Welcome back to It could happen here a podcast about things falling apart, and you know, when things fall apart, one of the few things that can keep you on an even keel, you know, keep you feeling like there's something that makes sense in the world. It's good TV. You know, I think we can all agree no job more important than making television because it's really, for a surprising amount of the population, the only thing keeping them
on the ragged edge of sanity. And obviously, if you're at all aware of the news, both the Writers Guilt the WGA and the Actors Guild sag AFTRA have both separately although they are now you know, on strike at the same time, have both kind of independently announced strikes after a breakdown in negotiations with the major studios. And to talk with me today about what's going on. What's it like being a writer on strike? Is my friend and one of the people who makes a show that
helps keep me on the ragged edge of sanity. Soren Bowie, Soren, how you doing, Woo?
You're simply the.
Best money you bet of them all the risks. Stop it, Tina, stop it.
Thank you, guys.
Very good, very good. Sew. You are my former colleague at cracked dot com dot net backslash aol.
Don't send anyone there now, and.
You are also, at least before the strike hit where a have been for the last several years a writer on American Dad, one of the most consistently funny animated shows of like twenty years now almost.
It's been on the air, stop it stop. Thank you, Robert Tina, You guys are the best. Uh, that's very nice of you. Thank you very much for saying that.
It did cost a lot of money to get her in the studio today.
Oh, that's very kind of you to say. Yeah, I we try very hard. But it also has like a feel at the show of like the warden isn't watching, Like we're kind of allowed to do what we want, and it's.
Yeah, you love your job. It's very obvious that I think probably everyone there loves writing for that show. Most of the people I know who write for TV have the same attitude of like, Wow, I can't believe I get to do this. But that attitude is great and it makes life livable. But what doesn't make life livable and what makes the enjoyment of the job harder is starving to death, which is an increasing reality for a
lot of writers over the last like ten years. So a decade ago, about thirty three percent of TV writers got what was paid like the minimum rate, which is kind of the minimum rate you get paid to get staffed on a union show. And the WGA says that about half of TV writers are at that point. Now, writer pay has declined about fourteen percent over the last
five years. And that's with inflation. That's like, if you kind of take out inflation, right, everybody's making a Yeah, with inflation, it's like twenty three percent writer producer pay over the last decade with inflation factored in. So that sucks because people aren't watching twenty three percent less TV. In fact, I think we're watching more TV than we
ever have before. Like, so it and I like, if you listen to the kind of numbers given by streaming platforms about how many people are watching, it sure doesn't seem like TV writers have have been gotten twenty three
percent worse at their jobs. So anyway, there was The WGA went into negotiations earlier this year and basically to kind of you know, shorten it, we're asking for more money, more money and residuals, more money and upfront pay changes to some policies that streamers were using to kind of avoid. There's been sort of this effort by streamers for a while now to kind of kill the concept of a writer's room in a lot of shows, and they have a couple of different sort of fucky ways to do that.
I gotta say, Robert, it is a dream to come on a podcast with you, because you do your fucking homework. I usually I'm the one who has to explain all this stuff, but this is great. I'm loving where this is going.
You're right, Can you walk us through kind of what's been happened, because that's a thing that I think is sort of you miss that on kind of the big level sort of like discussions of this is like what like what a writer's room is and sort of what streamers have been tiny to try to do to change that because fundamentally, like one thing people who know what they're talking about will point out is that like movies are you know, not that scripts don't matter, but it's
like a director's medium. That's like the big sort of like guiding you know, through the vision of like what a film is going to be and TV is a writer driven medium more often you'll at least hear that a lot, and I kind of want to talk about, like what is a writer's room and what has been changing in terms of how studios have been trying to edge that concept out?
Great, great question. So, so writer's room traditionally, like you think back to broadcast television and it's heyday, the way writer's room worked is you had probably first you're gonna have like twenty to twenty two episodes a season, and then within that you've got a block of anywhere from
like ten to almost sometimes twenty writers. And the reason that you have so many writers on a show like that is because while you're working on it, it's also in production, so as stories are being broken, and that means that there are rooms where people are creating a
story together. As that's going on, there's like six other things going on, like you're gonna have they're probably filming during that time, and if that's your particular written by episode, like that's the episode with your name on it, you might be on set for that because you're going to be having to make changes on the fly. While that's going on, there's table reads happening, there's joke punch ups happening, so.
There's generally a separate room for that.
And so you need like a pretty big group of people to just make a show, to just write a show. And that's that's to keep the hours within like, to keep them bearable. I mean, it doesn't even you wouldn't even turn that into a nine to five. Generally, that's still a lot of hours with a lot of people,
but at least it's bearable for everybody. Now, streaming has tried to change that because they're tired of hiring so many writers and they're tired of paying writers, and so with streaming there's different loopholes that they can get into, which is, if you start creating a show before it's even technically green lit, you can start having writers write episodes, but because it's not green lit, you're not beholden to
the same rules through the WGA. You can start hiring people at their at a minimum even if they are should be making more than that. And depending on what your position is at as a writer, like you start as a staff writer, then you move up to story editor, then executive story editor, and you move up and up and up, from there. Generally, what happens is if you leave a show as a as an executive story editor, you don't then go to another show and drop back
down to staff writer. You maintain the position that you have because you've now learned the trade enough that usually you have a skill set that's valuable enough that you should be being paid for being an executive story editor. So what they're doing is they're making sure that people are not being paid for the roles that they generally
have because they can do that. Be four show has been green lit, and then they will say we're gonna write, like, let's just write twelve episodes, and that's a lot, Like that's a whole season of television. But they're doing it before it's green lit. And then what happens is you will have these writers who are burning the midnight oil trying to get this thing done and calling in a lot of favors from friends because you have such a
small group of writers. You have maybe like in a pre green lit room, you've got like three or four people trying to write an entire season of a show. Yeah, and as they're writing it, they're like they're calling in favors from friends, and be like will you come edit this and stuff?
Because you don't have.
Enough people for everything. You have to break all these stories simultaneously. You have to know what's going on in each individual room, but you don't have enough bandwidth for all of that. So you're calling in favors from other people, like do we just come and like look at this?
Will you just take a look?
Like we need like eyes on this, and so you're calling in favors from friends. Students have figured out that they can. They can you can ask people to do this. Essentially, it's like they.
Get a natural part of the process. Every writer in every form of writing does a version of this, and they're like, what if we did this to help to make it easier to start?
Yeah, yeah, exactly, and then and then what they would do. There's different tactics beyond that, which is like once those are app once those episodes are written, then maybe the studio will will uh. They can kind of pick and choose when they want to release that. They don't have like a it's not like in broadcast television where everything gets released in the fall. It's just like you can choose when you want to release it, So maybe you wait a year or whatever, you release it, and then
you can release it in two seasons. So if you have twelve episodes, you can cut those into six.
Six six, which I fucking hate. This is a little bit of a distraction, Like we miss by because we're not doing seasons the way they used to. There's so much good shit we miss thin. Like half the best episodes are star Trek. We're just like, we have forty dollars to shoot this episode on, Like what can we do with like three guys in a room? You know?
I know? Like you, yeah, you're like you miss out on those bottle episodes, those like little ones where you're just like or like that. If you think back to Breaking Bad, like there's the.
Fly episode episode.
Yeah, oh, it's like the best episode of the show because you've got room to stop and breathe and like build just characters.
Yeah.
Anyway, Yeah, it's like you lose out on all that. Then you can also because you're breaking it up, you don't have to pay people to like advance them to the next the next season, and then that would also
be released over the course of like two years. And so you have a writer who's written for maybe like eleven weeks on something on a show, and then they don't know that they have that job again for another two and a half years, and so there's no consistency, there's no and nothing is stable, and that makes it very very difficult for writers to keep their jobs and like maintain a writing job.
It's this really fucked up situation in which I think the streaming era in freeing sort of television from some of like the way that sweeps used to work, the way that a lot of like kind of the way that you would have to like run shows, and the way that they aired when you were you were doing it on like fucking cable and they're that supported. Has allowed for kinds of TV shows and structures of shows that you never could have had, right it was just
we're just watching the Bear. Probably the standout episode of The Bear from season two is this like episode about a family Christmas party that's just this absolute, like anxious nightmare that's an hour long episode, twice the length of a normal episode, And oftentimes that's kind of a mixed thing with TVs, but it works in this one, and the fact that it's so much longer actually like helps with like trans you could you can only do that with shows that work the way they do in streaming.
That wouldn't have been a thing that you would have gotten to do in nineteen ninety three. Probably. But while I think like there's a lot of cool stuff structurally that's gotten to come out of that, it's also it's it's made the compensation so much worse. It's made the job so much less reliable. Like it's it's like it's really stark, how much more difficult it's become to make a living in TV? Yeah, yeah, is more popular than ever.
Yeah yeah, that's like it's making more money than it ever possibly has in the past, and certainly through streaming. Like they're not these these studios are not moving to streaming because like they they're early adopters of technology. The money is there, so they're going to streaming. It's like they're making way more through streaming, but writers are getting paid les and less because they're finding these, like well
West loopholes in streaming. Residuals is another one that's like it The way that residuals work is it is if you have a show that then gets played again through syndication or through streaming, you should then get a residual check for every time that the wrote episode that you wrote shows up on television, and it was very easy to track that as it would show up on like our show on American Dad. Yeah, I know that it's going to get played on Cartoon Network. I know that
it's going to get played at these other spots. The TBS will rerun it at some point, and I can I know when those are coming in. With streaming, it's much more difficult to determine when somebody watched something, not because those numbers don't exist, but because all these platforms that are created by studios will not give out that information. That information is like in a black box where you
have no idea how often a show gets streamed. There's a couple of reasons, like people are speculating as to why that might be. One is that either shows are getting watched way more often and people are not getting the proper residuals that they should be, or that the whole business model doesn't quite work. Yeah, it's all yeah, yeah, And if you found out how little people were actually watching television, this whole all investors, everything, the whole thing
would collapse. I don't know which is true.
I don't care.
I just want to know what the numbers are. So like a big part of a big part of this is is the WJA asking different streaming platforms. You got to you got to be more transparent. You got to tell us how well our show is doing, so that we know if people are getting paid properly.
Yeah, and it's again, it would be one thing if like writers were getting less than ever and TV was just like dying as a as a thing, as a as a create things that people want. But there is the money. We know where the money is going. The eight major Hollywood studio CEOs in twenty twenty one made nearly three quarters of a billion dollars an annual salary, which is more than the value of what the WGA and sag AFTRA want to take out of them and
increase compensation for their members. For those eight guys, I'm gonna guarantee you ari Emmannual, the highest compensated of these CEOs over at Endeavor three hundred and eight million dollars. And like, I don't think he made any of your He's not responsible for any of your favorite shows whatever, Like lying in the great you know made you made you laugh? Or cry or like whatever joke from American Dad keeps you you know, makes you suddenly start like
balling out laughing while you're driving down the highway. That was not ari am manual. Yet neither the shows were endeavor whatever. You know what you know what I'm trying to do here?
Right?
Yeah?
Yeah, Ted Sorrando's whatever. Fucking you know, Bob Eiger, all the guys like they're they're I mean fundamentally like Bob Eiger. One of the big things he did was pushed the Flash movie out into theaters, really put a lot of money into that, thought it was gonna be important for the brand going forward. Lost so much money lost, like probably about as much money as like the Writer's Guild is asking for it increased compensation this year, like if
they just hadn't made that movie. So let's talk. You guys went on strike. What it's been like two months now already.
Yeah, it's like day eighty four or something like that.
Yeah, so a little more than two months. How are you feeling, Like, what does it mean like physically to be on strike, like going out and picketing and stuff.
Great questions, Robert, Uh, it's uh, it's actually really nice. I don't want to say like it's I enjoy it because I would rather be getting paid and not being freaking out about the fact that.
I don't have a job.
But going out it gives me gives me a sense of purpose first of all, each day to like get up and go out of this to the picket lines. Yeah, and you're out there, you're marching around it. You choose your studio, like from the majority of the time I go to Sony or I go to Amazon, and I know the people there. Now it's like going to the gym every day where you get to know the people there and then you build your community. And so I've got this group of people that, like I go there.
These are just people that like I happen to talk to because like we'd see a truck going and we're like, oh, I hope that's not teams their truck or whatever. And then and then you just like strike up a conversation with somebody. You start talking, and then you find out that this person like ran Malcolm in the Middle for eight years and you're like, oh, okay, cool.
You know, people talk a lot about how the last writers strike, which was kind of like right when I was getting out of fuck in high school. They're not far from that point, like a year or two later. Uh, how the last writers strike was kind of what gave us the birth of like a lot of reality TV. You can almost argue there was a degree to which it like was part of Trump's rise to prominence, right, because that's why The Apprentice gets on air, because that's
a way the studios can get around paying writers. But I also wonder on the opposite and like, how many shows do we get because of connections people make out of the picket line, because like folks meet each other and get talking, like I do. I do wonder if that's like a thing.
Yeah, I guarantee it is. I mean it is shocking how like how quickly you just chum up with people and like, yeah, the the contact I shouldn't call. It's like it's not supposed to be a networking experience, but
it just ends up being that. Like you can't help it, Like you're just talking to people and then all of a sudden, your jobs come up and you start talking about your work, and then people are like after lit while like well like send me something, like send me some of your writing and then you just become buddies and like you start working on stuff accidentally together. And I guarantee that like by the end of this, there'll be writing teams that didn't exist before, and there'll be
people who want to make stuff together. Plus the studio pipeline will be empty, so like they're gonna want to like fill it with They're gonna want to fill it. Yeah, when the strike ends. And guarantee there's gonna be people from the lines who came up with stuff on the lines, So we're gonna be like we've got lots like there's what about this and be like, yes that by it, we'll take that.
And I like just kind of in general, the fact that like that's sort of the the hope, right, Like that's actually the thing that can defeat these giant industry colossuses, not just like writing TV shows with other people, but like the solidarity, like the fact that you're building connections with people, the fact that you there's an understanding of shared interest. You're seeing this especially like now that like
sag After has joined the strike. There's a lot of a lot of people who are very famous and prominent talking about issues that go well beyond Hollywood, right, the the incredible amount that executive pay and compensation has increased over the years, the fact that a lot of companies that used to do things of value and employee people and good jobs have been hollowed out for the short term profits of you know, vulture capitalists who's job is to you know, fucking suck money out and hand it
to shareholders and shit like this is not just a you know, a lot of this started in the fucking nineties. We've talked about like uh, Jack Welch and Ge and kind of like how that company was turned from something that made stuff to something that produced stock value and fired people. And you're you're getting that all across entertainment right now. And I think this is I think, and this is something I think kind of everyone knows on
some level. This is an inflection point, right, you know, AI is a part of it, the fact that we're about to see them try to use this technology to cut down the number of people they have to pay even further. But it's like this is bigger than Hollywood. Hollywood is just getting a lot of attention because actors know how to get attention. Yeah, that is the job.
Yeah, Yeah, that's yeah.
Writers are good at building the narrative and right, actors are very good at getting attention.
Then you exactly, yeah.
It's like it was a it's a worst case scenario, want to say, for like for the studio is and just because it's no coincidence the UPS is going on strike that all these companies are going on strike right now, because the same thing's happening across the board where it's like this consolidation of power and then consolidation of money. And then it's just like all that you are beholden to when you are at the top of these companies is the shareholders and like getting them money, and so
whatevery way you can do that, you do it. And a lot of times the way you do that is that you just fuck everybody at the bottom and figure out how to carve out money from them and bring it.
Rise it to the top.
And so yes, I think that it's what happened was the WGA went on strike. The WGA is a very strong good guild, good union that like does not blink, and and everyone saw that, and immediately people were on the side of the WGA in a way that I think no one anticipated that all everybody else in unions is like, no, this is wrong, Like we should We're dealing with the exact same stuff, and universally everyone seems.
To be on the side of unions right now.
Then that's like we should use that, like we should, we should ride that wave a little bit, and absolutely they should, because there's there's so many things that are systemically broken right now, just happens to be the entertainment industry is the only one that I have it.
Yeah, I have skin in the game on.
We had this moment about a week or so ago where, you know, a couple of weeks ago that it came out that like some anonymous studio executive told a writer at I think it was Deadline, that their plan was to the wja's demands were un reasonable and we're just going to kind of wait out until they lose their homes, right until we're on the street, and then well then
we can get them to accept it. And you know, this is right around when SAG was, you know, deciding to strike and Ron Pearlman gets on and makes a little video where he basically says, you know, we can burn your houses down, Like there's more than one way to lose a house. And I thought the important thing about sharing that because one of the ways you know,
media works is that there's people. The things that people are willing to listen to and that can like affect them and change their minds is partly dependent on the situational context that the time. This is why so many of like the journalist, much of the journalism have done the far right, like has been articles that I felt like I had to get out within an hour or two of a shooting because people will pay attention to
these these things that are problems that are important. They won't lead if I do a deep dive on how this specific kind of radicalization works normally, But if somebody has just been shot, they'll listen, you know, And that's like unfortunate, but that's the way people are. And there's
this I thought. What I thought was important about that is that not that you know, Ron Peerlman threatened to burn down a guy's house, that's just kind of funny, but what he was doing there that's really valuable that I think more people need to think about is accepting that when you're saying something like, well, we just need to wait for writers to lose their homes. That's a
violent threat. That is a threat to harm somebody for your own personal gain, and we shouldn't view that as like fundamentally morally different than saying I want to go rob a guy with a thirty eight, right, Like I don't. I don't feel like there's a big moral gap between them, And you can get people to actually kind of who maybe wouldn't think about that, to think about that this way. And I think that's an important thing to transmit in this time.
Oh man one hundred per Yeah, the fact that that what it gives, it gives you real context for what they're actually saying when they say we just got to wait them out till they don't have any more money, and like it really starts to h hurt their health and well being, Like, yeah, you have somebody else being like, oh I can hurt your health and well being and be like, okay, I get how those are the same thing, but but but that's not what the way I was
saying it was. It was more removed, you see, And so you're absolutely right, Like having hell Boy come out and be like there's lots of ways to lose a house, it's like, oh.
Shit, Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a it's there's like potential right now that I'm glad to see recognized. How are you doing, like just in general with this because it is you know, we've talked about all the good parts. There's a lot that's good. This is like, this is a stressful time, Like I'm wondering like when you wake up and like you here for acknowledging that. Yeah, that's it's like how you be.
It sucks.
It sucks real bad. It sucks particularly badly because I loved my job. When I talk about all these things, a lot of this wasn't happening at my job. My job was a I had working for an animated show that ran twenty two episodes a season that was it would get We knew when we were getting our pickups generally.
And it was a system that worked.
And I was really really enjoying it and very happy at my job. I was getting paid well, like I liked everything about it. I felt like it was financially stable and I was getting what I deserved and I was just happy. And that's not what's happening across like eighty percent of other shows right now. And so like we left we left our show in solidarity of other writers because at some point, you know this, I maybe won't have this job anymore and I'll have to go
get another job. And also for all the people who are working those other jobs, and it is really really struggling right now to even make ends meet. We know they're watching what they're working on three different shows a year, like they came and pay their rent, Like we're working on behalf of them, but more importantly, like we're striking on behalf of all of the other writers who are
going to come along after this. Like the fact that the two thousand and eight strike happened was the reason that my show is so good and has such good benefits, and like why the show is is comfortable for writers because they fucking went to work and like they got what they needed from the studios, even though it was hard and it was bitter, and a lot of them lost their jobs over it. And so now it's just like even though it sucks and I'm not happy about it,
it's it's our turn to do it. It's like our turn to make sure that everything works.
Yeah, it's such an important detail that like a lot of the people striking there's been this kind of like bad faith theme I've seen. I've seen some people on the left do it online where like they'll post some video of like an actor, you know, talking about why they're doing this striking, like this person's net worth is this many millions of dollars. It's like, yeah, well they're not striking for them, Like Ron per ol Man is going to be okay. Ron Perlman is not going to
be forced out of his home. Like that's not why they're doing this, because I mean, yeah that.
You can have a you can you can have a good job but also have a sense of the bigger picture and like a greater a greater good.
You can just like care about the art form. You know, we're watching journalism get fucking eatn Alive right now, and AI is gonna has been a part of like people have already lost their jobs because this shit, and like the thing that keeps getting brought up to me when I'll I'll talk about it to like family or whatever, it's like, well, you know they're using it to replace
these low level jobs. You know, some up sports articles or like you know this kind of coverage or that kind of coverage like it's not the kind of stuff you do. It's not like investigation. You can't have a machine do that. And it's like we have, but how do you think people learn to do what I do? Like part of it is like doing the Like that's the feed, right, It's part of what you're saying about
like TV writing. It's like they're trying to kill the way in which people learn how to continue this art form.
Yeah, there's so many parallels between this and what's happening with journalism in terms of like it's turning it essentially into a gig economy, which is exactly what destroyed the news, yeah, or is destroying the news, but like, yeah, it's it's
the same thing. And when you talk about AI, like you if you were to write an episode of a show and you ever written by credit on it, you get a script fee for that, and ultimately, like what the studios want is to just have a piece of shit AI written script to begin with, and then they're not paying a script fee to anybody, and then writers just fix that and so like yeah, it's it's all these different like cost saving measures then ensure that no one will ever come up through this industry again.
And learn all the things. Yeah, there will still be people who become writers, but there'll be people whose parents are rich and so they can afford to work for free for forever and then and then you know what, we don't get the Bear. Yeah, the bear in it's curiously jacked leading man. Where's where's he get the time? When's he putting down the protein? We're not saying him jug a protein shake every twenty minutes. You can this on Twitter, and I agree with you.
The structure that requires the like to get a body like that, the structure you need in your life and like the regiments that you need to follow, need to be like to a tee every single day. And there's just he's too sponteus. There's too much going on in his life.
He doesn't have time.
He doesn't have two hours to carve out to go to the gym every day.
No, this is my only issue, Like, this is what's really threatening my support of the WGA. I just need an episode of the Bear where all it is is going through his workout routine. He's in the back room, he's doing some pearls, you know.
Yeah, he's got bags of rice back there and he's doing squats with them on his shoulders. I even I want to see him at three am in the morning and I'll buy it. I'll be a five at three am in the morning and he's like going to it anytime, fitness or fucking whatever, and he's like work it out a little bit.
I can be like, Okay, there it is.
That's when he's doing it. There, we got benefits of it. Let me see him get his BCAAs you know, have fucking ritchie be like you're taking your pre workout today. Yeah, it give me a little bit, you know. All right, Soren, you got it out here. Do you have anything you want to plug before, like perhaps a podcast with our with our other former colleague Dan O'Brien.
No, yeah, no, yeah, yeah, I got a show called a Quick Question with Dan and Soorn. No, Soren and Dan oh got him a headliner. Uh yeah, Quick Question with Soren and Daniel. You can check that out anywhere you listen to podcasts. It's basically just Dan and I catching up because we live on opposite coasts.
And we're good buddies.
And uh that's about it.
Yeah, excellent. Check out Quick Questions with Sorn and Dan. Special show just a thank you. It's a wonderful time, Soren, thank you so much, and you know, good luck out there on the picket line. To you, to all of the other writers, and to everybody at SAG after, thank you.
It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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