What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. -Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)
Friday, November 30, 2007
Again With the Studios Sucking
While I fully support the strikers, and while I am dreading the impending onslaught of shitty reality television (Coming Soon! American Gladiators! Again! Still Stupid!), I cannot prevent myself from watching shows online, mostly because I also fucking hate Comcast, and live in an extremely bricky house, and thus watch only network TV with a very shitty signal via a very cheap set of rabbit ears. And I like a fair amount of the shows that are out this year, a lot of which are scheduled opposite each other.
Anyway. You'll recall (or not, whatever) that one of the studios' main legal arguments for streaming full episodes online was that these were "promotional" broadcasts, despite the fact that they were only put up the day AFTER the episodes aired, and despite the fact that they were broadcast with about the same amount of commercials (although sometimes the same stupid commercial four times, brilliant, guys).
OK, fine, if you're a giant tool, you MIGHT buy this argument. Why, then, is ABC streaming the pilot of My So-Called Life? The show ended 12 years ago! The DVDs have been out for 5! Fuck you, ABC!!!!
And now back to the latest episode of Pushing Daisies, which I am watching for three reasons: it's by the same people who did Wonderfalls, which I greatly enjoyed before it was unceremoniously canceled*, because the main character drives some sort of late 60s early 70s Mercedes that they've never completely shown, and because Kristin Chenoweth has only exposed 86% of her boobs in the episodes thus far, and I'd like to see as much of the remaining 14% as I am able to. And what a nice clear picture, oh hi.
*Strictly speaking, I didn't enjoy it until long after it was canceled and released on DVD with the 4 aired and 9 unaired episodes; when it was first on, I either missed it or thought it was weird. Anyway, it was weird, but it is fun to watch all in a row.
My maternal grandmother died this morning about 9 o'clock. She was getting ready for breakfast at the nursing home to which she had recently been unwilling confined, and basically fell asleep in bed with her hands folded. I guess that's about as peaceful as one could hope. Certainly more peaceful than my plans to ram a bridge at 90 mph in a vintage Mercedes.
My father's parents died several years ago, but I had only seen them a couple times in my life, so it was difficult to muster much emotion. I didn't even attend the funerals. My mother's father died when I was two months old. The last time I saw Grandmom she told my mother that she thought I was on drugs, presumably because I barked at my mother while I was trying to fix her computer and she was trying to have an inane conversation with me. So that's suboptimal, but it's not like we can really control those things.
Anyway. Funeral's next week sometime. Happy Holidays!
More content forthcoming, including some bile to be spewed at Kevin Cowherd when I am not at work...
UPDATE: Again at work, but I did find this at lunch:
UPDATED UPDATE: Not at work, and not yet drunk. This seems as good a time as any. But first:
OK, so, the basic issues are these:
There is money being made from shows and movies that writers create from their imaginations, that editors and crews help assemble into finished products, that producers get funded. All of these people are important, and they all deserve a cut of the profits.
Traditionally, the profit from these works came in the forms of advertising revenue and merchandise, which was split between the studios and the creators.
With the advent of video, recordings of these works could be sold directly to the public. Citing costs of production and marketing of this new and immature revenue stream, the studios got the creators to agree to a pathetic share of their profits.
When DVDs came out, it was clear that the technology was mature. The creators have attempted to increase their share, without success. They did strike for 22 weeks in 1998 over increased residuals for the new 1-hour shows and foreign reruns. Wikipedia is not helpful as to the outcome of this strike, although they do not that this strike was partially responsible for both the cancellation of Moonlighting and the advent of the writer-less Cops. Christ.
With the advent of the World Wide Intertubewebs, studios are able to "broadcast" their shows, with ads, to another set of viewers, who may or may not be part of the viewership lost with the rise of cable and so on.
The writers don't get shit from these re-broadcasts, which the studios characterize as "promotional" tools, despite the fact that they are not available until after the show is broadcast on TV, and despite the fact that they are entire episodes. In fairness, this bullshit argument might've worked for "2-minute replays" and the like that NBC pioneered. And yet.
While the average writer's salary is about $200K, the median salary is either ~$44500 or ~$5000, depending on whether you count writers who are working or writers who are active WGA members. Either way, try living in LA for less than $100K. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Kevin Cowherd is a terrible writer who has mysteriously worked at the Sun for about 2 decades, writes like a clone of Dave Barry that has been beaten about the head until he is neither funny nor witty nor erudite, clearly makes less than $200K, and recently wrote this pile of steaming excrement. I may have commented on it.
This, to me, is a lot like the baseball strike, with a few key differences. Both are strikes of groups of people that work in phenomenally (and perhaps unjustly, but that's a matter for your Civics class) profitable industries, and both lend themselves to eye-rolling and tiny-violin-playing on the part of ordinary working slobs who make less than the league minimum or the average TV writer.
An additional similarity is that there are a handful of obscenely wealthy fat white men hiding in the shadows taking disproportionate shares of that profit.
The key difference, however, is that the league minimum was around $110K per year when the baseball strike occurred, and there is no such minimum for writers.
It is worth noting that the career of a good writer could go on for decades, whereas the career of a good ballplayer will be lucky if it makes it to one decade, but there are plenty of ways for retired ballplayers to make bank, whereas for writers, it's pretty much "selling their own blood".
I refuse to listen to any arguments of the "but they're making money for writing cartoons and playing sports" flavor. While I think teachers and police officers should make more than baseball players or TV writers, there's no giant pool of money in schools and police work to divvy up, so the issue is completely irrelevant. Also, I would kill to do something that I loved doing for money. If only I knew what that was.
Anyway: I will be sad if any decent shows are lost because of this. I suppose it wouldn't kill me to do something more productive than watch TV, although I suspect I will just watch Netflix movies instead. But it's pretty fucking clear cut here; the writers are right, and the studio heads are giant assholes.
