Multiple times now at the WGA picket line, former Last Week Tonight with John Oliver writer Liz Hynes has met passersby who had no idea that her job existed.
“I am shocked at how many people thought that late-night hosts wrote their own material,” Hynes told The Daily Beast during a recent interview. “About three or four times now, I’ve had to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, there's usually a team.’”
Usually, that team is unionized through the Writers Guild of America (WGA)—now in its fourth week of a critical strike against studios. The last writers’ strike lasted 100 days from 2007 to 2008, and this time around, solidarity among the industry’s organized labor appears to be cresting.
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Still, the issues at hand are complicated, particularly to those outside the industry who have not had a front-row seat as venture capitalists gutted the entertainment world’s old pay structures. In order for the WGA to succeed, Hynes and her fellow late-night scribes Greg Iwinski and Sasha Stewart know that communication will be key—both within the union and outside it. So they’ve put their joke-writing compulsions to good use to create “Contract TK”—a web-based late night show all about the writers’ strike.
Iwinski previously wrote for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Hynes worked as a writer’s assistant on Colbert during Iwinski’s tenure and also worked alongside him as a writer on Oliver. And Stewart previously wrote for The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, where Hynes once also served as an intern.
All three writers now sit on the WGA East’s legislative council, and Iwinski is also a member of the negotiating committee. Speaking with The Daily Beast, Iwinski emphasized that “Contract TK” is not an official guild project—just “us idiots doing stupid stuff in the back.”
Self-deprecation aside, Iwinski and his fellow “Contract TK” writers know that what’s at stake in their fight is paramount not only for them but for workers across the country. They’ve been thinking since last March, when striking remained just a hypothetical possibility, about how to engage fellow WGA members ahead of bargaining and maintain morale.
Eventually, Iwinski got an idea. “Late-night writers have learned how to quickly explain complex socio-political issues in an entertaining way,” he said. “And I wanted to make sure that we leverage that as much as possible.”
Why not make a late-night show about why late-night is now on strike?
“One of the biggest issues with the negotiations is that the studios provided no counter to many of our proposals,” Iwinski quips in “Contract TK’s” first video, posted last Monday. “The first time in history that a studio had no notes.”
The project’s name is a play on a media-world term, “TK,” which is used as a placeholder for pieces of text and other assets still “to come.” Stewart hosted the first segment alongside Iwinski last Monday, when she joked that an alternate title could’ve been, “The Jokes You Love from the Picket Signs but We’re Saying Them Out Loud.”
The show’s latest installment debuted Thursday night, as will all subsequent episodes. As one might have expected, the comedians did not waste much time before they went in on Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who got booed at a recent Boston University graduation ceremony with the chant “Pay your writers!”
John Thibodeaux, who hosted this week’s episode alongside Hynes, quipped that the graduates “also hit him up with, ‘We don’t want you here,’ and ‘Shut up, Zaslav.’ Zaslav then suggested bundling all those chants together in a new service called ‘Protest Max.’”
“Drop the ‘Protest,’” Hynes added. “It’s cleaner.”
As industry-specific as certain aspects of the WGA’s negotiations with studios might seem, Iwinski told The Daily Beast that the basic fight is the same one workers face in countless industries across America: “Your company is making more and more, and you are not getting a bigger share of the profits. You're in fact making less and less money.”
The destruction of residuals and the rise of mini-rooms have been key battlegrounds between the union and studios, and late-night writers have become particularly vulnerable as job security within the industry continues to evaporate.
As Late Night with Seth Meyers writer Sal Gentile recently put it on The Daily Beast’s Last Laugh podcast, “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.”
Iwinski also lamented the threat of day rates on comedy-variety writers’ already brief three-month contracts. “We have such a stark existential threat on the table in terms of the kind of TV we make,” Iwinski said. In working on “Contract TK,” he said, “It’s motivating to be able to strike back a little bit at people that want us to get paid by the day.”
Future episodes will feature a rotating string of hosts, and various late-night writers will also appear on camera to perform sketches and other bits. Thursday’s episode wraps up with a segment in which Stewart breaks down the unequal treatment studios heap upon streaming shows versus “real” television series.
“Late Night with Seth Meyers on NBC and The Amber Ruffin Show on Peacock are recorded in the same studio,” Stewart says, while decked out in professorial gear including a bowtie. “They share many of the same writers, producers, and crew. And yet, the writers on Amber Ruffin’s show have no minimum weekly rates, no residuals, no 13-week guarantee—no protections they would get on Seth Meyers. All because instead of airing on the channel with a bird logo, it’s airing on a streamer with a bird name.”
All of the materials used to produce “Contract TK” were donated, as was everyone’s time, and the production will never be sold. Iwinski also expressed gratitude to former Late Show and Colbert Report writer Rob Dubbin for the use of his co-writing platform Scripto, which made this collaboration possible, even between writers from six late-night shows across multiple time zones. The trio encourages viewers to donate to the Entertainment Community Fund to support workers affected by the strike.
“It’s nice to be able to put a face to this idea of the people who are writing the jokes for you each night, and to say, ‘Yeah, there's a whole lot of us who are in the industry and who are trying to make these gains and have these protections,’” Stewart told The Daily Beast.
Plus, the rotating cast can highlight how various issues within the strike affect different people. For instance: Stewart revealed that the show plans to welcome a husband-and-wife writing team to explain “how hard it is to be on strike when you’re both on strike.”
To Hynes, it seems that Hollywood is now overrun with enterprises that have decided organized workers are too expensive. “There’s a ton of unionized labor here,” she said. “And I think that these companies have come in and been like, ‘That is by far your most expensive part. There’s a lot of money generated by these products, and it should go to less people.’”
On Last Week Tonight, Iwinski said it often took a good bit of work from writers like himself and Hynes to underscore their subjects’ hypocrisy. In this case, however, it’s ridiculously easy. “These companies seem unable to understand that we can see the recordings of their earnings calls,” he said. “We can hear what they say at Upfronts.”
Meanwhile, on the picket lines, Stewart has consistently met other workers whose stories remind her why she’s fighting. “We’re only getting more and more determined to stay here until they give us a fair deal,” she said. And as long as they are, “Contract TK” will be there to provide regular recaps, roast some clueless executives, and most of all, to keep writers laughing during a difficult time.
As for any professional hosts who might want to get involved? “Any host is welcome,” Iwinski said. “If Arsenio wants to come down, I would give him unlimited time.”
