LINDA HOLMES, HOST:
Actors and writers are on strike together, and it looks like it could last a while. There are deep divides in Hollywood over issues including how creative people should be compensated in the streaming era, how work is structured and how artificial intelligence will be used. Production of TV and film has largely stopped only a few years after an interruption during the early part of COVID that unsettled viewing habits and delayed both movies and shows. I'm Linda Holmes. And today on NPR's POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR, we're going to explain some of what's at stake and the different ways it might end and how the strike could impact viewers.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
HOLMES: Joining me today is NPR's TV critic Eric Deggans. We're grabbing Eric in the airport lounge, so thank you for being here. Welcome back.
ERIC DEGGANS, BYLINE: Yeah. If you hear, you know, a Muzaky (ph) version of "Careless Whisper"...
HOLMES: Yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
HOLMES: Or planes taking off or someone being pulled back to security to pick up their phone. All right. So let's talk about the development of what is now this double strike by the actors and the writers. We should stress, by the way, that this is a double strike and not a joint strike. These are still two separate unions that will negotiate two separate contracts. The WGA represents the writers. SAG-AFTRA represents the actors. These two strikes will probably end at different times just as they started at different times. SAG-AFTRA only went on strike last week. The WGA has been on strike since May 2. Both strikes are against the AMPTP, which is the kind of bargaining group that represents the studios and the streamers, so like Paramount and Disney and also Netflix and Apple and so forth.
Both of these unions have been on strike before at different times, but the last time they were on strike at the same time was 1960. That too was a strike that went to some very basic structural issues about, at that time, the rise of television, and it led to, really, the whole idea of residuals as we now know them, which are payments creators or actors get when things are used on a new platform, like when a movie is broadcast on TV or when a TV show is in reruns or on cable or on streaming.
Residuals for streaming services, though, are very limited, which is true for a bunch of reasons. One is that companies behind services like Netflix and Disney+ and Apple TV are and always have been very, very hesitant to give out any information about how much money they're actually making on streaming, how many people are actually watching. And that makes it hard to share revenue with performers and creators the way they do on cable and broadcast and things like that. So for instance, according to Variety, SAG-AFTRA had a proposal that 2% of the revenue from a streaming show would be shared with performers, but the studios and streamers basically say that's impossible because nobody can possibly know how much money a streaming show makes. This is where I want to start with you, Eric. I've heard you say that you suspect a lot of this fundamental conflict - this hangup they have - is about that kind of transparency. Can you talk about that?
DEGGANS: Sure. And this is an ethic that I think the streaming services imported from Silicon Valley, where Silicon Valley companies are stingy about giving away any kind of information that they don't have to about how their company is performing. One of the first things that Netflix did was it refused to share viewership data with almost anyone outside the company, including the producers and showrunners who were making their programs. There's a story where actors from "Orange Is The New Black" talk about - you know, many of them didn't get paid that much, and even one of the showrunners said that they didn't find out the viewership for the show until the day after they had a party for the finale season.
HOLMES: Yeah.
DEGGANS: And supposedly, Jenji Kohan, the show's creator, said, I want to renegotiate my contract.
HOLMES: Yeah.
DEGGANS: So this is information that could really help showrunners and show creators and writers and actors negotiate their fees. And if they don't know this, it's really hard to figure out what a show is worth. When you have a show that's, like, cable or broadcast, everybody knows it because Nielsen does the TV ratings, and everybody buys Nielsen TV ratings, so everybody knows.
HOLMES: Right. And, I mean, at the beginning of streaming, there were creators who said, I like the fact that I don't constantly get ratings reported to me. I like the fact that, you know, I'm not constantly being told your show is reliant on the ratings that you get. But it didn't take very long - and I remember Jenji Kohan from "Orange Is The New Black" being one of the first people who really made this point that you can't really negotiate from a position of what the value of your work is if nobody tells you how many people are watching. The other thing that I find so interesting is that when they say something like, we have no way to tell you how much revenue there is from different shows, it's like that, from a business perspective, feels to me like it can't possibly be true. Do you know what I mean?
(LAUGHTER)
DEGGANS: Right.
HOLMES: Like, that's not how businesses operate. Like...
DEGGANS: Doesn't that sound like a little bit of smoke and mirrors?
HOLMES: I feel like a lot of this does go back to the fact that a lot of the people the actors and writers are negotiating with are tech companies. It's Apple and Netflix and Amazon and Comcast, which now owns the whole NBCUniversal empire. So at the tippy, tippy top, you're not dealing with people who are primarily in a creative business, as these folks would describe it. You have actors and writers and their representatives negotiating with people who answer to tech executives, and I don't know how you solve that.
DEGGANS: And the other thing that is interesting here that makes it even more complex - Amazon Prime Video - you get access to their original content by paying for Amazon Prime, but Amazon Prime also...
HOLMES: Right.
DEGGANS: ...Gives you all these other services. So how do you break out...
HOLMES: Right.
DEGGANS: ...What percentage of what you pay for Amazon Prime goes to fund the TV shows, right?
HOLMES: Right.
DEGGANS: Apple TV+ is a different sort of paradigm where they're charging what I think is probably a low price for subscription to that service 'cause it's an add-on. They're basically creating all these shows to suck you into the Apple universe of products.
HOLMES: Right.
DEGGANS: The real stumbling block is that none of these companies want to reveal how much money they are making or not making on these shows. They will resist that, and I think it's very possible that, you know, Netflix and maybe one other streamer may be the only streaming service that's making any money on their shows. And nobody wants to admit that...
HOLMES: Yeah, yeah.
DEGGANS: ...Because then Wall Street will stop investing in the shows, and the whole enterprise will collapse.
HOLMES: The understanding in creative businesses - and this goes for television, it goes for film, it goes for publishing, even - is that, to a certain degree - and I want to be clear, this does not apply across the board. But to a certain degree, if you get involved in a project and it's a hit, and it's really successful, and more money is made off of it by the people you made it for, then some part of that comes back to you. That's what residuals are. With a show like "Law And Order" that runs for a billion years and reruns all the time, the fact that you are on that show, and it's successful, and people keep watching it, and they keep showing it, and so money keeps coming in - that you get a chunk of that money. And so when the streamers and the studios now are saying we just don't have any way of measuring that money, their solution is that whole thing goes away, and you'll just get paid whatever everybody gets paid. And there's kind of no financial benefit for you for making something that's a hit - that's really successful, and that's a complicated thing for people, I think, to swallow, yeah?
I do want to ask you about the part of this that's playing out in public 'cause I think this is fascinating. There have already been, you know, some pretty intense moments for the studio side, on the PR front. The news site Deadline ran a story where some anonymous sources said some pretty harsh things about essentially intending to drag the dispute out until the writers started to lose their houses. The AMPTP disowned these comments, but obviously, when you have executives nobody really knows in a dispute with the people who make people's favorite movies and shows, the unions would seem to have a natural advantage. And that's true even though, as the unions will tell you, these strikes are not really about what superstars make. They are about what regular working actors and writers make and whether those people can build careers and earn a living. But how do you think the public side of this is going to affect what happens?
DEGGANS: Well, what's interesting is that we have never been in a media environment where the public has had more power over what happens because the streaming services are so dependent on constant use and attention from the audience. They can track it, and they can tell which shows are drawing that attention. And if the public decides en masse that they're fed up with the streaming services because of how they're treating the actors and writers, and they decide to start dropping these services, particularly when the original content starts to wane at the end of the year, that's going to be another crisis point for the industry. Right now, the advantage that writers and actors have is that they're the public face of the industry, and so they are the people that folks have been welcoming into their homes, or they're the people who - stories have been entertaining them for years. Or they're the people who they've gone to see at the multiplexes, and they feel like they have a relationship with them. So they're able to communicate their message much more easily. They can also talk freer because their negotiating teams go into a closed room and negotiate, but the members of the union can go out and speak as just members of the union.
HOLMES: Yeah.
DEGGANS: The studio executives have more responsibility. They can't do that, and they're all sort of nameless suits. And they're making tens...
HOLMES: Yeah.
DEGGANS: ...Of millions of dollars a year, and it's hard for them to go out there and articulate, hey, you know, this is our point of view. But they may still be making money. They are still getting paid while this strike is going on.
HOLMES: Right, right.
DEGGANS: And so they might be able to make it last longer. And I'll just say one other thing is that, you know, this story that was in Deadline where they said they wanted to drag out the strike - it came just as the deadline was coming for SAG to decide whether or not they were going to go on strike. It seemed like the worst possible moment for anybody on the studio side to say these things when the actors are trying to decide whether they're going to go out on strike.
HOLMES: Yeah. And I mean, I think the double-edged sword - right? - of what we're talking about, which is that a lot of the people, particularly in SAG, are familiar famous people. You've already seen pictures of, like, Mark Ruffalo on the picket line and, you know, Bob Odenkirk on the picket line and people like that. But the question becomes, is that a double-edged sword if it becomes a question of the strike being about the sort of high-end A-list people and how much money they make? - because if it becomes perceived publicly as being about that, I think that's very different from if you can kind of make the point that a large percentage of people in SAG do not work enough to qualify for health insurance. They've been talking about that. So there is this whole other population of people. So you kind of want to leverage the PR potential of all your famouses (ph) if you're the union without kind of having it turn into rich people versus rich people, if that makes sense.
DEGGANS: Yeah.
HOLMES: I want to ask you one other thing. You've talked about this as long-term fallout from COVID. Tell me what you mean by that.
DEGGANS: Yeah. So when the lockdowns shut down production way back in 2020, the streaming services saw this huge influx of attention from subscribers, and I think that convinced a lot of media companies to realign all of their efforts toward streaming. So, for example, at Disney, we saw the ABC broadcast network kind of get downgraded a little bit. An executive they really liked who was heading ABC Entertainment, they shifted her to overseeing streaming, and they put ABC's broadcast division - supervision of it underneath the guy who was also overseeing Hulu. And of course, we saw that legendary move where Warner Brothers had a whole slate of films that they just put on the streamer and didn't put in the theaters.
HOLMES: Right, right.
DEGGANS: So that sends a signal to the audience to tell them, hey, streaming is the next thing because there's cool stuff there. That's what these companies are focused on, and so people started to leave and cut the cord from cable. And cable makes money, and streaming doesn't for as many companies. So they were basically encouraging their audience to leave a platform where they made money and go to a platform where they either weren't making money yet or might not ever make money. And this is what I call...
HOLMES: Yeah.
DEGGANS: ...Sort of the long tail of COVID. We're still dealing with that. I mean, if you look at the amount of cable TV that people have in their homes, at one point back in the day, it used to be like 85% of homes had - have cable TV, and now it's below 50%. And it's accelerating. That's one of the big problems, too, is that even if people wanted to try and salvage the economic model for television, the audiences already decided to leave the areas of television that make the most money, and they're going to this area where profitability is very uncertain.
HOLMES: Yeah, you know, I have the same reaction that other people do when something disappears from the library of a streaming service that I have, and they move it, let's say, to an ad-supported, you know, streaming service or whatever - they move it from Max to Tubi or whatever it is. I have the same kind of instinctive, like, you're taking something away from me. But I also feel like the future may hold some contraction in what you get for a flat fee and some increase in the cost of some of these things as part of whatever kind of systemic shift we're talking about, if it ever happens. You know, as a viewer, I'm trying to kind of be cognizant of, you know, not assuming that the actual issue here is that the studios have no money but, like, trying to think about whether my expectations for what a streaming service subscription looks like and how it works and how much it costs and what you get are going to have to change in the future.
DEGGANS: Well, I mean, it's so interesting to me because people complain...
HOLMES: Yeah.
DEGGANS: ...That there's too many TV shows out there, and they can't keep up with what's out there. And they don't know what to watch because they're just blinded by choice. And then when they start yanking stuff off that people don't seem to be watching, people complain about that too.
HOLMES: Yeah.
DEGGANS: I think we have too many series. Because they've made all these shows that appeal to different constituencies, no matter what you pull, there are going to be some people who like it. And so the audience has to prepare itself - you are going to lose shows that maybe you like. Hopefully, you just lose...
HOLMES: Yeah.
DEGGANS: ...Shows that you kind of like, and the shows that you love will remain. But that's going to happen.
HOLMES: Yeah, yeah.
DEGGANS: And the other thing is these streaming services started out with low prices to suck people into memberships, and they are going to get higher. But if the payment model changes and actors and writers get more money, they're really going to go up. People are not paying what it really costs to make these shows. That's been amortized by a bunch of different things but including by trying to hold down costs of production by not paying people that much. So once that changes...
HOLMES: Right.
DEGGANS: ...The audience is going to have to pay. So the audience has to get ready for higher subscription fees and less content. I think that's inevitable.
HOLMES: Yeah, well, ultimately, this is sort of where we end up. What do you think the possible end games are? - because obviously some of this feels a little easier to resolve. There may be compromises that are possible on some of the issues around, for example, the structure of writers' rooms, the use of AI, and from a process perspective, it's possible for individual studios and streamers to choose to break off from the AMPTP and make individual interim side deals with the union so they can go back into production. That happened in 2007 into 2008 when the WGA was on strike. But I think that you and I agree that this feels like it could be really long and certainly stretch out past the kind of Labor Day point that people are starting to identify as - like, this continuing past Labor Day is when it really starts to interfere with kind of the release schedule - the longer term kind of what people are going to be able to see and when.
DEGGANS: Yeah. Billionaire media mogul Barry Diller did an interview where he said he thinks if this strike goes into the fall, that the entertainment industry will fall apart and that there has to be some kind of resolution around September. I think the industry will hang out for longer than that, but I do think he has a great point. A couple of things strike me about this. No. 1, I would say there has to be some sort of solution for paying people more. And it's going to be a solution that the studios hate and that the writers and the actors hate, too, because it's - nobody's going to get everything they want.
HOLMES: And potentially that viewers hate, as we were just talking about.
DEGGANS: Yeah. It will be some kind of compromise just so that the wheels can stay on the bus, and you can keep going down the street. And the question is, how much pain does each side have to undergo before they're willing to bite the bullet and do that compromise? The other thing that I remember from the previous strike in 2007, 2008 - a lot of the agreements that came out of that were more focused on DVD and types of media that we were familiar with then, and people couldn't really forecast or predict the current home streaming business. And so my fear is that we will come out of all of this mishegas with a new structure that doesn't really anticipate where media is going to go.
HOLMES: Yeah.
DEGGANS: The other thing they've got to do - and we haven't really talked about this - is artificial intelligence.
HOLMES: Yeah.
DEGGANS: There has to be a way to control and lock down how artificial intelligence is used. I don't think that's as big a stumbling block as this other stuff that we talked about, but they will have to figure it out.
HOLMES: Yeah. All right. So I think we're going to close on this. I think another thing that people are really curious about, obviously, is how this is going to affect what's available for them to watch. We know that late night is already shut down. It's looking, I would say, increasingly dicey whether you're going to get the Emmy telecast in September, depending on how this goes. Certainly, the fall season of network shows is in obvious jeopardy, or at least the starting on time is in obvious jeopardy. And there's kind of no way, I think, to know for sure what it's going to look like when, say, Netflix maybe tries to bring in more productions from overseas or services try to supplement with reality shows or game shows. What are you thinking about what people should expect this to look like in terms of their viewing habits sort of over the course of the strike?
DEGGANS: Yeah. I think barring some sort of miraculous resolution in the next month or so, the Emmys are not going to happen in September. They'll probably happen in 2024. The networks have already advanced fall schedules that are filled with unscripted shows...
HOLMES: Right.
DEGGANS: ...And filled with shows that are not affected by the current strikes, and so that's what they're going to do. So all your favorite scripted shows are not going to debut. They're not going to have new episodes. We're going to see an influx of shows from outside the country. The CW - the scripted shows that they have that are going to start in the fall are all from overseas. So we're going to see that. We'll see more content from overseas on streaming services, too, but it won't measure up to the stuff that people are used to seeing, and the streaming services are going to start to run out of their premium content, I would say, by the end of the year. So if the strike keeps going, the coverage is going to look bare for every sector of television in January. That's when we're going to start to see...
HOLMES: Yeah.
DEGGANS: ...Some real problems. So that deadline is when the pain really starts to mount, and it's going to push people...
HOLMES: Yeah.
DEGGANS: ...To make the kind of compromises that maybe now they're not willing to think about.
HOLMES: And on the film side, you'll start to see, I think, the release schedules get juggled. Around the same time, I think, as this stretches into the fall, they'll start to potentially change plans for movie releases, even with stuff that's already out there, 'cause remember, if you do have a big movie that you plan to release before the end of the year, if you release it during the strike, you're very limited in how you can promote it, 'cause SAG in particular has very particular rules about - I mean, both the unions do - about how much you can do promotions. So if you've got a big movie, you don't necessarily want it to come out during the strike, even if you theoretically could have it come out during the strike. So I'm going to be very interested to see how it all goes, but I think you're right that as this - you know, barring a big resolution in the next month or so, it's going to start to get real, real messy around the end of the year.
DEGGANS: Well, and the other thing we haven't talked about is that right now, the unions are not asking audiences to stop using streaming services or stop going to movies, but that could change, too.
HOLMES: Yeah. It absolutely could. Well, NPR will be covering the strike. We've got reporters who will continue to follow these developments. You can find all that coverage from Eric and other people, obviously, online and on air for however long this all continues. Eric, thank you so much for being here. I hope you make your flight.
DEGGANS: Thank you so much for having me, and it's a measure of how much I really want to talk about this that I am standing here in the middle of listening to "Careless Whisper" come through the Muzak, but I'm talking to you about TV.
HOLMES: All right, bud, thank you so much.
DEGGANS: Thanks.
HOLMES: This episode was produced by Mike Katzif and edited by Jessica Reedy. Thanks to Mandalit del Barco and Rose Friedman from NPR's Culture Desk for their great reporting and editing on the strikes. Hello Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR FROM NPR. I'm Linda Holmes, and we'll see you all later this week.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
Copyright © 2023 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.