TV is the New Reading

Both sides have a point

in TV writers’ strike

I approach the network television writers’ strike as a more than casually interested observer of television, and am mostly troubled by the fact that I can see both sides of this argument and everyone’s got a good point.

On the one hand, writers are a huge reason behind the new Golden Age of Television we’ve been experiencing in the past few years. Scripted television like “Pushing Daisies” and “Heroes” has just generally raised the bar on the box, and this fall season has arguably shown the most promise since “LOST” and “Desperate Housewives” premiered in the fall of 2004.

And network contracts have kept profits from home media and non-traditional distribution from filtering back to the writers. It looks like all the profits are going to the networks for products the writers and actors involved had a big part in making popular in the first place.

On the other hand, viewership has been in decline for years, now, with the expansion of cable and satellite and especially with digital viewership, networks face an even more difficult challenge convincing big-ticket advertisers to plunk down for quality programming when the eyeballs aren’t there – either in the numbers they’ve been in the past, or because people are zipping through their commercials.

Some advertisers have gone the route of product placement, but that isn’t always effective, and can damage the quality of the program it’s supposed to be supporting.

So dollars are in decline, the market is impossibly fractured and no one is working for free. The networks might legitimately argue that the writers have already been paid for their creative input and the networks are free to do anything they like with the finished product.

Also, networks have already invested quite a lot of production capital in the alpha consumer – those in the forefront of purchasing high definition televisions, HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray disc players – up to and including new means of makeup application so the actors continue to look good in HD.

This hasn’t been free. And it’s not free to produce and distribute DVD sets, which is a cost that was not factored into salary structures in the last set of negotiations.

And whatever happens with writers’ salaries, producers know that the actors are coming in right behind them to renegotiate their salaries as well, and they weren’t working for free either.

Generally, the writers make a good point that they’re a big part of the reason people are purchasing home media these days. And with series compilations retailing in the hundreds of dollars in a multibillion-dollar U.S. market, the writers probably should be sharing more equitably in some of that wealth.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

Back Back to Shows Back to Main Page Next