Top 4: Writers' Strike Silver Linings

It didn't take long for the Writers Guild of America strike to impact the television landscape. With no one to write original material, most every talk show went to reruns. Saturday Night Live will probably have to as well. It sounds like most scripted network series have 5 scripts ready to go, so they should be ok for a while, but if this keeps up, there won't be much to watch beginning in December. So with that in mind, let's look at a few positives of the strike:

#4. Brian K. Vaughan has more time to write comics: Brian K. Vaughan was hired last year as a writer on Lost, and co-wrote the episode "Catch-22." But he made his name writing comics, as evidenced by the argument over whether Superman was faster than the Flash in that episode. Vaughan is the creator of Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, and Runaways, and (perhaps most important to television fans) is scripting the current arc of the Buffy Season Eight comics. BKV recently blogged that he will "take however long the strike lasts (which could be anywhere between a day and forever) to concentrate on making Ex Machina kick as much ass as possible as we start to head into that series' final year, and to continue to develop my next big creator-owned projects," which is nice for a fan to hear.



#3. Comic Books: Speaking of comic books, I've got a pile of them to read. And now with an extra hour a day (which I would have spent watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report), I can start tackling them. Among the titles to catch up on: Criminal, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' noir-ish crime book, Invincible, quite possibly the greatest superhero comic in the universe, and Dynamo 5, which I haven't actually read any of yet, but it sounds pretty cool.


#2. Netflix Queue: Should the strike keep up for long, I'll have more than an extra hour on my hands, and I can start going through those Netflix DVDs faster. I usually watch 2 a week, but I might go as far as upping my plan to the 3-at-a-time if we're stuck with only reality and game shows at some point. My queue is almost 300 movies long, and I seem to add things faster than I watch them.


#1. Writers Getting What They Deserve: Apparently, the last time the WGA contract was up, the union was told that the home video market for television would never amount to much, so the writers didn't push the issue. Now, TV on DVD is huge business. According to a recent televisionary post, TV series writers are currently getting four cents per episode for TV on DVD sales. So when you're dropping $40 on a season set, about 90 cents is going to the writers. That hardly seems fair. On top of that, I don't think the writers are seeing a penny for itunes, those amazon unbox things, or ad supported streaming video on network websites.

I love television as much as the next guy, and I have no life, so production shutting down on my favorite tv shows sucks for me. But the writers create the characters we love, dream up the worlds they inhabit, put them in the situations that drive the action, and don't seem to be getting their fair share. Hopefully this can all be resolved quickly, writers will get their due, and maybe the studio suits can handle life with only one butler.