He wrote for four seasons on television's long-running Cheers , and he is the author of Conversations With My Agent . This week, they ruminate on whether the Writers Guild got what it deserved . To me there is one historical lesson to the near-strike of 2001, and that is that the Writers Guild has never been nearly so unified. This is by no means insignificant. The guild is a big tent.
Television writers have very different interests from feature film writers.
Rich writers have very different concerns from struggling writers. But we all stuck together. And the studios knew that we would. Those who express skepticism about the relative gains realized in the contract should consider the climate in which they were achieved. What we should have wound up with, a month after Disney announced 5,000 layoffs, was rollbacks.