members will stop working until a new contract can be reached.

📝 What do they want?... The WGA is seeking pay increases, especially in terms of their residuals, which are the payments writers receive when their content is re-aired on TV or streaming. The writers also want more safeguards to prevent the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to generate new scripts.

• The WGA claims that industry profits have risen from $5bn in 2000 to ~$30 billion in 2021, yet half of TV series writers now work at minimum salary levels. That’s up from the ~33% of writers who were paid scale – the minimum rate for any given position – in 2013-2014.

🧐 So, what happens now?... Late night shows like The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon and Saturday Night Live will likely stop airing new episodes immediately. That’s because those shows require up-to-the-minute topical writing – without it, Jimmy Fallon would need to put together his own monologue, and no one wants that (including Fallon himself).

📸 Big picture: Writers aren’t the only people in Hollywood affected by a strike. Most people who work on set will be out of a paycheck, from gaffers to makeup artists to teamsters. The last WGA strike – which started in 2007 and lasted for 100 days – resulted in the loss of about 37,700 jobs (in addition to ~$2.1 billion in lost output).