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From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise and this is “The Daily.”

This week, thousands of writers went on strike against the Hollywood studios.

Over what they say is an existential threat to their livelihood.

Today my colleague John Koblin explains how streaming turned the most prolific era in American entertainment into a fight that’s brought Hollywood to a standstill.

It’s Friday, May 5.

So, John, the writers in Hollywood are on strike — first strike in 15 years. Tell me what’s happening.

So earlier this week, 11,500 TV and movie writers announced they’re going on strike. Much of Hollywood’s production is going to grind to a halt. The writers are represented by The Writers Guild of America, one of the most powerful unions in Hollywood, and basically they’re fighting about one thing with big Hollywood studios, money.

Despite the fact that television production has exploded in the last decade, the WGA, The Writers Guild, they’ve said that writers’ pay has stagnated and they’ve been saying for weeks that this moment is existential. They say the system is broken, and it really has to do with how this industry has changed dramatically in the last decade. And it all has to do with streaming.

Right. We live in a world of streaming now, right? There’s no more rushing home to watch “Seinfeld” at 8:00 PM. It’s streaming “The Handmaid’s Tale” 10 episodes at a time so I watched them all like I’m eating a piece of chocolate cake on a Saturday. But you’d think that would mean a real golden age for writers. So what happened?

So let’s go back to 10 years ago.

Netflix basically back then was known primarily as a DVD company.

Right.

But they had a streaming service at that point that was four years old, and Netflix executives were pretty convinced that watching TV and movies over the internet was going to become a thing. So it was time for them to get into original series.

It all started with “House of Cards,” the big original show from Netflix which premiered in 2013.

Starring Kevin Spacey from the director David Fincher, like Hollywood royalty at the time.

I remember it well.

And it was weird, right? That Netflix was making a TV show. Netflix is basically the post office. They sent you those little red DVD things.

Completely. It was crazy. And I’ll never forget watching “House of Cards” for the first time where all 13 episodes of that first season were available.

Yeah.

So it was 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock, midnight, 1:00 in the morning. Suddenly —

Another!

— I’ve just burned through four episodes. It was such a crazy concept.

Yeah.

So the show was a huge hit, and it also changed everything. It proved that watching a television show over the internet could work and it caused a shift in the industry which fundamentally changed the way that writers work and it changed the business for the studios, which has led us to this moment.

So let’s talk about that. How did streaming change the industry, not just for us as viewers, but also for the people making these shows?

So production has really, really changed.

Think back to the 1990s.

You’ve got “Friends, you’ve got “ER.”

You’ve got “Seinfeld.”

And a season would be more than 20 episodes, and if you’re a writer staffed on a show like that, a network show, you were taken care of. That was your career.

But in the streaming world, now that we’ve got those movie stars who like shorter commitments, we’ve got seasons that are 8, 9, 10 episodes.

Did you watch “The White Lotus” a few months ago?

Oh. I was desperate to. All my friends did. I didn’t actually because I was working too much on “The Daily,” but I plan to.

That was seven episodes this past season. The first season was six episodes. So with these shorter seasons, the writers are sometimes working as little as 10 weeks, and then they’re left scrambling to find another job. So they’ve said that this is untenable, and it’s affecting everyone. It’s affecting totally decorated showrunners and writers just getting their foot in the door.

So it sounds like everything is just much less stable for writers much shorter seasons, just a few months or even a few weeks, versus a whole year or several years — which means, by definition, less work and more scrambling.

Yeah, and it has benefited the studios to the extent that it’s created a more efficient structure for how they produce these shows, but the writers think that there could be long term consequences to this. I recently interviewed Mike Schur. He’s the co-creator of “Parks and Recreation” and the creator of “The Good Place.”

Yeah.

And he really is worried about the future because he gave me an example. When he was a young writer on “The Office,” he said he learned how to write a script, rewrite a script, he learned about editing, he learned how to work with actors on set. He learned how to scout a location, and then he became familiar with specialized crafts like sound mixing and set design. He learned how to make a TV show, essentially. But Mike Schur says that with the current system, writers are only writing. They are gone after those 10 weeks and they’re not even invited into the production process.

OK, so the writers are saying this is also bad for career development, like they’re a cog in a machine instead of an apprentice learning how to make the machine.

Yeah. They say it’s bad for their careers, but on top of that, it’s bad for the industry at large. So he thinks there could be a future where writers are going to be asked to be showrunners and to create a show, and they could have a lot to say about the world and they could be fantastically talented, but they’re not going to know how to do it. And that could be a long term problem.

Right.

And the other way it’s bad for the industry — I mean, think about how it was done 20 years ago. If you’re watching network television, you just bought a TV, you turned it on, and it was free. A cable network. You paid your cable bill automatically every month.

Right.

But these streaming services, they’re subscription based services, so you are paying every month for your Netflix account. In fact, I remember when Netflix used to advertise proudly, cancel us any time. We’ve got it right at the top of the website. If you’re not pleased, you can cancel us.

Easy in, easy out.

Easy in, easy out. But the problem is some people are taking them up on that, and that’s true of all the streaming services. So you need a ton of fresh content to keep them subscribed.

And maybe this is obvious for people, John, but why exactly was that? Why did they need tons of content?

To keep these people hooked, to keep their subscribers hooked. I mean, consider how much Netflix is shooting at you every single week. There are reality shows, movies, TV shows, foreign language shows, and now they’re not alone.

In 2019 —

Disney started its streaming service Disney+.

Apple TV+ started, like, within a week or two of Disney+.

Shortly thereafter, HBO Max launched.

And then —

— Peacock launched.

So we have all these streaming services, and they’re all competing with each other and it’s created this sort of arms race. And as a result, the number of shows just exploded. I mean, last year there were something like 500 scripted shows in the United States. 10 years ago that was something like 250 or 300.

Oh my God. That’s amazing.

So it’s just — it has blown up, and it’s also created opportunity There are more diverse shows, shows that just wouldn’t have been made 10 years ago.

“Orange is the New Black,” a show about a women’s prison.

“Transparent,” which featured a transgender character.

“Insecure” from Issa Rae, a show focused on Black female friendships.

Or “Atlanta” from Donald Glover or “Fleabag.”

Oh, love “Fleabag.”

That’s something that would never have gotten made 15 years ago. So you’re trying to program to every conceivable demographic. So there was a lot more opportunity, and that’s great creatively, but the writers have said that the economics just haven’t been working.

We’ll be right back.

So John, we’ve talked about how streaming has changed the way TV shows are made, but what about the underlying business? Has it changed how the people who make these shows, including the writers, make their money?

So it’s upended the economics, really, in how both sides make money. So one of the things that the writers are fighting for in this dispute is better residual pay. That’s a type of royalty. In the old model, with success, a writer would get a lot. So “The Big Bang Theory,” that was the show on CBS. If you’re flipping through channels and you see it on TBS, it’s in syndication. That’s like a rerun.

So if you wrote an episode of a popular show and it goes into syndication, you could potentially make a pretty decent amount of money off of episodes you wrote. You’d just get a check in the mail, or if the production company, which was Warner Brothers, in this case, sells it overseas and suddenly you’re in Ireland watching “The Big Bang Theory,” you just get a check in the mail, and this really helped writers.

If you lose your TV job — because shows get canceled all the time — you can take a minute before you find your next job. Maybe you want to create a show. Maybe you want to write a movie script. They argue that those residual payments would keep you afloat. It was sort of a critical source of income for the middle class writer.

OK. Crucial economic lifeline in the before days. What about now?

So now they argue that everything has changed because if you are a Netflix or you’re an Amazon, there are no distribution arms. You’re not putting shows into syndication. You’re not selling them overseas. They’re global streaming services. Now the Netflix and Amazons pay a fixed residual. Writers are arguing they’re making less money in sort of the afterlife of a show after it has been on the air.

John, from what you’re describing, it really sounds like the studios are in this kind of defensive crouch over money, which is kind of weird because streaming is the way everybody watches TV now, right? These streaming companies have millions of subscribers, and at least the people I know, they subscribe to more than one. So why are they behaving like they’re strapped for cash?

Well, the studios would actually argue that they did a lot better in the before times, in the cable model. The cable bundle used to kick off so much money. I mean, we’ve been talking about canceling streaming services and how easy it is. You might remember how difficult it was to cancel —

Oh my gosh. Do I remember? Yes.

They would try to negotiate with you. They would convince you out of it. You would be on the phone for 45 minutes.

Forget it. Just keep the cable bill going because you’ll never cancel it.

So it was a great business as a result, but the economics of streaming has made things much crazier. The technology is really expensive. The marketing is really expensive because there’s so much competition. You want to get your billboards out there. The shows are way more expensive. I mean, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, a CBS drama could cost $3 to $4 million an episode. Now studios are investing $17, $18, $19 million an episode. That’s close to $200 million a season.

Huge.

It’s a huge amount of money. So these streaming services are not making money. Most companies are actually losing a lot of money on them, like, more than a billion dollars year. But that was OK because the profits didn’t really matter. All these companies wanted to do, at least as of two years ago, was just grow their subscriber base, so it was OK to lose money.

So kind of like Uber and Lyft in the early days, right? Just like compete, compete, compete for subscribers, for market share, and if you made a loss that was OK because your main goal was to get market share, corner the market.

Exactly. And think of how cheap Uber or Lyft used to be just for the consumer as well, and that was the case with these streaming services.

Right.

But then things changed.

Last April, April of 2022, Netflix lost subscribers for the first time in a decade.

And then all of a sudden everybody on Wall Street, everybody in entertainment said, uh-oh, how did that happen? And what they sort of realized is that —

Netflix, they had saturated the American market.

There really aren’t that many more subscribers to find in the US.

And this kicked off what many in Hollywood have called the Netflix correction.

That’s when Wall Street changed its mind about the growth at any cost strategy of these media companies. That’s when they said, we need to see these streaming services turn a profit. We cannot see you losing a billion dollars a year, and the fallout from that over the last year has been brutal.

Disney is in the midst of 7,000 job cuts.

Warner Brothers Discovery cut thousands of jobs last year and also shelved titles.

And other companies like Paramount or NBCUniversal, they’ve also adopted these cost saving measures.

So again, similar to Uber and Lyft, at some point investors said profits are important. Make them. So given that, in this situation, can the companies afford what the writers are asking?

Well, shortly before the strike was announced, the studio said that they actually did offer, quote, “generous increases” in compensation for writers as well as, quote, “improvements” in residuals. But the studios also said that there were just too many other outstanding issues on the table. I talked to one of the negotiators on the writer’s side, and he told me the night the strike was announced that, philosophically and practically, the two sides are very far apart.

So John, all this brings us back to the deadlock where we still are and may be for some time. What’s the immediate effect of it?

So, daily shows, shows that are made every day like late night shows, they’ve gone dark. So no “Stephen Colbert,” no “Seth Meyers,” no “Jimmy Kimmel.” They are all sitting this out. They’re all WGA members and they are — there will be no new shows for the foreseeable future. “Saturday Night Live” also off the air, and they might not be able to have their season finale. Soap operas, they will run out of episodes within a few weeks, maybe a month.

Longer term it would take a while. I mean, there are a lot of shows that are in the can, and there are some shows where all the scripts are done and they can keep filming. However, if it’s a really long strike, if a strike lasts several months, viewers could start to notice fewer new TV shows by the end of the year or early next year, and that might mean more unscripted series. In the past, when other strikes happen — there have been several — the industry has adapted in interesting ways. For example, during the 1988 strike, which lasted five months, that’s when Fox programmed “Cops” because it needed unscripted programming.

Oh, funny. I didn’t realize that.

And during the 2007-2008 strike, that’s when NBC decided, is there something we could do to shake up “The Apprentice?” And that’s when NBC executives came up with Donald Trump’s “The Celebrity Apprentice.”

Funny. Funny. Like necessity is the mother of invention. You don’t have writers, you do reality TV. So in a way, the changes have the ability to shape our culture in quiet ways we don’t always fully notice or understand.

Totally. And the actors and directors, their unions, those negotiations are going to begin soon, and their contracts expire at the end of June. So that could either complicate the writers strike — that is, those two unions make a deal and undercut the Writers Guild — or they decide their working conditions have been upended by streaming and then suddenly we have three unions on strike at once.

So like a 10 car pile up of strikes, basically.

That would really be a disaster. That would be catastrophic for Hollywood.

OK, but just stepping back here for a second. What would you say to someone who sees this strike from the outside and is trying to make sense of it, listening to this podcast? I mean, we’re talking about professional writers in Hollywood, right? Educated people, basically pretty much fine in the workforce, no? I mean, in some sense, world’s smallest violin, no?

Right. Well, I mean, from the writers perspective, there’s a distinction between the big established names, the Shonda Rhimes’s, the Ryan Murphy’s, the multimillionaires, versus the working writer trying to get their foot in the door, trying to craft a career. And also a prolonged strike has the potential to affect a lot of people in the industry, not just writers. The last time there was a strike 15 years ago, it damaged the Los Angeles economy by an estimated $2.1 billion.

Oh, wow. What was that made up of?

So there are so many small businesses that help keep productions afloat. That includes drivers, costume dry cleaners, caterers, set carpenters, lumberyard workers.

The whole ecosystem of movies.

Exactly. And a lot of them will soon be out of work, especially as Hollywood production gradually grinds to a halt. And they’ve just regained their footing out of the pandemic, so that really increases the stakes of a strike and could potentially lead to some community fissures.

So John, I’m left kind of wondering at the end of our conversation, you know, what this fight over streaming has shown us. Has it shown us that we, as consumers of all this content, were the winners, but it’s a much murkier new world for the studios and the creatives? Is this the end of the era of amazing television?

Not necessarily. We’re not going to see the days of 500 scripted shows anymore, but good TV and good movies, they’ve been around for a long time. And if you think of the times when the writers have gone on strike before, many times these occurred at these inflection points because of big technological shifts. In the 1980s you had the rise of cable TV and the rise of a home video. In 2007 during that strike, think of how we were consuming content back then. You still bought DVDs, but you were also starting to do it digitally. You were renting shows. You were downloading shows off of iTunes, right?

Right.

YouTube at that point was only two years old. And now here we are at yet another technological inflection point, but we still have TV. We still have movies — like, really good ones. It’s been about a decade since the streamers have become ascendant, but we’re still in the early days of the streaming wars, so there are going to be inevitable skirmishes. This will not be the last one. But yes, VCRs are gone. Cable’s slowly going away, but TV persists.

TV is not over.

It’s just going to be different.

John, thank you.

Thank you.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you should know today. On Thursday, four members of the Proud Boys, including their former leader, were convicted of seditious conspiracy for plotting to keep Donald Trump in power by leading a violent mob in attacking the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The fifth and lowest level defendant in the case, Dominic Pezzola, was found not guilty on the sedition charges, although he was convicted of other serious felonies. It was one of the most serious cases brought in the attack, and the verdicts were a major blow against one of the country’s most notorious far right groups and another milestone in the Justice Department’s vast investigation of the Capitol attack.

And North Carolina hastily approved legislation on Thursday that would ban most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy, setting the stage for a likely test of the Republican Party’s new but slim supermajority in the state. The state’s Democratic Governor, Roy Cooper, said he would veto the measure and has 10 days to do so, but the legislature now has the potential to override his veto if Republicans can keep their party united to muster enough votes. North Carolina currently allows abortion up to 20 weeks and has been one of the few states in the South that preserved substantial access to the procedure after Roe v Wade was overturned last summer.

Today’s episode was produced by Diana Nguyen, Sydney Harper, Michael Simon Johnson, Asthaa Chaturvedi, and Clare Toeniskoetter, with help from Eric Krupke and Mooj Zadie. It was edited by Marc Georges and Liz O Baylen with help from Paige Cowett, contains original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. We’ll see you on Monday.