copyright 2024, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
Jump Cut, No. 62, winter 2022-23

Series TV after the deluge: the vaster wasteland

by Dennis Broe

This article, divided into two parts, outlines changes in the streaming industry at two different phases of its contemporary development. Part 1 charts transformation in the industry in the wake of the declining profits of Netflix after March 2022 resulting in the beginning of an industry-wide retrenchment. Part 2 maps the further deceleration of the industry in the wake of the collapsing of funding because of the crash of the U.S. mid-level banks, as well as the increasing militancy of writers and actors within the industry. Together, these two different snapshots frame an industry that describes itself as increasingly abundant while its actual product suffers from the same global and fiscal constraints limiting Western capital as a whole and the same greediness which is a severe limit on creativity to the point where a profitable industry is being destroyed.

Part 1: The business of streaming:
“The one where the whole thing nearly collapsed”

If the buzzword for corporate streaming in 2021, with life still centered online as COVID lingered, was “expansion,” the key phrase in 2022-23, with nuclear war looming, inflation and rising interest rates deflating salaries, and climate destruction worsening, was “retrenchment.” The turnaround of what was once part of one of the last of the still thriving sectors of capitalist enterprise was so fast and so wide ranging that in March 2022 Netflix’s rising subscription rates were still the toast of Wall Street, but by April a one-quarter decline brought on a 35% loss of valuation as the company shed $50 billion in one day.

The tech industry as a whole—and the entertainment industry is now a branch of that sector after the mass movement to online streaming during COVID—suffered huge losses. The starkest of these being the crypto company FTX which went in days from a valuation of $32 billion to bankruptcy and which was described in court documents by creditors trying to reclaim their money as “a Ponzi scheme” with $8 billion “accidentally” missing from the books. The 30-year-old owner, who at one point talked about buying Goldman Sachs, also contributed $1.5 million to the U.S. war in Ukraine as well as bankrolling, to the tune of $70 million, both Democratic and Republican candidates in the November election, and in that way spreading the fictitious wealth around.

The Big Three streaming companies, Disney+, Netflix and HBO, have all sustained losses in both subscribers and market valuation over the last year, to the point where Wall Street has now made a shift and no longer values simple gain in subscribers but instead is looking at the actual worth of these companies—that is, are they really profitable? The answer to that is, of course, no. They are hugely in debt and none of the streamers have as yet turned a profit. That is, they are part of the debt-driven inflated U.S. economy as a whole, entirely dependent on the promise of the future and the willingness of investors to believe in that promise. All of which the social philosopher and political economist Karl Marx termed “fictitious capital,” noting that these enterprises created no real worth or value for society.

That is not entirely the case here since the entertainment business creates potentially socially useful products, in this case, serial series. The problem is the “use value” of these products—their potential to improve the lives of those who consume them—is tempered, mitigated, and often corrupted by their “exchange value”—how many people they reach and new subscribers they appeal to, and how that boosts the marketability of the company.

At the beginning of the streaming era, in the 2000s, a high price was put on “quality TV,” as “showrunners” carved out a place for more sophisticated, intelligent or “Complex TV” which replaced the morass of cheap to make “Reality TV.” But as the bigger players entered the arena, they have brought with them an increased emphasis on the profit motive of the streaming company which has resulted in a reversion to past media formulas. Thus, we have new kinds of homogenization, where viewers find shows “unwatchable” because of their design to appeal to a faceless “middle class” where market values dominate. The MeToo series Yellowjackets and The Power promote all-powerful women who do little to challenge the precepts of a crass commodity driven society which continues to imprison them. Station 11 functions along these lines also as an apocalyptic series which helps us accommodate rather than challenge the end of the earth through global warming. Finally, Succession, the most honored series at the moment, simply offers a voyeur’s view of The Murdoch empire eliciting middle class envy at the lifestyle while ultimately, through its lavish presentation of charismatic personalities who inhabit that lifestyle, lauding, rather than questioning planetary destructive consumption by the ultrarich as desirable. Just as in the television network era of old, but which is also still with us, when one series or genre happens to resound with sectors of the public,[1] [open endnotes in new window] the streamers then rush to follow that trend and create their own version.

First came the success of Netflix’s Emily in Paris, a high-end fantasy view through the eyes of a young female American associated with the fashion industry of a Paris that looks nothing like that of the city today but which appeals to viewer’s dreams of the city. Subsequently, the second season of HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant, seeking the same demographic, became even less a narrative than in season one, and instead was a globe-hopping travelogue of its female heroine in fashion hotspots in the United States and Europe.

This is especially true of the fantasy genre, where each streamer has allocated more and more money to have its own in-house mega production following the success of HBO’s Game of Thrones. HBO has its sequel/prequel Throne of the Dragon, Disney+ has its Star Wars franchise and the George Lucas fantasy version of that myth Willow, Netflix its medieval Witcher and super-powered Sandman produced by Warner Television, and Amazon its Lord of the Rings prequel and origin story The Rings of Power. As the mutations proliferate, the originality of each series declines.

The streaming backlash began in April 2022. After Netflix subscribers declined (by 200,000) for the first time in its 2022 first quarter report, the company lost 25% of its worth. In reaction, as is happening in all quarters of the tech industry, the company laid off 300 workers and eventually 3% of its workforce. In addition, the streamer instituted advertising which the company boasted would never happen. The company also cancelled series it would usually renew, such as Glow and She’s Gotta Have It.

Mouse in the house

The Disney+ shakeup, after the company reported $1.5 billion in losses from streaming in November, involved replacing the Disney head Bob Chapek with its former head Bob Iger and a supposed return to a more “creative friendly” environment. Chapek had attempted to install a vicious cost-cutting regime throughout the magic kingdom where even its once profitable theme park customers were complaining of nickel and diming.

Probably the grandest fiasco, though, was Warner Bros. where AT&T, once it had bought the company, installed its own head, John Stankey, as boss of the entertainment complex. Stankey was a “no-nonsense” leader who proposed to take the company global by producing quantity not quality, with a tilt toward more inexpensive game shows and reality TV. He simply wanted more hours of entertainment which meant that HBO Max would dilute the HBO programming. The response of the HBO head Richard Pepler, who then left the company, was “more is not better, better is better.”

AT&T botched the job so badly with its bottom-line uninspired programming that it had to spin Warners off and eventually merge it with the Discovery Channel, though the conservative Texas company still controls 71% of the stock. The Discovery Channel leader David Zaslav was appointed head of the enterprise not because he would add quality to the HBO Max stable but because, under his “frugal” boss, the media baron John Malone, he too learned how to trim a budget, which he did. He immediately canceled the CNN streaming platform CNN+, the $90 million nearly finished film Batgirl, and did not renew the HBO series Westworld. On the TNT channel, Zaslav refused to air the already completed Season 4 of the class-conscious, climate disaster series Snowpiercer, choosing, as with Batgirl, to claim a tax write off rather than incur the expense of marketing and broadcasting the series. He also tried to cancel the Warner Bros. Screenwriting Program which selects and trains new writers, that is, the entertainment complex’s future, but the outcry was so great he had to rescind that decision.

Warner Bros. Discovery also, in an unsuccessful move which predicted the writer’s strike, tried unsuccessfully to delete writers’, actors’ and directors’ credits or rather to group them all under a “Creators” label. Clearly the Zaslav promotion was also an attempt to lower quality by filling the airwaves, once again, with cheap reality TV, such as the Discovery “hits” Deadliest Catch, Diesel Brothers and Shark Week.

These actions, of course, have consequences beyond the insular world of streaming. Warners is being sued for exaggerating its subscribers by, among others, Ohio pension funds, a staple of many teachers, who claim the funds have lost $25 million on the company’s inept shenanigans.

Climate and other catastrophes

What is responsible for these losses? Several factors limit subscriptions, but three figure prominently in the global macro picture since the streaming pool in the United States is saturated and the companies need foreign expansion to show profit. The same factors also limit expansion in the United States where at present an average household has an unsustainable four streaming subscriptions a month, plus cable.

The first factor is global warming. Summer 2022 was the hottest on record for Europe and China, approximately 25% of the global population, with that record broken globally in summer 2023. In addition, because of global warming, ordinary weather catastrophes—droughts, fires, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanos—have increased in magnitude. Needless to say, in the aftermath of these dire global disruptions, streaming TV is not the first thing on local consumers’ minds. Anticipation of more dire weather changes to come has also prompted the programming response of Apocalyptic TV series, many of which are not about trying to avert the disaster but coping with and accommodating to its inevitability.

The second major trend impinging on global audiences is the threat of global war, the disaster not only of the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine but also the anticipation of new global conflicts as the United States and NATO up the ante in now also pursuing possible simultaneous wars with China, North Korea, and Iran. All of this make more likely the possibility of nuclear war since most of those countries have nuclear arsenals which they are potentially willing to let loose if the United States continues its drive for “regime change” in its quest to return to a unipolar world in which it dominates. With the various embargoes on these countries, and especially that on Russia, European and global consumers who now must choose between food, shelter and energy or electricity have less left over for streaming TV.

Another result of these current and prospective wars is the way the closing down of these potentially lucrative markets inhibits profits, such that one factor in triggering the Netflix crisis, which started this collapse, was losing 700,000 subscribers in Russia. This points to an overall emphasis, [as in the collapse of the Weimar Republic] in Germany, on the West’s reliance on the heavy industries of weapons manufacture and energy in the form of oil and fracked natural gas, with a corresponding deemphasis on light industry—communications in this instance—which thrives in open rather than closed borders. In the Germany of the late 1920s the dominance of heavy industry led to fascism.

Third, the inflation crisis is just the most recent in a series of global economic shocks, that began with the collapse of the housing market bubble in the United States in 2007-8, and eventually spilled over into the European state debt crisis of 2009-12. COVID then exacerbated what was already one of the capitalist economy’s periodic recessions, which was then followed by the current inflation crisis as greedy owners coming out of the lockdown raised prices far beyond those that would cover their losses. Wages, however, stagnated, making consumers, having suffered through the effects of these sequential shocks, less likely to consider streaming TV a must. The way the United States tackled the problem, raising interest rates, which was then picked up by Central Banks across the world, increased the pain of those middle- and working-class audiences in the United States and beyond who then found borrowing more difficult for the ever-accelerating costs of housing, college, health care and maintaining a suitable standard of living.

As a result of the streamers cost cutting and homogenizing product in a competition where each is afraid to distinguish themselves too much from each other, the initial creativity unleashed at the outset of streaming serial TV suffers. Viewers lose interest because the series do not speak to their lives but rather accelerate in a frenzy of, as suggested by the French term for “entertainment,” divertissement, or diversion. That is, to put it simply, the series are not as good as they used to be.

All is not lost. Part 2 of this series discusses those serial series which, rather than ignore, responded in various ways, some of them oblique and metaphorical, to how these crises affected their audiences. The future of corporate streaming, though, is most likely one of further retrenchment with, for example, the Comcast/Universal/NBC streamer Peacock and the CBS/Paramount company Paramount+ in danger of drowning as audiences tire of an endless array of ever cheaper series whose “bread and circuses” are what is offered to them, while all around them Rome burns.

Part 2: Series TV after the deluge: the vaster wasteland

What is the state of streaming TV and serial series in the wake of 2022’s Netflix devaluation and 2023’s bank crisis? That was a question that was not very much on the table or addressed specifically at Lille in Northern France at the 2023 Series Mania, perhaps the world’s largest television festival which boasted 55 series from 24 countries. The festival included first time series from Iran (The Actor) and a Pakistani/Indian co-production (Limboland). The question of how to survive in an industry in retreat however did surface in disguised form repeatedly.

Limiting this apparent cornucopia and abundance is the fact that financing is shrinking in the wake of another bank collapse, this time most notably of Silicon Valley Bank. That bank made loans to digital companies that facilitated streaming including bankrolling the streaming service Roku. On the international level Credit Suisse collapsed, followed by the collapse of another U.S. mid-level bank, First Republic, equally crucial to the digital economy on both coasts. The bank lost 102 billion in deposits in the first quarter of 2023 and needed a 30 billion bailout. The net effect of a run on mid-level banks in the United States was that money fled to the supposedly safer, larger banks, in particular J.P. Morgan (whose profits jumped 52% for the first quarter of 2023) and Citibank. J.P. Morgan then absorbed First Republic. These banks will now be more conservative financiers of a largely debt-ridden industry which has yet to turn a profit. Warner Bros. now sustains $50 billion in debt, having lost 217 million in the first quarter, while claiming that loss a victory since it was far less than the previous quarter. Meanwhile, Disney+ “hopes” to be profitable by 2024.

With less money to go around and the money that is available coming from more conservative sources that will want more guarantees that the money invested will make a profit, creativity decreases. All this happened in the wake of last year’s market devaluation of Netflix, based on subscriber decline for one quarter and a new emphasis on overall company profitability—rather than on number of new subscribers—as the market becomes more suspicious of the streaming house of cards.

The retrenchment was an unacknowledged topic at the conference with everyone realizing that budgets will be leaner with fewer series commissioned. This new conservatism in programming likely dates from a 2019 statement by Reed Hastings, at that time the head of the most influential streamer Netflix. Hastings commented, in refusing to contest Sandi Arabian cuts in a Netflix documentary: “We’re not in the news business. We’re not trying to do 'truth to power.' We’re trying to entertain.” Such a purposeful abnegation of any larger social role for the streaming industry echoed a statement attributed to Jack Warner in 1947 in the wake of a strike against his studio: “I will never again make a film about the common man.”

Series Mania director Laurence Herszberg criticized this renouncement of social content in candidly declaring before the festival that, “Today Netflix is more conservative than TF1 (a commercial French on air station, equivalent in the United States perhaps to CBS).” During the festival, HBO showrunner Lisa Joy, when asked if today HBO would have bankrolled her series Westworld, which the pay-per-view service cancelled after its fourth season, simply shrugged her shoulders and said she was grateful that the series made it on the air at all.

The results of this retrenchment involves a cutting back not only on the number of series and/or on the budgets of commissioned series but also the potential failure of some of the streaming services. The policy of adopting cheaper series, usually unscripted or reality series or game shows, means a general diminution in quality.

Last year the French streamer Salto, which aggregated series from French public and private stations, collapsed. Meanwhile, Warner Bros. merged with the documentary service Discovery and is now simply titled Max, having dropped “HBO” from its title, a former nod to the quality series producer in the Warner’s stable. The new entity favors saturation of lower-level, cheaper, reality series from the Discovery label with the emphasis on more bottom feeder series such as Gold Rush, Deadliest Catch, and Moonshiners.

The end of Peak TV

Slate described this new state of affairs in online service as no longer “Peak TV” but rather “Trough” or bottom-of-the-barrel TV. Last year, 2022, probably the height of series abundance, boasted 599 series produced in the United States. In contrast, in the current climate, Sky, one of the leaders in European series, invested in 200 series but only about 10 percent of them are scripted. All over the world, led by the United States, consumers, who the industry describes as “cord cutters,” are cancelling expensive cable services for cheaper streamers. The effects of inflation and a global attack on working class salaries though also prompt subscribers to cancel both cable stations and streamers. In the wake of new austerity measures such as the French raising of the pension age from 62 to 64 and the global central banks’ raising of interest rates which makes borrowing prohibitive, cord cutters subscribe to fewer streaming services. At the same time, the competition for viewers is increasing with Herszberg now counting over 700 streaming services across the globe.

With cord cutters’ new penny-pinching, the streaming industry has reverted to many of the practices of the older era of network TV, practices which for a decade or so the steamers had claimed they had surpassed in a frenzy of creative activity. Streamers cancel series sooner with some now cancelled in production before they reach the air. This practice resembles the usual mid-season casualty list that network TV used to announce after Christmas as a fresh second season: the networks replaced fall series that were duds and ratings failures with spring series, many of which, a few months later, shared the same fate.

With reduced budgets for series, canny showrunners are already adapting to the new austerity. One of the best series in the festival was Nordland ’99 from Danish public television, in a shortened but tight half-hour rather than the usual hour format. The showrunner, Kasper Møller Rask, has fashioned a low-budget, rural series with a cast of largely newcomers. Filmed cheaply in the Danish countryside whose dark forests are alive with the eerie intonations of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, Nordland also echoes the thematics of Lynch’s series. Three teens search for their missing friend and discover the evil of an adult world—itself left for dead by the systemic brutality of what we now call in the West, authoritarian neo-liberalism. This new streaming budget frugality contrasts sharply with the earlier era, and, by earlier, I mean just a few years ago, when, led by Netflix, money flowed freely. Then the streamers had as a priority simply putting as much content on their platforms as possible.

Another accommodation going back to the network TV era is the adoption of the dreaded strategy of advertising, which Netflix previously famously shunned, claiming viewer sponsorship with its revenue coming exclusively from subscriptions. All streamers now use “two-tiered” pricing, with a lower price that includes advertising and a higher price that excludes it. Advertising of course also opens the door to sponsors having a say in content and particularly in the atmosphere that the program surrounding their product sets up, yet another infringement on creativity that results in a blanding of series content. This new austerity, control, and limited range of content then gets presented as “freedom of choice” for the consumer.

More oversight has come with new, more frugal Netflix functioning. It’s like the TV networks of old, famous for interfering in programming; every producer lived in fear of the network executives’ visit to the set. Gone are the days of commissioning a series and then leaving the creatives in charge until the show reached the air. Along with this, TV showrunners and writers, those responsible for a series’ creation and vision, have less job security. Unlike the Hollywood studios of old, whose system of control was feudal and absolute but which still guaranteed a regular paycheck, most showrunners and writers now work from show to show. Netflix signed the German creators of an earlier hit Dark, Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, and the Spanish creator Alex Pina, on the strength of Money Heist,but these high-priced signings resulted in failure. Netflix cancelled the next high budget series by the Dark team 1899 after one season. Subsequent Alex Pina series’ disappointed so that his next series returns to his hit franchise with a prequel about the most charismatic of the Money Heist thieves titled simply Berlin. The trace of the older writer-centered practice surfaced though in HBO head Casey Bloys’ claim at the conference that he had scheduled The Last of Us, his latest HBO hit and one of the best shows of this season, simply because he wanted to be in business with Craig Mazin after his series Chernobyl. On the strength of Mare of Easttown, Bloys also indicated his interest in any series Kate Winslet proposes.

To appeal to lenders wanting assurance that their money will prosper, the buzzword in steaming is now “IP,” Intellectual Property, which does not mean more thoughtful challenging work but rather the opposite. IP refers to utilization of a previously successful property. In the Hollywood studio sense this could mean that the series already has an audience in another medium—thus recent television series remakes of the novels Great Expectations and Tom Jones, as well as Drops of God, an international co-production from a popular Japanese manga about competition between wine growers in France and Japan.

More often though IP means extending one hit series into a franchise, the business term, or “universe,” its creative equivalent. For example, the very conservative Yellowstone succeeded witha kind of modern-day cross between Bonanza and Dynasty about a rancher and his family holding onto their land, aided by the fading star quality of Kevin Costner. Its company, Paramount+, with its older audience drawn from its network profile on its subsidiary CBS, has now gone back in time and created two copycat series about the origin of the dynasty titled 1883 and 1923. HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon also scored big. Despite Game of Thrones’ lackluster final season, the prequel has proven an enormous hit and prompted the development of six more GOT series. You can never have too much of a good thing even if that good thing ended by exhausting itself. (21)

Europe is less genre-oriented and more attuned to individual productions, so the European way of coping with U.S. IP production and shrinking budgets is a new emphasis on “co-pros,” the European buzzword most heard at the conference. The showcase series for this mode was The Swarm, a co-production featuring public stations in France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland and the private streamers Viaplay (Scandinavia) and Hulu Japan. The point of the series is a strong one, that all manner of corporate dumping and overfishing abused the ocean, which then fights back and wreaks its revenge. However, the script wastes too much time on its thinly sketched personal peccadillos for its array of young scientists scattered across the globe (“Is she sleeping with him? Will they get back together?”). The series, on the model of the film Outbreak, could have done better if it simply stuck to its main theme.

Co-productions, which now include U.S. streamers teaming up with Euro public television networks and private companies, have however produced some solid results. This year’s The Good Mothers, a British/Italian indie production for Hulu and Disney+, won the inaugural Berlin Biennale Best Series. The show offers an on-point, utterly accurate detailing of the feudal misogyny of the clannish ‘Ndrangheta as a way of maintaining its power through secrecy. Rather than a typical mafia series filled with gaudy physical violence, The Good Mothers concentrates on the emotional violence suffered by its’ trio of heroines who must contend with guilt induced by their captors for “betraying” the system which imprisons them. Disney+ and FX now are also developing Deepti Kapoor’s Age of Vice, about the endemic corruption in India in the 2000s and the movement of gangsters into the government as that country made a transition from socialism to capitalism.

Nevertheless, the general quality of the streamers’ stables is declining. Once upon a time critics described television as “the vast wasteland.” That phrase gave way to the labeling of the streaming era as a new “Golden Age,” harkening back to the quality, often socially inflected, anthology dramas of television’s early years. At the conference, today’s budget-conscious streamers, in an era of increasing competition, each stressed their desire to be all things to all audiences, a one-stop shop for entertainment, given that much of the audience can now only afford one stop. This Noah’s Ark approach with comedy, drama, family, quality entertainment all in the same bundle stressed the element of abundance, but today’s shows mostly feature abundance without much merit; to find quality series requires scouring all the steamers to find the one or two relevant series on each, a practice that resembles the quality series amid the reruns on cable.

Paramount+, for example, a newcomer to European markets, in line with its old studio logo featuring a snow-capped peak, described its offerings as “a mountain of entertainment,” a “popular array of content” that presented a range of series with each “best in class.” The streamer’s “sizzle reel,” a montage of its various offerings, with the tagline “The Stars Are Streaming,” belied these claims. The preview reel featured an almost comatose Kevin Costner in Yellowstone, Sylvester Stallone in his beyond-clichéd gangster series Tulsa, a coming extension of Dexter about a vengeful serial killer, and NCIS Sydney, the overseas expansion of that tired franchise. This is surely a mountain of something, but I’m not sure the correct name for it is entertainment.

At the conference, Netflix meanwhile described its collection of series as equally “premium and commercial at the same time,” though it was difficult to detect the premium element in its mostly standard generic offerings. The streamer also boasted ominously, “we have become the biggest builder of cross-European culture in the EU.” Netflix thus rationalized its goal of supplanting a wide range of public European stations in a mode of neoliberal entertainment that would fashion a Euro cultural soup. Through this lens, European culture is now being systematized by the top four streaming services on the continent: Netflix, Amazon, Disney+ and Sky, which is majority-held by Comcast, the conservative U.S. owner of NBC/Universal and Peacock.

Striking back against the Empire

The question of “What is to be done?” about this dominance is now more appropriately altered to “Can anything be done?” Three factors challenge the power of the streamers both globally and locally.

The first, in Europe, is still the possibility of government intervention to level the playing field. However, the EU trails in the race to regulate Artificial Intelligence (AI) as exemplified in ChatGPT. Its’ intervention in the digital economy often comes in the too little, too late variety. As an example of how the streamers are outwitting regulation, there is a European mandate that the U.S. streamers’ content must be at least 30 percent local. The regulation produces some interesting local series but also some throwaway series simply meant to satisfy the law, much in the way of British low-budget “quota quickies” in the 1940s by the major American studios in order to release their A films in the British market.

Despite, or perhaps to surmount, this mandate, the streamers are pilfering the best European series talent. Netflix, for example, recently hired Eleonora Andreatta, formerly the head of the drama department of the Italian public television network RAI. The producers of the French espionage series Bureau of Legends, which has now become a global franchise, find themselves developing series currently for Disney+. In France, though, following the Chinese model, each co-pro with a U.S. streamer now must have a delegated French producer. The idea here is that the producer then absorbs the American model and can instill it into French production, the way the Chinese allowed foreign companies to set up in China but then absorbed their know-how. The problem is that the American system, geared toward industrial efficiency and churning out product, often displaces older less factory-oriented methods of production.

There is also progress in the battle of creative producers to not cede the rights to their series in perpetuity for an (often slightly) increased up-front payment. This change is a factor of government negotiation and pressure but also due to the fact that the streamers, and Netflix in particular, have now acquired so much content, that they no longer have any need to build up their catalogue and so can, after a specified time, let the property circulate. We are seeing this now as Warner Bros. Discovery leases its HBO hits, most notably Six Feet Under, to other streamers.

The most impactful challenge though at the moment is located in the belly of the beast. The biggest story in series and film production is the ongoing screenwriters and actors strikes. Since 2007, with a contract won in the wake of the last strike, the writers have been watching those gains steadily erode as their salaries declined on average 4 percent while profits in the entertainment industry as a whole, despite the debt, have soared. The streaming companies on the other hand, now more budget conscious, have not budged in negotiations, trying to extract as much profit as possible from writers who have an increasingly more crucial role in the establishment of series TV and whose hiring is now more precarious since series have shorter time spans, 8 to 12 episodes as opposed to the former network model of 22. Those 8 to 12 episodes now also take longer to produce in the era of “quality TV,” but writers earn the same amount per show and thus must, like workers everywhere, work longer hours for less pay.

The showrunner Lisa Joy, with Westworld behind her and currently engaged in Amazon’s The Peripheral, is not in the precarious position of the majority of writers. When asked what the strike means to her though, she answered promptly that she sympathized with the strike which would also lead to her getting “to spend more time with my kids.” As for the reason for her avowed support for the union and the strike, she explained to a European audience, where the benefits of social democracy though systematically lowered still prevail, that U.S. writers have no job security, work show to show; and have no safety net—no health insurance, no long-term unemployment insurance, and no free education. Elsewhere in a panel of European producers, the journalist/moderator made the onerous suggestion that perhaps the Europeans could benefit from an American strike. She cited U.S. audiences’ more willing acceptance of foreign languages and subtitles after the successes of the South Korean Squid Game and the Spanish Money Heist, implying that foreign productions could act as scab series and strike breakers. The European producers declined to endorse this proposal. (27)

Writers and actors challenge the corporate lords of film and television

The Hollywood writers and actors strikes—the first time both unions have been on strike at the same time since 1960—have thrown the industry into an uproar; both groups together questioning and reversing some of the main precepts of not only the Hollywood film and television industry but the way work as a whole is constructed and managed in the digital age.

First, the strikes are challenging the precept that unions and union solidarity is a dead letter in the era of both Artificial Intelligence and ever-increasing corporate power and prestige as the twin answers to solving the world’s ills. The high profile of the two striking unions has drawn more attention and produced much more publicity for unions. The news stories in The New York Times, for example, doubled since the actors joined the writers on strike, with most major publications feeling the need to generate stories from the picket lines. Formerly, major news outlets concentrated on the beginning and end of strikes and seldom showed up on picket lines.

The result: a kind of reverse Blacklist effect. In 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee decided that it would launch its campaign against radical elements in the labor force by first attacking Hollywood, and thus ensuring maximum publicity in its campaign of fear. Here the opposite is happening. In the wake of the Occupy Movement, and using that language, the coverage of the strikes of the two unions, largely favorable in the press since its readers are avid followers of films and television series, have prompted more favorable coverage of other strikes. Teamsters and nurses have shown up on the picket lines at the Hollywood studios, with the former in some cases helping to stop production. Likewise, the leaders of the Writer’s Guild joined hotel workers in a July 4th strike for higher wages.

On the actor’s picket line Fran Drescher, President of the Actors’ Guild, employed the Occupy language of the 1 percent to criticize executive salaries. She described one of the most powerful men in the industry, Disney’s President Michael Iger who makes $27 million annually, as a dazzling example of the rampant inequality in pay structure. She claimed that she was on the line representing “the 99.9 percent of the membership who are working people who are just trying to make a living to put food on the table, pay rent and get their kids off to school,” while labelling the Hollywood executives as “land barons of a medieval time.” This labelling not only echoes the language of the Occupy movement but is also drawn from a popular left characterization of a new Feudalism, which describes the majority of the population as now in the position of serfs serving corporate lords. Thus, we have Jeff Bezos’ dominion of Amazon warehouses, Apple and Microsoft’s kingdom of those slaving in its computer workshops and Iger’s writers and actors whose salaries are every day being reduced, as prices rise, to not even being able to live on the lord’s manor.
 
One of the main claims of the writers is that they can no longer make it in a city they helped build as Los Angeles rents skyrocket. This claim in similar to the hotel workers who say they have to live outside the city and sometimes travel 90 to 100 miles to work. The writer’s claim was validated by a studio exec who, anonymously, told Deadline that the studio producers would “bleed out” writers and force them to “start losing their apartments.”

Second, the strikes are challenging the attempt to conceal profits and keep from paying residuals. For over 70 years the vast majority of television series operated on the principle of deficit financing. Producers and talent (writers, directors, and actors) understood that the vast majority of money made on any television series comes after the series was sold into syndication. The “magic number” that would trigger these sales was 100 episodes. The show would then become profitable in perpetuity with its creators and financiers able to live off of these sales.

Part of the drive toward online subscription services, where the studio or streamer locks content behind a solid wall, is the elimination of these residuals or the limiting of them since the creators can no longer track how their work is being monetized. The streamers, on the other hand, generate more data and track viewer habits minutely, down to the second where the viewer continues to watch or tunes out. The transparency of the old system, with the Nielsen Ratings and with syndicated contracts, allowed creators to track profits, though the studios often tried to conceal their gains. A major demand of both strikes is finding a way to reclaim residuals in the age of streaming. The battle here goes beyond film and television writers and actors and encompasses the problems with monetizing digital work as a whole. Journalists, for example, often work for less or for nothing on internet publications while search engines such as Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft’s Bing accrue value by appropriating stories from news outlets and only reluctantly pay for this content.

Third, the strikes challenge the parceling of work, a trend that is going on throughout industry as a whole and which is being exacerbated by experiments with Artificial Intelligence and programs such as ChatGPT. The idea of breaking all kinds of work into tasks has of course been around since the Taylorist experiments with assembly lines in the 1920s. What is new, or as the owners say “innovative,” is the potential ability, once the work is broken down into its component parts, to have laborers replaced with robotic replicators of their work or to reduce work to “smaller, more degraded, poorly paid jobs.” 

Both actors and writers complain that “Our careers have been turned into gig work.” The meteoric rise in streaming has been fed by the work of writers creating television series of high quality and moving themselves into all areas of production, to make sure, like the Hollywood directors of old, that all aspects of the series (costuming, makeup, set construction) form a seamless whole. This expansion fueled the rise of more and better showrunners, responsible for the overall concept of the series.

The producers in response are attempting to limit the writers to just their time in the writing room, and then release them. Their preferred model is to pay a single creator an exorbitant salary (Shonda Rhimes-Bridgerton, Ryan Murphy-American Horror Story, Taylor Sheridan-Yellowstone) and dispense with the rest. The Writer’s Guild has been tracking this trend and says that writers’ time on a series has decreased because they are let go faster and that in 2022 over half of the writers, stripped of their producing jobs, are being paid at the weekly minimum, as opposed to one-third eight years ago.

Contrary to the Tom Cruise version of AI in Mission Impossible—Dead Reckoning where an all-powerful “Entity” threatens a machinic takeover of the earth, the real challenge of AI, which this Hollywood fantasy version conceals, is that its’ use in un-employing workers in all kinds of industries as well as forcing them to work harder through its monitoring capacities. Thus, warehouse workers describe being tracked minutely, then pressured to skip breaks while setting them up for disciplinary actions if their goals are not met. The personal touch of service workers, who one worker described as providing “a kind of therapy” to their clients, is discounted as their work is automated. A recent Biden administration summit to “regulate” AI rather than impose restrictions allowed the seven major makers of the service to voluntarily agree to guidelines. None of the restrictions even mentioned AI’s power to eliminate, tame and discipline the U.S. workforce.

A long-term goal for Hollywood’s use of AI it potentially to use the machine to grind out scripts that are then “created” not by the writer, but by the studio/streaming service. The scenario for this goal involves the studio plugging in a basic concept with AI or ChatGPT which then churns out a (highly unworkable) script. A writer would then be hired to turn the script into a usable scenario but the credit, and the profits, would go to the studio. This is an attempt to turn television production back to the 1950s when, for example, Warners cheated the “showrunner” Roy Huggins out of the “Created By” credits for both Maverick and 77 Sunset Strip,two shows which kept the studio afloat . For Maverick, the studio bought the rights to a book that a plot turn in the pilot employed and thus claimed it owned the property. For 77 Sunset Strip,Warners screened the pilot in a movie theater outside the U.S. and claimed the studio then owned the rights to “the film.” Huggins himself addressed this ignominy in his next contract with Universal which granted him the “Created By” credit and established it as a norm for the industry.

An actor on the picket line described AI as “a tool to generate wealth,” noting that the main task of the “Entity” was “cutting jobs for corporate profit.” Another writer’s guild member summoned up the end game as “creating material in the cheapest, most piecemeal, automated way possible” so that “one layer of high-level creatives take the cheaply generated material and turn it into something.” The actors’ and writers’ guilds demand to regulate how this process is used constitutes a crucial attempt to counter this thrust.

The writers’ campaign to keep AI out of the writing process though is also burdened by the declining quality of series TV which this article has mapped, and the whole history of Hollywood film and television production as rolling off an assembly line. Some recent series look like they have already been written by programs like ChatGPT. However, this assembly line production can never replace well-written series. One need only look at two recent series, released within a day of each other, to observe this. Amazon’s bloated, utterly unoriginal John Wick/True Lies/Jason Bourne paint-by-numbers Citadel is a global franchise with new entries in India and Italy. The series, exec produced by the Russo Brothers who did better work on The Avengers, sounds like it has been spun off a machine. Employing the language of AI, the script, lacking an ounce of originality, is simply "recombinatory." On the other hand, David E. Kelley’s Love and Death, is an extraordinary, minute examination of how unmet desires in a suburb of Texas at the dawn of the repressive Reagan “revolution” erupt into violence. Not a machine-like spitting out of past cliches but a highly original work.

The play’s the thing

The third overall challenge to the power of the streamers spotlights global showrunners willing to buck the trend of “pure entertainment” and create socially relevant series, though these admittedly are in the vast minority.

To return to the festival, at this year’s Series Mania, a number of series highlighted global discontent and (often local) opposition to the reigning corporate neoliberal order. These series may represent a beacon as, post-Strike, writers and actors return to the studios with a greater consciousness of not only their earning power but also, perhaps, their ability to challenge the ethos of the profit-making machines that they are now on the picket line contesting.

In this category, a Scandinavian entry, featured the aforementioned Danish series Nordland ’99 as well as the Norwegian series The Fortress, which won the jury prize for writing. The Fortress, an eerie dystopian or apocalyptic series, describes a future Norway building a Trump wall, with enough oil wealth and agriculture to sustain itself. The country shuts itself off from the rest of the world but then falls prey to a bacteriological attack because of this isolation.

An India/Pakistani production Limobland makes an anti-capitalist point. Although much more Pakistani-centered, shot amid the breathtaking peaks and lowlands of the Hunza Valley in Karachi, it resembles a Succession-themed series but unlike that series does not simply focus on wealth. Instead, Limboland centers on the decisions an old man, now a wealthy hotel owner, made in his life, shutting out the woman he loved in favor of the pursuit of money. Compared to Succession, this show moves at a non-Western pace that equally belies the frantic pursuit of profit evidenced even in the editing of its U.S. cousin. Similarly progressive in theme, Black Santiago Club, from Benin, depicts the fellow-feeling around a jazz club threatened by a developer who wants to gut the club and turn it into condo apartments. The film explicitly contrasts the communal sprit engendered by the club and the attempt to destroy that spirit by privatizing a neighborhood treasure.

Pedro Almodóvar and his brother presented Fleeting Lies, with an almost perfect pilot episode about a cosmetician who has staked everything on a corporate promotion and then is sabotaged and must go into practice for herself. The follow-up episodes though, instead of following her troubles setting up an affordable beauty clinic away from the province of the ultrawealthy, concentrates too much on the sit-com element of her having to lie to maintain her social status.

Finally, two other series presented at the festival highlighted racial inequality. Canada’s Little Bird, voted the audience favorite, situated itself first in the present as it follows the path of a Native American ripped away from her family and inserted into a Jewish professional milieu. She has thrived there but the script then flashes back to her painful abduction by the Canadian state and highlights the attitude of racial and cultural superiority that allowed and still allows that state to break up families in the name of “progress.” 

Netflix presented Thicker Than Water, a tour-de-force by showrunner, writer, and series lead, Nawell Madani. This show highlights the racism of the French professional classes as an Algerian female reporter must claw her way onto the set of French TV as an anchor woman, all the while dealing with family problems. Her brother has gang connections and she must cooperate with her sisters as their family tries to rescue the brother. Visually the cinematography includes telling details. For example, as a reporter Fara can wear her own curly black hair, a physical mark of her Arab heritage, but as an anchor, to come into the living rooms of a white French public, she must straighten her hair and dye it blonde. After the changeover, she climbs into an elevator filled with nothing but dyed blonde French women, ascending to the top of the station hierarchy symbolically and physically.

The dominant genre though at the conference was the dystopian or apocalyptic series where the world either has ended or in the process of ending. These are not necessarily progressive series since they often promote an inevitability about planetary destruction, negating activist attempts to reign in the fossil fuel industry. In a parallel manner, they may brand activists as dangerous and potential terrorists themselves. From South Korea came Duty After School, a fast-paced story that also cleverly interwove animation, about high school students being armed to oppose alien invaders, but ominous given that the U.S. recently pledged to rearm the country with nuclear weapons to oppose an “alien invasion” from North Korea. Likewise, A Thin Line, a German series on Paramount+, followed two sister activists and hacktivists as they attempted to foil government attempts to further climate degradation. The series quickly descends into a cautionary tale about “going too far” to save the environment. In this case, one of the sisters becomes involved with an “eco-terrorist,” not the corporate fossil-fuel kind laying waste to the earth for huge profit, but a fringe, lunatic anarcho-terrorist group; the other sister joins the police effort to catch her hacktivist sister before she can wreak havoc on the planet. Tellingly, this series, which at the start admits the apocalyptic danger we all face, rapidly moves into fearing those on the front lines trying to halt this danger.

As Western economies everywhere decline, the streamers also find themselves in a precarious position. For example, Peacock, Comcast’s streamer made up of content from NBC/Universal, now might lose its identity in a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery that would make Peacock the first of the major streamers to throw in the towel. The struggle of writers, creative workers in general within the industry, public stations, alternative streamers, and audiences to oppose the corporate juggernaut continues. In the latest manifestation of this struggle, writers, never more important in the industry, attempt, through the time-honored tool of a strike, to fight off these latest efforts to reduce their value both by a regressive movement back to “non-scripted” reality television and a coming attempt to supplant their work in general through the onslaught of AI and ChatGPT. Unfortunately, the overall atmosphere of cost cutting and subsequent decline in series quality attempts to ready the audience to accept the inferior replacing of a writer’s sensibility with a machinic recombination of genres.

Notes