Battlestar Galactica

Yesterday’s post explained why fans of good television should support the writers’ strike, and amazingly Battlestar Galactica provides one of the best illustrations of why fans should back the writer’s in their efforts. 

By now most BSG fans have seen the highly entertaining Razor flashbacks which show Admiral Adama as a young man on his eventful first flight and resulting encounter with the Cylons.  Many of you have also seen the Battlestar Galactica webisodes that were released last year in anticipation of Season Three, and which are still available for viewing on SciFi.com.  What most of us did not know is that the network originally did not want to pay the actors, writers, and producers for those webisodes claiming they were promos. 

"I had a situation last year on Battlestar Galactica where we were asked by Universal to do webisodes [Note: Moore is referring to The Resistance webisodes which ran before Season 3 premiered], which at that point were very new and ‘Oooh, webisodes! What does that mean?’ It was all very new stuff. And it was very eye opening, because the studio’s position was ‘Oh, we’re not going to pay anybody to do this. You have to do this, because you work on the show. And we’re not going to pay you to write it. We’re not going to pay the director, and we’re not going to pay the actors.’ At which point we said ‘No thanks, we won’t do it.’"

"We got in this long, protracted thing and eventually they agreed to pay everybody involved. But then, as we got deeper into it, they said ‘But we’re not going to put any credits on it. You’re not going to be credited for this work. And we can use it later, in any fashion that we want.’ At which point I said ‘Well, then we’re done and I’m not going to deliver the webisodes to you.’ And they came and they took them out of the editing room anyway — which they have every right to do. They own the material — But it was that experience that really showed me that that’s what this is all about. If there’s not an agreement with the studios about the internet, that specifically says ‘This is covered material, you have to pay us a formula - whatever that formula turns out to be - for use of the material and how it’s all done,’ the studios will simply rape and pillage."

Ron Moore explained this shocking story from the picket lines, and it’s a great example of what the fight is about in the writers’ strike.  Everybody knows that the future of entertainment lies on the Internet, and the days of "appointment television" will soon be a thing of the past.  Viewers want to watch their shows when they can, on computer-like devices such as TiVo or on computers themselves.  Studios and networks are already selling ads for these episodes, ads that are more valuable because they can’t be skipped but they can be customized to coincide with whatever demographic information the network has about you, the individual computer user.  It’s amazing stuff, it is the future of entertainment, and it is going to be worth billions of dollars.  But it can’t work without content … and yet the networks and studios want the writers, and everybody else on these shows, to provide that content without getting paid.