An Open Letter from Fans to the Streaming & Entertainment Industry

As fans of scripted, creative series like Warrior Nun, we offer our support of the Writer's Guild of America (WGA) in their pursuit of fair pay and fair working conditions.

As fans, we love great writing. We love the beautiful, heartbreaking, and joyful worlds that writers, producers, and showrunners bring to life on screens big and small. We are, of course, partial to the great writing of the TV series Warrior Nun, but we're fans of so much of the great content writers have created over the years - 1899, Motherland Fort Salem, Legends of Tomorrow, Wynonna Earp, and so, so many more. **What these series all have in common is great writing**.

Great writing is under threat today from many different directions. The WGA's key negotiating points - on more equitable pay for streaming residuals and falling median writer pay due to mini-rooms - are just the first fights for the survival of great writing on the air.

As fans working to save a show, we know how difficult it is to even find good data about your favorite show to understand how well it's performed, something we've struggled with in our pursuit to see our favorite shows renewed. This is something that the WGA has noted - that the black box nature of streaming and closely-held data means that no one except the content distribution platform ever really knows how well a show has performed. In turn, that means writers are unable to ask for fair compensation commensurate to the impact a show has delivered.

We believe that increasing writer pay is necessary, but we also demand transparency in content analytics to provide clarity to writers, producers, and fans about how their favorite content is performing. Such transparency would also prevent the dismissal of writers' hard work if a studio could be held responsible for publicly available performance metrics. Additionally, if a show is performing well, even if it's not favored by studio executives, it could be more easily acquired by another studio using common-ground content analytics.

However, this is the tip of the iceberg. We believe writers deserve fair pay and equitable treatment because the writing industry, the content industry as a whole, is on the verge of a gigantic tectonic shift. It's no secret that new, powerful artificial intelligence tools can generate content - including screen writing - faster and better than ever before, and the pace of that advancement is only accelerating.

Studios have made clear in their bargaining positions that they are seeking to cut costs, and since many streaming platforms are also technology companies at their core, or significantly underwritten by technology companies, it's no great leap of imagination for these companies to be looking at the use of artificial intelligence to reduce the number of writers they use and what they pay the remaining writers.

The challenge with artificial intelligence is that by its very nature, it can't create anything truly new. It can only create from data it's been trained on. In studios' efforts to cut costs, they may doom us - the fans, the viewers, the audience, the lovers of great writing - to machine-made mediocrity, a perpetual recycling of past greatest hits (without compensating those past writers either). True lovers of scripted entertainment don't want this, and the antidote to this mediocre future is paying writers - human writers - fairly for their original work, today.

The WGA is correct in saying that the very survival of their profession is at stake - and not just from streaming platform residuals. Negotiating fair pay and fair working conditions is in the best interest of both the WGA and progressive, forward-thinking studios that don't want to see their content devolve to machine-made reruns in perpetuity. We urge everyone to support the WGA in their quest to keep imagination alive, and keep great content on the air.

Signed on 4 April 2023,

The Order of the Cruciform Spreadsheet

An Independent Consortium of #SaveWarriorNun Advocates