Strike Notes

Ron Moore has announced the winners the Pencils to Moguls giveaway.

The WGA announced that their informal talks with the AMPTP companies are underway, and that they withdrew their proposals on animation and reality. You might recall the AMPTP previously demanded the WGA withdraw something like six proposal points. So with two set aside, at least there is progress. And no one seriously thought much progress would be made on reality and animation anyway. I'm sure the WGA will continue to fight for free and fair elections for reality and animation writers who want their interests represented by the WGA.

Still, no one knows what impact the DGA's deal is having on this process.

In other news, the NBC/Universal chief Jeff Zucker said:

"I'm not happy there's been a strike but there have been some benefits," he added, predicting the industrial action would "probably" be over before the Oscars in five weeks' time.

The article in The Guardian goes on to say that NBC will no longer waste money on making pilots and instead will just skip that phase and directly commission series orders:

NBC has promised to axe the glitzy pilots of new series traditionally produced at great expense by US broadcasters, saving around $50m a year in the process.

Days after announcing plans to end another of the US television industry's cherished traditions by pulling the plug on annual "upfronts", presentations to advertisers, the NBC Universal chief executive, Jeff Zucker, said the ongoing US writers' strike had made the network re-examine its attitude to pilots as well.

Heroes: series finale Heroes: one of NBC's shows He said the cost of a typical pilot, many of which are never made into a full series, had soared from $3m to $7m in three years. Because that bore no relation to the eventual cost of a standard episode and was an increasingly poor indication as to its eventual success, Zucker added that they were becoming redundant.

Every year, US producers pull out all the stops to produce pilots for series they hope will be picked up by broadcasters.

But Zucker, in London today en route to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and speaking to journalists before addressing NBC Universal's 16,000 worldwide staff, said: "It's a different world, yet Hollywood is built on this system of making pilots in the old way without realising things have changed."

He added that NBC, which makes Heroes, would still produce new scripted dramas but that they would just go straight to air without an expensive pilot in a move that will bring the network more into line with standard practice in the UK TV industry.

Could this effect "Caprica"? Would NBC/U and Sci-Fi Channel instead of just ordering a pilot to be filmed, would they instead simply launch "Caprica" as a series?