ON A RECENT Wednesday, live from New York, it was the Writers Guild of America strike. Following the breakdown of contract negotiations with the major Hollywood studios and streamers, a picket line had formed outside Netflix’s 888 Broadway headquarters some thousand people strong, among them writers of late-night TV, streaming sitcoms, and, in a thick clump, the writers of Saturday Night Live and their friends. These being writers, the placards and chants were a little more clever than usual. DON’T UBER WRITING, one read. DON’T PISS ON MY LEG AND TELL ME IT’S STREAMING, read another. Were Netflix execs cowed into skipping their Sweetgreen lunch runs? “I hope so,” said Streeter Seidell, one of the head writers of SNL. “Or they sent their assistant out to get it?”
The strike,…