Have You Missed Them?
1st September 2023
You may or may have not noticed, but there is currently a writers’ and actors’ strike happening across Hollywood. Major film productions have been shut down, as have regular television and streaming shows. No new content. Anywhere.
This also applies to all late-night talk shows. There hasn’t been a fresh new episode of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, or The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon or Kimmel. All three network shows have downed tools in solidarity with the strikers. The question is: has anyone noticed, beyond their niche core audience of coastal liberals, for whom such programs have become little more than political group therapy sessions? Those three late-night hosts certainly feel like they’ve been missed, as they have come together, along with Seth Meyers and HBO’s John Oliver, to host a podcast. On it, the absence of writers is omnipresent; every time a host says the name of the podcast, Strike Force Five, there is a headache-inducing explosion sound-effect drop. Every time the name of the podcast is spoken. And they say that name a lot. Colbert, Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers and Oliver have united, they say, to raise charity for their production staff, who were all forced off the job earlier this year when the strike took effect.
If you struggle to tolerate all five of these hosts giving their own shows’ usual opening monologues on the issues of the day, then imagine all five of them, giving the same monologue, while talking over each other. In the first episode they dive into the writers’ strike from 2005, because that’s a historical event that not many people seem to remember or, much like this writers’ strike, care about. This is a podcast about the hosts, talking about the hosts and an entertainment strike, a problem that seems to be at the back of most Americans’ minds, as they face up to with issues like inflation and credit card debt.