How writers’ and actors’ strikes affect what we watch — even years later
How writers’ and actors’ strikes affect what we watch — even years later
Last week in its quarterly results, Paramount gave investors what could be a preview of some coming attractions in the media landscape after it was rocked by months-long strikes last year: The media company said it would continue several experiments it began in response to strike-related production shutdowns because they had proven successful at cutting costs.
That’s something it seems every media company is trying to do these days, and the strikes may have moved those plans along.
The first season of the AMC show “Breaking Bad” has become part of the prestige TV canon. But when it wrapped up after just seven hour-long episodes in the spring of 2008 with a dramatic killing, it wasn’t exactly a cliffhanger. The show’s writers had been planning two more episodes that never got made because of the Writers Guild strike back then.
But the shortie season had an upside, per Michael Pachter, a media analyst at Wedbush Securities: “Fewer episodes actually was a good economic decision.”
Shorter seasons were cheaper, and splitting up high-profile shows into two mini seasons helped spread out advertising. That air time that used to be taken up by more expensive scripted programming would increasingly be filled with something else.
“Reality TV, as you know, is cheap. It’s so cheap to produce,” Pachter said.
Shorter seasons and the rise of reality TV were already happening, but the 2008 writers strike supercharged these trends and something similar is likely happening now, said Ken Leon, an analyst at CFRA research.
“The strike gave the industry a moment and the moment was four or five months to really think of, you know, coming out of it, where do we want to go from here?” he said.
The studios can’t keep shoveling money at big expensive original series, he said, and their strategy during the strikes could show a way forward. “You know, it’s great to have ‘Yellowstone,’ but you don’t need 20 of those.”
Instead they’re likely to go bigger into live sporting events, said Charles Schreger, a marketing professor at NYU and former executive at HBO.
“Even sports that we thought of as being secondary will suddenly be on television because they can attract an audience right then and there,” he said.
Along with reality programming, networks are likely to look abroad, Schreger said, for cheaper productions like “NCIS: Sydney.”
“You’ll start to see programming in the United States — dramatic programming where the actors have an accent,” he said.
Schreger added that he wouldn’t even be surprised to see foreign language shows on live TV, given the success of the Korean series “Squid Games” on Netflix.
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