The Weirdest, Wildest Movies and TV to Emerge From the Last Writers Strike

On Monday, the Writers Guild of America officially voted to strike after devoting weeks to negotiating a new contract with Hollywood’s major studios. It’s the WGA’s first strike in 15 years, since the approximately 12,000-member branch comprised of film and television writers shut their laptops and took to the picket lines from November 5, 2007, to February 12, 2008. In the wake of that long pause, with no writers to pen popular shows that were already on air like Lost, Friday Night Lights, and 30 Rock—or perform rewrites on existing screenplays such as Quantum of Solace—television and film got, well, a little wonky. 

Here are a few of the wildest ways that Hollywood coped—for better or, mostly, for worse—with the 2007–2008 writers strike, producing some compelling, unexpected, and ultimately weird work along the way.

Elder millennials will remember that Lost—the hit mystery plane-crash show from J.J. Abrams—had trouble sticking its ending (so, they were in purgatory the whole time?). But the troubles may have begun with the ’07–’08 writers strike. Season four of Lost had shot 8 of 16 episodes before the writers strike. Due to the strike, it had to cut two episodes from its season order. Those missing two episodes were added to seasons five and six of the series, respectively, but we’ll never know what exactly we “lost” in season four.

Jon Stewart showed solidarity with the WGA by (briefly) renaming his show. Comedy Central’s The Daily Show With Jon Stewart became A Daily Show With Jon Stewart, highlighting the importance of his writing staff in creating his show, day in and day out. 

For some actors, the writers strike might have actually kept them gainfully employed. Played by Dean Norris, Hank Schrader, the brother-in-law to Bryan Cranston’s Walter White on Breaking Bad, was supposed to be killed off at the end of season one, which premiered on AMC January 20, 2008. Ultimately, Hank was spared, because the final two episodes of the first season were never written due to the strike. Good thing for Norris, who continued to play Hank for the duration of the series and in a cameo on Breaking Bad’s spin-off series, Better Call Saul. 

Remember that time Jesse Plemons’s Landry Clarke killed a guy? If you don’t, you probably skipped Friday Night Lights season two, in which Landry gets wrapped up in a murder plot with Tyra Collette (Adrianne Palicki). The second season of Friday Night Lights, which premiered on October 5, 2007, was deeply affected by the ’07–’08 writers strike, only airing 15 out of a planned 22 episodes that season. When Friday Night Lights returned for a third season on October 1, 2008, the murder was never brought up again. Because of the writers strike, Plemons more or less got his own season of How to Get Away With Murder.

Some comedies got a bit creative during the strike. The second season of Tina Fey’s 30 Rock—intended to be 22 episodes long—was cut short by the writers strike, with 10 episodes made before the strike and five made afterward. Most likely pulling from her SNL roots, Fey and the entire 30 Rock cast went live with “30 Rock—On Strike,” performing a staged reading of an upcoming episode, “Secrets and Lies,” at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in New York City. Proceeds from the show benefitted the striking writers. The live episode was so popular that Fey and company would produce an entirely live episode of 30 Rock, called “Live Show,” in 2010. 

After the international box office success of 2007’s Transformers, the 2009 sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, was rushed into production, despite an unfinished script. Director Michael Bay later told Empire magazine (via The Hollywood Reporter) that the team “made some mistakes” on the “crap” film, which was critically panned. “The writers strike was coming hard and fast,” he said. “It was just terrible to do a movie where you’ve got to have a story in three weeks.”

Eager to prove that wacky, worthwhile art could be made beyond a studio’s purview, Joss Whedon created a three-part musical web series starring Neil Patrick Harris as an ambitious supervillain battling Nathan Fillion’s Captain Hammer for the affections of his crush, Penny (Felicia Day). Written during the strike and later distributed on the internet, Dr. Horrible would ultimately foretell emerging internet culture, satirize the blossoming superhero landscape, and gain a cult following.

After the success of Daniel Craig’s James Bond debut in 2006’s Casino Royale, expectations for his sophomore outing, Quantum of Solace, were sky high. The project’s initial script by director Marc Forster, Michael G. Wilson, and Paul Haggis arrived only two hours before the ’07–’08 writers strike. That meant the rounds of rewrites required to bring Quantum of Solace to the screen would be up to its director and leading man. “On Quantum, we were fucked,” Craig later told Time Out London (via IndieWire). “We had the bare bones of a script and then there was a writers strike and there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t employ a writer to finish it. I say to myself, ‘Never again,’ but who knows? There was me trying to rewrite scenes—and a writer I am not.’”

Left with ample airtime and no writing to fill it, late-night hosts Stephen Colbert, Conan O’Brien, and Jon Stewart got creative—orchestrating phony beef among them over who was to credit (or blame) for then presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s rise in the polls. Things got so giddily contentious between the three hosts that they all appeared as guests on each other’s programs on February 4, 2008, for an on-air brawl. The fictitious squabbling—and Huckabee’s presidential hopes—would eventually die down. But at the time, “it certainly helped that all three of us are in a period in our careers where we’re looking for content,” O’Brien told The New York Times. 

With writers on scripted shows and movies at a standstill, reality TV during the writers strike flourished—with expanded episode orders for competition series like The Biggest Loser and The Amazing Race. “Then I came up with the idea of doing Celebrity Apprentice,” then NBC chairman Ben Silverman would later recount to The Hollywood Reporter. “I reached out to Mark Burnett, who said, ‘There’s no way Donald [Trump] will want to be around other celebrities. He has to be biggest celebrity.’ And I said, ‘Actually, he’s going to be the biggest celebrity because he’s going to be the boss.’ I called up Trump and he agreed, and we relaunched to huge ratings.” Not only did Celebrity Apprentice reinvigorate the fledgling Apprentice franchise, but it placed Trump in the living rooms of all Americans, including some who would eventually vote him into the nation’s highest office. Strikes—they have all sorts of consequences, don’t they?