Hollywood calls it ‘the Netflix strike’. this is why

Netflix is ​​one of the power centers of the entertainment industry and its agent of change.

So much so that the streaming giant has also become an avatar of anxiety for Hollywood screenwriters who are entering the second week of a historic strike that has no end in sight.

Some of the 11,500 members of the Writers Guild of America have focused their frustration on the streaming company. In the industry, some are calling this year’s labor action “the Netflix strike.”

“Netflix in many ways has upended the business model and broken it in fundamental ways,” Jaclyn Moore, executive producer and writer of “Queer as Folk” on Peacock and “Dear White People” on Netflix, said Monday. picket near Netflix’s posh Sunset Boulevard offices.

Moore was joined by hundreds of WGA writers who rallied outside the Netflix offices to protest for better wages and working conditions. They cited tensions and changes in the business, which they say have been exacerbated by the streaming revolution Netflix started.

Those changes, the writers argue, have made it more difficult to support a family in Los Angeles while writing shows for the guild minimums. The boisterous crowd included pregnant women, parents with children carrying signs reading “daycare is expensive” and WGA union chief negotiator Ellen Stutzman, who pushed her son in a stroller along the picket line.

“Transmission is the problem,” said writer Janet Lin, who worked on the first season of the Netflix hit “Bridgerton,” one of the most beloved TV shows during the pandemic.

Netflix helped change the way people watch TV shows and movies by giving consumers what they wanted: on-demand viewing instead of having to wait for the last episode, and with an option that was cheaper than the bundled pay tv.

The company did it while releasing hits like “Squid Game,” “Bridgerton” and “Tiger King,” spending about $17 billion a year on programming and becoming one of Hollywood’s biggest employers.

The downside for many writers was that it changed how they were compensated and how shows were made, in ways they argue now threaten their livelihood.

“They changed the model, for a lot of good,” said Stephanie Hicks, a WGA member since 2016 who has worked on ABC’s “Castle” and “The Rookie: Feds.” “There is a lot more content available around the world. But you have to pay the content creators.”

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said in a recent earnings presentation that the company’s vast library of shows and movies will help it weather a strike any time soon. However, production on several Netflix shows has been halted, including “Stranger Things,” according to its creators, the Duffer brothers. “Cobra Kai” and “Unstable” were also shut down.

The Los Gatos, California-based company has embraced shorter TV seasons with fewer episodes, put together smaller writers’ rooms for shorter periods of time, and paid artists upfront instead of a tiered “back-end,” which it would be lucrative when a show airs in syndication or when a movie hits cable TV.

Many of those practices have been adopted by legacy media companies, including Walt Disney Co., Amazon Studios and WarnerMedia (now Warner Bros. Discovery), which launched streaming services to compete with Netflix.

“They’ve been responsible for a lot of disruptive innovations and practices that, for the most part, have been embraced by the creative community, but the business part is now catching up,” said Tom Nunan, a former studio and television network executive. . .

Netflix did not invent many of these changes that are affecting the industry.

Several of the trends, including the use of TV seasons with fewer than 22 episodes, were underway before its streaming service electrified the business. “The Sopranos,” HBO’s “Sex and the City” and FX’s “Nip/Tuck” all had shorter seasons.

While Netflix didn’t necessarily cause all of the writers’ problems, the company helped make certain practices commonplace, said Evan Shapiro, a former NBCUniversal executive who now runs his own company.

“They’re that brass ring that everyone chased after, only to find out it was made of pewter,” Shapiro said. “They are not alone in this, but they definitely started it.”

The Alliance of Film and Television Producers, the organization that represents media companies, said the increase in subscription video-on-demand has created more opportunities for writers to work on a TV series because so many more are being made. programs.

Writers also receive residual payments after the first season, while the syndication model relied on a show that ran for at least four seasons. During the last contract, the studios agreed to increase residual fees, which has led to more residuals being paid. The value of waste has increased 28.1% from 2016 to 2021, from $385.4 million to $493.6 million, according to WGA data.

One of the ways Netflix broke into Hollywood was by making it common practice for the streamer to greenlight a series based on a script, rather than a pilot episode. Though Netflix wasn’t the first (AMC Networks has based its selection decisions on scripts, not pilots, since about 2015), it has accelerated the trend.

“That’s a very attractive proposition for most show writers, because they don’t have to go through the audition process for a pilot,” Nunan said. “That made Netflix stand out and really revolutionized the business. Many other companies followed suit after that.”

On the other hand, Netflix Originals would live exclusively on its platform, eliminating the traditional syndication market that generated huge profits for creatives on hit shows.

“There is a price to pay for that,” Nunan said. “There is a residual price to pay. And that is largely what the strike is about.”

One of the most contentious developments among writers is a new way of working popularized by streamers. Streaming services hired small groups of writers to develop a series before moving into production. Those small groups, called mini-rooms, have been criticized by the WGA for eroding writers’ pay. Some writers spend weeks, if not months, writing three to six episodes of a show that doesn’t pick up.

While working on the traditional 22-episode broadcast series, the writers could work for almost 10 months out of the year. Now the new “typical” employment for low- and mid-level writers on a broadcast series is 20 to 24 weeks, or just 14 weeks if the room convenes without a series order, the WGA said in a recent report.

Most of Netflix’s writers’ rooms are 20 weeks long, according to a Netflix spokesperson.

Another issue for writers is how the hands-on experience of working on a show has gone throughout the creative process, often from picking up the pilot to filming individual episodes.

Geetika Lizardi, who worked as a writer on her first show, NBC’s “Outsourced” in 2010, was employed about nine months out of the year, working in production and post-production and learning about the editing process. But on broadcast shows, jobs last about 20 weeks.

“You can’t make a living,” said Lizardi, who has been working on the third season of Netflix’s “Bridgerton,” which has yet to be released. “It’s hard enough to get a job. And you need more like two or three to survive.”

Studio executives acknowledge the shortcomings of the current method because there are fewer writers during a show’s production. The problem is that the industry is losing its traditional channel for training showrunners.

Moore, the showrunner, also said streaming companies don’t provide detailed viewership data, making it hard for writers to know if they’re being paid properly. Lack of data reduces the bargaining power of creators when their show is successful.

“What used to be public information, how did your show do” is no longer available, Moore said. “The tech industry came in and turned that information into a black box.”

One of the proposals that the WGA tried to introduce was to make residual payments based on audience. But the AMPTP rejected the proposal.

Netflix noted how it publicly shares data about its most popular shows and movies and success metrics with showrunners and directors. Netflix’s top 10 page lists the number of hours watched on its most popular shows, which is more data than other streamers like Amazon’s Prime Video.

Many in the industry want even more data released.

“It’s really hard to negotiate the value of the product that you create if you don’t have the information about how successful or not that product is,” Moore said. “Instead, [you] I just have to listen to a tech company to tell you to trust them.”