On Wednesday, hours after the Writers Guild of America’s strike officially ended, studio and streaming executives were busy making scores of calls to the writers and producers whose deals were suspended during the five-month walkout.
To that end, sources say Warner Bros. Television is lifting suspensions that were issued to top showrunners including Greg Berlanti, J.J. Abrams and many others, effective Thursday, as some letters are still in the process of being sent out to the rest of the Channing Dungey-led studio’s stable of scribes. Other studios, sources say, have already started to lift their suspensions, with the process expected to continue through early next week.
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One key question remains as Hollywood’s TV writers return to work following the second-longest strike in WGA history: namely, if deals are being extended to include the time lost when they were suspended. Sources say many top producers — think Berlanti and Abrams — have air-tight deals with clauses built into them that automatically add time on to the back end of their deals to make up for the time that was lost to suspension. Other deals, however, may not have that clause built into them. That would leave writers and studios in a precarious position. If a deal, for example, expired during the summer, studios could opt to not tack on the months that were missed during the strike and the pact can now be considered expired and the time — and the money that came with it — now lost for good.
Nevertheless, the point remains that the 148-day-long WGA strike did not see a single overall or first-look deal be outright canceled — as of press time — under the force majeure clauses that would allow studios and streamers to do so if they so desired. As THR reported earlier this month, multiple studio and streaming sources said that their deal rosters had already been culled pre-strike, and the bulk of those that remained are ones that they often aggressively pursued in a competitive marketplace and still want to be in business with now that the writers strike has concluded. Optics have been a factor, too. For deals that studios no longer wanted, execs told THR that they were more likely to simply let them expire than to actively terminate.
The first wave of deal suspensions came in the spring, shortly after the strike began in May. That wave included the majority of pure writer deals and major overalls, particularly those with producers who were not willing to render non-writing services. Mike Schur (at NBCUniversal) as well as Chuck Lorre and John Wells (both at Warners) were part of those early wave of suspensions. On Sept. 6, Warners suspended the remainder of its stable — including Berlanti, Bill Lawrence and Mindy Kaling — save for three who had shows in postproduction.
The suspensions were a move by the studios and streamers to cut costs during the prolonged work stoppage. With the WGA strike now concluded, the rush now begins to reinstate deals and get scripted series and movies back into production as soon as the SAG-AFTRA, strike concludes.
