Some of my favorite people from the Office, talking about the Writer’s Guild Strike.
I watch the show on the internet, for the record.
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Alexander Chee
Koreanish 
While I just linked to Mark Harris’s “the WGA is right!” column, it’s really hard to feel sorry for these people. The writers of “The Office”? They’re all making more money than anyone could ever need. And Mike Schur? He’s married to the one of the head writers of “Heroes,” who is Regis Philbin’s daughter. He’s so, so, so not hurting. Meanwhile, the key grip is collecting unemployment. Niiiiice.
Well, I think it’s important to remember that the real people in this who are making more money than anyone could ever need are the networks. And while you or I might feel these writers make too much, in the last year we’ve moved into a world where millionaires have to keep their day jobs, and billionaires no longer keep their money in dollars.
Imagine if publishing were to decide that books should all come out in market paperback as well as hardcover and trade, and that the writers shouldn’t get paid for market paperbacks because they’re ‘promotional copies’. And that also the people who made the promos shouldn’t get paid. But they’re still getting sold, and maybe even more popular than hardcover or trade.
You know you wouldn’t stand for that.
Right now the only people making money off the iTunes downloads and the episodes aired on the websites are the studios, and in principle that is wrong, because that’s where the future is headed already. If we don’t close this gap, the studios will have found a way to make writers and actors work literally for nothing. And I’ll always be against that.