David Letterman Gets Writers (Dec 30, 2007)

On January 2, Letterman will return to the late night airwaves with his writers backing him up.

An interim agreement had been negotiated between Worldwide Pants, Letterman's production company, and the Writers Guild of America, that will allow the full writing staffs for "Late Show with David Letterman" as well as "Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" to return to work, even as the WGA writers strike continues to cause prime-time network TV to shift into reality show mode and threaten to put the daytime soaps out of production.

"I am grateful to the WGA for granting us this agreement," Letterman said in a statement Friday. "This is not a solution to the strike, which unfortunately continues to disrupt the lives of thousands. But I hope it will be seen as a step in the right direction."

"The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" and "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" on NBC, as well as "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" on ABC, had already announced they would resume Wednesday without benefit of their writing teams. Letterman battles Leno from 11:35pm-12:37am, but battles Kimmel after 12:06am.

Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert" also planned to return without writers on Monday, January 7th.

Carson Daly returned without writers on December 3rd.

Guild leaders said in a letter to membership Friday that Worldwide Pants accepted "the very same proposals that the guild was prepared to present to the media conglomerates when they walked out of negotiations on December 7."

All of the late night talk hosts, except Daly, are members of the WGA, meaning that they can't write their own material until the strike is settled.

Another problem that might occur is whether the guests that they invite during the strike will accept the invitations by the hosts to appear on the shows. Several may not be WGA members, but are supporters of the guild, and may not appear until after the strike is over.

News sources state that "Central to the contract dispute has been compensation for work distributed via the Internet and other digital media. The guild also has called for unionization of writers working on reality shows and animation." The guild wants compensation for Internet play of any of the video works that used WGA writers as this medium is practially everywhere.

When the WGA writers went on strike in 1988, only two late-night shows were affected: Johnny Carson's "Tonight" show and Letterman's "Late Night," both on NBC. CBS had reruns, and ABC only had "Nightline". There was no Comedy Central yet. Prime-time shows wrapped production by the time the strike occurred in March. The twelve soap operas on at the time used scab writers to stay in production. When it was settled in early August of that year, new shows began appearring in late October.

Carson made a deal with the guild shortly after returning to the air, but Letterman went weeks without his writers' services before the strike was settled.