No joke: The Office season finale airs tomorrow night
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- November
- 14
So this is it. We waited 133 days for Season 4 of The Office to begin. And 49 days later, that’s a wrap.
A lot of independent blogs went silent yesterday as a show of support for the writer’s cause. Right now I’m just bummed out that tomorrow night’s episode, “The Deposition”, is now the de facto season finale. Here’s the summary…
Michael finds himself between a rock and a hard place when Jan sues Dunder Mifflin and Michael is deposed as a witness. Meanwhile, Kelly trash-talks Pam after Darryl beats Jim at ping-pong.
United Hollywood, the writers’ strike blog, reported last week that production had come to a halt, and the New York Times quickly confirmed that we won’t be getting much Dunder Mifflin for a while.
I suppose the reason people should care about this is because the television networks get their broadcast licenses from the government,” striking showrunner Greg Daniels told The Times. “They are supposed to create public culture. Instead, they are taking the attitude of ‘We will crush you’ toward the people who create their programming. They are talking of canceling scripted programming and replacing it with reality programs. I think that is not in the public interest.
Word, Greg. Of course, that position has not just put writers out of work. So called below-the-line workers—everyone from the grips to craft services—is losing pay. Key Grip Dan Alexander, one of 102 Office staffers laid off, e-mailed the LA Times TV blog some perspective not conveyed by either side in the labor standoff.
The lowest paid writer in television makes roughly twice the salary than the below the line crewmember makes. Everyone should be paid their fair share, but does it have to be at the expense of the other 90% of the crewmembers. Nobody ever recoups from a strike, lost wages are just that, lost.
Mike Schur, an above-the-line guy—he writes and plays Dwight’s Cousin Mose—offered a modest proposal for peace. He eloquently takes the studios to task for crying poor with regard to the Internet at the bargaining table then turning around and touting it as a cash cow to shareholders.
If they want to offer me absolutely nothing when they stream my show on-line, (NBC shows were streamed 50 million times in October alone, according to Jeff Zucker), and further offer the comically-low 0.3% residual rate on things like iTunes downloads (“The Office� was downloaded millions of times from iTunes, and then NBC pulled its content off iTunes because they wanted more money), well, over time they will end up reducing my salary by something like 85%. That seems like a pretty drastic paycut. But, according to these guys, there is simply no money to pay out, they’re not making anything!
Speaking of the Internet, NBC has announced the launch of NBC Direct (on the heels of Unbox and Hulu), which is getting less than rave reviews.
In somewhat strike-related news, participants in the online interactive Dunder Mifflin Infinity game who weren’t already driven off by the fact that it never functioned properly—or was much fun—are banding together to support the writers with a walk-out. I don’t know if they’ll make much of an impact on the network, but considering a recent challenge had participants driving Web traffic to NBC.com via hotlinks I’d say it’s worth a shot.
If you want to know where various shows stand with regard to remaining episodes, check out Michael Ausiello’s updated chart at TVGuide.com. For the record, there are four more 30 Rock’s after tomorrow, five Chuck’s, three Heroes’s and zero Office’s.
Office tidbits (which is all we’re gonna get for a while)
- Check out a snippet from Walk Hard, featuring John C. Reilly and Jenna Fischer.
- Vote for The Office as EW’s Entertainer of the Year.
- Download a sample of the new Office videogame (My rating: meh).
- Jason Reitman directed “Local Ad” and then blogged about it.
- Rainn Wilson did something funny during Monday Night Football.
Photo courtesy Angela Martin’s myspace page.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 9:00 am by Brian Howard.
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