More than 100 days into the Writers Guild of America strike, writers for the beloved legal drama Suits are calling out the abysmal excuse for residuals they have received for their work on a show with major streaming numbers. Needless to say, they deserve a lot more than what they’ve gotten so far — which is a major tentpole in the WGA’s overall fight.
In an op-ed written for the LA Times, Suits writer and producer Ethan Drogan revealed he received a mere “$259.71” in streaming residuals last quarter for the episode titled “Identity Crisis.”
He added, “All together, NBCUniversal paid the six original Suits writers less than $3,000 last quarter to stream our 11 Season 1 episodes on two platforms.” If something seems wrong with that picture, it’s because the show’s viewership numbers have gone into the stratosphere since it moved from Prime Video to Netflix in late June — and it’s always been a hit with a dedicated fanbase.
Suits has found itself a consistent member of Netflix’s weekly Top 10 chart since the move off Prime, and it collected 3.7 billion viewing minutes on Peacock and Netflix combined from July 3 to July 9, according to Nielsen. With that massive number, the show set a new record as “streaming’s most viewed acquired title for a single week” — and the series had already set the record the previous week.
Suits producers and writers Nora and Lilla Zuckerman also revealed in a recent interview with Decider that their checks have also not been consistent with the kind of success the show has had over the years. Lilla told the outlet that she received “$12,568.57 in residuals” in 2016 for the season 5 episode “Blowback.” She added, “I imagine it was probably being sold internationally and re-airing on USA. This year, 2023, where Suits has been viewed for billions and billions of hours on Netflix, I received [a] grand total of $414.26 on that episode.”
Lilla — a WGA captain — is adamant that increasing the residual rates and putting more financial security back into that part of the payout process is simply going back to the way things used to be.
“You can’t necessarily count on it. But people really did back in the day,” she explained to the outlet. “When things would air on a network or basic cable, the work that you put in on a show — that the companies are still making money off of and they’re still monetizing — you were fairly compensated for that. And that is no longer the case…All we’re asking for is to go back to the functional way it was before.”
The Guild started negotiating on residuals back in the 1950s, but in the infamous 2007 WGA strike, they fought to keep a “toehold” in residuals, according to the Zuckerman sisters, in anticipation for a situation akin to the modern day streaming chokehold.
“The companies didn’t even want us to get a fraction. They said, ‘We don’t even know what this new media is going to be like. It might not be a thing. We need time to research.’ Luckily, we fought to at least crack the door open in terms of residuals,” Lilla told Decider, noting that the Guild is in the right every step of the way. “Everybody is more fired up than ever, because we know we’re going to win this thing. It’s really only a matter of time.”
Lex Briscuso is film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.