English Entertainment
Reality TV writers in the US sue major networks, production companies
MUMBAI: 12 reality TV writers, assisted by the Writers Guild of America west (WGAw), have filed a class-action suit in the Superior Court of California.
The suit charges eight television networks and production companies with gross violations of California’s labour laws governing payment of overtime, wages, and meal periods.
WGAw president Daniel Petrie Jr said, “These violations of California law are no mere accounting errors.They are deliberately designed to deny these writers the basic rights and legal protections of fair wages, overtime, and a meal break. Unfortunately, those cases are not unique.
“It is but one example of the pervasive conditions we have found in reality television productions – and it underscores why so many reality writers and editors have come to the Writers Guild seeking union representation.”
The writers who brought the suit worked on such reality shows as The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, Are You Hot?, The Two Timer, The Will, The Starlet, and The Real Gilligan’s Island. They were given such various job titles as assistant story editor, story assistant, story editor and story producer.
Their complaint charges four production companies – Next Entertainment, Telepictures Productions, Syndicated Productions and Dawn Syndicated Productions and four networks ABC, CBS, WB and TBS with failure to pay overtime, willful falsification of or failure to maintain payroll records, and the chronic failure to afford meal periods required by law. The suit also seeks class-action status on behalf of the plaintiffs and others employed on these programmes.
According to the suit The Bachelor and the other shows established a flat weekly rate for an 84-hour work week. Regardless of the number of hours employees worked, they received only the flat weekly rate, even when the law requires that they receive time-and-a-half after 40 hours and double-time after 80 hours. In California, employers are required to calculate an employee’s hourly rate by dividing 40 hours into the weekly rate.
The suit alleges that once they were hired, the 12 writers were required to falsify their time cards, either by simply writing the term “Worked” across the card or by entering predetermined start and end times for each day of the week. In fact, the suit notes, the employees worked far in excess of 40 hours per week during virtually every week of their employment but never received any premium overtime pay.
Petrie notes, “The entertainment industry established basic decent working conditions and compensation standards decades ago. What is happening here harkens back to the conditions experienced in the early 20th century. The companies falsified the hour rates on their pay stubs to reflect that overtime had been paid when it hadn’t. To add insult to injury, they refused to give meal periods to writers when they were working 10-, 12-, and 20-hour days, six or seven days a week.
“These are major production companies and networks with financial and creative control who should be ashamed to have talented writers with a de facto hourly pay of less than $10 per hour, with no overtime, no meal periods, no pension and health, and no residuals. It’s time to put an end to these conditions.”
UK: The aerial is losing its grip. As broadband becomes the default way Britons watch television, the UK is edging towards a decisive, and divisive, question: should Freeview be switched off by 2034? The issue, highlighted in reporting by The Guardian, has exposed deep fault lines over access, affordability and the future of public service broadcasting.
For nearly 25 years, Freeview has delivered free-to-air television from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 to almost every corner of the country. Even now, it remains the UK’s largest TV platform, used in more than 16m homes and on around 10m main household sets. Yet the same broadcasters that built it are now pressing for its closure within eight years.
Their case rests on a structural shift in viewing. Smart TVs, superfast broadband and the Netflix-led streaming boom have pulled audiences online. Advertising economics have followed. By 2034, the number of homes using Freeview as their main TV set is forecast to fall from a peak of almost 12m in 2012 to fewer than 2m, making digital terrestrial television, or DTT, increasingly costly to sustain.
But critics say the rush to switch off risks abandoning those least able, or least willing, to move online.
“I don’t want to be choosing apps and making new accounts,” says Lynette, 80, from Kent. “It is time-consuming and irritating trying to work out where I want to be, to remember the sequence of clicks, with hieroglyphics instead of words. If I make a mistake I have to start again.”
Lynette is among nearly 100,000 people who have signed a “save Freeview” petition launched by campaign group Silver Voices. She fears the government is about to “take [Freeview] away from me and others who either don’t like, can’t afford, or can’t use online versions”.
Official figures underline the fault lines. A report commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport estimates that by 2035, 1.8m homes will still depend on Freeview. Ofcom’s analysis shows those households are more likely to be disabled, older, living alone, female, and based in the north of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Freeview is owned by the public service broadcasters through Everyone TV, which also operates Freesat and the newer streaming platform Freely. After two years of review, DCMS is expected to set out its position soon, drawing on three options proposed by Ofcom: a costly upgrade of Freeview’s ageing technology; maintaining a bare-bones service with only core PSB channels; or a full switch-off during the 2030s.
The broadcasters have rallied behind the third option. They argue that 2034 is the logical cut-off, when transmission contracts with network operator Arqiva expire. By then, they say, the cost of broadcasting to a dwindling audience will far outweigh the returns from TV advertising.
Ofcom agrees a crunch point is approaching. In July, the regulator warned of a “tipping point” within the next few years, after which it will no longer be commercially viable for broadcasters to carry the costs of DTT.
Others see risks beyond economics. Questions remain over whether internet TV can reliably deliver emergency broadcasts, such as the daily Covid updates, in the way that universally available DTT can. The UK radio industry has also warned that an internet-only future for TV could push up distribution costs and force some radio stations off air if PSBs no longer share Arqiva’s mast network.
“It is a political hot potato,” says Dennis Reed, founder of Silver Voices, who says he has “dissociated” his organisation from the government’s stakeholder forum, which he believes is “heavily biased” towards streaming.
The Future TV Taskforce, representing the PSBs, counters that moving online could “close the digital divide once and for all”. “We want to be able to plan to ensure that no one is left behind,” a spokesperson says, adding that rising DTT costs could otherwise mean cuts to programme budgets.
The numbers show the scale of the challenge. Of the 1.8m Freeview-dependent homes projected for 2035, around 1.1m are expected to have broadband but not use it for TV. The remaining 700,000 are forecast to lack a broadband connection altogether.
Veterans of the analogue switch-off, completed in 2012 after 76 years, recall similar fears of “TV blackout chaos”. Around 6 per cent of households were labelled “digital refuseniks”, yet a targeted help scheme and a national campaign, fronted by a robot called Digit Al voiced by Matt Lucas, delivered a largely smooth transition.
This time, the BBC is less keen to foot the bill. Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, has said the corporation should not fund a comparable support programme for a Freeview switch-off.
Research for Sky by Oliver & Ohlbaum suggests that with early awareness campaigns and digital inclusion measures, only about 330,000 households would ultimately need hands-on help ahead of a 2034 shutdown.
Meanwhile, viewing habits continue to fragment. Audience body Barb says 7 per cent of UK households no longer own a TV set, choosing to watch on other devices. In December, YouTube overtook the BBC’s combined channels in total UK viewing across TVs, smartphones and tablets, albeit measured at a minimum of three minutes.
That shift may accelerate. YouTube has recently blocked Barb and its partner Kantar from accessing viewing session data, limiting transparency just as online platforms consolidate power.
“When the government chose British Satellite Broadcasting as the ‘winner’ in satellite TV it was Rupert Murdoch’s Sky instead that came out on top,” says a senior TV executive quoted by The Guardian. “There already is such an outsider ready to be the winner in the transition to internet TV; it is YouTube.”
Freeview’s future now hangs on a familiar British dilemma: modernise fast and risk exclusion, or protect universality and pay the price. Either way, the aerial’s days as king of the living room look numbered.
