Television
Fans Unite In Support of Striking Writers
Five hours and fifteen minutes.
That’s how long it took for the smallest seed of a campaign by
television fans to support the striking Writers Guild of America to
take root and grow. It was November 5, 2007, the day before the strike
was set to commence, and it happened on the Joss Whedon (creator of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer) weblog whedonesque.com.
The discussion thread where it all began reads something like this:
“Kinda short notice, but anyone interested in getting up a collection
and sending some pizzas over to the front of Universal Studios?”
(C.A. Bridges, 1:57 CET)
“If somebody sets up a Paypal and offers to order the pizzas it
should be good to go.” (gossi, 2:15 CET)
“I talked to the guys at my regular pizzeria…. They said
they can have a large order ready any time around lunchtime as long
as it’s called in in the morning.” (dreamlogic, 4:37 CET)
“OK, stop sending payments. I’ve got enough for the pizza.”
(dreamlogic, 7:12 CET)
Television fans have always been taken for granted. For decades, network
executives have been able to cancel shows and program freely knowing
the ratings would still be there in the fall. “If we air it, they
will watch” was the unofficial mantra. Sure, there were exceptions,
most notably the campaign to save Star Trek from cancellation
in the 1960s, but most efforts by fans to influence the network decision
makers were swatted away with the assurance there would be no major
repercussions.
Then came
the Internet and its promise of being a social unifier. Fan websites
of practically every show on television now exist and flourish, with
legions of supporters. More importantly, these fans are intelligent,
resourceful and persistent, making it harder for them to simply be ignored.
And one of the largest collections of online fans belongs to Whedon,
who created Angel and the short-lived Firefly as well
as Buffy.
If anything, Whedon fans are resilient, have a “can-do”
attitude and demonstrate an amazing ability to unify and expand their
efforts. Thus four days after pizza was delivered to the front lines
of striking writers, a new website was launched.
Named “Fans4Writers,” it was started by members of whedonesque
but had a larger purpose; as the website itself states, “It quickly
became clear and necessary for the effort to encompass more than just
a single group of fans. As such, Fans4Writers is not just for one fandom.
It is not just for ‘genre’ fans, television fans or movie
fans. This effort belongs to fans of ALL striking writers.”
It
wasn’t long before blogs and fansites for shows as diverse as
24,
Battlestar
Galactica, The
Unit
and Las Vegas added banners of support as well as links to
Fans4Writers. New websites like “Office Fans for Office Writers,”
set up by
viewers of the NBC comedy, popped up on the Internet landscape. Criminal
Minds Fanatic
even auctioned off a can of beef stew autographed by the writers of
Criminal Minds to benefit the staff of the CBS series who were
adversely affected by the strike. Before anyone knew it, a full-fledged
movement was apparently underway.
But it seems that movement was only slightly noticed by the mainstream
media, and even then more by web-based offshoots of the mainstream like
Scribe Vibe: Variety’s WGA Strike Blog. It did, however,
garner the attention of those it was supporting, and not just in a small
way. Slightly over a week after the strike began, a group of television
showrunners met to discuss the fan outpouring.
“The point of the meeting was that the WGA is aware of—and
a little blown away by—the passion, tenacity, and organizational
savvy of the online community,” Joss Whedon himself posted on
whedonesque. “The ‘Jericho’ nuts are the stuff of
legend. Whedonesque and the creation of Fans4Writers were spoken of
in awed whispers.”
The “stuff of legend” comment refers to the cancellation
of the CBS freshman series this past May. Probably 99.99 percent of
all fan-driven campaigns to save a cancelled show end in failure; Angel,
after all, remained dead despite blood drives and a billboard truck
patrolling the streets of downtown Los Angeles, and even a strategically-placed
Ferris Wheel could not bring Everwood back. But fans of Jericho
borrowed a page from Roswell (which has the distinction of
being cancelled after each of its three seasons) and how it was rescued
the first time when fans bombarded the WB with bottles of Tabasco sauce,
a favorite of one of the show’s characters. In the season final
of Jericho, Skeet Ulrich shouts “Nuts” when confronted
with a surrender ultimatum from a nearby town intent on overrunning
his own. Fans rallied around that battle cry and in turn bombarded CBS
with forty thousand pounds of peanuts. And guess what? It worked. Jericho
will return at some point in 2008 with seven additional episodes.
The purpose of the meeting Whedon attended—which reportedly involved
showrunners Ron Moore (Battlestar Galactica), Shonda Rhimes
(Grey’s Anatomy), Rob McElhenney (It’s Always
Sunny in Philadelphia), Stephanie Savage (Gossip Girl),
Carol Barbee (Jericho) and Bill Prady (The Big Bang Theory),
among others—was to find a way to tap into the fan’s energy
and utilize it to everybody’s advantage. Thus a little over a
week after the launch of Fans4Writers came Pencils2MediaMoguls,
with the goal of sending pencils to the network and studio heads to
show support for the striking writers. In less than two weeks, two-hundred-eighty-thousand
pencils had been purchased by television fans.
Can it make a difference? Can the fans truly have a say in this labor
dispute? Only time will tell, but the movement has proven that television
fans are not to be taken lightly nor are simply drones who will follow
the dictates of network television. They are intelligent enough to understand
the issues involved in this strike, imaginative enough to find ways
to take a stand and strong enough to not be denied their due as an involved
third-party in the raging conflict. Joss Whedon and the other showrunners
who met on November 14, 2007, understood this, as the Whedon post on
whedonesque demonstrates:
“There are no longer two sides to this struggle; there are three.
The audience has a voice, and a right to be heard…. There was
no one in that room who didn’t understand that they were there
BECAUSE OF YOU, because you guys have already proven yourselves not
just dedicated fans but an active, forceful community. Take a moment
to be all up in yourself. Now get over yourself. Now doubt yourself.
Now hug yourself. Now touch your knee – Hah! Didn’t say
‘Simon says.’ Like, ever. FOOLS! It’s you unauthorized-knee-touching
fools who are proving that the internet is indeed the line in the sand
(‘…must be drawn Heah! This fah! No fuhther!’), for
it’s the one medium the congloms don’t control. Televised
news is largely ignoring us, the print media is eating Nick Counter’s
astonishing lies like candy they get paid to eat, but you upon the ether…
you haven’t been silent and you can’t be silenced. Go ahead.
Touch that knee. Simon be damned.”
Perhaps that is the greatest strength and true legacy of the current
fan movement, and the role of online fandom in general: not so much
to influence the network television suits but to merely support and
stand behind the creators and writers whose shows resonate with viewers.
Television is no longer simply about entertaining; shows like Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, Jericho
and even Grey’s Anatomy define our times as much as anything.
These shows debate issues of morality and tell stories that we all can
relate, unite us as a community like no other medium and even help shape
our lives.
The creators and writers of these shows, meanwhile, must maneuver their
way through the upper echelons of network television, worry about overnight
ratings and deal with the constant threat of cancellation. Movements
like “Save Jericho” and the outpouring of support that Fans4Writers
represents are ways for fans to let these scribes know their struggles
may actually be worth something after all, and even energize them to
continue onward.
It has yet to be seen if the Les Moonves or Rupert Murdochs of corporate
America take notice of Pencils2MediaMoguls, but if the effort allows
television fans to stand on the virtual front lines of the writer’s
strike, side-by-side with the likes of Joss Whedon, Ron Moore and Shonda
Rhimes, that may in-and-of-itself generate enough synergy to alter the
television landscape forever.
And that
is a legacy worth striving for.
Anthony
Letizia (November 26, 2007)
