Full Of Food and Television / Strike (Jamie Antonisse)

Our Thanksgiving turkey, courtesy of Hutson Hayward. Brined (brined!) for two days prior to eating. Amazing.

We have a nice little Thanksgiving tradition: a gathering of East Coast expatriates that congregates at our house on turkey day, a second family for the family starved. This year the party grew to seventeen; we threw every table and chair in our house into the center of the room, stacked foodstuff on every surface, and ate ourselves to distraction. Forget Christmas, Thanksgiving is the holiday that really showcases people's giving spirit: twenty dishes! Eight desserts! 15 bottles of wine! And I never needed to stray farther afield than my sidewalk. What a holiday.

Yes, it has been awhile. I have not been a well-oiled blogging machine. There are of course several reasons for this, none of them exciting or in any way Guild-related. So no, I am not on Strike.

[Nice segue, Jamie!]

Having spent most of the day sitting prone on a couch watching old episodes of Dead Like Me, I have a renewed appreciation for the value of well-written telemavison, and therefore a renewed interest in this WGA debacle. Obviously, as a man who hopes to make a living off ideas and their execution, I stand beside writers' compensation for creative work. It's a given that a fair shake of film/TV profits should go to the writers. Damon Lindelof, one of the creators of Lost, wrote a very persuasive piece on the issue. However, I've been continually surprised by the ambivalent responses to the Strike outside my little circle of wordsmiths. Check out the first reply to Damon Lindelof's post: there have been quite a few editorials floated on the interwebs with that exact same furious tone. Is it just the gnawing emptiness of a world without original TV that has people upset, or is there some other side to this?

I went over to Mahalo (dot com) to try to get the issue cleared up, and instead I only found another perspective that confused me further. This section in particular illuminated the problem and got me scratching my head:

They [Those greedy greedy writers] are also demanding a percentage of the advertising revenue earned by the networks from ad-supported streaming.
However, the WGA’s contract is not with networks, it is with producers, who receive no proceeds from these advertisements, just as they receive none of the revenue achieved by networks through commercial television.

I've been surprised how little discussion I've heard in the IMD about this: perhaps it seems like an old-media issue, but I don't think it is. Any smarter heads than I have opinions on this issue? Better yet, has anyone heard of anything USEFUL for us poor guildless people to do to support the writers and/or get this thing resolved?