wga strike

Not everyone I know is as into TV news as I am, but one thing that I've read a lot about over the weekend is the Writer's Guild of America (WGA) strike.  This is a strike that has been in negotiation for month, and they finally went on strike at midnight this morning.  Here's the facts as I know it for anyone who is interested...

• Writers are striking because they want to renegotiate their contracts; the main issue I''m hearing discussed is that they want to receive more money on alternative ways of viewing their work, like dvds and internet viewing.
• Right now, writers get about 3 cents on the sale of a $20 dvd.  I'm guessing that's further divided when it's multiple writers on the same show.
• The strike impacts film and TV writers, more than 10,000 nationwide (source).  The impact on movies will be much less in the short term than TV.
  
• The WGA is the only group striking, but some people who are not only writers, but actors (SAG) or producers or directors (DGA), may be caught in the middle, being required to participate in their other role (see related news mention B.J Novak of The Office)
• Whedonesque pointed out a list of some of the striking writers on the TV side: Pencils down means pencils down
  
• This will not affect all shows immediately, but it will impact late-night talk shows right now and shows like Jon Stewart, Colbert Report, and Tonight Show will start with reruns today (source).
• Reality shows won't be affected because they don't use WGA writers.  This means we might see more reality shows pop up as networks run out of scripts.
  
• Most soaps have enough scripts written to go through January (source).
• Comedies are expected to be hit more than dramas because they depend on writers to rewrite on set to tweak and polish.  Without those writers, we are left with less "polish" (source).
• Midseason shows are also going to be in trouble, with things like Lost only half-way done writing their season, and same for 24; and these shows are counting on being able to run their whole season non-stop. (little bit more divided up by network here, but I think we'll see more definitiv guides really soon as tv sites get those details together).
• Depending on how long this goes, shows for next year will also be affected.
  
• The last major strike happened in 1988 and went on for 22 weeks.  That was in the days of Star Trek: TNG and they recycled unused scripts from the original Star Trek to get by (I don't see the link to where I read that now).
• Many people tuned out of TV during this time, and many viewers were lost that didn't come back afterwards.  We could see that similar tuning out and not coming back and viewership is already down this year; it could be bad news for TV for a long time.
  
• Because networks were expecting this could happen for the last few months, they've been increasing orders of shows that they may not have saved in any normal season.  This could be good news for some shows that I love, like Journeyman, because we'll get to see more of it potentially than we would have if they had just cancelled it already due to low ratings.
• Even though it's not going to impact the next few weeks worth of regular serial TV, the long term affect could be really bad.  Heroes has apparently refilmed a few parts of episode 11 in case they have to use that as the season finale!  Eek, that means the viewers are missing out on a huge storyline that would be happening at the end of the season.  I'm sure more instances of stuff like this could come up, too.

If this keeps up, I'll probably be increasing my Netflix quantity (we are only at 1 at a time right now) and watch old stuff.

I'm bummed that it comes to this, but I do agree that there has been great changes in the way that shows are distributed since back when these agreements were made that it makes sense they should renegotiate.