EPISODE 815 MY INNER LANDSCAPE IS LITTERED WITH BODIES

And I Rebel.

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

Hello and welcome back to Pop Culture Spirit Wow, the newsletter where I try write about pop culture as it begins to grind to a screeching halt.

I’m sure you’ve all read about the Writers’ Guild strike, which began a week ago at midnight PST after the networks and studios shuts down negotiations with writers. Its impacts are already a little bit noticeable, depending on your viewing habits. Late night comedy is shut down. Game shows are coming. So potentially are awards shows. For now some movies are able to continue filming (but only because the feature industry really doesn’t pay much attention to the writer in the first place).

Meanwhile virtually nothing on the television end of things is happening. A few shows are saying their scripts are in, so they can start filming the next season, but I’d be a little surprised if that happens. So much in a script can change during production. And a show needs writers to do that work.  Some outlets have a bunch of shows stockpiled or ready to go. But give it a couple months and we’ll see where we are.

For writers, the situation we’re facing is an existential threat. Networks are more and more comfortable hiring just one writer for a show that should have 5, 6 or more,  or establish “mini-rooms” which includes fewer writers who work fewer weeks for less money. The recent advent of computer algorithms that can steal material from anywhere on the internet and repurpose it into stuff that looks new and creative means we’re also facing a situation where networks could have a program write a script and then hire a writer just to fix it.

If we roll over on any of the things, we’re basically accepting a situation in which we’re left with a very small group of people who actually write and produce shows, which might sound fine from the outside—“They do it in Great Britain all the time” is I think an argument we’re going to hear. But British writers also get paid a lot less than ours do, and they produce just a fraction of the content that we do, too.

So yeah, big, complicated, messy days. Variety is doing great day-to-day reporting. I tried something about the strike for America in more spiritual terms. It ended up becoming a reflection on some experiences I’ve had with unions.

I wonder if from the outside this strike feels like going to a friend’s house for Thanksgiving and then being trapped in a dinner where the parents start fighting. Like, I don’t know what any of this is, but could someone please pass the cranberries? We’re so used to receiving content without any sense of the group of writers that are responsible for them happening.  Shows are less made than they happen. They’re Christmas gifts we get all year long. Do we really care how they happen as long as they do?

I guess we’ll see…

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TWEET OF THE WEEK

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MEANWHILE IN LONDON

There’s lots of other things going on in the pop culture world. King Charles got coronated, which sounds like a medical exam you don’t want to have, and honestly doesn’t that kind of fit the job? And his facial expression?

In Los Angeles Carrie Fisher got a star on the Hall of Fame, and while the big story has been about some drama within her family about it, for me the real drama is how the hell did Carrie Fisher not already have a star on the Hall of Fame.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3 opened to mostly great review, and I’m sure I’ll see it,  but I don’t know if it’s the way that James Gunn has treated DC creatives and execs in his new job or just a general Marvel movie exhaustion but I just can’t seem to get excited.  And there’s a new prequel to Bridgerton about Queen Charlotte which everyone is adoring with a certain amount of side-eye toward the original series. “Sexier,” “higher stakes,” “more grounded in reality,” “less Whistledown,” read the reviews. It’s wild how quickly the Bridgerton fan energy has gone from insanely adoring to this:

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Meanwhile this weekend a friend told me had never heard a Taylor Swift song.

Yeah. I know.

Which lead to a number of music videos, which led to me having to explain how often Taylor shreds her ex-boyfriends in songs, which led to me rewatching the 2022 extended remix video of “All Too Well,” her song about breaking up with Jake Gyllenhaal like, so so long ago. And what was really surprising watching it with a friend who had no prior relationship with Swift was realizing just how normal their break-up seemed—he was douchey to her around his friends, she felt left out, they were clearly not a good match, the end—and yet she turned it into a 15 MINUTE FILM OVER A DECADE LATER.

There’s drama and then there’s drama.

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MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

It’s a short one today. And I’m going to leave you with a song from the season finale of Schmigadoon, which also aired last week. It’s been on repeat on my playlist and in my brain. If you need something special this week, it’s here for you.

See you next week!