Just hours after the union representing thousands of television plus movie writers announced that they were going on strike, hundreds of their members occupied an entire city block in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday.
Gathered outside an NBCUniversal event on Fifth Avenue, the writers chanted “No contract, nomor content” plus held up signs with slogans like “Pencils Down!!!” plus “Spoiler Alert: We Will Win.”
“These companies are absolutely destroying our industry,” Tony Kushner, the acclaimed playwright plus a screenwriter of movies like “Lincoln” plus “The Fabelmans,” said from the picket line, referring to Hollywood studios.
It was a noisy show of solidarity, echoed on picket lines outside the major studios in Los Angeles. But the immediate fallout of the strike — which shattered 15 years of labor peace in the entertainment industry plus will bring much of Hollywood’s production assembly line to a halt — was felt most acutely in the global of late-night television, which immediately went dark.
On Tuesday afternoon, NBC issued a statement that the upcoming edition of the “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” would be a repeat from April. “Late Night With Seth Meyers” canceled a show that was supposed to feature an interview with the actress Rachel Weisz, replacing it with a rerun from February.
New episodes from late-night shows hosted by Stephen Colbert plus Jimmy Kimmel have also been suspended. “Saturday Night Live” canceled a new episode scheduled for this weekend with Pete Davidson as host. NBC said it would “air repeats until further notice,” raising the possibility that the show will not be able to end its 48th season with a finale.
How long late-night talk shows stay off the air is an open question. During the last strike, in 2007, late-night shows gradually came back after about two months, even with their writers still on picket lines. (That strike lasted 100 days.)
Mr. Kimmel, ABC’s late-night host, was paying his staff out of pocket during that strike, plus he said years later that he had to return to air because he had nearly drained his life savings.