According to The Hollywood Reporter, as the writer’s strike reaches five weeks, the Writer’s Guild is moving to more direct disruption. Sources say that picketing outside soundstages in Georgia has paused the filming of Peocock’s series Hysteria!
Hysteria! is a thriller series set in the 1980s. The series is set to take place during the “Satanic Panic” of that time period. According to IMDB, Hysteria! will follow a satanic metal band that has to deal with a witch hunt brought forth by a series of strange events. The series is created by Michael Scott Kane (It’s Always Sunny In Philidelphia, Annabelle Comes Home).
Warren Leight, WGA East strike captain and veteran showrunner, sat down on The Hollywood Reporter’s Top 5 podcast to discuss the WGA’s strategy to picket outside both corporate offices and studio lots. “We want to disrupt as much as we can,” he said. “The guild realizes this is a pretty powerful thing. If the whole point is to empty the pipeline, the AMPTP [Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers].knows they have to come back to the [bargaining] table. The quickest way to empty the pipeline is not to wait until all the shows are shot but to stop the shows from shooting.”
Studios can lose several hundred thousand dollars per day when they have to stop filming, so preventing filming like the Writer’s Guild of America is attempting to do can be very effective in getting executives to take notice. Pickets like the one that shut down Hysteria! have also shut down Showtime’s The Chi and Billions, Marvel’s Thunderbolts, Lionsgate’s Good Fortune, and Apple TV+’s show Loot.
The Screen Actor’s Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists [SAG-AFTRA] is conducting a strike authorization vote. Both the Director’s Guild of America and SAS have their contracts with studios ending in June.