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It’s nice to see that you can take the boy out of the Midwest, but you can’t take those good homespun Midwestern values out of the boy. David Letterman, talk show titan, has opened up his own coffers to pay his writing staff:
I’ve just learned that David Letterman and his producers yesterday morning announced to his Late Show staff that they will be paid through the end of the year even though the show isn’t on the air during the writers strike. “Dave’s not doing this to get good press, which is why it hasn’t been reported for almost two days,” a source tells me. “This is really significant because, as opposed to all of the other shows, this money comes out of Dave’s own pocket.” When Late Show stopped making new episodes last week, CBS ceased paying Letterman’s production company on November 5th. And, in case you were wondering, Dave owns Late Show while Jay does not own The Tonight Show as Johnny Carson did.
Good for Dave. It’s nice to see that all his fame and fortune hasn’t gone to his head; he still seems to be the same boy from Indiana who done did good.
However, I can’t say the same for CBS, as the technical staff of Dave’s party are CBS employees, and they have been out of work as well:
However, most of the technical crew for the Late Show and Late Late Show are CBS employees, some of which are non-staff but per diem, even though they work on regular basis. These employees (at least in Los Angeles) have been on the street since day 1 of the strike. CBS does not want to pay them. They’re like the bastard child nobody wants to claim.
I said in an earlier post that this strike would start to affect more than just the writers, and it seems it is happening. I also said that more show hosts might be thinking about crossing the picket lines to save the jobs of their crews, as Ellen has done, and as no less than talk show king Johnny Carson had to do in the 1988 writer’s strike. He did so to save the jobs of the Tonight Show crew, and it may come to that for today’s talk show hosts. It might not be a popular thing to do, but it just might happen while the studios and writers attempt to hammer out a solution to the strike.
And speaking of the strike…here is an interesting little tidbit I found:
If this strike lasts longer than three months, an entire season of television will end this December. No dramas. No comedies. No “Daily Show.†The strike will also prevent any pilots from being shot in the spring, so even if the strike is settled by then, you won’t see any new shows until the following January. As in 2009. Both the guild and the studios we are negotiating with do agree on one thing: this situation would be brutal.
I will probably be dragged through the streets and burned in effigy if fans have to wait another year for “Lost†to come back. And who could blame them? Public sentiment may have swung toward the guild for now, but once the viewing audience has spent a month or so subsisting on “America’s Next Hottest Cop†and “Celebrity Eating Contest,†I have little doubt that the tide will turn against us.
Um. Well, let’s not get hasty. Brutal? I’m not so sure that applies. Yes, I like my television as much as the next person, even though I’d be hard-pressed to name a current prime-time network television show that I like. But brutal?
Brutal is the situation that our soldiers face in stations around the world. Brutal is the situation that poverty-line parents find themselves in, when it’s time to decide between paying the rent and feeding their child. Brutal is the situation that elderly people find themselves in when they have to decide between their medication and food.
But if a host of fans have to put up without a season of Lost if there’s no decision made in this strike by the end of December, that might be unfortunate, but it’s a far cry from brutal. While I want to see people get their fair share for their work, let’s keep a bit of perspective here. If they reach a contract by the end of December or first of January, the shows will go back to work, and so will the crews, there just won’t be new shows for a year. Are we really that hard-up as a nation, as a people, that we can’t find something else to do if there is nothing on the telly to watch?
That’s okay. I’ve got a lot of TAGS and Dirty Jobs to catch up on. And Dave and his toast will be back.