Hooray, showbiz is back! Now what?
Wednesday night, SAG-AFTRA reached a tentative agreement with the AMPTP, bringing to an end to six months of Hollywood strikes, involving the writers guild and then the actors. The writers have been back at work for a month, and SAG leadership has told its members they can resume working even while everyone waits for the new agreement to be ratified.
Things have gotten pretty lean over the last few months of television, as some networks and streamers have largely run out of original scripted programming, while others have been more carefully parsing it out to make sure they always have at least one or two notable shows on. The conclusion of the dual strikes, though, means TV should get back to normal immediately, right?
Not so fast, unfortunately.
Rolling Stone spoke with a variety of producers, actors, executives, and publicists — all speaking anonymously because the current moment is so unpredictable — about how quickly we should expect to see something resembling the return of Peak TV. The answer is complicated, for a variety of reasons. Let’s run through them.
Even though the writers have been cranking out scripts for a few weeks, and even though many scripts were ready to shoot when the actors walked out in mid-July, it’s not as simple as telling an entire production — literally hundreds of people, between cast and crew — to report back to work on Monday and get moving. As happened when production resumed following the initial Covid lockdown, there won’t be enough available soundstages for every project. Worse, there may not be enough crew people. Every gifted below-the-line worker is going to be in high demand, and as one source put it, some of those people left the business altogether over the past six months because they needed to find more stable income.
Between needing to find a place to work, needing to reassemble large workforces, and the bare minimum prep work needed to start or restart almost any film or TV shoot, most series are going to need 4-5 weeks at minimum to get started. And that brings us to the next wrinkle: the business traditionally takes most, if not all, of December off to give every actor, gaffer, and agent a breather from what can be very long days and weeks the rest of the year. Some producers will feel like they have no choice but to drastically trim down this winter break. But as with the crew and soundstage issues, there’s a basic infrastructure problem about getting people working at a time of year when everything is usually shuttered. So most things won’t even be able to shoot until January, and some substantially later than that.
There’s a basic infrastructure problem about getting people working at a time of year when everything is usually shuttered. So most things won’t even be able to shoot until January, and some substantially later than that.
The first priority around town will be to finish projects that weren’t quite completed when the strikes began — especially the ones that are premiering sooner rather than later. HBO’s True Detective: Night Country is set to debut in mid-January, for instance, but there’s still some ADR work (re-recording of some dialogue that was either muddled in the initial performance, or changed after the fact) left to do. Similarly, I spoke with an actor appearing in a high-profile film that’s hitting theaters in the first quarter of 2024, and that hadn’t finished reshoots when the SAG-AFTRA strike began; they’ll be back at work within the next few weeks. And Stranger Things star David Harbour told Variety on Thursday that, “I mean, we got to film that last season of Stranger Things, don’t we? I got to be down there, like, in a couple of days. We got to get going — we’re late.”
Also on the front burner will be the sector of the TV business that always gets into the most trouble during a work stoppage: the broadcast networks. Shows like NCIS, Abbott Elementary, and Night Court are produced much closer to when they debut than cable and streaming series. (Broadcast shows generally are still in production while their episodes are airing, whereas on cable and streaming, the whole season is usually ready before the first episode premieres.) Since September, the broadcasters have been filling their schedules with even more reality TV than usual, plus shows imported from other places (CBS has aired episodes of some Paramount Network and Paramount+ shows like Yellowstone and Frasier, while the CW is loading up on everything they can buy cheaply from other English-speaking countries). Ratings for this strategy have, unsurprisingly, been terrible. So ABC and friends will be especially motivated to get their big hits back on the air. A producer on one broadcast show said they were hoping to be back in production shortly after Thanksgiving, with a goal of having new episodes ready to air by late January or early February.
Some types of shows will also be able to come back faster than others. A multi-camera comedy like The Conners, that shoots each episode on a stage in front of a studio audience on a single day, will be ready to air faster than dramas or single-camera comedies like Ghosts (shot on film over many days). And because the broadcast ecosystem is designed for shows to only run until mid-May, most of these series will probably only be able to make between 8 and 13 episodes this season, rather than the more traditional 22.
There are also the shows that were either mostly or entirely completed, but were deliberately held back for 2024 once it became obvious the strikes weren’t going to end quickly. True Detective and FX on Hulu’s Shogun both seemed set for 2023 premieres; now they’ll be coming in January and February, respectively. Regardless of when Stranger Things is able to return, Netflix has another potentially huge show coming in mid-March, with Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss adapting the sci-fi bestseller 3 Body Problem. And the specific timing of the strike hasn’t affected some shows with shorter seasons; FX is hoping to have The Bear back in roughly the same summer window where it’s been released on Hulu the last two years.
But other big shows have been swept out of 2024 altogether, like The Last of Us and The White Lotus, which HBO has already said won’t be back until sometime in 2025.
Over the last few years, the March/April/May stretch has been ridiculously crowded even by the standards of Peak TV. That’s the home stretch for Emmy eligibility, so all the awards contenders (and would-be awards contenders) tend to premiere then. (That period this year included the final seasons of Succession, Barry, Ted Lasso, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.) The upcoming spring seems like it will be much leaner. Some of that is strike aftermath, and some is a result of the market correction that was already happening before the WGA walked out. The AMPTP used the strikes as cover to cancel a lot of shows, but they were going to do that anyway. Five hundred-plus original scripted shows per year was not sustainable, and we’ve finally reached the point where everyone in the business is ready to admit that.
So strike or no strike, 2024 won’t be as full of TV as we’ve grown used to. But by spring, we should be out of a relative drought and into at least a pleasant stream, even if the Peak TV firehose never gets turned on again.
