…No, not all web series. And not just any web series either. We’re talking about ONE LIFE TO LIVE and ALL MY CHILDREN, two former ABC daytime serials that are coming back from the dead (as in ABC stupidly canceled them) on the web.
Here’s the announcement Guild members received in an e-mail late yesterday afternoon:
Second, we can announce the signing on January 11 of a Guild agreement with Prospect Park that covers writers on the made-for-internet continuation of the daytime dramas One Life to Live and All My Children. One Life to Live aired for some 43 years before going off the air last year; All My Children ran for 41 years. Both shows were mainstays of the ABC daytime schedule and are classics of this extraordinary form of storytelling. (Guiding Light, for instance, which began in the days of radio and continued for some 72 years, is arguably the modern era’s longest continuous narrative.)
Well done, WGAw!
Observant readers have, of course, noticed the “Second” in the quote above. If you’re wondering what was the e-mail’s first order of business it was an announcement that the WGAw has “reached agreement” with Central Productions, Comedy Central’s production arm “that achieves all of our principal goals.” Some details:
These [the goals] include the adoption of our industry-standard residual formula, and protection against Central Productions’ past practice of hiring writers without a Guild deal in place. This means hundreds of thousands of additional dollars in writers’ pockets over the term of the agreement, and, crucially, the end of frantic show-by-show negotiations for dramatic, comedy-variety, non-dramatic and Quiz & Audience shows produced for Comedy Central.
The e-mail also talks about a bunch of other important stuff for writers and, yes, television viewers as well. We’ll have the full text up and running as a separate article here on TVWriter™ tomorrow, so come back and take a look.