TVSquad

Ah, product placement. It's a subject that's come up before. We have an award for it, and even as far back as those care free days of 2005, Karina was writing about the Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild Of America protesting it. The telling quote from that piece, "Our writers are being told to perform the function of ad copywriter, but to disguise this as storytelling." And isn't that where most of us have always drawn the line in the sand? The placing of products into sets was kind of an understood cost of doing business, but having the writers change scripts to incorporate them was a whole other ball of (Turtle) wax. Unfortunately, those (Foster Farms) chickens have come home to roost.

This year's awards season, barely a month old now, has not been a good one for Hollywood. First, the Golden Globes ceremony was reduced to an Access Hollywood special after members of the Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild boycotted the show. Now, it looks like the Grammy Awards ceremony may also be in trouble.

It is being reported that the striking guild will probably bar its members from working on the February 10th Grammys telecast. Grammy organizers have yet to ask for a waiver allowing for writers to work on the show. However, according to a WGA spokesperson, a waiver grant would be unlikely. There is no word if the WGA will picket the ceremony. If it does, then SAG members will not cross the picket line. This potentially means another exciting 1-hour infotainment special.

I'm sure members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are sweating a bit now.

As the strike lingers on and the Writers Guild of American (WGA) and Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) seem no closer to bridging their philosophical and monetary gap, the WGA is set to try a new tactic. According to Variety, the WGA is going to make a "legal demand" today for individual members of the AMPTP to schedule bargaining meetings with the WGA. However, at this point it isn't clear if the companies are legally obligated to do so, and if not, will they?

• The WGA-East declares that "Ellen DeGeneres Not Welcome in NY."
• Lost's co-creator Damon Lindelof announces, "Television is dying" in the New York Times.
• Some soap writers are crossing the picket line to resume work.
• Today (Tuesday) was dubbed "Picketing with the Stars" as 100 actors from 30 TV shows joined the picket line at Universal Studios in a show of solidarity.
• Seventeen entertainment blogs went dark for a day in support of the writer's strike.
• Peter Chernin (president of Fox's parent company, News Corp) bragged that the strike is "probably a positive" for the company as it will most likely save them money.
• CBS News is preparing for a possible strike by 500 of their news writers.
• The Simpson's Mr. Burns tells striking writers they can't have the internet: "It's Mine!"

Waiting for new Battlestar Galactica webisodes on SciFi.com? Well, you may be waiting for a long time because executive producer Ron Moore said he won't be delivering any more of them, including the ten episodes that have already been completed. Why? Because SciFi's parent company, NBC Universal, is being a bit tight with the purse strings.

Universal executives are witholding residuals and credit from the writers of the BSG webisodes, claiming that the three-minute episodes are 'promotional materials'. When Moore heard this he halted delivery. In turn, NBC Universal seized the webisodes and filed charges of unfair labor practices with the Writers Guild of America. The WGA then went back to Moore and told him not to deliver any more Internet content until their was residual deal.

Last month, nearly six million people streamed BSG episodes within two days of the premiere. Compare that to the 2.2 million people who watched the third-season premiere of the show. This goes to show that the Internet is beginning to draw more and more television viewers into its gaping maw, and that the industry is going to need to work together with the WGA to determine the best course of action.

The Writers Guild of America, the union which represents over 12,000 people working in the entertainment industry, wants to allow writers, editors, and producers currently working on reality television productions into the union. However, networks and studios are refusing. This gets into a lot of jargon and rhetoric that neither you or I really care much about, but the bottom line is that reality television is produced and "written" in a much different way than a scripted series, and the WGA has to figure out how to make such an inclusion work without a complete overhaul.