America’s long national nightmare is finally over as its national actors union’s membership finally ratified the agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) that ended it. Sag-Aftra members voted by a 78%-to-22% margin in favor of the new deal with the Hollywood studios. But only 38% of its membership even bothered to vote, for whatever that means.
You may have noticed that your favorite television shows did not return this fall. Or maybe you have a life and so you didn’t notice. But they didn’t because of the actors’ strike as well as an only recently settled writers’ strike.
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Streaming services like Netflix, however, have released some new programming, such as shows made in England where the strike was not in effect. There were also short season types of programs that were completed before the strikes.
“SAG-AFTRA’s transformational agreement with the AMPTP achieves some of the most significant updates to the contract in generations,” said the union.
The deal includes more than $1 billion in new compensation and benefit plan funding, along with what Sag-Aftra called “outsized gains to the traditional residuals formulas.”
It also offers a new compensation model for performers working in streaming, with a substantial bonus on top of existing residuals structures, plus compensation escalation for principal and background actors. Additionally, the deal establishes detailed informed consent and compensation guardrails for the use of AI, hair and makeup equity, meaningful protections for the casting process, sexual harassment prevention protections and more.
Concerns about AI soon replacing writers and even actors sparked the two strikes. No, AI is not only used for writing college kids term papers and writing news stories such as this one which was most definitely not written using AI.
But Hollywood studios were already trying to use AI to write screenplays. And many critics said they could not tell the difference.
SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher said, “I’m proud of our SAG-AFTRA membership. They struck for 118 days to grant the TV/Theatrical Negotiating Committee the necessary leverage to secure over $1 billion in gains, along with the union’s first-ever protections around AI technology. Now they’ve locked in the gains by ratifying the contract. SAG-AFTRA members have remained incredibly engaged throughout this process,.”
“This is a golden age for SAG-AFTRA, and our union has never been more powerful,” she declared. And we should definitely take Fran Drescher seriously as a political figure because she was, after all, “The Nanny.”
So now we can soon get back to watching unfunny sitcoms whose real live human writers re-use all sorts of old jokes, cliches and shticks over and over again. The repetition and lack of any attempt at originality will be proof that the writers are actual human beings and not a computer.
