IDEALLY -- and note the caps! -- there'd be a theme of fired-up ardor in the shows the writers return to. Since the mere 4,000 writers Doug speaks of have a cultural impact disproportionate to their size, that could affect cultural & media discourse. A lot of shows veer left anyway; the Daily Show writers' strike clip is an example of a show like that.
The pessimist in me says the strike will be a momentary anomaly: Once it's settled, the guns will be holstered. Because why, for example, don't they write about this stuff anyway? I mean, outside the glancing blows regularly delivered in shows like the Simpsons, Daily Show, etc., but certainly not in absolute crap like Friday Night Lights or the increasingly-preposterous House?
During the 2002 Enron/Tyco/Worldcom scandals, the anti-CEO sentiment on talk shows, etc., at that time, was incredible. The best folks like O'Reilly could do is, again, try to trace it all back to Clinton [O'Reilly's take was that Clinton somehow caused Enron to fail], as they do with every single evil thing that exists in our universe. Record numbers of people said they wanted to join unions; TV shows seemed to have a theme for a year or so there about how fucked up the business community is. Of course, this is the USA, and the huge number of folks who told phone surveyors they'd join a union if they could never did.
And to Dwayne M., if you have an inside track on the strike, I'd certainly be interested! I bet a lot of the list would, too.
-B.
Dennis Claxton wrote:
"More writing about class struggle in popular shows?"
Doug Henwood wrote:
"I don't believe any of that, and really hope the writers win - but what would the upshot be for the broader class struggle?"