How much did 1988 WGA writers strike affect season 1 & 2?

[jefferiestubes8]

After seeing this thread on Star Trek XI forum
How much did the writer's strike affect Star Trek '09?

I thought I'd start up one about the TV writer's strike for 5 months in 1988 affecting season 2.

It ran from March 7 to August 7, 1988, for a total of 5 months, and 7 days.

The second season finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled "Shades of Gray" was a clip show as the bulk of this episode is composed of footage from previous TNG episodes; this is generally considered the worst episode produced in the franchise's 40+ year history.

1988 Writers Guild of America strike

As per "Shades of Gray" Wiki:

"Shades of Gray" is a clip show with the bulk of this episode composed of footage from previous TNG episodes. In a writers' strike-shortened second season, the producers needed one more episode so they quickly drafted and filmed a story that would allow for Riker to simply "remember" past events.

#222 Shades of Gray 07/17/1989
There were only 22 episodes for season 2 vs season 1's 25 episodes and later seasons' 26 episodes.

This episode was written to save time and money as a result of the writers' strike of 1988. It was shot in only three days, while most take at least a week.

"Shades of Gray" as per Memory Alpha

Here is the TrekBBS thread:
Poll: Shades Of Grey - Worst TNG Episode Ever


I wonder how many Trek writer TNG season 2 scripts they had completely already written and passed on and rather decided to do this recap episode to also save money? Does anyone know from owning season 3 scripts if any of them had their dates of 1987-1988 drafts dates?
What other TNG episodes were specifically affected by the writers strike in 1988?

 

[TV's Frank]

From everything I have read about the production in the last 20 years, the strike affected greatly the start of Season 2. They had a later premiere date that season, sometime in November, I believe, and the opening episode "The Child" was re-purposed from the aborted 70's Trek series. Of course the strike did have consequences for the rest of Season 2 straight through, starting with fewer number of episodes produced. In addition, "Shades of Gray" was a money-saving effort. The show had to have a certain number of "bottle shows" in order to stay on budget for each season.

 

[jefferiestubes8]

'The Child' #201 & 1970's PhaseII scripts

They had a later premiere date that season, sometime in November, I believe, and the opening episode "The Child" was re-purposed from the aborted 70's Trek series.

Aha. #201 The Child Airdate 11/21/1988

The Child was the 3rd episode in Phase II episode list of the first 13.
In 1997 , the book /Star Trek Phase II: The Lost Series /, written by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens , was published, containing the original scripts for "In Thy Image" and "The Child ", and synopses of the original story treatments for the other commissioned stories.

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Phase_II

This episode [The Child] and "Devil's Due" were earmarked for possible recycling for Star Trek: The Next Generation, in anticipation of what became a lengthy Screen Writers' Guild strike which delayed production on Season Two.

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_Child_(episode)


Devil's Due (episode)

A very early version of this story was part of Gene Roddenberry's first draft proposal for Star Trek in the early 1960s.

During the third season, Michael Piller commissioned Melinda Snodgrass to do a minimal rewrite of the script, replacing the characters with the Next Generation crew. This didn't work, so Piller gave it to Philip LaZebnik over the hiatus.

..."It was very off for our show, and I thought its origins showed,"...

Jonathan Frakes commented, "It was like an old Star Trek. It's ironic that it was an old Star Trek story, because it's really a Kirk story. It was so 60's."

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Devil's_Due_(episode)

Cool how 11 years later the stories were used. Not cool though because of the writer's strike...

 

[Doug Otte]

Yeah, I remember those events. The strike's effects were highly publicized, both for TNG and for TV in general. We waited impatiently for the premiere of Season 2, while watching reruns of Season 1 over and over and over...

I agree that Devil's Due seemed out of place for a TNG episode, but The Child was thematically correct and turned out to be one of TNG's best from any season.

Doug

 

[Christopher]

This oft-repeated meme that "Shades of Gray" was a consequence of the writers' strike makes no sense, since the strike was a year earlier. And it's illogical too. There's no reason why a clip show would be a consequence of a writers' strike, because someone would still have to write the bridging material. And as long as you have a writer available, there's no reason not to have them write a complete episode. Clip shows are the result of production and budget issues, of a show not having enough money to film a whole script and thus having to create an episode where they only need to shoot a limited amount of new material.

It was the end of the first season that was most affected by the strike. "We'll Always Have Paris" had something of an incoherent climax because they'd departed from the original script but didn't have any writers on hand to write new lines, so they kind of had to ad-lib a climax (which is why there's no explanation for how the multiple Datas decide which one is in the right time frame, and is probably why Data says "It's me" at a time when it's been established that he doesn't use contractions). And "The Neutral Zone" was such a lame episode overall because it had to be shot from a first-draft script, with no chance to revise and improve the story.

The effect the strike had on the second season was at its beginning, as TV's Frank said; the season was delayed by a month and had its length cut down by four episodes. Which makes one wonder how they managed to spend so much that they still ran out of money at the end and had to do a clip show.

 

[Hober Mallow]

The main effect of the strike was that season two didn't start until November, and even then only four new episodes aired before the show went on hiatus again until early 1989. And, as someone already mentioned, the premiere episode was a recycled Phase II script.

 

[TV's Frank]

This oft-repeated meme that "Shades of Gray" was a consequence of the writers' strike makes no sense, since the strike was a year earlier. And it's illogical too. There's no reason why a clip show would be a consequence of a writers' strike, because someone would still have to write the bridging material. And as long as you have a writer available, there's no reason not to have them write a complete episode. Clip shows are the result of production and budget issues, of a show not having enough money to film a whole script and thus having to create an episode where they only need to shoot a limited amount of new material.

It was the end of the first season that was most affected by the strike. "We'll Always Have Paris" had something of an incoherent climax because they'd departed from the original script but didn't have any writers on hand to write new lines, so they kind of had to ad-lib a climax (which is why there's no explanation for how the multiple Datas decide which one is in the right time frame, and is probably why Data says "It's me" at a time when it's been established that he doesn't use contractions). And "The Neutral Zone" was such a lame episode overall because it had to be shot from a first-draft script, with no chance to revise and improve the story.

The effect the strike had on the second season was at its beginning, as TV's Frank said; the season was delayed by a month and had its length cut down by four episodes. Which makes one wonder how they managed to spend so much that they still ran out of money at the end and had to do a clip show.

Good points, Christopher, thanks for those! I forgot about how it affected those episodes end of season one, I recall now reading about the ad-libbed ending of "Paris". I'm usually pretty good at remembering TNG history!

 

[doubleohfive]

The effect the strike had on the second season was at its beginning, as TV's Frank said; the season was delayed by a month and had its length cut down by four episodes. Which makes one wonder how they managed to spend so much that they still ran out of money at the end and had to do a clip show.

New sets (Ten Forward, the new shuttlepod mockup; The Sherlock Holmes episode sets were overbudget and only used for two days after costing $125,000.00 to build) and other set modifications ...

"The Royale" was, according to director Cliff Bole, "a budget buster."

"Q-Who" went over budget by $50,000.00 as well. The Borg ain't cheap.

Adding Whoopi Goldberg to the semi-regular cast probably wasn't cheap either.

... I'm not saying these were the only things that caused the budget shortage, but none of these were free, either.

Another contributing factor -- and one that boils down to simple practicality -- it may be that some of the shows went over their usual seven day taping schedule and thus went overbudget as well. Think about all the Klingons in "The Icarus Factor" and "A Matter of Honor" and the Borg, Pakleds, Sarjenka, etc ... hair & makeup takes several hours sometimes, and you need a crew there to make it happen. Those people gotta get paid.

(All this info comes from the TNG Companion, by the way)

 

[indolover]

But isn't a sci-fi series necessarily costly? Especially Trek, with actors wearing prosthetic make-up, CGI effects, models, etc. An episode of TNG or DS9 must have taken about million dollars to make alone. DS9 perhaps more so, since they had a literal Promenade as a set. TNG's sets were never as large.

I think season one was poor due to crappy writing period. Season two picked up slightly in fairness.

 

[Christopher]

Well, yes, TNG was one of the most expensive shows on the air at the time, averaging a million and a half per episode. But the point is that they didn't have unlimited freedom to spend; they worked out an estimated budget for the season based on their expected needs, then the studio, the sponsors, and the stations that carried the show put up enough money to cover that budget, and it was then incumbent on the producers to stay within that budget and avoid going into the red. If unexpected costs reared their heads or they weren't successful at managing their expenses, they would run over budget and would have to devise ways to cut costs to balance out the excess. A clip show is a standard way of doing this, because you only shoot around half as much material and thus it costs half as much. In later seasons, the producers found better ways of doing money-saving episodes -- bottle shows such as "The Drumhead" and DS9's "Duet," stories that kept costs to a minimum by requiring no new sets and hardly any visual effects beyond stock footage. So they were able to avoid having to do any more clip shows.

As for the Promenade, it cost $2 million to build that set alone. But of course that cost was amortized over seven seasons' worth of episodes.

 

[JoeD80]

The other side to the Promenade, the second-level access to Quark's, and more Promenade turbolifts all had to be held off until the season two budget came around according to the Deep Space Nine Companion.

 

[tharpdevenport]

It must have not been too big a deal, lest we've all forgotten "Code of Honor" (hands probably one of the top three worst episodes of ANY Trek series...) and stuff like beaming a large tree out into space and destroying it (a lot of amateurishly written stuff in S1).

 

[Christopher]

It must have not been too big a deal, lest we've all forgotten "Code of Honor" (hands probably one of the top three worst episodes of ANY Trek series...) and stuff like beaming a large tree out into space and destroying it (a lot of amateurishly written stuff in S1).

Uhh, what has any of that got to do with the topic? Are you implying that it didn't matter whether they had writers or not? Keep in mind that this wasn't a strike of ST:TNG writers, it was a strike of the entire WGA, essentially every working writer in Hollywood. Every show and film that was then in production was affected, just like in the strike of 2007-8. So yeah, it was a pretty big deal.

 

[doubleohfive]

It must have not been too big a deal, lest we've all forgotten "Code of Honor" (hands probably one of the top three worst episodes of ANY Trek series...)

I think that has less to do with the strike and more to do with it being second regularly produced episode and the writers were still trying to find their footing. Never mind the fact that "Code of Honor" was made at the beginning of the season and the strike occurred toward the end of TNG's season one production schedule.

and stuff like beaming a large tree out into space and destroying it (a lot of amateurishly written stuff in S1).

What does this have to do with anything we're discussing?

 

[Christopher]

When did they beam a tree into space? I don't remember anything like that. Could that be a reference to "Datalore?" The Crystalline Entity looked vaguely like a tree, but it was already in space the whole time. Lore was beamed into space, but neither he nor the Entity was destroyed in that episode.

 

[doubleohfive]

I vaguely recall something about a tree being beamed in to space and it having something to do with the Crystalline Entity ... maybe in Silicon Avatar though?

 

[Christopher]

Oh, here we are. From Chakoteya's "Datalore" transcript:

LORE: Suggest moving fast to confirm what I told it, sir. Permission to use the large transporter in cargo room three. There I can beam up some living pattern, perhaps a large tree.
RIKER: Which you'll beam over next to the entity
LORE: That is correct, Riker. Our ship's phasers will then blast and disintegrate it, proving we are dangerous.

I guess what threw me off is that he didn't actually do that, just suggested it as an excuse to get to the cargo transporter so he could work his eeevilll.

 

[doubleohfive]

Reading it now, as opposed to hearing it on screen in 1987... yeah.