In the summer of 2023, actors and writers did something they had not done in more than 60 years: They went on strike—together—in a stunning display of solidarity that shut down most new film and TV production for more than six months.
On September 27, 2023, members of the Writers Guild of America reached an agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture Television Producers (AMPTP) and began returning to work, putting an end to the 148-day work stoppage—the second longest in the Guild’s history. (Actors reached their own agreement on November 9.)
Late-night writers in particular had a great reason to invest in the fight. The proposal on the table, supposedly the studios’ best and final offer, would have turned late-night writing into gig work. In place of an already brief 13-week contract minimum, writers would instead receive day rates with no certainty of steady employment.
It was a “dogsh*t” offer says Liz Hynes—a four-time Emmy-winning writer on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, who also sits on the WGA East Council. At that point, she tells LateNighter, “It became a fight to just maintain any sense of long-term employment, maintain any possibility of a career in this field.”
Hynes says that no one she has spoken with regrets going on strike. The proposals on the table were, after all, pretty damn insulting. But as the entertainment industry contracts, late night—like pretty much every other genre—is feeling the crunch. Which has prompted some onlookers (and even hosts) to take a fatalistic view on its future.
On the one-year anniversary of the conclusion of the writers strike, LateNighter chatted with a few experts in the field about the lessons they and their peers took away from the walkout—and what kind of future they see for the genre.
Hynes, like everyone else, has noticed that Hollywood seems to be in its purse-tightening era. That said, she points out that this trend has been years, if not decades, in the making. “It’s easy to use the strikes as a scapegoat,” she says. “But the timeline obviously goes so much further back than that, and I don’t know how easy it is to separate one from the other.”
Writer and comedian Mike Drucker, whose credits include The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, feels similarly. As he put it, “I’m not sure if that relates to the strike or trying to please stockholders.” Later on during our conversation, he observed that at least in late night, a lot of the contraction had begun before the strike.
The strike galvanized late-night writers as it did writers of all stripes in Hollywood, but much like background actors—who found themselves particularly vulnerable on the actors’ side—late-night writers’ motivation was existential.
“We were fighting for the right to not go home and wait by the phone to hear if you have a f**king job the next day,” Hynes explains. By the end of the strike, she added, the studios had caved to all of their demands—“even the ones that we were told were impossible.”
That was thanks, in part, to how drastically the discourse around the strikes had shifted since 2007, when writers last went on strike. This time around, frustrated TV fans seemed more inclined to direct their anger at studio bosses. Social media has put all of us more in touch with the actors and writers who make the entertainment products we love, and as Hynes pointed out, the wage gap between CEOs and workers has widened over the past two decades, so more people were sympathetic to the writers’ plight.
The studios’ presentation in the media also did them few favors. Two months into the writers strike and just days before actors walked out, an anonymous studio executive outlined a cruel strategy to Deadline: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” they said. Months later, Bob Iger—who raked in $65 million as Disney CEO in 2018 (1,424 times the company’s median employee salary)—called the strikers’ goals “not realistic.”
If there’s one silver lining to Hollywood’s growing wage disparity, Hynes says, it’s that “the counter-argument just gets easier.”
Ironically, the same technology-fueled industry developments that have wreaked havoc on residuals have also shifted TV fans’ scheduling expectations, which Drucker suspects made viewers even more sympathetic to the cause. When TV seasons debut further apart, people are less anxious about getting their fix right on time.
“Stranger Things fans are angry or annoyed, at the very least, when things are delayed,” Drucker says, “but they’re not like, ‘You’re ruining everything.’”
Looking back, Drucker says, late-night shows emerged from the strike relatively lucky—at least at first—because they could return to work quickly. The sets were built, and there was nothing to pre-shoot. “At the time, I was writing on The Tonight Show,” he said. “So we could go back in the studio and start back up.”
Now, however, late night—like the rest of the industry—is feeling the squeeze. In June, Late Night with Seth Meyers associate musical director and keyboardist Eli Janney announced that when the show returned for its new season in September, it would go without its house band for budgetary reasons. Earlier this month, NBC cut costs again by scaling The Tonight Show back to four new episodes per week. “I’ve heard that that has been universal across networks,” Drucker said. “That there have been cutbacks.”
While budgets seem to be shrinking left and right, Roy Wood Jr. thinks that studios seem less willing to take chances. In a statement to LateNighter, he said that since leaving The Daily Show last fall, he has noticed “that there is not a large appetite for new concepts.”
Although Wood just launched CNN’s Have I Got News for You, a new late night-style comedy panel show, he noted that it’s still a remake of a British show that’s been running for more than 30 years. “People are not really rolling the dice on anything right now,” he said. “It’s all about safe bets.”
Still, Drucker and Hynes don’t buy into the pessimism that has consumed some of the discourse surrounding the future of late night. Both writers recognize that the form is evolving and that platforms are shifting, but neither of them sees these changes as a death knell. Both pointed to John Mulaney’s recent live Netflix series, Everybody’s in LA, and Taylor Tomlinson’s After Midnight as signs that experimentation and playfulness are still alive and well in the genre.
“A lot of people stream on Twitch,” Hynes pointed out, “and they get these crazy numbers like Johnny Carson used to get.”
The shift to platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok brings us right back to a classic question: what actually is late night? If John Oliver moved Last Week Tonight exclusively to YouTube, Drucker asked as a thought experiment, would we stop considering it a late-night show? As far as he’s concerned, the format isn’t going anywhere, even if it shifts over time. Variety shows will continue to exist in some form; the rest is just semantics.
Looking ahead to the next contract negotiation, Hynes said that one of Hollywood’s buzziest topics—artificial intelligence—is not actually top of mind for her. “I asked it to write an episode of our show before,” she said, “and it hurts my feelings. It’s not good. It gets the rhythms down, and in a way, that is upsetting. But it’s totally not funny.”
Instead of battling the water-guzzling robots, Hynes wants to ensure that as late night makes its way onto new platforms, CEOs don’t chip away at precedent.
“The work is the same, no matter how the user engages with it,” Hynes said. “The stuff to make it is exactly the same, and we already have a system in place. We’ve already decided what that’s worth.”
Last year’s strikes, which won protections like guaranteed weekly minimums and residuals for high-budget comedy and variety streaming shows, prove that these protections can be achievable—a lesson that Hynes won’t soon forget.
“I think if we just hold that line, then whatever the landscape looks like going ahead, we’ll have a good foothold in it,” she said. And while she’ll always hesitate to believe that studio executives have learned anything, “I definitely hope that they’ll think twice about underestimating the Guild again.”
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