Reality TV vs. Writers Guild
Previously I argued that the television studios were going to be the big losers from the writers’ strike. Today’s NY Times reports a different angle on the unfolding battle. A powerful resurgence of unscripted “reality shows” has some questioning just how necessary writers are after all:
Time periods may be lost to scripted shows. If you’re a writer, you don’t want to kill that golden goose. CBS can fill three hours a week with ‘Big Brother’ for about five bucks.
The two perspectives actually aren’t incompatible. The real legacy of the writers’ strike may be a migration of scripted content to niche media, while the dwindling networks prop up their declining profit margins with cheap-to-produce unscripted fare. The question is how much staying power this stuff has, and whether its mass appeal is sufficient to sustain an increasingly irrational medium.
Tags: strike
