Posted in: Preview, TV, YouTube | Tagged: Contract TK, Greg Iwinski, late night comedy, Picket Tonight, Sasha Stewart, WGA Strike

Picket Tonight: Striking WGA Comedy Writers Launch YouTube Show

With the WGA strike raging, Picket Tonight is a weekly YouTube show to snark at the studios & raise money for The Entertainment Relief Fund.

You know there's a writer's strike on, right? That's why all the late-night talk shows have gone dark – there are no writers to write the jokes. The WGA strike is moving into its third week, and what do we get? Reruns. Now several late-night talk show writers have teamed up to make a weekly YouTube show titled either Picket Tonight or "The Jokes You Love from the Picket Signs But Now We're Saying Them Out Loud!"

Picket Tonight is hosted by Greg Iwinski, who used to write for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert & Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and Sasha Stewart, who wrote for The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore. It follows the late-night talk show format where the hosts sit at a desk and tell jokes, with many of the jokes snarking at the studios on top of current affairs, though the show is only about ten minutes long. One of their opening remarks immediately brought up the studios' profits in the wake of the strike: "Come on. That's not a lot of cash. It's what the studio heads would normally call 'pocket yacht money.'"

"We'll bring you jokes and sketches whenever we can," Iwinski said at the intro, "and you'll get to hear from writers inside the strike about what we're fighting for and why the studios need to talk to us." Stewart added, "We're two of the many writers who will be reading these strike propaganda jokes, so if you're like, 'I want to watch someone more attractive,' just wait a week." "One of the biggest issues with the negotiations is that the studios provided no counter to many of our proposals," Iwinsk said. "The first time in history that a studio had no notes."

Picket Tonight: Filling the Gap Left by Late Night

"As the studios continue to move into streaming, but especially as they move into the free ad-supported space where stuff looks more and more like old TV," Iwinski told Deadline in an interview, "you're going to be seeing more late-night television, soap operas, and game shows in the digital space. And right now, we have no protections there. We don't have a payment amount; we don't have contract-linked minimums; we don't have residuals, really. We're in the Wild West.

"And so for us, our whole genre of television could move to a place where we have absolutely no protection. So we've got to get that, especially when the studios' counteroffer to our asks for the same things we have in free TV, their response was to propose a day rate, where you write a day of a show similar to The Tonight Show, you go home and wake up the next morning and hope you get called for another day of work. And anybody who's worked on a late-night show will tell you that that's just not how you make those shows.

"As the show gets its sea legs a little bit, I think our hope will be to also address some of the bigger things that are out there, because, as late-night writers, we have a relationship with our audience, and we help take the edge off a little bit when there's horrible news. We're doing that for the strike, but hopefully, we'll have some space to take a few side-shots at things going on in the world."

The current plan is for new episodes of Picket Tonight to premiere on YouTube during the middle of the week during every week of the strike with an all-volunteer crew and an all-volunteer writing staff. The show can be seen and subscribed to via its new YouTube channel Contract TK, a journalism term meaning "Contract to Come."

"We thought it was important that we didn't just do the jokes and needle the studios," Iwinski said, "but try to help all the people that we know on these shows, some of which have a hundred or two hundred employees – our friends and colleagues who are out of work right now because of the strike. So, we want to do what we can to help them and make sure that they can pay rent and hang on during the strike action."

The end of the show has a message that says, "was made with zero budget using only grassroots volunteers and is not an official message of the WGA." It also asks viewers to donate to the Entertainment Community Fund "to support the crews and staff of late-night impacted by the strike."

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