On Friday, three days before what is looking like a very likely writers strike, the mood in TV writers rooms across the city veered from mad panic to sullen resignation. But what no one is denying was that it was time to brace for another work stoppage.
“Shows that are very, very close” to having their seasons completed “are rushing so they’re ready to shoot,” said one showrunner on a streaming show. “My room is rushing not because we have to, but because you want to have as much (material) as you can by the finish line.”
That said, the showrunner said that though the staff would be coming in to work today — the current WGA contract expires on 11:59 pm tonight — they anticipated “last-day-of-school energy” in the room.
Another showrunner who’s overseeing a mini room for a streaming platform said they were feeling frustrated, as their writing was heading into the final episodes of a season and there was no way to wrap everything up by today. “My biggest issue is the strike. It’s hard for the streamer to make a decision about ordering the show. We won’t have the episodes done, so there will just be this holding pattern. We’ll see how it gets resolved.
“It’s one of the hardest things to do with a serialized story,” the showrunner went on. “The part we don’t have finished is the ending. It’s very stressful to not know if we’re going to end it. Some of the most intense brain power you use is how to tie all of your story lines together. Theoretically that would have been done in another couple weeks. It’s really frustrating.”
There were some writers, however, who expressed something close to a Zen-like calm about the coming week. “My theory is that the pandemic was essentially a forced dress rehearsal for a strike. Everyone had to shut down production overnight without any way to prepare. I think we learned a lot about what this looks like versus how it looked in 2007. The pandemic was a forced strike for everybody and it worked out. I think the general feeling is, ‘We survived the pandemic. We can survive anything.’”
