Late-night comedy has been in reruns, or off the air completely, since day one of many Writers Guild’s strike. However a lot of their present and former writers have banded collectively to placed on a weekly YouTube present referred to as Contract TK that satirizes the information, lampoons the corporate bosses, and promotes the targets of the strike, which is now in its 38th day.
Host Greg Iwinski, a former author for The Late Present with Stephen Colbert and Final Week Tonight with John Oliver, opened tonight’s episode with a reference to the apocalyptic air high quality situations blanketing the East Coast. “Hello! I’m Greg Iwinski, coming to you from New York Metropolis, sponsored by Bladerunner.”
When the present was launched 4 weeks in the past, he instructed Deadline – in all seriousness – that the problems at stake within the strike are “existential” for late-night comedy writers. “Because the studios proceed to maneuver into streaming, however particularly as they transfer into the free ad-supported house the place stuff appears to be like increasingly more like outdated TV, you’re going to be seeing extra late-night tv, cleaning soap operas, and recreation exhibits within the digital house. And proper now, we’ve no protections there. We don’t have a cost quantity; we don’t have contract-linked minimums; we don’t have residuals, actually. We’re within the Wild West.”
The exhibits are allowed underneath the guild’s strike guidelines, as a result of everybody concerned is an unpaid volunteer they usually’re not working for a struck firm. Right here’s tonight’s present, which may be discovered by looking out YouTube for Contract TK, which is journalism lingo for Contract To Come.
And listed here are the earlier three episodes:
