‘General Hospital’ Latest Soap To Rely On Temporary Writers During WGA Strike
The ongoing writers’ strike has now impacted Port Charles: Deadline has confirmed that temporary writers have been hired by General Hospital to keep the daytime drama in production.
News of the change went viral Tuesday after Shannon Peace, a GH writer, posted to her private account on Instagram that “scab writers” are now penning for the soap exclusively. “Daytime writers face a unique conflict during strikes,” she wrote. “We hate to see our characters and storylines handed over to ‘writers’ who cross the picket line. But we’re also keenly aware that stopping production could spell the demise of soap operas.”
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Her post was picked up on social media by actors like Bradley Whitford and Lisa Ann Walter, a longtime fan of daytime dramas who wanted to call out “scab writers putting the writers of these beloved soaps out of work.”
A spokeswoman for the ABC show declined comment.
As Deadline reported last month, production on the daytime soaps is continuing through the SAG-AFTRA strike because soap actors are employed under the National Code of Fair Practice for Network Television Broadcasting (aka Network Code). Negotiated between SAG-AFTRA and the Big four broadcast networks as well as other producers, the National Code covers soaps as well as morning news shows, talk shows, variety, reality, game shows, sports and promotional announcements. The current Code agreement, reached a year ago, goes through July 2024.
Many soap writers, however, are WGA members, but the strike didn’t impact the daytime dramas until recently since they tape well in advance. To help bridge the gap when writers hit the picket line, soaps ended up relying on financial core (fi-core) writers, who resigned their WGA membership while benefiting from the guild’s contracts with the studios. Others, such as producers, assistants and executives, also help to pen scripts in some cases.
Besides GH, Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful remain in production and are currently working on new scripts, Deadline has learned.
During the 2007-08 WGA strike, a total of 28 writers went fi-core per the guild; almost all of them worked on daytime dramas. There were eight soaps at the time that kept going during the work stoppage.
Some of the dozens of soap writers who claimed fi-core status in 2007-2008 remain active today. Additionally, the WGA has listed five writers who went fi-core this year, three of whom — Sheri Anderson, Michael Minnis and Mark Pinciotti — are daytime scribes.
“The shows don’t stop,” DOOL Head Writer and WGA Member Ron Carlivati said in an interview from the picket lines a month ago. “They replaced us in 2007 when I worked at One Life to Live, and I can only assume they’re replacing us right now. I’m being replaced on day one by other people.”
He told Vulture that DOOL was going to run out of scripts he and his team had written before the strike “in a few weeks.”
After the strike is over, returning WGA soap writers will have to adjust their storytelling to accommodate the plot developments introduced during their absence.
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