This is, fundamentally, a newsletter about stories. Stories about politics, stories about news, stories about aliens, stories about scammers, stories about alien scammers. Stories are, at our very core, who we are. And stories require writers.
There is no doubt that scientists, athletes, baristas, and bartenders are critical to our lives and history. Bartenders especially. But when we decide, as a people, who to remember throughout history, we remember the artists. Aristotle, Sophocles, Aristophanes. Da Vinci, Botticelli. Shakespeare. Dostoevsky. Hurston. Hughes. Angelou. Spielberg. Scorsese. Anderson. When we connect with each other over dinner we don’t talk about particle physics- although that would be awesome- we talk about Severance and Game of Thrones. We don’t list our favorite medical discoveries on our Tinder profiles. We list our favorite books (I’m assuming. I have never been on Tinder. But obviously literary preference is the only way to choose a mate.). My point is probably obvious, artists matter. They are who we are. They decide who we are. Every week I write a newsletter recommending a bunch of stuff created by writers.
Right now, many of those writers, the ones who make TV and movies, the ones we turn to when we are happy, sad, lonely, bored, devastated, joyful, alone or in a crowd, at home or in a hotel room, on airplanes and in the backs of cars, the writers who give us something to talk about and a way to connect and a way to see each other and understand the world and understand ourselves, the ones who write great shows and terrible shows and a lot of shows in the middle, who write jokes for Colbert and monologues for Roys and everything in between, who are the reason that every studio and network can have their own streaming channel, are on strike. Actual strike. Newsies strike. And they should be.
The streamers- Netflix, HBO slash HBOMax slash Max, Paramount plus, Apple plus, MGM plus, all the plusses and everyone else, are being huge dicks. They are absolutely refusing to fairly pay the people who are the very reason they have platforms at all. And they’re being pretty rude about it. Like, Elon Musk rude. This is not a case of two sides trying to come to an agreement. This is the emperor with no clothes trying to absolutely crush the tailor. This is Starbucks throwing their own coffee into the harbor. This is madness.
I love a good strike. Nothing makes me as happy as a one man picket line. This is a nation of strikers and protestors and honestly, we should do more of it. I especially love it when artists demand to be paid what they’re worth. I often wish I could send money to the writers of my favorite shows. I owe the women who make Black Lady Sketch Show so much. We all owe a year’s salary to everyone who worked on Succession. I probably owe Vince Gilligan a kidney. We, the people who live and die by what’s on TV tonight, who can’t wait to live text our favorite shows with our friends, who talk about the art of writing every day, owe it to our favorite writers to support them in this strike. I have no idea what that will look like. I imagine at some point, if this goes on long enough, there will be a fund to which we can donate. Perhaps we’ll be able to send pizza to picket lines. Whatever it is, we have to do it. For the sake of art, for the sake of writers, for the sake of great TV.
So thanks to the writers, for having the courage to make art and put it out there for all the world to see, and the courage to stop making art to stand out in the streets and demand fair pay. And to the streamers, seriously, fuck you.