I recently published a piece on Orange is the New Black‘s legacy at Shondaland. You can find that by navigating through to my portfolio. There was a good chunk about Netflix’s and streaming’s legacy that didn’t make it in that I felt passionately about and wanted to put out there. It would have fit between the penultimate and last paragraphs. Published with permission.
The announcement of GLOW’s cancellation came at the end of 2020 after several episodes of the fourth season had already been filmed prior to the onset of COVID-19. It joined a bevy of other women-led shows that were canceled ostensibly due to the pandemic, signaling a disturbing trend that continues today. Many other shows that could be seen as spiritual sisters to GLOW and, indeed, OITNB, like Teenage Bounty Hunters (another Jenji Kohan joint) and The Baby-Sitter’s Club, as well as shows that seemingly did well for the streamer, like 1899, First Kill and Sex/Life.
And that’s one of the big issues that, being the first major streamer, Netflix arguably caused and is at the forefront of the writers’ strike currently happening: it doesn’t release ratings.
“It was for television creators to get out of ratings and Standards and Practices and actually free up their narrative form so that they could tell stories that weren’t [influenced] night after night by those numbers,” Netflix executive Scott Stuber told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019.
But what that ratings opacity has actually done is remove power from showrunners, writers and, indeed, talent—which is also one of the points of contention for the SAG-AFTRA strike that began July 1st—to negotiate for more money and better conditions.
You might wonder, well do Hollywood stars really need more money while the rest of us are experiencing a cost of living crisis? As Grey’s Anatomy actor Adelaide Kane revealed on TikTok in 2020, for a series regular who isn’t a household name, much of their wage goes to paying the many people who help get and keep them employed, such as managers, agents and publicists, not to mention hairstylists, trainers and beauticians to help them maintain a camera-ready appearance because, while OITNB and other shows of its ilk helped diversify the types of bodies we see on-screen, there’s still very much a Hollywood ideal. Guest stars are paid less than $10,000 for just over a week of work (which is nothing to sneeze at, but certainly not $1 million per episode during Friends’ heyday), while the majority of SAG-AFTRA members don’t work regularly in their field.
Peak TV has also eliminated, or greatly reduced, things like residuals. Back in the olden days, AKA B.N. (before Netflix), people who worked on a show would continue to be paid long after an episode aired in the form of residuals. If a show made it to 100 episodes, it would go into syndication, meaning that residuals continued to come in well after a show like Cheers or M.A.S.H. went off the air. B.N., it was easier for a show to reach that number owing to the usual 22-episode season that rare few shows still enjoy thanks to Netflix popularizing the 13- and then eight- to 10-episode season, which a lot of the streamers followed. Previously, a writers’ room spent several months breaking the story arc of the season, the rest of the time on-set adjusting scripts (insert Jenna Ortega joke here) when needed as the show was being made, and getting on-the-ground producing experience that would then help land those writers their own showrunning gigs.
Now, with the rise of mini-rooms, which is a smaller, shorter writers’ room in which a few writers outline the season and then the showrunner fleshes it out solo, coupled with the aforementioned shorter seasons, writers are forced to seek out several rooms per year through their agents who also get a cut. And you can forget about on-set experience.
Alanna Bennett, a writer on Roswell: New Mexico and the new Netflix spinoff of To All the Boys…, XO, Kitty, tweeted that she had to go on government assistance between jobs to make ends meet.And that’s before AI is factored in, which is another big concern of the writers’ strike.
in recent years it’s demonstrated how out of touch it is becoming. There was the championing of Dave Chapelle’s transphobic comedy specials coupled with the mass firings of its culture writing arm Tudum in 2022, and this year saw the streamer ignore calls for it and the shows’ creators to address criticism of Beef’s casting of alleged admitted rapist David Choe as it tried—and failed—to dip its toes into live programming with the Love is Blind reunion.
In addition to the spate of cancellations that have become an expectation rather than an exception, we’re seeing the troubling trend of shows and movies being removed completely from streaming platforms, which of course contributes to all of the above. How much art have we lost to the streaming wasteland that was once a boom?
The difference from the last writers’ strike in 2007, when there was significantly less content and no streaming, is that there’s heaps of content to catch up on for as long as this strike continues—you know, if the streamers don’t remove it. It’s just that the writers won’t see anything from our rewatching of OITNB or any of the shows that followed in its footsteps.
Image via New York Times.
The Scarlett Woman 