The actors’ strike has just started, and Star Trek: Picard’s Michelle Hurd has shared a big issue with shorter seasons of series.
If you polled fans across the globe, you’d find that not many are a fan of the shorter seasons of their favorite series. We miss the times of twenty-two episodes for a season, but that only happens now on regular television, not on streaming. Streaming either drops all of the episodes at once or delivers them over a ten-twelve-week period, which is frustrating for fans, especially when they know all of the episodes have been completed.
Michelle Hurd, who portrayed Raffi on Star Trek: Picard, is a member of the SAGAFTRA Negotiating Committe, and she just shared some information that we wouldn’t ordinarily have access to. Terry Matalas, the showrunner for Picard, tweeted it, adding that she was speaking the truth.
Here’s @ItsMichelleHurd speaking the truth. https://t.co/E5FgyAospM
— Terry Matalas (@TerryMatalas) July 15, 2023
Michelle Hurd discusses the difference in the amount of work actors have now versus many years ago.
Before streaming, most series filmed for nine months or so to deliver the necessary amount of episodes. Now, though, with streaming, there is roughly four-to-five months of work for actors. Then the studio/channel can hold the show, decide whenever and however they want to drop it. After that, they can wait one, two, even three years, according to Hurd, to let the actors know whether they have been picked up for the next season. And she isn’t talking about the show itself. The studio can decide whether or not to bring an actor back to a series, but they can wait years to do that. Of course, we don’t know about all the logistics of an actor’s contract, but we can see how not knowing whether or not you have a job for one-three years can be painful as Hurd says.
As much as we all love streaming, it hasn’t changed everything about entertainment for the best. Though we might think actors make all of this money and shouldn’t complain, none of us would want to be in a situation where we didn’t know if we had a job from one month to the next.