(For other coverage on this topic, don't miss our Supernatural Fan Survival Guide, the Writer's Guild Strike and You, and Strike One!)

The strike is upon us, and most people don't even know what's going on yet. The short of it: the Writers Guild of America has called for a strike, effective today. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) could not reach an agreement with the Guild at the eleventh hour. That means if it's written in Hollywood by anyone in the Guild, it's no longer being written, full stop. Scripted shows such as Supernatural, Heroes, and even Battlestar Galactica (which is currently scheduled to come back in April) are no longer having scripts written for them, which means when the current batch of eps in production are finished, there won't be any more for however long this takes to resolve. Movies that don't have their scripts finalized ("Transformers 2," "Shazam!" just to name two) aren't likely to move forward anytime soon.

The LA Times has a handy list of what shows will be affected when and how badly. The fannish round-up:

and The Colbert Report are headed into immediate reruns. The LA Times says Lost should have eight episodes ready to go when the midseason gets in gear. However, series regular Michael Emerson told IGN: "You know, I know that's out there but I don't think that's true. I think that story is not true. To the best of my knowledge, they never have more than one episode beyond what we're shooting."

, another midseason show for ABC, could have all thirteen episodes ready but it's iffy. Moonlight has all but one episode of a 12-ep order ready. Jericho is getting its final seven episodes, to the relief of fans, and wth the lack of competition, there's a good chance of building an audience. Journeyman will have twelve episodes ready. Supernatural, as discussed in our previous article, has up to twelve episodes completed for the season, and possibly five scripts in the drawer they can use IF no changes are made to the scripts. 24 should have eight or nine eps, maybe ten, but that means it won't be able to finish out the twenty-four hours required for a season, and there's a good chance it'll be benched until next year. BSG has ten eps set to go, plus "Razor" in the can, though the strike will likely delay the second half of season four even more. Eureka has not yet started production for next season. Stargate: Atlantis seems to be fine for now, but again, it depends on how long the strike lasts.

and New Amsterdam, both FOX series, have plenty of eps in the can and may get an extra push from the strike, as the network only has to worry about scheduling them around American Idol. A silver lining for ER fans: the strike may offer the show a shot at another season. One ER insider said to E!Online's Ask Kristin: "There is a small positive [to the strike]. It could force NBC to pick us up for another year, so we can end the story properly." Because of the shortened season, the team won't be able to land the show properly, and after all this time, NBC will likely be okay with it.

This strike may also be just a glimmer of things to come. The Directors Guild and Screen Actors Guild are facing contract renegotiations of their own, and the contract the writers get will almost certainly reflect what everyone else will see in a few months. Screen Actors Guild president Alan Rosenberg said it bluntly: "We'll get what they get."

Diana Son, who writes for Law & Order: Criminal Intent, said, "It's an extremely volatile industry. There's no job security. Residuals are an important part of our income. There's no cushion." Son has three children, and says her residuals paid for her leave after giving birth.

The negotiators for the writers took the DVD residuals off the table yesterday. One of the major bones of contention has been the tiny amount given to writers on the sales of DVD sets (usually about a nickel per set sold). Now everything hinges on whether or not the producers will give residuals on new media (internet downloads, mobile podcasts, etc.). As it is, the people who write the shows we love get exactly nothing when we download eps from iTunes or view them on the web, and since electronic media is the wave of the future, they'd like to change that.

The writers have been joined in their strike by supporters. Jay Leno brought doughnuts to his striking writers. Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and Tina Fey have joined in, and members of Joss Whedon fansite Whedonesque showed up to the picket lines and brought pizza to striking writers.

Even Presidential candidate Barack Obama spoke up on behalf of the writers.  In a statement Monday, Obama said: I stand with the writers.  The guild's demand is a test of whether media corporations are going to give writers a fair share of the wealth their work creates or continue concentrating profits in the hands of their executives. I urge the producers to work with the writers so that everyone can get back to work."

At Firefox News, we love our shows and we love the people who make them for us. We also embrace new media platforms and as such, we believe the people who write the things we watch should receive fair compensation for their work.

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Mark Evanier has been blogging about the strike for months, and continues to update on his own site:

About writers being "overpaid": "The first thing to point out is that 'the writers in the WGA' do not all work and that they sometimes go long stretches without pay, writing things that do not sell for a many years or at all. I know the job may look sparkling from afar, and I'm not about to suggest it's a bad one. Obviously, I pick my profession willingly and enjoy it. But the screenwriter who's wiping his butt with currency is the rare exception. Each year, the WGA knocks hundreds of members off its Active roster because even though at one point they had jobs that earned them membership, it's been a long time since they got one of those jobs or grossed even a modest amount in their profession. If you read the stats, you'll discover that the average screenwriter makes something like $5,000 a year, which wouldn't qualify as 'overpaid' in anyone's book. But the situation is really worse than that because there are people who get a million or three per screenplay. And when you have a couple of those guys around, it means there are an awful lot of people making less than $5K for it to average out the way it does."

On what residuals actually mean: "[I]f a Harry Potter book goes into another printing, J.K. Rowling gets another check.… I get payments if an issue of some comic book I wrote in the seventies is reprinted. I get payments if a song I wrote in the eighties gets played again. It is a generally-established principle that if you create something that has an ongoing value — particularly if its reuse competes with new product — additional compensation is appropriate. This is not to say it's always paid. Comic books, for a long time, didn't pay for reprints. A lot of animation work still doesn't pay for reruns. But that's because of the way the financial structure of those fields developed, with creative folks placed at an economic disadvantage and not having the clout to get reuse fees. I don't think it's because they don't deserve them. Residuals exist for a couple of reasons. One is that they are deferred compensation. Let's say you want to hire me to write your TV special and there's no WGA and no residuals and we're negotiating out in the wild. I suggest $10,000 would be a rational price. You were thinking more like $5,000. I point out to you that this is likely to be a great show that will rerun for many years to come and that you'll be able to sell it again and again and again. If we could be certain it would be, ten grand to me wouldn't seem unfair but as you point out, we can't be sure that it will have all those resales. So how do we resolve this? Simple. We invent residuals. We agree that I'll write the show for $5000 or maybe even a little less, and that I'll receive another $5000 if you can sell it for a second run and then maybe $2000 if there's a third run and $1000 for a fourth and so on. The reuse fees are not a gift to me. They're part of the deal...and by the way, this is not all that hypothetical a scenario. I've made deals with this kind of structure for animation projects where the WGA did not have jurisdiction. Even some pretty stingy cartoon producers were glad to make them because it lessened their initial investments to have me, in effect, share a little of the risk."

From James Gunn's blog:

This strike is absolutely not a matter of the rich getting richer. We're not striking because of guys like me who have made numerous feature films, or guys like Greg Daniels who have created popular TV shows. This is for middle-class writers – your regular TV staff writers and people who may have done one or two small feature films. Residuals are a way they can make perhaps a few thousand dollars a year between gigs. This is a way they can put food on the table and pay the rent during downtime – and downtime is something almost all writers (and actors and directors) have.

And the writers guild are striking not only for themselves – they're striking for the actors and directors as well. Most likely, whatever deal we agree to is the same deal the actors and directors will get when their contracts are up later this year.

None of the TV shows or movies you watch would exist without us, the people who created them, who poured our hearts and souls into the making of them. And yet, again, the studios think that only they should be making the money off of them. And new media is exceptionally important – in just a few years that may be the way most of us experience most of our entertainment.

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From Paul Dini's blog:

Some of us have been screwed for a while now, and not in the pleasant sense. Below is an email post from Micah Wright, posted on the WriterAction (WGA-only board). I requested and have his written permission to spread it like the plague. ~ Tina

(FYI, to set the scene, the tone of Micah’s intro is in response to another WA poster unhappy with our leadership).

I came to this guild having had a "successful" career writing Animation for $1400/week for five years. During that time, I wrote on several of Nickelodeon’s highest-rated shows. My writing partner wrote and directed 1/4 of the episodes of "SpongeBob SquarePants" and I was responsible for 1/5 of the episodes of "The Angry Beavers." The current value that those shows have generated for Viacom? $12 Billion dollars. My writing partner topped out at $2100/week. In the year 2001, tired of not receiving residuals for my endlessly- repeating work (even though the actors and composers for my episodes do), I joined with 28 other writers and we signed our WGA cards.

So, Nickelodeon quickly filed suit against our petition for an election, and set about trying to ferret out who the "ringleaders" were. In the meantime, they canceled the show that I had created 4 episodes into an order of 26. Then they fired the 3 writers who’d been working on my show. Then they fired 20 more of my fellow writers and shut down three more shows, kicking almost their entire primetime lineup for 2002 to the curb, and laying off 250 artists.

Then, once the WGA’s petition for election was tied up in court over our illegal firings, Nickelodeon called in the IATSE Local 839 "Cartoonists Guild" — a racket union which exists only the screw the WGA and its own members — and they signed a deal which forever locks the WGA out of Nickelodeon, even though we were there first. Neato!

Then Nickelodeon’s brass decided —out of thin f---ing air— that myself and two other writers had been "the ringleaders" of this organizing effort, so they called around to Warner Bros. Animation, the Cartoon Network, Disney Animation, and Fox Kids, effectively blacklisting the three of us out of animation permanently.

And why did Nickelodeon do this? Why were they so eager to decimate their own 2002 schedule, fire 24 writers, break multiple federal labor laws, sign a union deal, and to even bring back the f---ing blacklist? They did all of that to prevent us from getting the same whopping $5 residual that the actors & composers of our shows get.

For five lousy f---ing bucks, they destroyed three people’s careers and put 250 artists out of work and f---ed up their own channel for a year.

Ahh, but my episodes run about 400 times a year worldwide, though, so obviously Sumner Redstone (Salary in 2001: $65 million dollars) and Tom Freston (2001 salary: $55 million) were right to do what they did… myself and those other 23 writers might have broken the bank, what with each of us going to cost them another TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS each! OH NO! That… that’s… FORTY EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS!

A YEAR!

So don’t come crying to those of us who have EXPERIENCED what the AMPTP plans for all of the rest of you, that people who are deciding to stand up to bully-boy tactics like that are the crazy bunch of "horads" lustily marching "throught" the streets searching for blood. The AMPTP are the barbarians sacking Rome in this scenario.

The AMPTP and their glittering-eyed weasel lawyers are a bunch of lying, blacklisting, law-breaking scumbags, and the fact that they haven’t budged off of ANY of their proposals in the last three months proves that what they have in store for EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU is exactly what they did to us at Nickelodeon, and what they can do any day of the week in daytime animation. Or reality.

Strike or no strike. That’s their plan: to winnow down your membership, to snip away at your MBA, to chew away at your health & pension plans until there’s just nothing left of the WGA. Why? Because they’ve had a good strong drink of how much money they make off of animation when they don’t have to cut the creators in for any of the cash, and now they want to extend that free ride to all of live action as well. THAT is why they have pushed for this strike at every step, with their insulting press releases, with their refusals to negotiate, etc. — because they’re HOPING we go on strike, and that enough cowards and Quislings come crawling out of the woodwork after six weeks that they can force us to accept the same deal that Reality TV show writers have.

If you doubt me, go read their contract proposals again… there’s not ONE of them which isn’t an insult and a deal-breaking non-starter.

From Brian K. Vaughn:

A few months ago, I was thrilled to start my second season as a writer and now a co-producer over at Lost, and have been unbelievably fortunate enough to help write a few scripts for what I think could end up being the show’s best season.

And much as it breaks my heart for my colleagues and I to have to walk away from a job we love, we all think it’s vitally important to the future of our industry.

At least in the short term, my friends and I stand to lose a great deal both creatively and financially in this strike, but every working writer I’ve ever met feels a responsibility to help protect those writers less fortunate than we are, as well as the next generation of creators to follow in our footsteps.

These last few weeks have been a real crash-course in unionization for me, and I’ve come away a bigger supporter than ever.

When we first started talking about a strike, I figured the Teamsters (our faithful truck drivers, location managers, etc.) would hate us "spoiled, overpaid typists" if we threatened their livelihoods with a work stoppage. But instead, they’ve been incredibly supportive of us at every turn, with many vowing not to cross our picket lines.

I know I sound like a second-rate Norma Rae (or Chief Tyrol from Battlestar for you young hipsters out there), but seeing all kinds of laborers, regardless of our different crafts, treat each other like brothers and sisters during the negotiations with the powerful corporations that employ so many of us has been one of the best experiences of my selling-out time here in Los Angeles.

(Additional Sources: Reuters, Broadcasting & Cable)