Showrunners talk strike, plus what's off

By Rick Porter

    

November 5, 2007 1:12 PM ET

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All you Colbert Report fans can go to bed a little earlier tonight, courtesy of broken-down negotiations between writers and the media conglomerates who employ them.

The Writers Guild of America began its first strike since 1988 on Monday morning, picketing outside studio gates and almost immediately stopping production on most late-night shows, which write much of their material the day it airs. That means no new Colbert or Jon Stewart for the foreseeable future; the same goes for Tonight Show and Late Night on NBC; The Late Show and Late Late Show on CBS; and Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC.

Saturday's Brian Williams-hosted SNL optimistically promo'd next week's host (The Rock) and musical guest (Amy Winehouse), but that's not gonna happen either.

Primetime will be status quo for at least the next few weeks, but beyond that the flow of completed episodes will depend a good deal on showrunners, the writer-producers in charge of the day-to-day work on a series. Just about all showrunners are members of the Writers Guild, and as such will have to abide by strike rules that bar them from making on-set changes to dialogue or anything else.

However, a lot of showrunners also have deals with the studios and networks, and under those contracts their bosses could theoretically compel a writer-producer to show up to work and do the producing part of the job -- making sure scripts that have been written are filmed, dealing with post-production, things like that.

"I'm assuming that we'll have two, maybe three [unfilmed] scripts total" by the time a strike hits, Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence said in a mid-October interview. "And the company [ABC Studios], as [I'm] a producer that works for them, will make me shoot those. And then the Writers Guild, I'm sure, will say don't you dare write anymore or do anything beyond this."

During that interview, Lawrence was hopeful that the two sides would reach an agreement before the guild's contract expired on Oct. 31. That obviously didn't happen, and each group is unsurprisingly laying blame at the other's feet.

The Hollywood Reporter has quotes from a number of showrunners (including Lawrence) in this story, and several of them express the same kind of ambivalence about their multiple responsibilities. One of them, Shawn Ryan (The Shield and The Unit), says in that story that "There are certain things I will do to fulfill my [production] duties."

Or, perhaps not. In an e-mail posted on Deadline Hollywood Daily, Ryan explains why he's not working, at all, and why he hopes his fellow showrunners will follow suit. "I truly believe that the best and fastest way to a good contract is to hit these companies early, to hit them hard and to deprive them of ALL the work we do on their behalf," he writes.

Meanwhile, Nick Counter, president of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, had this to say after last-minute talks broke down Sunday: "It is unfortunate that they choose to take this irresponsible action."

Of course each side is going to serve up its heaviest rhetoric publicly, and that's going to make things sound worse than they are. But nothing I've read or heard makes me believe that the guild and the studios are anywhere close to a deal. Which means we could be in for a long, season-mucking strike. Sharpen up those Netflix queues.