A scene from ‘The Young and the Restless’.Photo: CBS
Hollywood may have largely shut down, but your favorite soap operas are sticking around… for now.
With theScreen Actors Guildofficially going on strike on Thursday, television viewers can expect tonotice a changein their favorite programming. But that won’t necessarily be the case for daytime soap operas, unscripted reality television, game shows and news programs, which operate under a different contract.
Though daytime actors are part of SAG-AFTRA — the union that comprises of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — they will continue to work through the strike as they are employed under SAG-AFTRA’s National Code of Fair Practice for Network Television Broadcasting, also known as the Network Code or Netcode.
PerThe Hollywood Reporter, the Netcode covers unscripted and non-primetime shows, including soap operas. Some of the programs with contracts under the code includeGeneral Hospital,Days of Our Lives,The Young and the RestlessandThe Bold and The Beautiful. Their contracts will run through July 2024.
Josh Flagg, Robert Scott Wilson and Abigail Klein on “Days of Our Lives”.JPI Studios
Until then, all four soaps will be able to remain in production for the foreseeable future, and have already been finding creative ways to work around the ongoing Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike, such as enlisting non-WGA scribes.
Because soaps shoot anywhere from weeks to months in advance, the programs have stockpiled scripts which have been able to help buffer the effects of the writer’s strike.
In the meantime, many streaming services will continue to pump out content, but they’ll no longer be able to air new episodes of scripted content once the episodes that have already been filmed run out. (The actors on Peacock’sDay of Our Livesfall under the Netcode contract, and the show films further in advance than the other three daytime soaps, so the WGA strike likely won’t affect the production for months to come.)
Mario Tama/Getty
She continued, “While we very much support our union and their determined efforts for fair and equitable working conditions, we are legally required to fulfill the obligations of our contract. We will be working through the duration of this strike while we stand in unity with our union.”
SAG-AFTRA unanimously voted toorder a strikeon Thursday after contract negotiations could not be reached with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
In apress conference, Drescher and Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator of SAG-AFTRA, said the studios “left us with no alternative” than to strike.
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“The jig is up…. We demand respect,” she continued. “You share the wealth, because you cannot exist without us.”
source: people.com
