Into the Black Hole: What’s at Stake for Comedy/Variety Writers in the WGA Strike
In exclusive interviews, three members of the WGA Negotiating Committee break down the MBA's mysterious Appendix A and how the streamers are exploiting the writers covered by it
When Greg Iwinski joined the Writers Guild of America East, his work as a late-night writer was covered under what is known as Appendix A in the Guild’s Minimum Basic Agreement with the Association of Motion Pictures and Television Producers. “It's called Appendix A because our contract is literally stapled to the back of the MBA,” he tells me over Zoom when I ask him to explain it to me. “It’s an appendix of all the weird shows that don't fit in this thing.”
This means, “Comedy/variety, late-night, daytime soap operas, news and documentary all fall under there,” according to Adam Conover who is, like Iwinski, a member of the WGA’s Negotiating Committee with the AMPTP. “And then there's this category ‘non-dramatic program’ which represents basically everything else. We like to call it the black hole.”
Conover might describe it as a black hole, but to me, it sounds like Appendix A is the WGA’s equivalent of the Island of Misfit Toys.
It’s a part of the WGA’s MBA that has always mystified me. Probably because I’m a feature/TV writer, one of the thousands of such writers who make up the majority of the WGA West and East’s membership. When I asked other film/TV writers in the Guild what they could tell me about Appendix A, or even the specific issues members who work in comedy/variety and late-night face, I received inadequate answers. I was not alone, I soon realized. And so, I decided to learn more about comedy/variety and late-night writers, in particular – writers whose ability to fairly profit from their work and even live are no less imperiled by streamers as film and TV writers’.
BLAME THE STREAMERS
Hallie Haglund is sitting in her toddler’s dark bedroom, hiding from her two children when she hops on Zoom with me to discuss the current strike and MBA negotiations. She’s a Los Angeles-based comedian and late-night writer who won three Emmys for her work on “THE DAILY SHOW” during her ten-year tenure there. She’s also a member of the WGA’s Negotiating Committee.
“The biggest issue for us is – you know, like everyone else – how streaming has disrupted our compensation,” she tells me. “I don’t know if you know this, but it’s pretty fucking insane that comedy-variety shows on any streaming platform are not covered by the MBA.”
This was something I’d only just become aware of, in fact. It isn’t so much that they were excluded from the 2007 contract that established streaming minimum payments from employers. It’s that they weren’t even an imagined possibility at the time.
Greg Iwinski explains this to me. The Harlem-based comedy writer and performer has won two Emmys for his work in late-night television and counts “THE LATE SHOW WITH STEPHEN COLBERT” and “LAST WEEK TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER” as credits. When we speak, he keeps apologizing for being scattered; he’s just returned from a funeral and had to immediately join the WGA Negotiating Committee’s first meeting with the AMPTP in more than one hundred days.
“The studios have kind of continued to chase this idea of the myth of Netflix, that you could just make a gym membership of infinite growth and just keep making money forever because people will just subscribe aspirationally to watch things that they'll never watch,” he says. “So, they moved out into an open space and started making all of these streamers of their own, and some of them have decided they want to do late night and comedy/variety in streaming.”
The WGA is currently proposing that the MBA offer streaming-based comedy/variety programs the same protections as it offers the same type of programs on linear television (traditional satellite and cable TV).
“They’re structurally the same amount of work,” Iwinski wants me to understand. “Especially for the writers.”
Iwinski cites “THE AMBER RUFFIN SHOW” as one of the worst examples of how streamers are exploited Appendix A writers. “Amber has a show on Peacock. It's shot in the same studio as “LATE NIGHT WITH SETH MEYERS”. Same camera, same cue card guy. But no protections because it's on a streamer.”
“No protections” comes with a very real-world consequence for the writers involved with the series. Peacock ordered six episodes for the third season, but shot them over several months. This meant that the writers worked non-consecutive weeks, which, in turn, meant the writers weren’t paid for those weeks they didn’t work. As Iwinski says, “They paid so little that you couldn’t live in New York to go to your own job,” so the writers would repeatedly fly home in-between work weeks to be able to afford their own employment – more victims of the gig economy increasingly championed by the studios and streamers’ business affairs departments.
WHAT THE WGA ASKED FOR
The WGA’s proposal to the AMPTP regarding Appendix A is composed of three issues. Here’s how its Negotiating Committee describes them:
Extend television “Appendix A” terms to high budget shows made for SVOD. This includes weekly minimums, 13-week guarantees, and residuals based on “aggregate”.
Okay, let’s break these down for anyone who’s confused by them as I am.
Weekly Minimums
This one is easy to explain. As Greg Iwinski says, the AMPTP already agreed to this several contracts ago for linear television’s move to streaming. All the Guild wants is the same base weekly pay from streamers that comedy/variety writers are provided by networks and cable.
This is obviously necessary if writers are to be expected to do things like pay their rent and feed themselves, two things extremely difficult to do when you live in most of America’s cities, especially New York City and Los Angeles where most comedy/variety programs are produced. If the AMPTP makes this impossible, they actually manage to shoot their own content in the face.
13-Week Guarantees
The MBA guarantees comedy/variety writers are hired thirteen weeks at a time by networks and cable. Streamers must accept the same.
“That is so important to us,” Iwinski says. “Thirteen weeks gets you health insurance [through the WGA], thirteen weeks means that you can tell your spouse or family member that you have three months of work. You can tell your landlord you have three months of work. Those things are very important in New York and L.A.”
There’s another advantage to 13-week guarantees over day-rate employment, which is the training and opportunity they provide writers to learn their skills and adapt to the rigors and voice of new shows. This benefits the AMPTP, too, as its members require a pool of talented writers to hire from – though you wouldn’t think they were aware of that based on their negotiating positions and stories I’ve heard about what’s been said inside the negotiating room itself
“It’s hard to get used to that pace,” Hallie Haglund explains of comedy/variety writers’ rooms. “It’s incredibly grueling and really, you know, everybody's bad at it at first. Even if you're a great writer, it's really different to be a great writer when you have an infinite amount of time or even a week to write what you're trying to write. But when you have an hour-and-a-half in the morning, when you've just seen the material that you're writing off of? I think it really does take people those thirteen weeks and more — I wish it was longer — to even start to get your footing and so to eliminate that it's like, ‘How do you think these shows are going to get made? No one's going to be able to learn how to do it.’”
Residuals Based on an “Aggregate”
If you’re not wholly familiar with the idea of residuals, they’re long-term payments to anyone who worked on films or TV series for reruns and other airings after the initial release. Of course, like everything else in the business, streamers disrupted and diminished the value of these to the point they barely exist in streaming at all. More, networks and cable networks now share sketches, monologue jokes, and lengthy clips from episodes everywhere from social media to YouTube to their own streaming platforms as a form of promotion.
Those skits from “SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE” and hilarious segments from “LAST WEEK TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER” you reshared on Facebook? The artists behind them, who produced them and appeared in them, make nothing from their work in this context.
Haglund’s old stomping grounds, “THE DAILY SHOW”, is a prime example of this. Comedy Central used to rerun every episode the next day, which provided its writers with healthy residuals. Now, episodes go directly to Paramount Plus and YouTube. For these writers, many of whom have been doing the same job for a decade – on a series that is more successful than ever – their real income has crashed and continues to decline.
Haglund worries about what’s going to come next, though – “the threat that, as more stuff goes streaming, then we lose protections altogether.”
“The most central theme here is we're not asking even for new things,” Iwinski points out. “We're saying, pay us what you already pay us to make the same kind of show.”
WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN IN PRACTICE?
Let’s get into the practical reality of this, which I’m going to let Adam Conover, creator and host of Netflix’s “THE G WORD WITH ADAM CONOVER”, explain. We talk over the phone as he walks his dog in Los Angeles. He’s one of the more visible faces in the strike – Conover, not his dog – given his presence on social media and talent for live interviews. Notably, we’re interrupted when a fellow member of the WGA passes him on the sidewalk and stops to thank him for his service.
“My show ‘ADAM RUINS EVERYTHING’ was non-union our first year – non-WGA – and I was able to convince the network to flip the show in the second year.”
This means to convince the network to abide by the WGA’s MBA, not always an easy thing to do. Conover today says that his primary objective for doing this was to earn himself health insurance, but his experiences with the Guild quickly turned him into a vocal adherent and ultimately led to him running for the WGA West’s Board of Directors, which he currently sits on.
“Because we flipped it, we ended up in ‘non-dramatic/other’,” he continues. This being the black hole that is Appendix A. “You know the sort of lowest rung of the totem pole. But because we went union, every single writer on that show was entitled to a minimum guarantee of weeks of weeks worked — which is thirteen weeks — and minimum weekly guarantee in terms of the fee. Then, we all received healthy residual because we were on cable.
“One of the most critical things I want to make sure membership understands about how Appendix A works is that we do not receive script fees. Instead, everyone is credited on every episode. Every writer is credited on every episode. We had at max five writers in our room for ‘ADAM RUINS EVERYTHING, pumping out eighteen episodes – which is, you know, quite a lot of episodes. Every single one of those five writers is credited on those episodes. And each of those writers only received their weekly fee. So, what makes up for that lack of script fees?”
The short answer is: residuals. But this is where things get interesting.
“The residuals for ‘comedy/variety’ and ‘non-dramatic other’ are calculated based on something called the aggregate,” Conover goes on. “This means that every writer we add, the larger the total residual. That means if you add writers, you don't dilute the pool, right?
“Every writer receives a residual on every single episode. So, every single one of those five writers and me — because I was the showrunner, writer as well — we all received a residual for every single episode airing. And because it was on cable, we had a big residual for the first airing, second, etcetera, etcetera. So even though all we're getting is a weekly fee, we’re all receiving a healthy residual.”
Conover then reveals what this meant for his bank account, in particular. In the first year alone, he made low five figures in residuals. “Which is,” he adds, “not a living – but it’s part of a living.
“Now I went on to create basically the exact same show for Netflix.” This is “THE G WORD WITH ADAM CONOVER”. “They wanted me to do the same format as ‘ADAM RUINS EVERYTHING.’ In many ways, they’re very similar shows. But it turns out Appendix A doesn’t cover streaming. None of those protections that I told you about exist at all in streaming.”
After one year on Netflix, Conover’s residual check from the streamer arrived: $500.
It gets worse when you hear how many involved with the series sought to exploit its writers.
“I'm sitting in one of our first meetings after our greenlight,” Conover says, “and we're talking with the line producer and the production company and the people from the production company says, ‘Hey, good news. Because this is a comedy/variety show on Netflix, we can do whatever we want with writers. We can hire and fire them by the day. We can pay them $1.00 a week if we want.’ Because writers don't have the 13-week minimum that we had in cable, they were all excited, right? Because this is flexibility for producers. And they're like, “Great, we can do whatever we want to these writers.” My blood boiled. Because this is what they say about the people who work for them – ‘Get fucked.’”
Conover insisted everyone he brought on to “THE G WORD” saw their quotes met, but it’s a position that showrunners shouldn’t be in. Nor is there any guarantee every showrunner will take such a stand.
WHAT’S TO COME
Right now, WGA members’ earnings are roughly divided 50/50 between linear television and streaming. But the concern is that networks will begin shifting their late-night and other comedy/variety series over to their streaming platforms where writers aren’t protected by the MBA and, thus, can’t be paid a pittance by comparison. “NBC doesn't have to close down for ‘THE TONIGHT SHOW’ to move over,” Greg Iwinski says. “They’ll just cancel ‘THE TONIGHT SHOW’ and relaunch it the next day as a Peacock ‘original’ – ‘THE TONIGHT SHOW’ present by Peacock.
This is already happening with sketch comedy shows. If you dismiss “THE G WORD WITH ADAM CONOVER” as a soft reboot, consider “INSIDE AMY SCHUMER”. It was on Comedy Central, where its writers were protected by the MBA, until it was rebooted as a “Paramount Plus original”.
“Same host, same logo, same company, everything the same,” Iwinski says – except now, the writers were being paid less than half of what they previously earned.
But what if this is just one part of a larger strategy by the networks and streamers to completely transform how Appendix A writers earn a living? Adam Conover believes it is.
“Everyone ran to adopt the streaming model — pay with no ads, they specifically wanted people to be binging television shows — but that's a really temporary state of affairs in the industry. They’re adding fast channels. They're all competing over sports now. The next thing they're going to want is that daily repeatable content. They're going to want their “DREW BARRYMORE SHOW”. They're going to want their “ELLEN”, they're going to want their “COLBERT REPORT”. They're going to want their soap opera.”
Conover argues this is why the WGA mustn’t fall for the AMPTP’s claims of poverty in these negotiations.
“This work area is about to blossom again because ads are rushing back into the industry,” he says. “The more ads they have, the more they're going to want people to be tuning in every day. That means we're going to want low-cost, non-repeatable content that keeps people coming day after day.”
He worries what will happen if this corner of the Guild — the Black Hole Club — is comprised of people working for such tiny rates compared to the rest of the membership. “It’s going to be bad for our health plan and bad for our overall solidarity to be undercutting each other. That’s why we need basic terms for all the writers who are going to be working in that area in the years to come.”
“WE INTERRUPT THIS BROADCAST WITH A SPECIAL NEWS BULLETIN”
As I worked on this article, the AMPTP leaked its latest counterproposal to the WGA in yet another attempt to undermine the very negotiations its members had only just announced they were finally committed to resolving for the sake of the whole industry.
Amongst its inadequate offers was an illusory triumph for comedy/variety writers, which Deadline, one of the AMPTP’s PR arms, reported yesterday with the headline, “Late-Night Comedy Writers Score Safeguards In Streaming Amid WGA/AMPTP Negotiations”.
The AMPTP pointed out Tuesday that for the first time ever, writers for high-budget subscription video-on-demand comedy variety programs will receive the same terms and conditions that apply under Appendix A, which essentially covers all other types of programming outside of scripted TV shows and films.
The Negotiating Committee that Adam Conover, Hallie Haglund, and Greg Iwinski sit on does not comment on active negotiations, but comedian and writer Mike Drucker, who has worked on everything from “FULL FRONTAL WITH SAMANTHA BEE” to “THE TONIGHT SHOW STARRING JIMMY FALLON”, had some thoughts on Twitter immediately after Deadline’s article dropped.
“I’ve spent a lot of time in comedy/variety and this offer isn’t the great ‘safeguard’ it says,” he posted. “Any movement is nice, but the leaked deal fails to mention streaming residuals and it would still not cover gameshow and daytime writers. It’s all of us or nothing.”
“The idea is to turn writers against each other by being like, ‘We got ours, fuck you! Sign it!’” he continued. “Writers ebb and flow between genres and jobs and platforms all the time. I might not be a drama writer, but I sure as fuck want them to have good terms if I ever become one.”
Haglund concurs with Conover’s earlier stated instinct to protect Guild solidarity that exists right alongside Drucker’s sentiment - which is why she’s not worried about any writer who works inside the Black Hole known as Appendix A being thrown under the bus in these negotiations. “When people have already struck for over one hundred days, you can't go back to them and say, ‘We didn't get you anything, but we got something for this other group. Everybody's on strike, nobody can feel left behind.”
You can read more of 5AM Storytalk’s exclusive WGA strike coverage here.
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Catching up with older posts, this is utterly outrageous.
This is all so infuriating!