A strange feature of my life is that I have never really had to choose between doing what is right and doing what is right for me. I have never been faced with any kind of true moral dilemma—not simply a question of being kind to someone or not, but a situation in which my morals were genuinely tested. Then the WGA went on strike.
It has been a long year. A year ago, I was experiencing my first real staffing season as a genuine candidate to write for a television show. I had just come out of the Warner Bros. Television Writers’ Workshop, wherein people assured me that “it would happen” — “it” being a staff writer job. One year ago exactly, I had already had two interviews. They’d both gone very well indeed, but the shows had chosen other people from my Workshop cohort instead of me. Not to worry, I was assured. There were so many other meetings that would happen. I would of course get staffed on some show. I was extremely likable and talented, and that’s all you need when you’ve got institutional support behind you.
Days became weeks. May came and went. June, July, August.
There were no other meetings.
The reason there were no other meetings remains largely mysterious, because no one has ever been able to explain why other than that, well, in the first week of May, Discovery, Inc. bought WarnerMedia and immediately started doing some spring cleaning. The CW, which was a big buyer of WBTV shows, had been sold and was no longer a big buyer of WBTV shows. HBO Max was also no longer a big buyer of shows from the studio. There was the possibility of the Workshop getting me a job in the next staffing season, but it felt remote. I was now intimately familiar with the problems plaguing TV writing: mini-rooms, no residuals, shows simply not hiring lower-level writers at all.
In mid-October, Warner Bros. Discovery officially killed the WBTV Workshop.
And so I quietly shelved my ambitions to write for TV. I kept writing TV, of course—I wrote two new pilots. But I forced myself into a radical acceptance similar to the one I had adopted in 2010, as the magazine industry collapsed around me and I had to take a job doing marketing at a management consulting firm: It isn’t going to happen, and that’s okay. We moved up to Portland just to get out of the screaming hellscape nightmare that is Los Angeles, and made plans to move back to New York.
In April 2023, I received the news that I’d won a scriptwriting contest. The contest came with a generous cash prize, but I was under no illusions that this win would translate into a job offer or some other revival of my ambitions.
And it didn’t. However: Completely separately, someone at WBTV decided they needed to spend what was left of the Workshop budget, and on April 24, I received an email with a blind script offer.
I cried. Whatever sense of obligation was behind the offer, all that mattered to me was this: WBTV promised me they would pay me $85,000 to develop and write a pilot script for them.
I have never in all my working life made $85,000 in one year; the most was a 7-month period in 2016-17 where my salary was around $65,000 a year. I accepted the studio’s offer, and the deal officially closed that very day.
This was the answer to all my problems. This was money that would allow my husband and I to breathe after he’d just been laid off. For the first time in my adult life, I felt the weight of financial instability lifted from my shoulders.
For four whole days, I got to feel hopeful about my future and calm about my present.
As the last days of April began to pass, my hope and calm dissipated. I hadn’t actually received any paperwork for the deal. And though I had assurances that the deal was “closed,” I also knew that a strike by the WGA against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers on May 2 could result in a force majeure situation, in which WBTV decides that because I can’t any work for them for a while they can pull the deal.
The WGA and the AMPTP were unable to agree to a new contract by the night of May 1, and the guild promptly went on strike. Trade publications and other news outlets have framed this as negotiations “breaking down.” And yet, as far as I can tell, the AMPTP simply refused to negotiate at all on most of the proposals the WGA made.
I had been a supporter of a potential strike in the first place, but after seeing the utter bad-faith and greed of the AMPTP I finally, viscerally understood why a strike is so necessary. The WGA is fighting for the very future of its members, and all other potential members.
The kicker here is that I am not a WGA member. I couldn’t vote to authorize a strike. I am not eligible for relief from the WGA. I don’t get to participate in any meetings. I must watch from the outside, even as I was probably weeks away from finally being invited inside.
Of course, I am also not a scab. Putting aside the fact that if the WGA caught me doing anything considered “work” for a studio they would ban me forever, I’d just never even consider doing something I thought would undermine the guild’s efforts to secure the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people.
And yet, I’m afraid. I am so afraid that this deal will evaporate, and I’ll never even get a chance to join the WGA. That this sacrifice will be made, but I’ll never be able to taste the resulting fruit. I feel ashamed of this fear, because it sounds like the fear of a selfish piece of shit, but I can’t seem to quell it. The idea that I might have the rug pulled out from under me twice in one year is simply devastating.
I don’t really have a choice in this situation: I have to do the right thing of avoiding any activity that the WGA might perceive as scabbing; what is “right” and what is “right for me” are, I suppose, one and the same right now, even if they don’t feel like it. My feelings are a maelstrom: fury at the studios and their rapacious greed, hope that the WGA can win this fight, fear and shame for my own personal plight.
At the end of the day, I will be fine chugging along making money however I can, as I have for the last six years. After all, until April 24, I had no idea that $85,000 even existed. And it was only for a few brief days that I got to feel as though all my work the past few years has actually not been for nothing.
I hope I get to feel that way again, after the WGA secures a fair deal.