


Their chief weapon is a legal tenet known as force majeure (literally, "greater force"), a clause in most writers' contracts that allows the studios to cancel deals in the event of a Writers Guild work stoppage. For years network bosses have talked about trimming development deals for writers and scaling back the annual literary boondoggle known as pilot season. Now it is happening.
NBC Universal's Jeff Zucker announced on Jan. 20 that the network will no longer develop TV pilots and will instead put most shows straight on the air to see if they succeed.
Additionally, he plans to have his lagging network bow out of holding a big gala for the upfronts - an expensive and cumbersome spring ritual in which networks preview, promote, and presell the fall schedule to advertisers with extravaganzas at venues including New York City's Radio City Music Hall.
"Many of the vanity deals and the big overall deals just haven't paid off," Zucker told Fortune. "We want to revitalize the industry. We don't want to go out of business."
Though they are not as vocal as Zucker - whose Peacock network is airing more unscripted programming - the other networks and studio bosses are making similar moves.
The major casualty of force majeure has been the "overall" deal. These glitzy holdovers from the pre-cable days of the Big Three networks paid as much as $2 million a year to writer-producers who would be given a paycheck, an office, and an assistant at a studio or network in exchange for sending their ideas along for consideration. Each year, show ideas culled from the writers under contract - along with pitches from outside - would go into development. Across the big broadcast networks, some 150 pilots could be developed to various stages of completion, and a handful would finally air at a cost that could reach $10 million for a one-hour drama.
"It was an awesome deal for writers that became unworkable financially for the studios as people's eyes moved from their televisions to their computers," says Jill Soloway, a writer-producer who lost one of her two overall deals last month with ABC affiliate Touchstone. She was one of many to get the ax around Jan. 14, a day industry publications dubbed Black Monday after close to 100 development deals were slashed by CBS, NBC, Fox, ABC, and others.
Not even celebs are immune: Also in January, CBS (CBS, Fortune 500) and ABC canceled the overall deals of Hugh Jackman and Taye Diggs, respectively. (Stars like Jackman and Diggs could get such deals as part of their agreement to "attach" themselves to network shows - not always to great effect, as witnessed by Jackman's short-lived CBS series Viva Laughlin.)
CBS Inc. chairman Leslie Moonves says he was not planning anything quite as sweeping as NBC's move. Yet all the networks have cut back meaningfully. "This will force changes in how we do business, and probably we've been heading that way for a while," Moonves says.
No one is sure how long the new austerity will last - especially if the writers come back and the hits don't. But even as Hollywood's creatives reel from the strike's unintended consequences, many knew this day would eventually come. "I hate it, but I'm not surprised by it," says Rick Rosen, co-founder of Endeavor talent agency. "It is going to be an awakening."
(money.cnn.com)