Everyone is talking about Lee Sung Jin's Netflix show Beef, which stars Ali Wong and Steven Yeun in a series about Asian American anger. Growing up Filipino in the U.S., classmates, relatives, and teachers commented how I always had a smile on my face. It certainly did not reflect a constant feeling of happiness. Like many Asian families who suffered the indignities of white supremacy in various forms, my family leaned hard on superb academic performance to transcend the oppression that often went unnamed. That had its costs. My persistent smile was a defense mechanism I developed in reaction to a society that I feared viewed me as someone who did not belong because I was not white.
Stories like the ones told in Beef that humanize Asian characters—whom Hollywood has long relegated to buck-teethed or hypersexualized caricatures—and are told from the perspective of writers from immigrant families, are one of the many things at stake in the Writers Guild of America strike.
When Yeun's character declares in the first episode of the series, "I'm so sick of smiling," I thought of my younger self who had to smile all the time and pretend everything was okay when it was not.
Last month, Beef hit the No. 1 spot on Netflix's television shows in the United States, and has been praised by critics and viewers. The show appeals widely to audiences of all backgrounds, while simultaneously speaking to the experiences of Asian Americans like myself.
On May 1, over 11,000 television and film writers went on strike after the Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the management of most major Hollywood studios, failed to reach an agreement on a new contract. The Guild has rightly argued that the television industry is morphing into another gig economy.
Bill Lawrence, the showrunner of Shrinking, explained that if the studios get what they want, "this will become a business that you can only do if your parents are well-off enough to help pay your rent and support you while you get to a point that you can support yourself."
Only the children of rich white people will be able to tell the stories that inform our collective cultural consciousness. The extent of the studios' exploitation of writers' labor will vary widely among racial groups, especially for writers from immigrant families, whom have not been in this country long enough to build generational wealth.
The advent of streaming created new opportunities for writers of color. The Guild found that between 2010 and 2020, the percentage of people of color employed as television writers climbed gradually from 13.6 percent to 37 percent. In 2020, women of color made up 21.4 percent of employed television writers and men of color 15.3 percent. For the first time in 2020, the percentage of Asian television series writers is on parity with their share of the U.S. population, according to the Writers Guild of America West (WGAW).
If we have more diversity in television writing than ever before, doesn't that mean the current system is working? No. There is still a hierarchy within the writing world.
Showrunners, which the Guild refers to as "the Executive Producer-level writer who oversees the writing, production, and creative direction of a T.V. series" continue to be made up predominantly of white men (57.7 percent). Women of color make up the smallest share of showrunners at 6.9 percent with men of color at 11.8 percent, according to the WGAW.
Despite the strides made to diversify the industry—and the stories being told—without a strong union contract, the studios will slash writer compensation and reduce less-experienced writers' access to the production process, where they gain the experience to become showrunners.
The studios have not yet committed to limits on the use of artificial intelligence to write scripts. Nothing could be more dehumanizing than a robot telling immigrant stories. Such human stories need to be told by real humans: first- and second-generation immigrants themselves.
At a recent screening of the Disney+ series American Born Chinese, President Joe Biden stated, "This is an iconic, meaningful American industry, and we need the writers—and all the workers—to tell the stories of our nation, the stories of all of us."
Television is where stories shape the cultural narrative. If the studios win, only the rich, white, and the privileged will be able to tell those stories. If the writers get a strong contract, I'll smile again.
Jonah J. Lalas is a partner at the union-side law firm Rothner, Segall & Greenstone, which represents the Writers Guild of America West, and a former union organizer with the SEIU. He is a PD Soros Fellow and a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
