STRUCK DUMB: SOAP SUDS: The soap opera market is often overlooked in speculation about the prospects and long-term effects of the Hollywood writers’ strike, and a story in Monday’s Variety gave an overview of how the strike will affect daytime melodrama, and how it’s the place where the first cracks in the strike are showing up.
More than any other kind of TV show, daytime soaps with their daily schedule have the most voracious need for new scripts, and the most audience – and ad revenue – to lose if they go into strike-enforced reruns, so it wasn’t surprising that the pressure on writers to cross the picket line would be considerable, especially if they were a hyphenate – a showrunner or writer/producer – with a considerable stake in the show’s survival.
Like game shows, soaps are as old as TV itself, predating sitcoms by a few years, and like variety shows have a lineage that goes back to radio. They’re treated like the redheaded stepchild of the network family, however, and the future of some of their most venerable titles have been in question for a few years, according to Variety. “Ratings for the daypart have been in decline for years, with several sudsers barely hanging on,” read the industry bible, in its characteristic lingo. “NBC, for example, has made it clear that Days Of Our Lives may not be renewed when its license agreement expires. There’s been talk for years about CBS cutting one of its soaps, too.”
Which is probably why an unnamed “high-ranking writer-producer” on CBS’ venerable The Young And The Restless took advantage of the “financial core” provision in his Writer’s Guild contract and informed the guild that he was giving up full membership and withholding the part of his dues spent on political activities before going back to work on the show. Two other writers on the soap have also “gone fi-core,” according to a source, an option that’s rumoured to be spreading among other soap writers official on strike.
The Guild has withheld comment, and there are no reports of writers working on other, higher-profile genres such as late-night talk, sitcoms or primetime drama doing the same. Anticipating the upcoming strike, the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers put up info on their website a month ago informing WGA members how to go “fi-core”, a move that has the added bonus of sounding really butch, especially if you’re job is writing about the love lives of doctors.
While Guild members who go fi-core and keep working are supposed to immune from being disciplined – censured, suspended, fined or expelled – the Variety story speculated that the WGA “move to publicly embarrass members who take such a step.” Considering a story by the indispensable Lisa de Moraes of the Washington Post yesterday that strikers have started bringing their kids along to hoist signs on the picket line, it’s hard to figure out just what the Guild considers shameful.
