Opinion | Can the Writers’ Strike Fix Hollywood?
Right here’s my try and summarize the context of the Hollywood writers’ strike in three sentences. First, the leisure enterprise, floated on straightforward cash and inspired by the weird situations of the Covid period, dedicated itself to an unsustainable enlargement — the good streaming experiment, by which each main model would have a Netflix of its personal.
Then, because the unsustainability of this progress grew to become obvious, the studios and streamers started wringing increasingly out of their writers, at longer and less-predictable hours and with fewer long-term rewards, at the same time as the company fits seemed hopefully to A.I. to render sure writerly duties out of date.
This context makes the writers’ calls for seem affordable and simply, but it surely additionally signifies that the putting scribes may lose whereas profitable — wringing concessions round pay and dealing hours as a prelude to a bigger contraction, a collapse within the variety of scripted exhibits that Hollywood places out.
The query for these of us who watch and write about TV exhibits and flicks, relatively than creating them, is what this battle means for the artwork that justifies all of this industrial wrangling.
One narrative sees a possibility within the strike to rethink the bigger method that Hollywood has developed, particularly the Marvel-era fixation on franchises, reboots and “presold” storytelling, which is variously attributed to a profit-mad venture-capital mind-set taking maintain in Hollywood or the results of consolidation within the movie enterprise. In opposition to this backdrop, the monopoly critic Matt Stoller argues that the objective of the strikers must be discovering allies in the reason for large, structural change — breaking apart the vertically built-in company behemoths, separating manufacturing and distribution as soon as once more and thereby making the alchemy of the midbudget film extra aggressive with the superhero sweatshop.
A considerably extra pessimistic evaluation, supplied by writers like Sonny Bunch and Jessa Crispin, emphasizes that the superhero-sweatshop company technique developed as a result of it’s giving audiences what they need. The individuals are shopping for tickets for comedian guide films and “Tremendous Mario,” Bunch factors out, not “Air” or “The Final Duel.” The fan tradition that sustains these initiatives, Crispin argues, usually appears to desire its writers to be replaceable cogs in a content material machine. And so even when the strike is a chance for reconsiderations, it’s in all probability not a lever that may change the system as an entire.
Personally I’d like to see the strike lever a special Hollywood system into being. However I’d settle for a return to the leisure panorama that existed round 10 years in the past, earlier than the streaming takeoff — when the downsides of the special-effects franchise period in cinema have been partly compensated for by the emergence of richer, deeper, extra bold tv.
My viewer’s impression of what’s occurred since then is that the streaming enlargement first delivered a welcome surfeit of small-screen ambition however then more and more felt as if it was spreading inventive expertise too skinny, working it too arduous or each.
Generally the exhibits of the peak-TV period begin out brilliantly however then battle to maintain their dynamism even in a second season. (HBO’s “Westworld,” for example, or these days Showtime’s “Yellowjackets.”) Generally they play like skinny imitations of the earlier decade’s antihero dramas. (Netflix’s “Ozark,” say.) Or they tackle the character of the theatrical expertise however considerably worse — with too-big-to-fail franchises that no person actually enjoys. (“Obi-Wan Kenobi,” say, or “Rings of Energy.”) Or they ask an excessive amount of of a gifted showrunner, who’s paid increasingly to ship a selection of content material relatively than concentrating on a single story. (The evolution of Taylor Sheridan’s “Yellowstone” and its disappointing spinoffs fills this invoice.)
In idea, the strike-and-aftermath state of affairs I sketched above — the place the writers win higher working situations and better pay however then the general variety of exhibits contracts as streaming platforms fold or merge — may deliver some form of decision to this spread-too-thin downside. It may yield a world the place writers’ room expertise is best compensated and extra concentrated, the place showrunners don’t have as many empire-building alternatives however the exhibits they make are higher for it. Clearly this isn’t the result the union is hoping for, as a result of it might imply fewer writing jobs. However for the viewer, a world with considerably fewer exhibits may additionally be a world with higher ones.
The darker state of affairs, although, is that any streaming contraction may mix with an intensified tv imitation of the big-screen franchise mannequin. In that case, we may get increasingly blockbuster tv as a safe-seeming however uncreative wager whereas shedding a few of peak TV’s serendipitous experiments — just like the completely happy accident of “The White Lotus,” whose resort drama got here into being as a strategy to movie in isolation throughout Covid, or the brilliance of “Andor,” a “Star Wars” present and not using a model title or a Child Yoda.
In the event you care about originality, that’s the true lose-while-winning state of affairs for this strike: Writers find yourself with a fairer share of an business pivoting farther from creativity.
