Dispatches From WGA Picket Lines Day 14: Neil Gaiman Among 200 Writers Picketing NBCUniversal Upfronts

The NBCUniversal Upfront presentation was the center of Day 14 of the writers strike on the east coast.

Good Omensnovelist and showrunner Neil Gaiman was among more than 200 writers and supporters that stretched around Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

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Gaiman walked alongside Fargo actor David Foley in a line of sign-waving picketers who streamed along Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, and back and forth underneath Radio City’s famous marquee — emblazoned on Monday with “Welcome to the NBCUniversal Upfront” for hundreds of attendees who went inside the Art Deco concert hall adjoining the network’s headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

The fantasy and sci-fi novelist and screenwriter had a message of his own: “Pencils the f*ck down,” printed in block white letters on his red t-shirt.

“I’ve spent my life as a writer,” Gaiman told Deadline. “Right now, I’m showrunning three shows, and we need contracts. These people need contracts.”

Gaiman said he was “incredibly fortunate” to finish the new season ofGood Omensbefore the strike. “We handed it in at the end of March and it’ll be out July 28th,” he said.

Other projects include the second season of Netflix’s The Sandman and Amazon’s Anansi Boys.

“But the other stuff — I’m not doing anything on them.”

He said the issue that has galvanized him more than any in support of the WGA strike is the industry’s treatment of younger writers. Like other show runners joining picket lines since May 2 — when the WGA contract with film and television producers including NBCUniversal expired with no deal — Gaiman was harsh in his appraisal of “the phenomenon that they call the mini-room, where you get six or seven writers in a room for six or seven weeks and that is their involvement in a show.”

Gaiman said mini-rooms are producing “a generation of writers who are not on set, who don’t know how to make TV,” adding, “Fundamentally it’s a flawed system and we’ll need to fix it.”

Foley, an alumnus ofThe Kids in The Hallwho joined FX’s black-humored crime dramaFargofor its fifth season, agreed. “It’s incredibly shortsighted, as Neil had said, to structure the business in a way that nobody learns the business,” he said. “Nobody can progress from being a writer to a showrunner if they aren’t on a contract that lets them learn and so there’s not going to be another generation of great showrunners that produce things like the great work that Neil does.”

“I just finished working on[[Fargo], that has some of the best writing on television, working with Noah Hawley, who’s brilliant,” Foley said. “We’re not going to produce a lot of new Noah Hawleys if we don’t give writers a chance to learn the business and learn how to make television. People coming from the executive offices are not going to come up with ideas, and they’re not going to produce good work. That’s not what they do.”

In addition to the writers strike, there were other issues for some outside of Radio City. Advertising execs who streamed out of the event around midday were handed leaflets that covered a range of other topics involving the company.

“NBCUniversal is breaking the law, union-busting, and bargaining in bad faith,” read a leaflet.

“For three years, NBC management has repeatedly broken federal labor law while slow-walking a contract with its digital news workers,” it opened.

It comes after around 300 workers across NBC News, MSNBC and Today Digital, which make up the NBC Digital News Guild, walked over in February over what they say is unlawful actions including laying off seven bargaining unit members.

The guild is also railing against reports that NBCUniversal instructed managers to “break up unionization efforts”. It also claims that the company “refuses to release employees bound by NDAs in cases of harassment and discrimination” following the firing of CEO Jeff Shell.