One week into the WGA strike, it’s time for a closer look at what’s at stake for the writers who entertain us on a daily basis. And there’s no one better to break it all down than Late Night with Seth Meyers’ Sal Gentile.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, the man behind Meyers’ “A Closer Look” segments talks about both the immediate and potentially lasting impact of the strike on late-night TV, what it’s been like out there on the picket lines, and how long he thinks this thing could last. Gentile also shares the story behind his unique path from cable news to Meyers, reveals how he ended up creating the most consistently funny and informative segment in late-night, and recalls the time he went “toe to toe” with Larry David in a behind-the-scenes sketch.
One day, Gentile was in the writers’ room for Late Night, banging out what would end up being his last “A Closer Look” for quite a while about the aftermath of Tucker Carlson’s Fox News firing. The next, he was out on the picket line in New York City making the case for his fellow WGA members as all of late-night television went dark. The whiplash was palpable.
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“We found out that Monday night,” he says of the May 1 deadline that came and went without a deal. “We’d all been bracing for it. I don’t want to say expecting it, because we were also trying to be as optimistic as possible. As everybody who works on a show right now has said, myself included, nobody wants to be on strike. Everybody wanted to go to work the next day. We just wanted a fair deal to do that, so it didn’t quite feel real.”
It wasn’t until Gentile woke up on Tuesday morning that he began to realize he wouldn’t be going to work for the foreseeable future. “That was when it really sunk in, and it was crushing,” he says. “And it was especially crushing when we saw the list of demands from the guild paired with the responses from the studios, because the responses from the studios, in many cases, were so demeaning and insulting and dismissive. That’s what was especially crushing, not only to not be able to go do this thing that we love, but also to see that they had just refused to negotiate on so many points.”
With no “A Closer Look” to write as a way to channel his frustration, all Gentile could do was “pace around my apartment with all this pent-up rage”—until he and his fellow writers hit the streets. One week later, the two sides of the negotiation appear no closer to a resolution, which means it could be quite a while before Meyers and the rest of the late-night hosts are back on TV.
Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation. You can listen to the whole thing by subscribing to The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday.
It occurred to me that not only can you not write “A Closer Look” about anything in the news, but you also can’t write one about this strike, which is obviously what’s on your mind right now. Have you thought about that at all, if you could write “A Closer Look” about the strike, what it would look like?
Oh, man, have I ever! Because as you said, it is a double whammy. Not only can I not write “A Closer Look” in general, but I can’t even write “A Closer Look” about the thing that I’m the angriest about right now. First of all, we all love writing so much. If anything, that’s why we’re striking, to protect what we love. We don’t want this to be diminished for the writers who come after us. We love this so much, we want to protect it as a career. A lot of times, for “A Closer Look,” I’ll start with a bird’s eye view of the broader picture and then hone in on specific details. And I think the broader picture is that this is an existential threat both to the career of writing, but to so many other industries as well. We are going through the kinds of change right now, and the kinds of disruption to people’s livelihoods, that so many other people have gone through in so many other industries. And so it’s a broad systemic problem across the board, and they’re not just going to stop with streaming. They’re not just going to stop with Uber. They’re going to continue doing this. They’re going to continue to try to chip away as much as possible at labor costs, and how much they have to rely on the value of human labor to find savings somewhere, so that they can keep making the billions that they make—and on an individual level, the executives making the tens of millions they make every year.
So it’s an existential problem for the entire U.S. economy going forward. And that, by the way, is why we’ve seen so much cross-union solidarity, especially this time around. I’ve talked to so many veterans of the last strike. I was in college during the last strike [in 2007], so I didn’t experience it personally. But I’ve talked to so many on the picket lines who have echoed this same sentiment, which is that this time around they feel much broader solidarity from other unions, from the people around them, from people who are completely outside the industry. Even if you don’t know the specifics of what the guild is asking for and the back and forth of the negotiations, you recognize the broader existential problem here, which is that this very elite class of people who have amassed all of this capital are trying to disrupt all of these industries to make more money for themselves and pay you less money. And it’s happening everywhere. So now I’ve basically just started to do “A Closer Look” for you right now.
Do you have any clips to cut to or anything?
Believe me, I have them bookmarked. So yeah, I have thought about it a lot, and I’ve certainly had a lot of time circling the picket line and sitting at home. Without the outlet [of “A Closer Look”], I am just going to pace around my apartment talking to anybody. My wife, my 3-year-old, “Please listen to me about what this means, the latest drama at Fox News! You guys don’t understand that it’s a broader statement about the condition of the political right!” And everybody’s just like, “I’m gonna put my noise-canceling headphones on and not listen.” But in this particular case, thankfully, everybody around me is actually very interested. So I’ve had the chance to perform a version of this “Closer Look” for many people.
Well, I think it would be a great format for it, because what “A Closer Look” does is take the news and boil it down, make it entertaining and funny, but also explain it. And I think that the strike in particular has some inherent challenges in terms of getting people outside of the industry to care about it. Because there is some perception that this is Hollywood people who are probably pretty well-paid complaining, but connecting it to some of these other fights in different industries is important.
Absolutely, yeah. And also, it affects the quality of what you’re getting when you do this to your workforce. And there’s no better example of that than Twitter. Look what happened to Twitter. They fired everybody and the site is horrible now. If you turn writers into gig writers who are getting paid day rates to punch up terrible scripts generated by AI, that’s just going to generate awful content. You’re not going to want to watch that and you’re going to be so mad watching it. I think they are aware of that as well. They know. The question is at what point they’re going to give in. And I hope it’s soon, I really do, because the solutions seem fairly obvious. In many cases, the structure we’re talking about—it was never perfect, but it’s been fought for for so many years by the guild through collective bargaining for traditional media, for broadcast, for theatrical releases. That structure already existed. And it was imperfect, but at least that was there, and it was working in large part for lots of people to help sustain writers who are going from gig to gig. Except for those of us who are incredibly lucky to have these stable jobs—I’m incredibly lucky and privileged to have a very stable situation, where I get to write “A Closer Look” every day for a show that I love. But most writers are working from project to project, so they’re trying to string that together. We had an old system that at least made that somewhat sustainable to be a middle-class writer. All we would have to do is take big chunks of that structure and move them over to streaming. And the streamers just don’t want to do that. And the reason is because they see an opportunity to just stop paying writers what they used to pay them on traditional TV, but they easily could.
Does it concern you that the studios don’t feel like they have the incentive, in their minds, to change the system or give in to any of the writers’ demands?
They’re always going to try their upper hand first. And this is true of any industry. They’re always going to try to break the union first, and they’re always going to try to get the maximum they can out of the workforce, because they see it’s been so successful in cutting costs and allowing them to continue to take home tens of millions of dollars on an individual basis every year. I was astounded—and this is one of the things I would have included in “A Closer Look” on this situation—I think a lot of people by now have seen all the annual salaries of the top executives at these companies, which are mind-boggling. And, by the way, nobody in this industry blanches at all at the idea that a studio exec makes a lot of money. We get it, that’s been true for the longest time. Nobody’s shocked by it. It’s just that it makes it fairly ridiculous on its face for them to say, “We don’t have the money to pay you.” But I was astounded to find out that it’s true everywhere. For example, at Netflix, two executives each get paid $50 million. That’s $100 million every year right there. But then I found out that one of the top execs at Roku gets $50 million, and I was like, Roku? Is there something I’m missing?
Seth spoke about the strike a bit in his last “Corrections” piece before the strike, and then again at the end of his last “A Closer Look” segment that Monday night. Did he discuss with you at all what he wanted to say? Did you know that he was going to include that at the end of “A Closer Look”?
He actually didn’t. I just knew that there was going to be something added to the end, but I didn’t know what it was going to be. And I was incredibly proud that he did that. I’m not saying anything he hasn’t said on air, but he identifies as a writer first; he loves writing, and he supports us 100 percent. And it’s incredibly gratifying to hear that from him. But I did not know that he was going to say that. It was that last day when we were kind of on edge, waiting to find out, and I was sitting there in the studio, as I do during every “A Closer Look,” taking notes for post—and also just to be there if Seth wants to roast me for a joke that goes badly. And I felt myself getting a little emotional because I was really proud to work for somebody who supports writers and loves writing and considers himself a writer. And that’s what the experience of working there is like every day, which is why we love it so much. The camaraderie of writing is so much fun. Seth and I, and our producer Mike Shoemaker, sit in a room with the rest of our staff, our talented production staff on Zoom, and we read through our draft of “A Closer Look” and we just sit there and laugh at how stupid everything is. We enjoy the catharsis of the political commentary, but then we’ll just be there laughing at our incredibly dumb bits. The camaraderie of writing is such a fun thing. We love that so much.
I think we’re all hopeful that this strike does not drag on for a long time, but it’s certainly possible that it does. Do you worry about the long-term impact on late-night TV and what it will look like when it comes back?
I haven’t thought about it other than how happy we will be—and I think, I hope, our audience will be—for us to come back. But for now, we’re all so committed to the cause of what we’re fighting for that we’re going to do it for as long as it takes. Believe me, we’ll be thrilled to go back to work once we get a fair deal from the studios that addresses our very reasonable concerns. I really am taking it one day at a time, because there is so much that’s not within your control. I have no idea when the studios are going to decide to come back to the bargaining table in good faith. I really hope they do it soon. But we all are so committed to doing this for as long as it takes. We all just have to simultaneously hope it doesn’t take that long. Because again, I think everybody agrees the solutions are fairly obvious and clearly the money is there, so it’s just a question of when they’re going to come to their senses and decide to give us a fair deal. And then it will all be over and we’ll all be able to come back to work and write dumb bits in “A Closer Look” about Tucker Carlson’s globe.
We’ve already seen your time slot competition disappear—they’re not replacing James Corden’s show. And there have been other changes in the late-night landscape. My hope is just that this strike is not an excuse to diminish the medium even more.
I hope that too. All I could say is, obviously the way people view these things is changing. But our three “Closer Looks” combined, the week before the strike, have something like eight and a half million views just on YouTube. And we’re so grateful for that. They’re just as cathartic for us to do as they are for the audience to watch, so I hope that connection will last. Clearly, that audience is there for it. Figuring out what the future is going to look like, that’s what’s happening right now and that’s what the strike is about in many ways. But I definitely think the audience is there for it and I hope they will be there for it whenever we come back.
Listen to the episode now and subscribe to The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday.
