In case you hadn't heard or haven't been following it, the Writers' Guild of America is on its way to a strike.
If you want a good take on what exactly their grievances are and so on, here's a good breakdown by the Washington Post we can recommend. Basically, at this stage, it's too early to say what's going to happen. All that's happened right now is that the WGA's members have been balloted for strike action and 96% voted in favour of strike.
The WGA is currently in negotiations with the studios to hammer out a deal and have until next Monday - that's May 1st - to get it done. The mood seems fairly optimistic that they can work it out - but if it doesn't happen, the WGA has told media buyers in a statement that "writing for television, feature films and digital series will cease," with immediate effect.
Entertainment Weekly reached out to a wide array of TV shows currently in development and at the writing stage, and identified a number of well-known shows as being immediately effected by the strike. The Walking Dead, American Horror Story, Star Trek: Discovery, Jessica Jones and the final season of The Mindy Project were all mentioned as targets. Not only that, the final three episodes of this season of SNL are likely to be cancelled - or distilled into one episode, maybe - if the strike happens.
As well as this, Conan, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, James Corden and pretty much every scripted late-night talk show is going to have to go to reruns in order for it work. It might happen that, like Letterman did in the '80s, they'll put on a show to highlight the invaluable nature of the writers' work - but don't be surprised if they're all suddenly dormant come next Monday.
Via EW
