A closer look
Writers Guild of America strikes in the late 1980s directly caused the explosive creation and eventual global domination of reality television. Because television networks were legally barred from using union writers to produce scripted comedies and dramas, desperate studio executives had to pivot to unscripted programming to fill their empty broadcast slots. This creative drought led to the premiere of Cops in 1989, which proved that you didn't need to pay talented writers to craft compelling narratives when you could simply strap a camera to a police officer and film intoxicated civilians making terrible life choices. Decades later, we are still suffering the cultural fallout of this labor dispute, as the entertainment industry realized it is exponentially cheaper to film narcissists screaming at each other in a hot tub than it is to hire a professional writing staff. We literally traded high-quality scripted storytelling for the Real Housewives franchise just to save a few bucks!
