strike zone

Strike-News Roundup: Is This Thing Over Yet?

Photo illustration: AP

Curtains! Leadership for the Broadway stagehands union has given the go-ahead for a strike, meaning if you don’t have a Nintendo Wii, you will probably not have any entertainment until 2009. [Variety]

Scabs Wanted: NBC is looking for guest hosts to cross the Tonight Show picket line in order to save the jobs of the series’ non-writing staff. Who would be crass enough — yet utterly devoid of career savvy — to take that gig? We bet they’ll get Jimmy Fallon. [Broadcasting & Cable]

Ellen Returns! Ellen DeGeneres, who resumed taping of her talk show on Tuesday, said she crossed picket lines for the people who traveled across the country to be in her studio audience, since they probably won’t care if writers starve to death anyway. [NYP]

See You in the Funny Books: As the television, film, and theater worlds come to a screeching halt thanks to striking workers, we can feel safe in the knowledge that the people who make comic books utterly lack the leverage or the initiative to unionize, even though pretty much everyone working in that industry seems to agree that they should. [Newsarama]

Networks Officially Desperate: Since the strike means they can’t actually develop any new shows of their own, NBC is in talks to acquire Quarterlife, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz’s Internet TV show, which was to debut on Sunday on MySpace. If it falls through, we bet Ben Silverman gives this guy his own show. [HR]
—Matthew Perpetua

Strike-News Roundup: Is This Thing Over Yet?