Posted in: HBO, Max, TV, YouTube | Tagged: amptp, HBO, John Oliver, Last Week Tonight, max, wga

John Oliver Talks WGA Deal, "Furious" at Studios for 148-Day Strike

Last Week Tonight host John Oliver addressed the WGA strike, saying that he was "furious" with the studios for allowing it to go on so long.

With the writers' strike officially over (pending the new deal being ratified by WGA membership), late-night television will be returning to our screens in a big way this week. But HBO got a bit of a jump on that over the weekend, with Bill Maher returning to Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night and John Oliver returning with Last Week Tonight on Sunday night. With being off the air for five months, there were clearly a ton of topics to be covered – but the most obvious one, right out of the gate, was clearly the strike and the union's ability to get what appears to be a pretty sweet deal out of the AMPTP (with SAG-AFTRA negotiations beginning today). That took a lot of hard work, patience, and (as Oliver said on Sunday night) "sacrifices" from a lot of folks for that to happen – something that clearly wasn't lost on Oliver (the jury's still out on Maher). "I'd have loved to have covered all of these stories back when they originally happened. I wished so much that I could have told you these jokes at the time, but I couldn't because our writers, the people who wrote those jokes, were forced to strike for a fair contract for the last five months," Oliver shared with viewers during his return outing. "It was an immensely difficult time, not just for them but for everyone else working on this show and others who could no longer do their jobs. To be clear, this strike happened for good reason. Our industry has seen its workers severely squeezed in recent years; you might have seen stories about writers and actors whose work you recognize routinely not making enough to qualify for health insurance or afford basic needs, so the writers guild went on strike and thankfully won."

But considering that the union appears to have gotten much of what it was looking for from the start, Oliver blamed the member groups comprising AMPTP (including HBO-owner Warner Bros. Discovery) for stretching out a strike that appears now to have not been needed. "While I'm happy they eventually got a fair deal and immensely proud of what our union accomplished… I'm also furious that it took the studios 148 days to achieve a deal that they could have offered on day, f***ing one." That said, Oliver hopes that the WGA's effort to secure a new deal that addresses its issues becomes a blueprint for other unions looking for fairer contracts. "Hopefully, this might encourage others from auto workers to Starbucks baristas to healthcare providers, whether they are in unions or would like to be, to find power in each other and within our industry," Oliver said. "I hope that SAG-AFTRA and IATSE, which represents crews, will be able to take what the writers achieved and leverage it to win fair contracts too because the truth is it takes many people working really hard to make film and TV, all of whom deserve a piece of the piece. For the actors guild, in particular, they can not come back to work soon enough, especially as we've all now seen what happens when non-professionals are trusted with the written word."

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